The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue

by Various

But it may be asked, When the standard of living of the Negroes is raised, will not wages go up, and will not that be a drawback? Certainly wages will go up, because the income of all classes will be increased. High wages generally indicate high productive power and general wealth, while low wages indicate the opposite. Only benefits can arise from better wages.

In the next place, the Negro's propensity to crime tends to excite the criminal tendencies of the white man. The South enjoys the distinction of having the highest percentage of crime in all the civilized world, and the reason is that the crimes of the one race provoke counter-crimes in the other.

The physical well-being of the one race has such a conspicuous influence upon that of the other that the subject requires no elaboration. The uncleanliness of person and habits of the Negroes in their homes and in the homes of their employers tends to propagate diseases, and thus impairs the health and increases the death-rate of the whole population.

Again, the lack of refinement in intellect, manners, and dress among the Negroes is an obstacle to the cultivated life of the whites. Ignorance and the absence of taste and self-respect in servants result in badly kept homes and yards, destruction of furniture and ware, ill-prepared food, poor table service, and a general lowering of the standard of living. Furthermore, the corrupt, coarse, and vulgar language of the Negroes is largely responsible for the jumbled and distorted English spoken by many of the Southern whites.

Seeing that the degradation of the Negro is an impediment to the progress and civilization of the white man, how may we effect an improvement in his condition?

First, municipalities should give more attention to the streets and alleys that traverse Negro settlements. In almost every town in the South there are settlements, known by such names as "New Africa," "Haiti," "Log Town," "Smoky Hollow," or "Snow Hill," exclusively inhabited by Negroes. These settlements are often outside the corporate limits. The houses are built along narrow, crooked, and dirty lanes, and the community is without sanitary regulations or oversight. These quarters should be brought under municipal control, the lanes widened into streets and cleaned, and provision made to guard against the opening of similar ones in the future.

In the next place, property-owners should build better houses for the Negroes to live in. The weakness in the civilization of the Negroes is most pronounced in their family life. But improvement in this respect is not possible without an improvement in the character and the comforts of the houses they live in. Bad houses breed bad people and bad neighborhoods. There is no more distinctive form of crime than the building and renting of houses unfit for human habitation.

Scarcely second in importance to improvements in house architecture is the need among Negroes of more time to spend with their families. Employers of Negro labor should be less exacting in the number of hours required for a day's work. Many domestic servants now work from six in the morning until nine and ten o'clock at night. The Southern habit of keeping open shopping-places until late at night encourages late suppers, retains cooks, butlers, and nurses until bedtime, and robs them of all home life. If the merchants would close their shops at six o'clock, as is the custom in the North, the welfare of both races would be greatly promoted.

Again, a revolution is needed in the character of the Negro's religion. At present it is too largely an affair of the emotions. He needs to be taught that the religious life is something to grow into by the perfection of personality, and not to be jumped into or sweated into at camp-meetings. The theological seminaries and the graduate preachers should assume the task of grafting upon the religion of the Negro that much sanity at least.

A reform is as much needed in the methods and aims of Negro education. Up to the present Negro education has shared with that of the white man the fault of being top-heavy. Colleges and universities have developed out of proportion to, and at the expense of, common schools. Then, the kind of education afforded the Negro has not been fitted to his capacities and needs. He has been made to pursue courses of study parallel to those prescribed for the whites, as though the individuals of both races had to fill the same positions in life. Much of the Negro's education has had nothing to do with his real life-work. It has only made him discontented and disinclined to unfold his arms. The survival of the Negroes in the race for existence depends upon their retaining possession of the few bread-winning occupations now open to them. But instead of better qualifying themselves for these occupations they have been poring over dead languages and working problems in mathematics. In the meantime the Chinaman and the steam-laundry have abolished the Negro's wash-tub, trained white "tonsorial artists" have taken away his barber's chair, and skilled painters and plasterers and mechanics have taken away his paint-brushes and tool-chests. Every year the number of occupations open to him becomes fewer because of his lack of progress in them. Unless a radical change takes place in the scope of his education, so that he may learn better how to do his work, a tide of white immigration will set in and force him out of his last stronghold, domestic service, and limit his sphere to the farm.