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"Buck Speaks on Problem of the Negro; Declares It 'Insoluble' at Present Time:
"Segregation Best Working Plan For Now; Has Stabilized The South"
HARVARD CRIMSON
Tuesday, January 17, 1939
On the Web at:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=460323
"I believe that the Negro problem is insoluble at the present," said Paul H. Buck, assistant professor of History, and Pulitzer Prize winner, at his lecture on the American Negro in the Freshman Union last night. "What we have now," he said, "is a working agreement, and to most people in the South and the North it is the only alternative to race riots and persecution."
The trouble with the post-war settlement, according to Buck, was that it gave the Negro too great a measure of political freedom, rather than economic opportunity. "Emancipation was a gift that the Negro could not appreciate," Buck said, "and he had neither the morale of freedom nor the feeling that it should be cherished. "A white man's country' is the basis of Southern society, whose viewpoint was untouched by the War, and who reestablished their discipline by disfranchising the Negro politically, reducing him to peonage, and segregating him socially."
White superiority, or rather the widespread belief in it, is the permanent base on which the question of the Negro's status rests. "Once people realize the insolubility of the equality problem, then they will learn to live with it."
Little Opportunity
Buck contrasted the attitude of Booker T. Washington, great Negro leader of the nineteenth century with that of William Edward Du Bois '90. "Washington urged the Negroes to acquiesce to their place on the social and economic scale and to become good mechanics and farmers.
"Dubois has attacked Washington's premise on the grounds that colleges dedicated to those ends, like Tuskegee, did not produce leaders." But while education does furnish a few middle class professional men, it can not drop the barriers of prejudice. Buck said that he was acquainted with college graduates working as porters, victims of the process of segregation. "We have peace and stability that the South did not have before 1900, and gives the Negro a chance for progress. However slow this may be, when compared to 50 years ago, it is discernible."
--End of article--
--End of article--
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Note on Professor Buck:
* Buck had won Pulitzer Prize in History in 1938 for his study of the postbellum South.
* Buck did not hurt his career by urging Black America to surrender all political rights, in 1939.
* Buck was appointed Provost of Harvard, serving from 1945 to 1953.
* Buck was dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1942 to 1953.
* Buck was director of the Harvard University Library from 1955 to 1964.
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Note on Professor Buck:
* Buck had won Pulitzer Prize in History in 1938 for his study of the postbellum South.
* Buck did not hurt his career by urging Black America to surrender all political rights, in 1939.
* Buck was appointed Provost of Harvard, serving from 1945 to 1953.
* Buck was dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1942 to 1953.
* Buck was director of the Harvard University Library from 1955 to 1964.
In other words, never trust anyone who campaigns for silence on racism, for the brutally enforced silence of the oppressed, so that the oppressor may enjoy "peace and stability".
--Not even if that oppressor is the very heart of Harvard University, like Professor Paul Buck.
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