The Position of the Negro in the American Social Order in 1950

Abstract

I have but one opinion that I can expose, without fear, to the scoffing eye of 1950. This collection of papers marks a high point of distinction in its reflection of the arrival of the Negro scholar. He is objective; he is mature; he approaches today, if not a mastery of all that is to be known about the American Negro, at least to a method and insight enabling him to speak about the Negro with seasoned, calm, expressive authority. Beyond this either prophecy or summary enters into repetition. Mr. Allison Davis, a social-anthropologist, reminds those of us who are pedagogues that Education is a process that goes on for each hour and moment of the waking day; and that our feeble educational institutions are but instruments in the hands of a culture that is moulding personality and attitudes in ways strange and mysterious to the hackneyed objectives of the school. Mr. Davis tells us what needs to be done to unmake the mind of the Negro child, who will be the Negro adult of 1950. But we know that nothing can happen within the space of eleven years to change the patterns of subordination, of violence, now being set, stone-fast, in the attitudinal structure of four million Negro children now of school age. The pattern of the Negro family so vividly described by Dr. Frazier can change but little in eleven years, come recovery, depression, or fascism. Cornely and Alexander point to 1950 when a few more babies of those born will live, a few less adults die of tuberculosis. The Negro church, tomorrow as today, will have poorly educated ministers, a variety of sects, a Negroid place in a Christian religion. Thompson suggests as fundamental a possibility for change as any. If, by 1950, our machinery of educational administration can begin to be oriented around the Negro child as the child of hard-working, poorly paid, culturally handicapped parents; the prospect for social and economic change by 1960 or 1970 or 1980 will be far from remote. Besides the beginning of applied intelligence, eleven years (the ninth part of a century, the onethirtieth part of the 331 years since the first landing at Jamestown) can make only an infinitesimal difference in the structure of Negro personal and social life in America. That will be the status of the Negro. What Negro? The Negro of statistics, census reports, health surveys, sociological analysis, historical and economic description. In 1950 he will be living, loving, dying; and doing each of these things as he does in 1939. It is an easy answer. It is harder if we personalize our synthesis of these brilliant articles, and give them an application to one class of Negroes, if not to all; to one small group of one class of Negroes; or even to just one Negro. What will be the position of the white collar and professional Negro in 1950? What will be the position of the Negro contributors to this