Well, whatever the white folks do and say, the Negro race will finally have to face the need to save itself. The whites have done the blacks some great wrongs, but also they have done some good. They have brought to them the benefits of modern civilization. They can still do a lot more, but one thing they cannot do: they cannot give Negroes the gift of a soul—a group soul.
Wherever I traveled in Europe and Africa I was impressed by the phenomenon of the emphasis on group life, whether the idea behind it was Communist co-operative or Fascist collective or regional autonomy. I lived under a Communist dictatorship in Russia, two Fascist dictatorships in Europe, and the French colonial dictatorship in Morocco. I don't like any dictatorship.
Yet even the dictatorships were making concessions to the strong awakened group spirit of the peoples. Soviet Russia was hard at work on the social problems of its many nationalities. Primo de Rivera in Spain had organized two grand exhibitions: one for discontented Catalonia and another for unhappy Andalusia. Regional groups such as that in Brittany and in the Basque country were reviving their ancient culture. Labor groups and radical groups were building up their institutions and educating their children in opposition to reactionary institutions.
But there is very little group spirit among Negroes. The American Negro group is the most advanced in the world. It possesses unique advantages for development and expansion and for assuming the world leadership of the Negro race. But it sadly lacks a group soul. And the greatest hindrance to the growth of a group soul is the wrong idea held about segregation. Negroes do not understand the difference between group segregation and group aggregation. And their leaders do not enlighten them, because they too do not choose to understand. Negro institutions and unique Negro efforts have never had a chance for full development; they are haunted by the fear of segregation. Except where they are forced against their will, Negroes in general prefer to patronize white institutions and support white causes in order to demonstrate their opposition to segregation.
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.
There are language groups and religious groups in this country that have found it necessary to develop their own banks, co-operative stores, printing establishments, clubs, theaters, colleges, hotels, hospitals and other social service institutions and trade unions. Yet they were not physically separated from other white groups as much as are Negroes. But they were in a stronger position to bargain and obtain social and political privileges by virtue of the strength of their own institutions.
But Negro institutions in general are developed only perfunctorily and by compulsion, because Negroes have no abiding faith in them. Negroes wisely are not wasting thought on the chimera of a separate Negro state or a separate Negro economy within the United States, but there are a thousand things within the Negro community which only Negroes can do.
There are educated Negroes who believe that the color line will be dissolved eventually by the light-skinned Negroids "passing white," by miscegenation and final assimilation by the white group. But even if such a solution were possible in the future, it is certainly not a solution for the great dark body of Negroids living in the present. Also if the optimistic Negro advocates of futility would travel and observe or study to learn something of the composition and distribution of white racial, national and regional groups that are more assimilable than Negroes, and of their instinctive and irrational tenacity, they might be less optimistic and negative about the position of their own.