Booker T. Washington. We
have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are
sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and
white.
First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South
discriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners are
not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly
hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is the indis-
criminate endorsement of the recent course of the South
toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of
the South. The South is not "solid"; it is a land in the
ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are
fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today
perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good.
Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South
needs,--needs it for the sake of her own white sons and
daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental
and moral development.
Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the
blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the
ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his
competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer,
some of the educated see a menace in his upward develop-
ment, while others--usually the sons of the masters--wish to
help him to rise.
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