Economic status of the negro.
The chief home of the negro is still, as it has been from the beginning, in the South. Nearly nine-tenths of the colored population of the United States lives below the Mason and Dixon line, particularly in the great agricultural plain which stretches from Virginia southwestward to Texas. In two states, Mississippi and South Carolina, the blacks outnumber the whites; in three others, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, they almost equal them. Most of the Southern negroes live in the rural districts and are engaged in the cultivation of the soil; those who have made their way to the Northern states, more than a million in all, live chiefly in the cities. During the past few years the negroes have been coming northward in greater numbers.
Can the negro problem be solved?
The problem of the negro has many phases, political, social, and economic. The political problem arises from the fact that although the negroes are guaranteed by the constitution the right to vote they are by one means or another debarred from voting in practically all the Southern states. The economic problems have been due, in the main, to the lack of educational facilities for the negro, and particularly to the absence of opportunities for vocational education. This defect is now being remedied to some extent by the spread of vocational schools, of which Tuskegee and Hampton Institute are the best-known examples. The social separation between the white and colored races, especially in the Southern states, is as absolute as ever it was and there is no reason to think that this separation will ever be broken down. When two races in the same community must live their lives entirely apart there is bound to be some mutual suspicion and distrust. In any case the negro problem, in its various phases, must be solved by the white population of the Southern states if it is to be solved at all.
The “gentlemen’s agreement”.
The Japanese on the Pacific Slope.—Some years ago the influx of Japanese into the states of the Pacific slope gave rise to the fear that the Far West would soon have a great racial problem on its hands if this immigration were allowed to go on unchecked. One of these states, California, enacted laws designed to prevent the owning or leasing of land by Japanese and pressure was brought upon Congress with a view to having the Japanese shut out of the country altogether. In the end, through diplomatic negotiations, a “gentlemen’s agreement” was concluded between the American and Japanese governments by which the latter promised to grant no more passports enabling its citizens to emigrate to the United States, except in the case of merchants, students and others whose residence in this country would be temporary. The Japanese government has lived up to the letter of this agreement, but this has not prevented a good many Japanese coming into the United States under one subterfuge or another. The Western states are determined that their territory shall remain a “white man’s country”; on the other hand the Japanese government is not willing to agree by formal treaty to the exclusion of its own people from any other country. As a great and powerful nation, civilized and progressive, Japan feels that such a treaty would be a humiliation. So there the matter rests at present. Japanese are not forbidden to enter the United States; we are merely depending upon the informal promise of the Japanese government to keep them from coming here.
THE MELTING POT
By Vesper L. George
From a mural painting in the McClain High School, Greenfield, Ohio.