Integration: A human relations problem

When we examine a problematic situation in human relations, it is all too easy to characterize the difficulties we face as unique ones. It may help us to understand our problems, however, if we view them as embodying perennial features of human relations present whenever men have lived together. In this way we may hope to achieve an ordered understanding of our situation, and to be guided by what has been learned in the past about the interrelated elements of human behavior.

One group of sociologists has viewed human relations as interrelated and changing complexes of activities, interactions and relationships, sentiments and values, and symbols.¹ These concepts have been found fruitful in analyzing human relations situations in modern industry, in informal slum gangs, and in primitive tribes of fishermen; and we shall employ them in our analysis of contemporary race relations in the United States.

The activities in which American whites and Negroes have engaged have helped to shape the course of relations between them. Their most characteristic joint activity has been the cultivation of plantation crops in the Old and New South. The development of a plantation economy in the South led whites to import Negroes as slaves; and the continuing importance of agriculture in the South has made this region the traditional arena of Negro-white relations. The rise of manufacturing has made the North an outlet for the South’s rural population surplus, both white and Negro, and has thus allowed the scene of a part of our race relations problem to shift to a northern setting in the years since 1865.