Item Information
Title
The Carolina Magazine. Volume 68, number 5.
Date
February 1939
Rights
https://rightsstatements.org/page/CNE/1.0/?language=en
Type
Text
Text
We Leave It to You
Foremost in the thoughts which pass through our minds with regard to the recent Supreme Court decision and the inevitable application of a Negro to enter the University of North Carolina, is the struggle we have with ourselves between our rational minds and our emotions or prejudices. Whether we are Northerners, Southerners or Westerners makes little difference to the fact that we all have peculiar emotional traits which, built up over a long period of time, usually are definitely not the result of pure “cussedness” on our part.
It is an undeniable fact for example that the experience of the average Southern student is ample explanation of his belief in the inferiority of the Negro. For the Southerner has only known the Negro in the role of a janitor, shoe-cleaner, tenant-farmer, waiter or nurse. What other conclusion can he make from his experience than that, if the Negro always holds such menial positions as in the South he does hold, he must be inferior?
Realizing that we are introducing as contributors to this issue of The Carolina Magazine, Negroes who have had the best that is to be had in the way of education and who are, themselves, in the top rank of educators} we are forced to reconsider an attitude taken at a time when the “educated Negro” was nothing more than a legend. Apart from the question of what a Negro ought to be is the fact that many of them are the equals in every way of the whites. But there is also the complementary fact that most of them are not our intellectual equals, just as a large number of whites are not our intellectual equals—and probably never will be.
In other words, there seems to be a fundamental class split, irrespective of race lines, which marks off the educated Negro and the educated white from the uneducated Negro and white.
And there is our problem. Few Southerners meeting and knowing the educated Negro will be anything but courteous to him. The real problem is that of the treatment of the uneducated Negroes.
Foremost in the thoughts which pass through our minds with regard to the recent Supreme Court decision and the inevitable application of a Negro to enter the University of North Carolina, is the struggle we have with ourselves between our rational minds and our emotions or prejudices. Whether we are Northerners, Southerners or Westerners makes little difference to the fact that we all have peculiar emotional traits which, built up over a long period of time, usually are definitely not the result of pure “cussedness” on our part.
It is an undeniable fact for example that the experience of the average Southern student is ample explanation of his belief in the inferiority of the Negro. For the Southerner has only known the Negro in the role of a janitor, shoe-cleaner, tenant-farmer, waiter or nurse. What other conclusion can he make from his experience than that, if the Negro always holds such menial positions as in the South he does hold, he must be inferior?
Realizing that we are introducing as contributors to this issue of The Carolina Magazine, Negroes who have had the best that is to be had in the way of education and who are, themselves, in the top rank of educators} we are forced to reconsider an attitude taken at a time when the “educated Negro” was nothing more than a legend. Apart from the question of what a Negro ought to be is the fact that many of them are the equals in every way of the whites. But there is also the complementary fact that most of them are not our intellectual equals, just as a large number of whites are not our intellectual equals—and probably never will be.
In other words, there seems to be a fundamental class split, irrespective of race lines, which marks off the educated Negro and the educated white from the uneducated Negro and white.
And there is our problem. Few Southerners meeting and knowing the educated Negro will be anything but courteous to him. The real problem is that of the treatment of the uneducated Negroes.