Negroes in the North

Report Outline
Negro Problems in Northern Cities
Negro Migrations and Negro Family Life
Effort to Improve Negro Opportunities

Negro Problems in Northern Cities

A white house conference on civil rights, scheduled for November 17 and 18, is expected to devote its principal attention to the situation of Negroes in the big cities of the North. It is generally recognized that the nub of the Negro problem now—and of the problem of relations between whites and Negroes—rests not in southern rural counties controlled by die-hard segregationists, but in slum districts of the urban North. The White House conference represents the latest move in the administration's effort to devise programs for removing obstacles to Negro advancement that persist despite civil rights guarantees, large expenditures for aid to the needy, and the opening of new opportunities in education and employment.

White House Meeting on Negro Opportunities

President Johnson said on Oct. 5 that it would be the basic purpose of the White House meeting to “point the way toward new efforts to include the Negro American more fully in our society.” The President expressed hope that the conference would direct attention to “new avenues of opportunity for Negro Americans…[who] will one day walk down those avenues toward full participation in a great society.” The November meeting, he said, would be followed next spring by a larger “conference of concerned Americans” who would take up recommendations made by the earlier group.

The scope of the coming conference was first indicated in a commencement address delivered by President Johnson last June 4 at Howard University, a largely Negro institution in Washington. The President said on that occasion that something beyond merely opening the doors of opportunity had to be done for “the great majority of Negro Americans—the poor, the unemployed, the uprooted and the dispossessed,” if they were to benefit from new gains in civil rights. Johnson asserted that the abilities of the individual Negro had been weakened by “the devastating heritage of long years of slavery and a century of oppression and hatred and injustice.” Although many Negroes had succeeded in overcoming those handicaps, others were “losing ground every day.” The poor and disheartened Negro must be helped to take advantage of opportunities available to him; “he just cannot do it alone.”