The American Negro in the Changing Economic Order

In facing the problem of the economic position of American Negroes in our national economic crisis some fundamental sociological facts and principles may well bear statement at the opening of this Conference. In venturing so to remind you I am not attempting a key-note speech. It is by way of suggestion that such scientific facts and principles may be in the background of our thinking and our discussion of conditions and remedies. We should, first, keep in mind that the rapidly changing economic and social conditions in America, that are so profoundly affecting the American Negro, are the results of comparatively recent developments in science and invention that have affected the whole world. These developments have greatly altered the methods of production and distribution, the relationship between producer and consumer and between workers and employers. In particular, the applications of electrical energy and of the power of the internal combustion engine have annihilated distance completely in the communication of intelligence and have tremendously reduced time and distance in the transportation of goods, services, and of persons. The effects of this on economic life may be illustrated as follows: An industrial manager or agricultural landlord today by telephone, telegraph, teletype, and radio can keep in constant touch with his operations in several different places and at any distance. He can personally be on the ground of one operation today and at another a thousand miles away tomorrow. To cite concrete cases, a lawyer in Los Angeles is one of the largest plantation operators in the Mississippi River bottoms of Arkansas. The Aluminum Company of America controls and directs operations from New York in a score of centers in the United States, Canada, South America, and other parts of the world. Chief officials from headquarters make personal visits to their several centers using the fastest means of transportation. Second, these changes have taken place at a rate much faster than the adaptations in the folkways and the mores, to use the terms of William Graham Sumner' to designate group habits of action and the beliefs and convictions about the rightness or wrongness that sanction those habits. The economic group habits and the beliefs about them have lagged far behind the operating conditions of industry and agriculture. Experience and surrounding conditions have changed faster than the habits and ideas of the people. White-Negro relations like other group contacts have been greatly influenced by the rapid changes in

Development economics · Economics · Order (exchange) · Political science · Sociology · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy