MARION VERA CUTHBERT
The Negro Today
Marion Vera Cuthbert, (1896-1989)
It will be necessary at the outset to insist upon the actuality of the problem of the Negro in this country. For those who doubt such insistence it is only necessary to call to their attention the number of times the whole matter is dismissed as being irrelevant or overemphasized or presented in an unnatural setting. The facts are these:
The Negro constitutes one-tenth of the total population of the United States. All hope that he would die out as a group is gone, the 1930 census reporting that he has a birth rate in the excess of the whites. Even with health conditions among the worst in the country he seems able to resist sufficiently those encroachments of disease that will ultimately wipe him out, and with increasing knowledge of sanitation, hygiene and a better economic foundation upon which to build he will probably hold his own for the immediate years. While the percentage of mixed bloods is high, varying in estimates from 40 to 80 per cent, there is no possibility that he will lose his physical identity and merge with the present population in the near future, although amalgamation of some sort is doubtless inevitable for the coming centuries. Gone also is any hope that he can be transplanted to another country; Africa is divided as spoils among the European powers who find far too many blacks left on their hands to entertain the idea of taking on any more, while possibilities of isolation in this country would wreck everything from individual property rights to state sovereignty itself. The Negro landed on these shores at the same time as the whites, whether by coercion or not, and has plenty of historical evidence for considering this his permanent home. And no longer can he confine himself to the South even if he would. The perilous state of agriculture in this country makes the hope of obtaining a living as a small farmer a more and more doubtful one, and coupled with this is the closing of foreign markets to one of our big crops, cotton. Moreover, industry in various sections of the country has made and continues to make a bid for cheap labor and the Negro will be drawn to the newly developing activities along with other groups. The closer union of all sections of the country by improved means of transportation must not be left out of the picture. The resultant lure of "there" as contrasted to "here" operates just as surely in the case of the Negro, to cause him to move from place to place, as it does with other groups.
And lastly as a very real part of the problem is the feeling of the Negro that he is, above everything else, absolutely American, an intensity of feeling so great that he identifies himself with the majority in the country which considers itself essentially right, even virtuously right, in most of its acts, even when such identification works the rankest injustice to his own group.
In all that we call American civilization, the Negro has shared. In the Old South he was not only the unskilled but the skilled laborer; today he performs the same function in a much more competitive field, and has found new lines of occupation even though the numbers in those new fields are as yet few. It is staggering to think what the sudden wiping out of one-tenth of the American population, both as producer and consumer, would be if the Negro were suddenly to be effaced from the picture.
But while the Negro has filtered into much of American life, the process has been slow and painful, hampered by traditional concepts of himself which it seems almost impossible to eradicate from the popular mind. One of the oldest of the concepts was that the Negro is an in-between man, not rightly beast or man, but inclining, if anything, more toward the bestial side. The early days were filled with debates as to whether he had a soul, and even today vestiges of this early concept linger in the singular brutality with which any of his acts against society are treated. They meet with such summary vengeance as if indeed he were a wild beast of the jungle. The appalling maintenance of both whites and blacks at a low level of social control because of this belief is one of the saddest spectacles of the contemporary American scene.
Another concept relegates him to a position of inferiority imposed, according to those who hold the relationship with an iron hand, because of his inherent mental disabilities. Such arbiters of his destiny either do not see or do not care to see that their control is an economic one and that what they fear is not a havoc wreaked in their midst because of his inability to comprehend so intellectual and complex a civilization, but that he will become a real contender for some of the honors and spoils of the world. Closely identified with these is a naive group who imagine that the differences in appearance which they find so striking are but the outward signs of inward differences even more striking, and that whether the Negro has mental abilities or not, those abilities would not operate like a white man's, but would produce an odd, and African culture.
But by far the greater portion of our population view the Negro as a delightful entertainer, something that must be amusing and furnish amusement because here is a creature as nearly the opposite of the prevailing type of the country as the world affords. Black vs. white in complexion; straight vs. kinky hair; broad vs. aquiline features--therefore grotesque therefore a mistake, therefore some sort of practical joke. A genial nature had been taken for one incapable of knowing or retaining any depth of thought or feeling; dramatic ability in him is only buffoonery; his music delightful but jungle-like--in fact, he is the dark playboy of the Western World, with all the exuberance of the New World at its best but in caricature.
However he may be held by contemporary white American society, there is a stern necessity to include him in any planning for the future of the United States. If he is considered as a worker he represents an unwieldy mass of labor to be exploited, to be used to thwart organized labor in this country by being used as strike breakers, or to keep wages low; or as material with a high rate of grievances that make him a fertile field for revolutionary propaganda.
If he is considered as a citizen it must be as a voter. [. . .] One gap in our existing state is the total disregard for constitutional amendments, and in the long run it is likely that the total disregard by the southern states for the provisions of the 14th and 15th as they affect the Negro as a voter, may do as much if not more to undermine our set-up as the immediate hysteria about the non-enforcement of the 18th.[note 1]
The Negro has shown himself capable of the highest training our educational systems afford. Undoubtedly the coming years will add to his creative thinking in the lines of art and science, which [is] already recognized and promising.
And finally the Negro will have to be reckoned with as a spiritual force. In these people are massed some of the most burning hopes and yearnings of any group of people in the country. What a people believes, what a people hopes for, what a people projects in powerful desires, will play a tremendous part in their own destiny and in the destinies of all people with whom they come in contact.
Considering the necessity for including the Negro in any plans for the country from another angle, these considerations must obtain: those who produce American civilization earn the right to share the fruits of their labors, and if white workers in their struggle for freedom against the tyrannies of the present capitalist system do not include the Negro worker in a united front, they leave a weapon to be used against them in the struggle, and a considerable one to be true. Secondly, the whole structure of democracy may fail unless its basic tenets are adhered to and serfdom abolished in a country designed for freemen. No one who has the good of the country at heart can fail to be apprehensive upon this point, for the position of the black men may be that rift in the dike through which waters of dissolution seep to boom some day into flood. Thirdly, all narrowness is incompatible with the scholars' world, and the attempt to hold down the mental achievements of one group will consume the energies of the group so concerned and leave them impotent in the end. And lastly, if spiritual force is to be considered in terms of Christian concepts, there simply is no Christianity without the inclusion of the black man in all proposals for right living, for the measurement of man by a God-ideal.
Source: Church and Society (January 1932): 1-2.
*The Fourteenth Amendment (1869) states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States. No state can abridge the rights of its citizens, "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws." The Fifteenth Amendment (1869) states that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The Eighteenth Amendment (ratified 1919; repealed 1933) prohibits the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol within the United States.
Marion Vera Cuthbert, (1896-1989)
It will be necessary at the outset to insist upon the actuality of the problem of the Negro in this country. For those who doubt such insistence it is only necessary to call to their attention the number of times the whole matter is dismissed as being irrelevant or overemphasized or presented in an unnatural setting. The facts are these:
The Negro constitutes one-tenth of the total population of the United States. All hope that he would die out as a group is gone, the 1930 census reporting that he has a birth rate in the excess of the whites. Even with health conditions among the worst in the country he seems able to resist sufficiently those encroachments of disease that will ultimately wipe him out, and with increasing knowledge of sanitation, hygiene and a better economic foundation upon which to build he will probably hold his own for the immediate years. While the percentage of mixed bloods is high, varying in estimates from 40 to 80 per cent, there is no possibility that he will lose his physical identity and merge with the present population in the near future, although amalgamation of some sort is doubtless inevitable for the coming centuries. Gone also is any hope that he can be transplanted to another country; Africa is divided as spoils among the European powers who find far too many blacks left on their hands to entertain the idea of taking on any more, while possibilities of isolation in this country would wreck everything from individual property rights to state sovereignty itself. The Negro landed on these shores at the same time as the whites, whether by coercion or not, and has plenty of historical evidence for considering this his permanent home. And no longer can he confine himself to the South even if he would. The perilous state of agriculture in this country makes the hope of obtaining a living as a small farmer a more and more doubtful one, and coupled with this is the closing of foreign markets to one of our big crops, cotton. Moreover, industry in various sections of the country has made and continues to make a bid for cheap labor and the Negro will be drawn to the newly developing activities along with other groups. The closer union of all sections of the country by improved means of transportation must not be left out of the picture. The resultant lure of "there" as contrasted to "here" operates just as surely in the case of the Negro, to cause him to move from place to place, as it does with other groups.
And lastly as a very real part of the problem is the feeling of the Negro that he is, above everything else, absolutely American, an intensity of feeling so great that he identifies himself with the majority in the country which considers itself essentially right, even virtuously right, in most of its acts, even when such identification works the rankest injustice to his own group.
In all that we call American civilization, the Negro has shared. In the Old South he was not only the unskilled but the skilled laborer; today he performs the same function in a much more competitive field, and has found new lines of occupation even though the numbers in those new fields are as yet few. It is staggering to think what the sudden wiping out of one-tenth of the American population, both as producer and consumer, would be if the Negro were suddenly to be effaced from the picture.
But while the Negro has filtered into much of American life, the process has been slow and painful, hampered by traditional concepts of himself which it seems almost impossible to eradicate from the popular mind. One of the oldest of the concepts was that the Negro is an in-between man, not rightly beast or man, but inclining, if anything, more toward the bestial side. The early days were filled with debates as to whether he had a soul, and even today vestiges of this early concept linger in the singular brutality with which any of his acts against society are treated. They meet with such summary vengeance as if indeed he were a wild beast of the jungle. The appalling maintenance of both whites and blacks at a low level of social control because of this belief is one of the saddest spectacles of the contemporary American scene.
Another concept relegates him to a position of inferiority imposed, according to those who hold the relationship with an iron hand, because of his inherent mental disabilities. Such arbiters of his destiny either do not see or do not care to see that their control is an economic one and that what they fear is not a havoc wreaked in their midst because of his inability to comprehend so intellectual and complex a civilization, but that he will become a real contender for some of the honors and spoils of the world. Closely identified with these is a naive group who imagine that the differences in appearance which they find so striking are but the outward signs of inward differences even more striking, and that whether the Negro has mental abilities or not, those abilities would not operate like a white man's, but would produce an odd, and African culture.
But by far the greater portion of our population view the Negro as a delightful entertainer, something that must be amusing and furnish amusement because here is a creature as nearly the opposite of the prevailing type of the country as the world affords. Black vs. white in complexion; straight vs. kinky hair; broad vs. aquiline features--therefore grotesque therefore a mistake, therefore some sort of practical joke. A genial nature had been taken for one incapable of knowing or retaining any depth of thought or feeling; dramatic ability in him is only buffoonery; his music delightful but jungle-like--in fact, he is the dark playboy of the Western World, with all the exuberance of the New World at its best but in caricature.
However he may be held by contemporary white American society, there is a stern necessity to include him in any planning for the future of the United States. If he is considered as a worker he represents an unwieldy mass of labor to be exploited, to be used to thwart organized labor in this country by being used as strike breakers, or to keep wages low; or as material with a high rate of grievances that make him a fertile field for revolutionary propaganda.
If he is considered as a citizen it must be as a voter. [. . .] One gap in our existing state is the total disregard for constitutional amendments, and in the long run it is likely that the total disregard by the southern states for the provisions of the 14th and 15th as they affect the Negro as a voter, may do as much if not more to undermine our set-up as the immediate hysteria about the non-enforcement of the 18th.[note 1]
The Negro has shown himself capable of the highest training our educational systems afford. Undoubtedly the coming years will add to his creative thinking in the lines of art and science, which [is] already recognized and promising.
And finally the Negro will have to be reckoned with as a spiritual force. In these people are massed some of the most burning hopes and yearnings of any group of people in the country. What a people believes, what a people hopes for, what a people projects in powerful desires, will play a tremendous part in their own destiny and in the destinies of all people with whom they come in contact.
Considering the necessity for including the Negro in any plans for the country from another angle, these considerations must obtain: those who produce American civilization earn the right to share the fruits of their labors, and if white workers in their struggle for freedom against the tyrannies of the present capitalist system do not include the Negro worker in a united front, they leave a weapon to be used against them in the struggle, and a considerable one to be true. Secondly, the whole structure of democracy may fail unless its basic tenets are adhered to and serfdom abolished in a country designed for freemen. No one who has the good of the country at heart can fail to be apprehensive upon this point, for the position of the black men may be that rift in the dike through which waters of dissolution seep to boom some day into flood. Thirdly, all narrowness is incompatible with the scholars' world, and the attempt to hold down the mental achievements of one group will consume the energies of the group so concerned and leave them impotent in the end. And lastly, if spiritual force is to be considered in terms of Christian concepts, there simply is no Christianity without the inclusion of the black man in all proposals for right living, for the measurement of man by a God-ideal.
Source: Church and Society (January 1932): 1-2.
*The Fourteenth Amendment (1869) states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States. No state can abridge the rights of its citizens, "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws." The Fifteenth Amendment (1869) states that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The Eighteenth Amendment (ratified 1919; repealed 1933) prohibits the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol within the United States.
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