University of Virginia Library

Proposed Cures

Let us now glance at some proposed cures. Great stress is being placed on education and rightly so, but the mistake must not be made of thinking intellectual training will solve the problem. Benjamin Kidd holds that intellectual training in the absence of certain social traits lowers rather than raises racial efficiency.

Prof. Floyd H. Allport discounts intellectual training as a solvent of the inter-racial situation. He says, "This discrepancy in mental ability is not great enough to account for the problem that centers about the American Negro, or to explain fully the ostracism to which he is subjected * * * The heart of the Negro question is not to be in the sphere of intelligence. * * *"

William Dean Howells was of the opinion that race prejudice would disappear in the face of Negro art. He regarded the poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar as establishing the essential unity of the human family. He said, "I permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and the prejudices which had so long constrained his race were destined to vanish in the arts; that they were to be final proof that God had made of one blood all nations of men." Howell's theory of the conquest of race prejudice through the development of art was subjected to a test recently in the city of Philadelphia. A Miss Hunter, director of the Art Alliance of Philadelphia, in refusing a bronze figure of a Negro as an art exhibit, is reported as saying, "The color problem seems to be unusually great in Philadelphia."

Industrial education, thrift and economic progress

so ably stressed by the late Booker T. Washington has not bright the nation any nearer to the solution of the problem, although the policy was a wise one and has done an untold amount of good. The economic success of the Negro is what enabled the race to invade the fine residential sections of their northern emancipators precipitating the flight of the latter.

The fear has been expressed that adjustment will be of a temporary nature, hence the enduring character of the problem. Prof. Wm. Dougall, of Harvard University, says, "The circumstances and environment may modify or even check for a time, the effects of the inherited racial characteristics; but these will always come out again and make themselves felt, and being thus the most persistent element in man's mental makeup, they will appear as the dominant influence in the development of the character and point of view of the group."

It has been suggested that the American continent may one day pass to the Negro. Count Herman Keyserling says in the Atlantic Monthly, "The problem is a very serious one, for if the white American continues on his present line of development, then America may end by becoming the black continent of modern days. We know today that from Paleolithic days onward there has been at least three great civilizations in Africa the original representation of which were not black. But the ruling races eventually lost their vitality. They lived too much aloof from Mother Earth."