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Race Relations
355
white children; in the political problems which arise out of a one-
party system; and in the use of the race issue as a tool for political
advantage. As a result of these last two characteristics of Southern
political life, the race problem is itself intensified; and concern with
fundamental political issues gives way to primary concern with person
alities and issues of race, thus making constructive political approaches
to racial problems almost impossible. In all of these ways and in many
others which affect the personalities—the emotional, the moral, and
the spiritual development—of both Negroes and whites reared in the
South, in ways that affect the region itself, in ways that affect the
nation as a whole, and in ways that affect other peoples of the world
the “wrath” of God is evidenced in His judgment upon men’s narrow
loyalties, their prejudices, and their discrimination.
But God’s judgment does not fall upon one region alone. While
there are important differences between the general pattern of Negro-
white relations in the North and the South, much discrimination
against the Negro has nevertheless taken place in the North; and
this has brought its inescapable harvest of intergroup tension, blighted
areas in large cities, and a high incidence of crime and disease in
such areas. Whereas the Negro has constituted the major minority
group in the South and often the only one, other sections of the nation
have variously discriminated against recent immigrants from parts
of Europe, Puerto Rico, and the Orient, and against the American
Indians and the Jews. Moreover, as Professor Vann Woodward shows,
one reason for the South’s adoption of an extreme racism toward the
end of the nineteenth century was the declining effectiveness of
Northern liberalism—in the press, the courts, and the government—
as a restraining force in preventing the growth and spread of bigotry
and discrimination by law during that period.19 For example, in 1890
the United States Supreme Court ruled that a state could
require
segregation on common carriers; in 1896 in
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
it
laid down the “separate but equal” principle as justifying segregation;
and in 1898 it opened the door to the disfranchisement of the Negro
by approving the Mississippi plan for depriving Negroes of the right
to vote. In addition, as a consequence of the fact that some eight
million colored people were brought under the jurisdiction of the
United States as a result of the Spanish-American War, the nation
as a whole took up many of the Southern attitudes on race in relation
10C. Vann Woodward,
op. cit.,
pp. 51-56.