Report on the Negro Question.

White and Black: Test of a Nation, by Samuel Lubell. Harper, $4.95 Samuel Lubell is a first-rate reporter. He neither begins, nor proceeds, nor ends with an ideology. He has that seemingly rare quality among journalists, a sense of fact. This has led him to conclude that we are none too slowly building a Southern racial problem of great complexity into a national problem of racial cleavage. The “Negro problem” is not, he argues, going to be settled or even significantly alleviated by school integration laws, or by the Negro’s acquisition of his voting rights, or by any normal process of economic growth.

More rapidly than schools integrate, our rising prosperity is, he points out, creating patterns of housing that make segregation a simple matter of logical school districting. Southern cities like Memphis and New Orleans are, for instance, more segregated today than they have ever been. And the situation is even worse in the North. Whatever programs of social engineering we set up there, the fact is—to use Robert Penn Warren’s phrase—that there simply aren’t enough white children left in the cities to go around. And the idea of corralling some in Virginia or Long Island and bussing them into Washington or New York is more than a little grotesque.

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Vincent Miller

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

White and Black: Test of a Nation, by Samuel Lubell. Harper, $4.95 Samuel Lubell is a first-rate reporter. He neither begins, nor proceeds, nor ends with an ideology. He has that seemingly rare quality among journalists, a sense of fact. This has led him to conclude that we are none too slowly building a Southern racial problem of great complexity into a national problem of racial cleavage. The “Negro problem” is not, he argues, going to be settled or even significantly alleviated by school integration laws, or by the Negro’s acquisition of his voting rights, or by any normal process of economic growth.

More rapidly than schools integrate, our rising prosperity is, he points out, creating patterns of housing that make segregation a simple matter of logical school districting. Southern cities like Memphis and New Orleans are, for instance, more segregated today than they have ever been. And the situation is even worse in the North. Whatever programs of social engineering we set up there, the fact is—to use Robert Penn Warren’s phrase—that there simply aren’t enough white children left in the cities to go around. And the idea of corralling some in Virginia or Long Island and bussing them into Washington or New York is more than a little grotesque.