University of Virginia Library

Voluntary Cooperation

1. We are now to note some differences between attitudes prevailing in the two races and to point out things which are feared by the conscious or the sub-conscious minds of the American people. No enduring society, whether of insects, animals, or of human beings, can be found in the absence of the seconding tendency, the innate tendency of one being to go voluntarily to the aid of another seen to be engaged with a task of common interest too great for his individual strength. We do not refer merely to the fact of the working together of two individuals. Two horses work together, it is true, but they must be hitched together. They will come together when trained but will perform no service whatever with a fellow horse except that which they are trained to perform. It is wholly different with the ant. It goes voluntarily and unfailingly to the aid of its fellow. A society is prosperous to the extent that its members possess this trait.

The two races have been compared intellectually, physically and otherwise. We are now to compare them with respect to voluntary cooperation. Prof. Jung says of the American white people, "When you find a good man, you generally support him and push him on until at last he is liable to collapse from sheer exhaustion, success, and triumph. It is done in every family, where ambitious mothers lead boys on with the idea that they must be heroes of some sort. You find it in the factory, where the whole system is designed to get the best man into the best place. And again in the school, where every child is trained to be brave, courageous, efficient, and a "good sport"—in short, a hero."

Contrast this with the usual experience of Negroes. Practically every Negro who has won unusual distinction in America is one who has been discovered by some white people or persons and put conspicuously before the world. This was true of Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Roland Hayes, William Pickens and so forth. As the white people touch only the fringe of Negro life it is no doubt a fact that there are numbers of undiscovered Negroes who are left to drown, so to speak, in the sea of obscurity.

At Geneva, Illinois, there is a home for delinquent, dependent girls. The girls of all races are sent to this home and all go to school together, but they live in cottages set apart for different groups. Irish, German, Jewish, and Negro girls, for example, live separately in racial groups. A person who visited this home says that Jewish girls and those of the Catholic faith have better equipped homes than the other girls. This is due in a measure to a superior seconding spirit possessed by some of the groups, which provide more attractive homes.

We give here an editorial from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a leading newspaper in the South, showing the widespread presence of the seconding attitude in white Americans and an article in the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Negro newspaper of the North, complaining about the almost total absence of the seconding spirit among the Negroes of the North: