this side of the railroad tracks, we have Negro-owned restaurants and night clubs with Negro performers attracting so much white patronage that on busy week-end nights Negroes sometimes have to be turned away at the doors because white people have taken up the seating space.
So when you talk about integration, don’t forget that white people of Atlanta came over here and integrated our restaurants and night clubs a long time ago without even going through the formality of asking us if we had any objection to being integrated by them. Of course, we think we do have the best night clubs and singers and musicians in Atlanta and we’re proud of it all.
The white people can’t be blamed for wanting the best in night life, and they’re always welcome and they receive special attention. Just the same, it is an ironical situation to have our clubs integrated by some of the white people who make violent protests when we say we’d like to enter some of their places of business over on their side of the railroad tracks.
White merchants want our trade, and they advertise for it in Negro newspapers, because anybody’s dollar is worth exactly one hundred cents. And yet they claim they ought to have the right to draw the color line at the lunch counter and the washroom door in a department store.
The real hardship of Negro life is in the country and small town and not in the city. I know about this because I’ve lived in all three places. I was born in a South Georgia small town and lived on an East Georgia sharecrop farm until I came to Atlanta to get an education. It’s the same in Alabama and Mississippi. In the larger cities, such as Birmingham and Mobile and Jackson, Negroes have been having their troubles with integration and civil rights, just as we do in Atlanta, but for the most part the Negro’s social and economic bind is in the country and small town. That’s where a colored man can be too scared to call his soul his own.
Very little is heard about life in the country. The big city gets the newspaper headlines when something happens in the Negro slums. Just the same when you break down the Negro population figures in the Deep South, the country outnumbers the city two to one. Servants in small towns, restaurant kitchen-boys, sawmill hands, day-wage laborers, and sharecrop farmers are so dependent upon their jobs for housing and survival that they live year after year in subjection to the whims of their white employers. Negro urban life is concentrated in side-by-side dwellings and floor-upon-floor flats. That makes it much more conspicuous than that of twice as many people living in desperation elsewhere.
I don’t mean to say our people are physically mistreated in the country and small town any more than a poor buckra is mistreated. Whipping and lynching are becoming things of the past, thank God. What does happen, though, is that as Negroes they are the victims of a kind of psychological hardship or bondage. I’m talking now mostly about the older generation—those who are forty and fifty and older. The white employer tells them to take the pay offered, the housing provided, the working conditions demanded—or he’ll get another boy who will.
And there are always other boys waiting in line for a job, too.
That’s the kind of system it is. It’s maintaining a pool of subservient people to work at the lowest possible rate of pay. This keeps the average country and small-town Negro in economic distress and makes him constantly fearful of risking his livelihood by speaking up for his rights. And this is why there’s so little public protest or demonstration outside the larger cities.
However, a change is on the way. The younger generation of Negroes in the small community—those in their teens and attending school—are growing up without this fear. They’ll be the ones to do what their parents and grandparents were unable to do.
Education is something new and exciting to young Negroes everywhere. The
So when you talk about integration, don’t forget that white people of Atlanta came over here and integrated our restaurants and night clubs a long time ago without even going through the formality of asking us if we had any objection to being integrated by them. Of course, we think we do have the best night clubs and singers and musicians in Atlanta and we’re proud of it all.
The white people can’t be blamed for wanting the best in night life, and they’re always welcome and they receive special attention. Just the same, it is an ironical situation to have our clubs integrated by some of the white people who make violent protests when we say we’d like to enter some of their places of business over on their side of the railroad tracks.
White merchants want our trade, and they advertise for it in Negro newspapers, because anybody’s dollar is worth exactly one hundred cents. And yet they claim they ought to have the right to draw the color line at the lunch counter and the washroom door in a department store.
The real hardship of Negro life is in the country and small town and not in the city. I know about this because I’ve lived in all three places. I was born in a South Georgia small town and lived on an East Georgia sharecrop farm until I came to Atlanta to get an education. It’s the same in Alabama and Mississippi. In the larger cities, such as Birmingham and Mobile and Jackson, Negroes have been having their troubles with integration and civil rights, just as we do in Atlanta, but for the most part the Negro’s social and economic bind is in the country and small town. That’s where a colored man can be too scared to call his soul his own.
Very little is heard about life in the country. The big city gets the newspaper headlines when something happens in the Negro slums. Just the same when you break down the Negro population figures in the Deep South, the country outnumbers the city two to one. Servants in small towns, restaurant kitchen-boys, sawmill hands, day-wage laborers, and sharecrop farmers are so dependent upon their jobs for housing and survival that they live year after year in subjection to the whims of their white employers. Negro urban life is concentrated in side-by-side dwellings and floor-upon-floor flats. That makes it much more conspicuous than that of twice as many people living in desperation elsewhere.
I don’t mean to say our people are physically mistreated in the country and small town any more than a poor buckra is mistreated. Whipping and lynching are becoming things of the past, thank God. What does happen, though, is that as Negroes they are the victims of a kind of psychological hardship or bondage. I’m talking now mostly about the older generation—those who are forty and fifty and older. The white employer tells them to take the pay offered, the housing provided, the working conditions demanded—or he’ll get another boy who will.
And there are always other boys waiting in line for a job, too.
That’s the kind of system it is. It’s maintaining a pool of subservient people to work at the lowest possible rate of pay. This keeps the average country and small-town Negro in economic distress and makes him constantly fearful of risking his livelihood by speaking up for his rights. And this is why there’s so little public protest or demonstration outside the larger cities.
However, a change is on the way. The younger generation of Negroes in the small community—those in their teens and attending school—are growing up without this fear. They’ll be the ones to do what their parents and grandparents were unable to do.
Education is something new and exciting to young Negroes everywhere. The
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