Desegregation

“ Meanwhile, countless class suits seeking desegregation orders were successfully prosecuted by Negro plaintiffs in the lower federal courts. Many public facilities were opened to all citizens, regardless of race, without direct intervention by this Court. ”

“ Critics of Court packing emphasize that it is hard to predict which forces will find themselves at odds with the Court in the future. At some points in our history, the Court has faced resistance from progressive groups—as illustrated by President Roosevelt’s effort to pack the Court in 1937. By contrast, in the mid-to-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Court was repeatedly attacked by conservatives who objected to the Court’s jurisprudence on abortion, school prayer, desegregation, protections for criminal defendants, and other civil rights issues. ”

“ They were turned loose and put upon their own resources in communities which were imbued with prejudices against them as a race, communities which for the most part had for years past-indeed from the very time when those who are now in existence were born-been taught and had instilled into them a prejudice against the equality which has been attempted to be established for the colored citizens of the United States. ”

“ More necessary than legislation is a more vigorous and alert public opinion among the Whites, which will put a stop to social mixing of the two races. Social separation is the key to minimizing the evils of race mixture at the present time. ”

“ It is natural that this striving for individual distinction comes out most clearly in a class of society socially subordinated, as a foreign race or a religious sect, subject to the persecution of the majority. ”

“ The presence of thousands of members of a different race, to whom complete social assimilation through intermarriage was refused, and who represented different standards of living and lower industrial efficiency, led inevitably to group conflicts. ”

“ I have heard talk of segregation in reservations, like the Indians—segregation out of existence! I have even heard unspeakable talk of the wholesale extinction of the race by preventing the breeding of children! ”

“ We say, then, what every body knows—though we regret the fact as sincerely as any one can—that the free colored people of this country, with few exceptions, have risen, in person or by genealogy, from a depressed condition, from a state of bondage, which, in connexion with the public feeling [135] and prejudice against the race, on account of a difference of physical constitution, subjects them unfortunately to social disadvantage, in a white population, who have always had the ascendency, and to whom society, as it exists, owes its origin and maintenance. ”

“ Segregation presupposes a force from without which seeks to compel those of the same race or nationality or religious belief to remain among themselves, separated from those of another group supposedly superior. Grouping together either for purposes of living or of religious worship or for other purposes, with the idea of developing a group or race consciousness and thus to develop "pride of race," presupposes a force from within—that is a conscious desire of the people themselves to develop the latent powers within their own group through intensive application. ”

“ If the Negro will take his place as an inferior, he and the white man can ride on the same seat in a buggy: if the white man will surrender his prejudice, the Race-Problem is settled. Which shall be surrendered—the manhood or the prejudice? The Congregational churches have no doubt on that question, and if we are to educate men in right principles we must stand firmly upon them ourselves. To begin with a compromise is to yield the very point at issue. ”

“ Here we encounter one of the greatest dangers attendant upon race segregation, where the two races are not equal before the law, where public opinion makes and enforces one law for the upper race, and practically another law for the under race. ”

“ That solution is segregation. It offers intact all the advantages which the opportunities of life among a highly civilized race create without the demoralizing and humiliating influences at work on account of race prejudice. It frees the whites and Negroes alike and enlarges the opportunities for the development of each race, under a common flag, that will no longer be under the necessity of polluting the pure air of Heaven by withholding its protection from among even the humblest of its citizens. ”

“ My third and greatest objection to the Colonization Society is, that its members write and speak, both in public and private, as if the prejudice against skins darker colored than our own, was a fixed and unalterable law of our nature, which cannot possibly be changed. The very existence of the Society is owing to this prejudice: for if we could make all the colored people white, or if they could be viewed as impartially as if they were white, what would be left for the Colonization Society to do? ”

“ Universal suffrage, clannish races, social classes, diversified interests, seem to explain and justify the presence of the party “machine” and its boss. Otherwise races, classes, and interests are in helpless conflict and anarchy. But the true explanation is an obsolete ward and district system of plurality representation adopted when but one race, class, or interest had the suffrage. Forms of government are the essence of government, notwithstanding the poet. ”

“ Yet it is a plain fact that the entire world of humanity is more or less segregated in groups. The family group gave rise to the tribal group, the tribal group to the regional group, and the regional group to the national group. There are groups within groups: language groups, labor groups, racial groups and class groups. Certainly no sane group desires public segregation and discrimination. But it is a clear historical fact that different groups have won their social rights only when they developed a group spirit and strong group organization. ”

“ This race of people came not as pioneers in the building up of this great nation, but as a menial race, sold into bondage by their own kith and kin, and not to be endowed with elective franchise nor representation in its councils. ”

“ A majority must of necessity be inferior to a picked minority and it always resents specializations in which it cannot share. 6In the French Revolution the majority, calling itself “the people,” deliberately endeavored to destroy the higher type and something of the same sort was in a measure done after the American Revolution by the expulsion of the Loyalists and the confiscation of their lands, with a resultant loss to the growing nation of good race strains, which were in the next century replaced by immigrants of far lower type. ”

“ Even those who have not subscribed to any form of political doctrine have felt it safer to make interpretations of the facts of race and heredity in such terms that they can bear a clearly egalitarian interpretation.... ”

“ The noticeable reservation in all attempts, North and South, to separate black folk and white is the saving phrase, “Except servants.”
Are not servants colored? Is the objection, then, to colored people or to colored people who are not servants? In other words, is this race prejudice inborn antipathy or a social and economic caste?
22
SOCIAL CONTROL
By JANE ADDAMS, of Hull House I always find it very difficult to write upon the great race problem which we have in America. ”

“ When peoples of the same race mingle by migration, the effect, as regards classes, depends chiefly on their [Pg 221] states of civilization and the character of the migration, as hostile or friendly. The peaceful advent of kindred settlers, like the English immigrants to the United States, creates no class divisions. ”

“ We condemn the segregation of foreign races in different sections of our large cities. But the segregation of the better, or at least more fortunate, classes, is just as bad and more disastrous to the welfare of the city. ”

“ A natural distinction exists between those races which was not created, neither can it be abrogated, by law, and legislation which recognizes this distinction and provides for the peculiar wants or conditions of the particular race can in no just sense be called a discrimination against such race or an abridgment of its civil rights. ”

“ We protest against segregated districts, separate public conveyances, industrial discrimination, lynchings and limitations of political privileges of any Negro citizen in any part of the world on account of race, color or creed, and will exert our full influence and power against all such. ”

“ These are the basic qualities which underlie democracy,—intelligence, manliness, coöperation. If they are lacking, democracy is futile. Here is the problem of races, the fundamental division of mankind. Race differences are established in the very blood and physical constitution. ”

“ There a circumscribed population of negro race has had a political and social and religious organisation and the elements of higher culture impressed upon it by Europeans, in the belief that it would be possible to construct a social environment which would mould the people. ”

“ Attempting to dispose of the moral and psychological implications of racism, the News and Courier insists that Southern whites should entertain no sense of guilt in connection with segregation policies. “It was God [Pg 69] who created people with different physical characteristics. Who is to say that the races He created separate and distinct should now be scrambled?” If separation on the basis of race were sinful, so was separation by faiths and creeds. ”

“ The practice of racial segregation is not in keeping with the ideals of Democracy and Christianity.
(2) Racial segregation is robbing not only the segregated but the segregator of his human dignity. Furthermore, the propagation of racial prejudice is unfair to the generations yet unborn. ”

“ Then came the crowning error: the practical carrying out of the theories by infusing into the body politic a whole race just emerging from slavery. The most intelligent and conservative class of the whites were disfranchised; the entire adult Negro population were enfranchised. ”

“ All civilized societies would be divided into different sects, factions, and interests, as they happened to consist of rich and poor, debtors and creditors, the landed, the manufacturing, the commercial interests, the inhabitants of this district or that district, the followers of this political leader or that political leader, the disciples of this religious sect or that religious sect. In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger. ”

“ All sectarism false and mischievous—the regenerated, throughout the world, members of one body, and the Head Christ Jesus. Prejudice against color was rebellion against God. Of all men beneath the sky, the slaves, because most neglected and despised, were nearest and dearest to his great heart. ”

“ Your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this be admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated. ”

“ The principle of race separation extends from civil into religious matters. Before the Civil War Negroes were often acceptable and honored members of white churches, and there are still some cases where old members continue this relation, but they could now hardly sit in the same pews. ”

“ Moreover, we cannot ignore the fact that assimilation today has proceeded much beyond where it was at the earlier periods. Blush or shudder, as many will, mixture of blood has been making inroads on segregation faster than change in law. No clear line of separation between the races has been observed. More and more a large population with as much claim to white as to colored blood baffles any justice in classification for segregation. ”

“ All such agitations introduced among us, with a view to our emigrating, ought to be frowned upon by us, and we ought to teach the people that they may as well come here and agitate the emigration of the Jays, the Rings, the Adamses, the Otises, the Hancocks, et al, as to agitate our removal. We are all alike constituents of the same government, and members of the same rising family. Although we come up much more slowly, our rise is to be none the less sure. ”

“ There was nothing racial, local, or social in this division. A family might be divided, one member being a live Molly, and all the rest the most dismal of hearses. Occasionally a stranger might be brought along. ”

“ But when a half million negroes migrate from the southern to the northern states in a few years, coming family by family, as the opportunity affords, yet with a steady tendency of drift, is that a group mind or the accidental agreement of many individuals? Is it mind or minds? And the same problem is present in a declaration of war, or the victory of a foot-ball team, or the adoption of a new fashion of clothes. When does the group act and when the individual members? When do we have the mind of all, when the mind of each? ”

“ When racial or religious lines are drawn by the State, the multiracial, multireligious communities that our Constitution seeks to weld together as one become separatist; antagonisms that relate to race or to religion rather than to political issues are generated; communities seek not the best representati e but the best racial or religious partisan. ”

“ With all of this confusing medley of races, with this diversity of Greek and Roman Catholicism and Judaism, with this history of race oppression and hatred, it is not surprising that the immigrants should break out into factions and feuds wherever thrown together among us. ”