Meet at the
dining-table and in the drawing-room,--visit, study, play, associate
familiarly and intimately,--and the young people of the two races, in
many instances, will pass through acquaintance and friendship to love
and marriage. Then springs a mixed and degenerate race; then the white
race, with its proud tradition, its high ideals, its grand power, shades
off into an inferior, mongrel breed. Our inheritance, our civilization,
our honor, bid us shut out and forbid that degeneracy at the very
threshold."
Let it be assumed that for the present the white South resolutely
maintains its attitude of social separation. But let its defenders
consider some of the consequences it involves, and make account with
them as best they may. Does not this social code strongly confirm, and
indeed carry as a necessary implication, that industrial separation
which must work injuriously not only to the negro but to the community?
If the white gentleman will not associate with a black gentleman in a
committee on school or public affairs, if he will not admit him to his
pew or his drawing-room, is it not to be expected that the white
carpenter or mill-hand will refuse to work side by side with the black?
What that means where the black man is in a small minority, we see here
at the North,--it shuts him out. Where he is in stronger force, as at
the South, the refusal of industrial fellowship means growing
bitterness, and the complication and aggravation of labor difficulties.
It all goes along together,--the social separation and the industrial.
Further, this means that each race is to be ignorant and aloof from the
other, on its best side. The best side of every civilized people is seen
in its homes. The white and the black homes of the South are strangers
to each other. Edgar Gardner Murphy in his admirable book, _The Present
South_, while he does not for a moment question the necessity of the
social barrier, laments that ignorance of each other's best which it
involves. He dwells hopefully on that development of the family life
which marks the negro's best advance,--but what, he asks, can the white
people really see or know of it? Surely it is a very grave matter to
keep two intermingled peoples thus mutually ignorant of each other's
best.
If it be asked, "What course can reasonably be considered as a possible
alternative to the jealous safeguarding of our race integrity?" the
answer might suggest itself: "Simply deal with every
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