THE OMAHA GUIDE
Published Every Saturday at 2418-20 Grant St.
Omaha, Nebraska
Phone WEbster 1517
Entered as Second Class Matter March 15, 1927,
at the Post Office at Omaha, Nebr., under
Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.
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Race prejudice must go. The Fatherhood of
God and the Brotherhood of Man must prevail.
These are the only principles whil will stand
the acid test of good._
EDITORIALS
THE iNEGRO AND THE NATION’S
NUMBER ONE PROBLEM
-oOo
By A. Phillip Randolph, International
President Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters. —
President Roosevelt has designat
ed the South as the nation’s Number
One Problem. Considering the extreme
sensitiveness of the South, and the fact
that the President must rely upon it
very largely to control the next na
tional Democratic Convention, and to
a great extent to get NEW DEAL leg
islation through the Congress, this was
a courageous statement. Time out of
mind, the South under the aegis of the
bankrupt doctrine of states’ rights, has
insisted that it be left alone in the
handling of its various problems. The
major reason for this position is that
the South realizes that its big problem
is the problem of race, and it is deter
mined to brook no interference on this
question. It ealizes that its treatment
of the Negro people, following eman
cipation from slavery in 1863 will not
bear the white light of public opinion.
Disfranchisement of the Negro
people in flagrant violation of the 14th
Amendment of the Constitution and
its enslavement of great masses of Ne
gro workers on turpentine and lumber
plantations in utter mullification of the
13th Amendment together with all
forms of jim-crowism in the nature of
segregation, vagrancy laws, vicious
relis of the BLACK CODE, to say
nothing of the national disgrace of the
lynch terror and the mob law, and the
notorious flounting of all civil rights
and decency by the night riders and the
KLU KLUX KLAN, place the South in
a position of grave moral vulnerabili
ty.
It is a matter of common know
ledge that millions of Negroes are
caught within the sinister grip of the
share crop and tenant farming, a form
of feudalisw where the workers have
the status of pre-capitalistic semi serfs.
This is a travesty upon justice, a
mockery of civilized life and an insult
to the Bill of Rights and common
sense.
But the President did not touch
upon these dejHcate and inflammable
issues. The reason is clear. He is a po
litician, a diplomat and a statesman. As
a politician, he looks carefully to the
maintenance of political fences so that
the Democratic majority in Congress
mav remain safe in order to insure the
passage of his important weasures.
Undqr our present party system, this
strategy from the point of view of the
leader of a great party, which must
depend upon the “solid South” to no
little extent is not without merit.
As a diplomat, he knew that to
raise the question of social justice for
the Negro people in the south, would
result in a volcanic eruption of racial
hatred and bitterness of the most viri
lent nature which would sweep over
the land.
In the pattern of a statesman,
President Roosevelt is looking steadily
toward the completion of his progres
sive NEW DEAL legislative structure,
the success of which can not fail to im
prove the living status of Hack Ameri
cans.
'Now, the question arises as to the
wisdom of foregoing facing a basic
human principle of social justice, in the
form of the right of the Negro people
to vote and ba secure from the ravages
of the mid-night riding mob, as well as
the persecution of the lynch judge, in
order to secure favoable consideration
for other constructive economic mea
sures that will benefit the people of the
south, including the Negro. This ques
tion, the wide and far reaching impli
cations of which are too intricate and
complex to be answered with complete
ness and finality in a brief editorial,
will bob up ever and anon to plague
the NEW DEAL champions .
Our own opinion is that the great
prestige and power of some President
of the United States must be thrown
into the balance against the nefarious
terrorization oi oiacK Amercans below
the Mason and Dixon Line. While it
may not be propitious for President
Roosevelt to take the bit in his mouth
and deijy southern burbon political au
tocracy at a time when he is seeking to
secure the enactment of laws that are
viciously fought by the Chambers of
Commerce the National Manufacturer
Association and all stripes of fascists,
from Maine, to Florida, yet there is no
person who has ever occupied the
White House who can openly, positive
ly and frankly demand that the South
put its house in order by abolishing the
lily-white! Democratic and Republican
•Primaries, so that black Americans,
wiho have fought and died and crim
soned the battle fields of every war in
which this nation has engaged from
Bunker Hill to Flanders Field, than the
matchless Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He has the moral and spiritual power
to drive the Tillmans, Bleases, Varda
nians and Bilbos into defeat and inno
cuous obscuity. For how can anyone in
America talk with any honestly about
democracy in the face of the notorious
rotten-borough system of the South,
where colored Americans are counted in
the population as a basis of the election
of Southern Congressmen and yet de
nied their constitutional right of suf
frage.
Yet, it may be that the President
may some day strike out in righteous
indignation against this horrible
breach of political decency and demo
cratic tradition. We probably must
await his own decision with respect to
the time of action. But we are certain
as the night follows the day- that the
South will never cease to be the na
tion’s Number One Problem so long as
one third of the population are treated
as economic and political peons.
The existence of such a condition
of the Negro people Who have made an
imperishible contribution in labor, ta
lent, genius, ability, courage and blood
to our great country, is cmt of harmony
with the high idealism and practical
policies of social, economic and poliical
reform of vision, and the spirit of hu
manitarian prophecy of our great Pre
sident Franklin Roosevelt, who history
will set down at the top of Washington
Jefferson and Lincoln, great Presi
dents though they were as a statesman
of the people.
And it is clear that he is not with
out dis due need of courage. One needs
must have courage and much courage,
to attempt a revision in the number of
judges of the well nigh ancient insti
tution of the United States Supreme
Court.
He lost, but he certainly was not
defeated in the attainment of the broad
objective of his maneuver. Moreover,
he denounced southern feudalists ro
yalistists right in the heart of the
souh.
But while he is certainly friendly
to the cause of Negro freedom and jus
tice and has probably done more to ad
vance this freedom and justice for the
race than any other American Presi
dent, »he has, nevertheless, remained
silent on the question of the passage of
Wagner Van Nuyis Gavagan Anti
Lynching Bill and the abolition of dis
franchisement of Negro citizens in the
south.
Of course, in the main, this is the
Negros own problem. It is he who must
bring sufficient pressure to bear out
upon the Pesidelnt and the Congress
to wipe out the evil of lynching and the
menace of the grand father clause
which curtails the right of the Negroes
to vote. The President nor Congress
will act without, pessure, and fifteen
million Negroes, when organized, can
exert a tremendous amount of pressure
to secure proper economic political and
civil consideration.
But it is proper to add, in this con
nection, that the attack upon the South
at the nation’s Number One Problem
by President Roosevelt with a view to
effecing its reconstruction in terms of
production and distribution, as well as
general social improvement, is certain
to benefit the Negro people of the
South. However, it will be important
and necessary for the Negroes them
selves to see to it that they participate
in the solution of this Number One
Problem, as well as in the economic re
construction of the South. Legislation
may be passed w(hich is ever so benefi
cient, but its purposes so far as the
well being of the Negro people is con
cerned, may be mullified by adminis
tration. It is not less important to the
Negro people to watch the administra
tion. It is not less important to the Ne
gro people to watch the administration
of a law, than its enactment. No ones
denies that the 14th Amendment was
intended to guarantee the right to vote
and other civil privileges to the Negro
people^ But the effect of the Amend
men is killed by interpretation and ad
ministration. ^ * i. .
Fundamentally, the south is back
ward. Both black and white workers
are in povery, because both are unor
ganized. The South has more than a
fourth of the total population of the
nation but raises only one fifth of the
country’s dairy products ,not enough
for itself. The report of the National
Emergency Council on the South, ap
pointed by President Roosevelt, states
definitely that the southern people
need food, although the south has a
variety of fertile soils, a mild climate,
fine sejaports, navigable rivers, giood
railroads, coal and iron and other mi
nerals, two thirds of the nation’s oil,
forljy per cent of its forests ideal fish
ing and hunting. Yet the reports states
that fat-back corn bread and molasses
is the all too common diet of the great
masses of the people, not black people
alone, but white pe\ople, also.
What is the trouble? The answer
is the South has never been able to rise
because it has been too busy keeping
the Negro people down, and as the sage
of Tuskegee, Booker Washington, said
“You can not keep a man down in the
ditch without staying down there with
him.” Thus, not only are Negroes, the
large majority of whom in the south
are in dire poverty, but so are the
whites. One Englishman traveling
through the South made the cryptic
remark that hs eyes behold, especially
in Georgia, “peaches poverty and
pines.” And Georgia typical of the oth
er Southern states.
What is the remedy? The remedy
lies not only in the President’s recom
mendation of certain economic mea
sures of business, industrial and agri
cultural reform, but fundamentally of
organization into trade unions, tenant
farmers’s organizatons, share coppers’
unions and cooperatives among con
sumers and producers, of the black
and white workers in the cities and on
the farms. Not into separate jim-crow
unions, but into the same unions. It is
base to he reconstruction of the South
that the fifteen million black people be
made free citizens wth a right to vote
in every election and to be voted for,
even if federal troops must be station
ed there to see that this simple act of
justice be done. Have not federal
troops been used for less noble pur
poses?
-oOo
HOW BIG IS TOO BIG?
Legislative, attemtps to limit the
size of businesses, especially those en
gaged in the merchandising field bring
to the fore a question similar to “How
far is up?" The hews question is, How
big is too big? Is the grocery store to
be kept by law'1, to the crossroads em
porium size? Is its number of employes
or its annual turnover, to be rigidly re
stricted? It not, just what basis of
computing size is to be used?
Some of the lawmakers would des
troy the chain stores, on the grounds
that they are too widespread, too large
and efficient, and do too much business.
If that is true, what is to be done about
department stores—some of which,
though they operate but a single outlet
do as much business as a chain with
hundreds of stores and draw trade
from the entire community and its en
virons?
Such questions as these inevitably
appear when you attempt to make
mere size the arbiter of commercial
virtue. Any law defining the right and
wrong sizes of industry is bound to be
unsound law, in that it must be based
upon the prejudices and opinions of in
dividuals. A far soundex solution to
the question of size is found in natural
economic law. When a business be
comes too big and unwieldy it likewise
becomes wasteful and ineficient—and a
smaller recompetitor promply steps in
and takes its trade. There are difficul
ties as well as advantages in size—as
the fact that thousands of progres
sive independqnt merchants have only
met chain competition but have given
it a merry race, proves.
Halt industrial gowth by law and
you halt progess. You establish a false
standard that is destricutive of oppor
tunity. To all inents and purposes’ you
defraud the consumer.You shackle am
bition and ability. And in the long run,
evqryone loses.
-0O0
NO GUESS WORK ,
The safety of life insurance, as an
institution, has been provn in a hun
dred economic storms. And that safety
is guaranteed by two irrevocable prin
ciples—the multiplication table and
the law of mortality.
A life insurance company knows
almost to a nickel bow much it will
have to pay out during any given fu
ture period. Its charges and costs are
edjusted accordingly And the money is
there and ready when a contract fall
due.
Life insurance has survived the
greatest war and the greatest depres
sion in modern history with its co^'s
flying.That is why more and mo"«
tizens arc turning to it as a haven for
savings.
