A writer once summed up the Negro question by saying, "The North has the principles and the South has the Negroes." We are coming to have the Negroes, and we want to keep the principles so far as they are applicable.
Industrial radicalism, expressed in the I.W.W. propaganda among the Negroes, will not help us to keep them. Thuggery will not help us to keep them. A rebellion by the Negroes against facts which exist and will persist will not help us to keep them, but we are confident that the situation in Chicago is susceptible of being handled in the fashion it always has been handled.
Unsettling the Race Problem
... Regardless of what may be considered the justice of the claims of the races, the fact undeniably is that white and black will not mix in quantity. For this reason—the reason reached by the jury—the remedy seems obvious: there must be a plane upon which the races can live socially distinct but industrially co-operative.
We are not disposed to think that the mass of the Negroes want social equality in the full sense of the term. The Tribune has had many intelligently composed letters from Negroes disclaiming any such desire. We believe the Negroes want an opportunity to develop their own society. If this is true there ought not be widespread objection to social segregation, directed by themselves and upon the theory of wholesome living conditions.
But against what we think is an inherent disregard for exact social equality there is appearing a very insidious propaganda among the Negroes. Whether it is being circulated as a radical irritant calculated to disturb political conditions or merely is the parlor philosophy of eager sociological transcendentalists, there is no means of determining.
The propaganda urging agitation for social equality may have every support under the law and under what ought to be human justice, but while fortified by what ought to be, it flies in the face of what is....
The blacks form less than 10 per cent of the population of the United States. They have less than one-tenth of a ghost of a show if the relations between white and black become bitterly hostile. The average black man and the average white man get along fairly well. Unless something happens to arouse their race prejudices and instincts they live by tolerance which may not be a solution of race difficulties, but it is a method of life and it is practical.
There is plenty of evidence just now that something is raising the race question. There is evidence, it is said, to support the story that agents had played on the imagination and ignorance of Negroes in Arkansas inciting them to arise against the whites and take their lands. Agitators have tried to excite the blacks. Some misguided sentimentalists have tried to organize whites and blacks for the compulsory recognition of social equality—a propaganda which is even more vicious than the red propaganda. There are numerous elements and factors of disorder, and the consequences already have been bad....
The position of the Negro is not a preferred one in American society. The Negro is at an economic disadvantage. He is needed in the South and has been brought into the North to meet labor emergencies, but he does not have an open field of work. These disadvantages cannot be removed by discussing them. They exist in race instincts and, along with the other disadvantages which the Negro meets, arise from causes not at the control of the reasoning faculties.