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University Daily Kansan
Monday, April 20, 1964
Vicious Circle
(The following is the first part of a three-part series.)
Bv Rick Mabbutt
American Negroes are poor, and the effects of years of discrimination by whites combined with the effects of increased automation in industry make the chances of greatly improving their economic situation quite small.
A recent survey by the Johnson administration lists 35 million Americans as being "poor." Their incomes are less than $3,000 annually. Of those poor, nearly eight million are Negroes or other nonwhites. Thus, a people who constitute slightly less than 10 per cent of the population of the country account for 22 per cent of the nation's poor.
Gunnar Myrdal, in "An American Dilemma," says, "In the beginning the Negroes were owned as property. When slavery disappeared, caste remained. Within this framework of adverse tradition the average Negro in every generation has had a most disadvantageous start. Discrimination against Negroes is thus rooted in the tradition of economic exploitation."
Discrimination by whites against the Negro is the chief underlying force accounting for the Negro's low social and economic position. To understand the bases for this discrimination one must go back to the founding of slavery in the United States.
False racial beliefs helped to justify this exploitation of the Negro. In the economic sphere, as a result of untrue racial beliefs, the Negro has been considered inherently inferior as a consumer and a worker.
The attitude is that "God himself has made the Negro to be only a servant or a laborer employed for menial, dirty, heavy and disagreeable work. And, since practically all such work is badly
paid, it is God's will that the Nerro should have a low income."
According to Myrdal, white prejudice takes the form of attitudes which operate in three ways.
(1) Many white workers, even if they think that Negroes generally should have a fair share in the job opportunities in this country, tend to be opposed to Negro competition in the particular localities, industries, occupations, and establishments where they themselves work.
(3) Many employers believe that Negroes are inferior as workers, except for dirty, heavy, hot or otherwise unattractive work. Perhaps even more important is the fact that they pay much attention to the attitudes of both customers and white workers.
(2) Some customers object to being served by Negroes unless the Negro has an apparently menial position.
These conditions are self-perpetuating in a number of ways. To illustrate the consequences of the first attitude listed above, imagine that one state, by means of legislation, abolished racial discrimination in economic matters within that state. If similar measures were not taken by other states the expected result would be an increase of Negro migration to that state.
"Thus," Myrdal says, "the very fact that there is economic discrimination constitutes an added motive for every individual white group to maintain such discriminatory practices."
In this manner discrimination by whites has placed severe restriction on the Negro laborer. Myrdal classifies these limitations into four types.
(1) Negroes are kept out of certain industries, North as well as South.
(2) In industries where Negroes
are working, they are often confined to certain establishments, whereas other establishments are kept entirely white.
(3) In practically all industries where Negroes are accepted, they are confined to unskilled occupations and to such semi-skilled and skilled occupations as are unattractive to white workers. The main exceptions to this rule are in the building industry, where the Negro had acquired a position during slavery but has been losing ground since then.
(4) Finally, there is geographical segregation. Negroes in the North are concentrated in a few large cities. In the western centers there is still only a small number of Negro workers. Negroes are even scarcer in the small northern and western cities.
This migration and concentration in the North is, Myrdal explains, "because the North has offered the Negro more economic opportunities (in relief if not in employment), more security as a citizen, and a greater freedom as a human being."
Since most Negro workers are forced into low-paid service occupations or unskilled, menial jobs in industry, they are the first workers to lose their jobs and the last to be hired again. Increased automation threatens not only the unskilled Negro laborer but also the semi-skilled worker. To date, no facilities for retraining such displaced workers have been provided.
Thus, the casual relationship involving discrimination and secondary factors such as inadequate vocational and other educational facilities is a vicious circle. It mires the Negro in a low economic and social position and makes it extremely difficult for him to escape his poor conditions or to improve them.
New Approaches and Techniques:
SNCC-"Snick"
There were two new elements in the Atlanta demonstrations of the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee ("Snick"). One was the use of nonviolent techniques like fasting and sitting in front of police vehicles. The other was the anxiety to identify with the Negro working class.
THE STUDENT movement of 1960-61 consisted of middle-class young people. Silence on the picket line, "proper" dress, dignity and fluency in the courtroom made a favorable impression on public opinion. The demonstrator by his acceptable behavior made visible his readiness to enter the white middle-class world. Since that time "Snick" has deliberately attempted to reach beyond the middle-class. Its organizers have sought out the hard-core Black Belt counties in southwest Georgia and the Mississippi Delta and they share the poverty of those they work among.
IN THE ATLANTA demonstrations "Snick" approached an urban community with a militancy learned in Albany, Ga., and Greenwood, Miss. It went out to organize people who were so badly off that they could scarcely go anywhere but up. When the UN subcommittee on the prevention of
discrimination and protection of minorities visited Atlanta at the height of the picketing, "Snick" greeted it with a leaflet describing "Buttermilk Bottom," a slum in the heart of the city where 16,000 Negroes live amid unpaved streets and uncollected garbage. The leaflet concluded: "As long as we are in a country that feeds the hungry of the world and stores its excess food in a fleet on the Hudson River, then we cannot forget our own poor or leave slums to be profited from by landlords."
THE SAME AWARENESS of poverty as the core of segregation was shown in SNCC support for the demands of unemployed miners in Kentucky, and its attention to housing problems in Washington, D.C.
One of my students put this changing conception of the task of the civil rights movement in a more personal way. "When I came to college," she said, "my goal was a big house in the suburbs." A visit to the SNCC office led to her increasing involvement and, in the last week of January, to jail.
— Staughton Lynd in The New Republic
from the morgue
On Feb. 19, 1919, the University Senate was burned in effigy by the senior law class in front of Green Hall. After hanging a rag doll, the effigy of the Senate, to a lamp post in front of the law building, the laws cut down the figure with somewhat lively ceremonies and threw it into a fire immediately in front of the law's home, where it was burned to a crisp.
The demonstration against the Senate at Green Hall was said to be expression of the feeling
of students of the School of Law toward the faculty organization. Yells of "Bolsheviki," armbands and hatbands and ties of bright red were everywhere in evidence. A placard bearing the words "An Expression of Student Feeling," was hung out in front of the building.
The demonstration took place to show the administration the sentiment of the students against the usurpation of their powers by the University Senate.
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BOOK REVIEWS
C. Vann Woodward, who has written extensively on the social status of the Negro in America, contributes a discerning and interesting approach in another in the American Heritage series on significant Supreme Court decisions. The famous Plessy v. Ferguson case, which finally was canceled out by the desegregation decision of 1954, is the subject of Woodward's "The Birth of Jim Crow" (American Heritage, April, 1964, $3.95).
Plessy v. Ferguson followed a period in which, although intermingling of the races was not absolute, white and Negro did associate freely, without outside comment or interference. Then came Jim Crow laws requiring railroads to carry Negroes apart from whites. One of these laws was passed in Louisiana, and a test case was carried to the high court.
As any reasonably good student of history or government knows, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld segregation. The lone dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan; the year was 1896. It was a landmark decision, and it shaped American social patterns for more than half a century.
A beautifully illustrated article tells the story of Maximilian and Napoleon in Mexico, and of the devious operations of a former U.S. senator named William Gwin, who had visions of gold in Sonora, a place for Confederates to flee, and an important position under Maximilian. Another article describes the fight William Penn waged for religious freedom; another nostalgically portrays the ferry boat, which is slowly giving way to bridges and tunnels.
The American Heritage pattern is truly eclectic in the new issue. Besides the Woodward article one can read a vastly entertaining (albeit frightening) article about the Millerites and the Second Coming, that frustrating October night in 1844 when the faithful awaited the great day and were sadly disappointed.
Many readers will enjoy reading about the cooking of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the silk-stocking citizens' army of Gen. Wood in 1915, and Lizzie Borden, who may-or may not-have hacked up her father and stepmother.
One of the mightiest novels of modern times is this story of the Cossacks by Sholokhov. Forget that it appeared in 1928, in the Stalin era of Russia. It is not in the least doctrinaire, and in scope it compares with Tolstoy's "War and Peace."
It was the first in a cycle of novels about the Cossacks of the Don Valley, and it is set in the World War I and Soviet revolution periods. It is earthy and turbulent and bloody. Sholokhov is a greater novelist than Pasternak, is one of the best of the 20th century, and this new paperback edition deserves a wide audience.
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AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON, by Mikhail Sholokhov (Signet Classics, 95 cents).
INVISIBLE MAN, by Ralph Ellison (Signet, 75 cents).
This novel of a decade ago is probably the best novel yet written by a Negro. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1953, and is reissued in a new edition. Those who have read James Baldwin should turn now to Ralph Ellison, for he is a better writer.
"Invisible Man" is the story of a southern Negro who comes north, becomes involved in revolutionary movements, and eventually comes to realize that he has no identity at all in the world of either North or South. The style is exceptional; the point of view makes the book especially important in today's racially torn country.