Arkansas State Press

PLAIN TALK

By Elmer Carter

We dare not permit ourselves to be isolated for then it would be ridiculously easy to be culturally, economically and socially hemmed in. We would be like a city besieged. We would be subject to the whim or caprice of whatever group happened to hold power and it would be easy to pick out the Negro group for repressive action. That is the real reason why we object to segregation - not that we object to association with our own but because segregation invariably and inevitably puts us "out on a limb." Its terrible consequences are so clear that failure to comprehend its dangers amounts almost to stupidity. For instance, if colored people were permitted to live wherever they could pay the rent, and white and colored lived in the same neighborhoods, the residents would receive equal treatment. They could not pave the streets in front of the houses just occupied by white folks. They could not collect the garbage for white families every day and that of the colored families once a month. They could not single out the neighborhood as a Negro crime center, and if the neighborhood was improved by modern lighting, sewerage and fire protection it would have to be done for the colored residents as well as the white. The same is true of color when colored men and women belong to the same labor unions as white men and women. You cannot make one scale of wages for the white members and another for the colored. But when they must be organized in separate unions of the same craft or trade, it is not uncommon in some sections of the country for the wage scale for colored workers to be lower than that of white workers. In other words, the Negro can be isolated and therefore singled out for special treatment, usually especially bad treatment. If this is true in labor and in community living, it is no less true of business enterprise. Negro business as such has made a fairly good record, but it still has a long way to go. We as business men lack capital, lack knowledge of business practices which you can't learn in school, lack contact with sources of information as to what is going on in the business world. We have to learn by trial and error, the hard way. When we read of this or that in the daily papers, whether it is an issue of new stocks or bonds, whether it is new sources of supplies or new substitutes for building materials, or the development of new neighborhoods, or sub-level of the underworld. There is no valid reason why the efforts of Negro business men should be confined to Negro areas no more than that Italian or Jewish business men should be confined to Italian or Jewish neighborhoods. A high grade Negro chef could be a partner in a restaurant downtown as well as in the Negro section. I know of a highly successful printing firm in New York City situated downtown where one partner is colored, the other white. Strange to relate it is the colored member who makes the contacts and executes the contracts. There is no field where colored men and women have successfully engaged in business that there could not have been even greater success if the enterprise had been conducted by the combined capital, management and labor of both groups. But where are we to get white people who would be interested? - is a legitimate question. Well, people both white and black go into business for one primary reason . . . and that is to make money. There are some of us who say that they go into business in order to help the race but if the business doesn't make money the race will be in a tough spot. In my experience I have learned this, that if you can show how money can be made you won't have much trouble interesting some white folks.