This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the
hindrance of all advance in the black South, or the absence of
a class of black landlords and mechanics who, in spite of
disadvantages, are accumulating property and making good
citizens. But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large
as a fairer economic system might easily make it, that those
who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to
accomplish much less than they deserve to, and that, above
all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance and
accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable
methods of selection. As a remedy for this, there is but one
possible procedure. We must accept some of the race preju-
dice in the South as a fact,--deplorable in its intensity,
unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but nev-
ertheless a hard fact which only time can efface. We cannot
hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that
the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close
sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which
their present situation so eloquently demands.
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