Little Rock THE OTHER SIDE OF SEGREGATION ISSUE

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28414, 22 October 1957, Page 12

Little Rock THE OTHER SIDE OF SEGREGATION ISSUE

[By

LESLIE FAULKNER,

chief European correspondent of World Press]

Little Rock, Arkansas, October 10. —The tall. lean. stoopshouldered negro had a grey moustache and grey hair. He walked with a slow step, almost a shuffle, his eyes on the pavement. His face was sober, his eyes thoughtful. His hands were longfingered and calloused. He wore a dark felt hat, clean overalls, a clean grey denim shirt, and heavysoled work shoes. He stopped when I paused and said: “Good morning. Uncle!” “Good mawnin'. suh.” he replied. “Would you answer a question for me. Uncle?” “Yas. suh, iffen I can.” “What do you think about all this agitation for integration?” He looked at me a second time as if debating whether this was a question to trap him. but I had called him Uncle, and I had spoken first, and I had smiled at him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “There's some of th’ younguns want it an' think it will work," he replied, “but most of us don’t want no integration.” He looked across the street as if he were viewing the years past. “We all has alius looked to the white folks. We been treated all right. We unnerstan’ each other.” "What would you do, Uncle, if all the bars were let down?” "I’d go about things jist like I been.” he replied unhesitatingly. Intolerance in North David Lee, negro editor of the “Jersey Telegram,” Newark, N.J., took time from his office two years ago to travel the South and ask questions. He found that the vast majority of negroes did not want integration. The discoveries he did make caused him to go back and write scathingly of the intolerance of northern whites toward the negro race. He described the racial hatreds that existed in the north, then went on to show that thousands of southern negroes owned prosperous businesses, and enjoyed economic security and the respect of the white people. He compared their living standards with those in the north, and cited instance after instance in which the northern negro lived in squalor in comparison with the negro iir the South.

This is nothing new to the people in the South, but the northerners do not want the facts revealed. When Presidept Lincoln freed the negro with his emancipation proclamation, the negroes were as babes being snatched from their mothers. They were incapable of personal initiative. Their needs had been provided for generations, and threefourths of the negroes of today want no more of life than the necessities with a minimum of responsibility. The freed slaves , begged to be permitted to remain with their owners, and these became the “tenant farmer” class on white plantations and farms.

Carl T. Rowan, a negro, native of Tennessee, a newspaper reporter in Minneapolis, holder of the A.B. and M.A. degrees, writing in the October 12 issue of the •Saturday Evening Post,” asserts that “the real desegregation showdown will come in the great cities of the north.” Negroes from the South are arriving in northern cities by the thousands monthly, attracted by a false sense of equality and the promise of good jobs with good pay. Archbishop’s Advice

Archbishop C. C. Addison, of New York City, a negro Georgian, goes about the country trying to talk sense into the members of his race. He points out the inconsistencies of the northern propaganda. and recites the blessings the negroes have enjoyed in the South through the years. He uses illustrations of the discrimination employed in places where they claim to have no race problems, where negroes live under moie segregated conditions than they ever did in the South. Dr. J. S. Nathaniel Cross, nationally prominent negro clergyman and educator, takes the air for 15 minutes every Sunday morning to appeal to the negro race. In a recent broadcast he said, “Freedom cannot be given to you; it has to be earned. If you want the respect of your fellow men, you must show yourself worthy of it.” For months he has been trying to make negroes

understand that they had gained immeasurable benefits through the years, and further advances would depend upon proving themselves capable of a more valuable part in society. He cited a long list of capital crimes of which his race was guilty and condemned their lack of morality. These negroes who have studied the social behaviour of their race have been caustic in their condemnation of those who were insisting upon equal social status on the basis of their history. The negro migrants going to northern industrial centres constitute one of the most grave problems for the authorities. They expect to be welcomed like long-lost children and offered highly-paid jobs requiring little work. They wind up on the list of unemployed; they resort to all sorts of crime; they create a still greater problem in race relations where those relations are already strained to the breaking point. The negro sections of the cities are over-crowded, causing a health menace. Demand of a Few

Still the number of negroes wanting integration is small, perhaps 2$ per cent, of the total population, and these are prodded into the demand by the N.A.A.C.P. “Race tensions are becoming far more acute in the north than in the South.” said David Lee, whose office was bombed by members of his race for revealing the truth of conditions in his State of New Jersey. Archbishop Addison calls attention to the fact that the Harlem Baptist church in New York, with a membership of 15,000. is a segregated church, yet Adam Clayton Powell, its pastor and a negro Congressman from Harlem, is one of the chief advocates of integration. His church would not think of taking in a white member, and the same is true of the second largest negro Baptist church, located in Chicago.

Biologically the negro is offensive to the white man, and it has been mentioned by many of the negro leaders that those members of the white race who are so insistent upon wholesale integration are those who would have none of it to contend with socially. One 85-year-old negro said: “I aint never heard of none of them Supreme Court jedges or Pres’dent Eisenhower asking no niggers into dere homes fer a meal yet, an’ I aint believin’ they will.”

No, the average negro does not want integration. He’d never be happy with it, for the southern American negro is the most carefree person in the world, and always will be.—Copyright, World Press.