DemocracySocial DemocracySocialism

340 THE CLASS STRUGGLE EDITORLIALS 341 ants and then causing a depreciation of the value of the property of his neighbor litigant.
This chronic shortage became acute with the importation of thousands of Negroes into the larger cities of the North.
Colored families paid fantastic prices for dwelling places and thus secured a foothold in neighborhoods that were closed to them before, to the consequent irritation of their white neighbors. Passive prejudice against the Negro became active resentment.
That the health and morals of the colored population must suffer under such adverse conditions is obvious. They raised the money necessary to pay the high rentals by overcrowding their cramped quarters. Immorality and disease flourish under such conditions. The Survey reports that in Cincinnati the death rate of the colored population is double that of the Whites, that pneumonia among the colored people is three times as deadly as among their white neighbors, that their syphilis rate is five times as high. That in proportion to the population, three times as many colored children die before birth, that three times as many colored babies, born alive, die before their first birthday; that the excess in colored deaths from preventable causes alone is so great that it accounts for more than one point in the general death rate of the city.
Conditions in other large cities are very similar. Nor is this due to racial weakness on the part of the colored population, for the physical examination of the male population during the draft revealed the surprising fact that the white men of the South show a far greater percentage of physically unfit than the colored population.
The returning soldiers and the subsidence of inflated war industries to their normal level have produced a situation that is little short of a calamity. The white man finds the job that used to support him in the hands of Negroes who are willing to underbid him in the labor market in order to maintain an existence. Labor unions which excluded Negroes from membership find their existence threatened by the influx of colored labor into their industries. Everywhere the colored man has become the dangerous competitor of the white. It is this fact, above all, that lies at the root of the race trouble that is brewing everywhere.
Popular discontent will remain, and will continue to culminate in horrible excesses such as occurred in Washington and Chicago, and in East St. Louis a year ago, so long as State and National authorities maintain the passive attitude of neutrality they have hitherto affected. Punishment of the offenders on both sides will do little good mand, indeed, we doubt whether there exists the slightest intention of calling to account those white hondlums who precipitated the trouble. The remedy must be niore fundamental, more farreaching in its effects.
So long as the colored children of the South are allowed to grow up with practically no schooling, because state and county appropriations for education are barely sufficient to give a rudimentary education to the children of the Whites; so long as the Negro of the South can receive a high school and college education only in schools and universities maintained by colored people themselves; so long as in many sections of the South Negro communities must maintain their own public schools and yet pay school taxes for the upkeep of white schools in their districts; so long as no attempt is made to develop and improve the moral tone of the Negro boy or girl after school hours, to maintain institutions of correction for the wayward boy or girl, for the incipient thief or rapist outside the county jail or state prison so long will the moral and mental standard of the Negro be beneath that of the White. The authorities of the North must meet this problem with a vigorous and efficient program of education and public hygiene.
But the most important factor in the permanent cessation of these race riots is the white workingman himself. So long as he insists upon Negro segregation, so long as he closes the doors of his industrial organization to the colored man, he will have in him a dangerous competitor on the industrial field. No protest, however emphatic, can drive him from the labor market, for, to the capitalist entrepreneur, Negro labor is cheap labor. Race feeling will persist until economic competition between the white and the black man will have ceased. But first the white man must understand that there is but one alternative either competition to the utmost or a common fight of all workers, without regard to color, race or creed, against the common enemy, the capitalist class.
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