Viewing page 23 of 84

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

THE AMENIA CONFERENCES:
A NEGLECTED ASPECT OF THE
AFRO-AMERICAN STRUGGLE

IRENE DIGGS

THE AMENIA Conferences of 1916 and 1933 were the outgrowth "of steady, unchecked, almost unnoticed growth of human hate," a sense of defeatism, numerous grievances and sheer fear. The shackles of past slavery remained. Blacks were physically bound by peonage, illiteracy, disfranchisement and insult. Probably because of these conferences Blacks were more united and better prepared to meet the problems of the world than they could possibly have been without them.

For American Blacks the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries were more critical than the Reconstruction years of 1868 to 1876. Blacks and whites usually discuss and interpret these years in terms of personalities instead of in terms of the triumph of Big Business, financed by white capital employing non-white labor, industrial consolidation and organization on a world-wide scale. The South, with a mass of cheap and potentially efficient black labor, was one of the most promising areas for industrial development. With natural sources of power, unequalled potential technology, its transportation system could reach the markets of the world. Government in the South was conducted by fraud and intimidation of Blacks and whites with open violation of state and federal law. True, there were labor difficulties; poor whites and poor Blacks were becoming increasingly embittered and angry. In addition to all this was he growing militancy of college-trained Blacks demanding the full rights of American citizens. Descendants of those northern founders of the first black institutions of higher learning were contributing time, talent and finance, but were also investors and workers in the new industrial organizations of the world. The South had to have broader and increased educa-
_____________________________________

Dr. Irene Diggs is Chairman of the Department of Sociology, Morgan College, Baltimore, Maryland. She was an associate of W. E. B. Du Bois when he was Director of Special Research, NAACP.

117