"RACIAL PREJUDICE IS CAUSE OF WAR,"
    SAYS DR. T.J. JONES AT SENIOR CHAPEL

            "Race prejudice is extremely general and insidious; it is a part of the whole economy of the human race and one of the fundamental and most potent causes of war," said Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones, Educational director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and author of several books on the Negro question. Dr. Jones addressed the upper class assembly on Inter-racial Cooperation and Self-Determination Wednesday, February 13, at the Church of the Pilgrims.

      "Negroes constitute one tenth of our population," added Dr. Jones. "They are an integral part of our lives, therefore, and we dare not overlook them. The American people, however, are not as much interested in this problem as they should be."

      According to Dr. Jones, the Negroes have achieved progress because of perseverance and their own inherent qualities. The American people, too, have contributed, for under the stimulus of American ideals, the Negro has realized his own capacities.

            In describing the progress made by the Negro during the last seventy years, the speaker noted that the number of colored high school and college students has increased ten times within the past seventeen years." And although Negro artists, sculptors, dramatists, writers, and doctors are contributing their share to the progress of the colored race," declared Dr. Jones, "I wish to point out that the most real, fundamental, and important progress made by the Negro is shown by land tenure."

            "At the end of the Civil War," Dr. Jones continued, "all Negroes were laborers. Gradually they became renters, and now seventy per cent of the Negro farmers own their own pieces of land. I consider this increase in land tenure more important than cultural progress because it deals with that most permanent and precious of the physical resources necessary for the preservation of life–the soil."

            "Africans have not, as a whole, attained a high civilization; they are somewhere back in the primitive. But this is no disgrace, for where were our ancestors a few hundred years ago? They, like all people of the world, have undergone and are undergoing evolution," asserted Dr. Jones, who has been studying inter-racial cooperation in both the United States and Africa for the last thirty years. "There must be integration and cooperation between the black and white races," he concluded.

      The Choral Club, under the direction of the Music department, opened the program by singing Negro spirituals. The speaker was introduced by Dean Adele Bildersee.

Return to Spotlight Page || Home Page

May 20, 2004