Word: classes
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...when she steamed into New York Harbor were 138 British children, tagged, labeled, carrying knapsacks, duffle bags, copies of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, gas-mask containers crammed with tuppenny treasures, dolls, souvenirs. Reporters and officials who boarded the Samaria at Quarantine found the refugees assembled on the tourist-class afterdeck. While they gazed at the skyline of Manhattan, they were singing There'll Always Be an England...
Authors Dollard & Davis sketched in their background with a few statistics: e.g., in Natchez the average Negro family's income is less than $400 a year; one child in three is a bastard. A Pullman porter rates as middle-middle class; a family with $250 a month is upper-middle class; more than three-fourths of Negroes are lower class; a Negro's social standing rises according to the lightness of his skin, the straightness of his hair. Case histories...
...Frightened Amazon." Dark, skinny Julia "Raddie" (for rowdy) Wilson, 16, is a member of a family sinking from lower-middle to lower class. Her father, a river roustabout, onetime bootlegger, consorts with prostitutes, quarrels violently with his family, once was axed by Julia's older sister. Her mother whipped Julia regularly from babyhood. "As a child, she was a favorite with the 'across-the-tracks' gang of boys and girls. They fought with rocks, knives and sometimes with pistols. At 14 she saw a boy badly stabbed by another in an argument over her at a school...
...Self-Made Man." Medium-brown Chester Olivier, 16, is also lower-middle class, the son of a Creole artisan who deserted his wife and four children for a mistress. But Chester is on the way up. Prodded by his ambitious mother, smart Chester is now a junior in a private prep school, active in dramatics, vice president of his class, goes to dances with lightskinned, upper-class girls, teaches Sunday school in the Methodist Church (higher in the social scale than his mother's Spiritualist Church), was recently voted "fifth most popular Negro in New Orleans...
Authors Dollard & Davis' conclusion: Negroes are doubly bedeviled by class and caste anxieties; one way to alleviate Negro problems is for society to visit less punishment on Negro children, more sympathetic understanding...