Our most widely known scholars have been trained in universities outside of the South.
Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.
And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.
The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.
They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.
The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.
One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.
Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.
Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.
This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.
If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.
The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.
If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.
This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.
I am a radical.
Let us banish fear.
In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.
I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.
We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.
As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.
