Guy B. Johnson

Newspaper Advertisements and Negro Culture

wishes to study the press as a social force or as a reflector of current opinions and cultural trends. There are some things, however, that advertise? ments say more plainly than any news story or editorial ever could. The present study was undertaken primarily with the idea of analyzing the advertisements in certain representative Negro newspapers in order to find out whether or not there is need for further research along that line. It was hoped that incidentally some light would be thrown upon the question of the status of the Negros culture in the United States.

The Gullah Dialect Revisited: A Note on Linguistic Acculturation.

Nearly 40 years ago I was a staff member of a study of the Negroes of St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The project was undertaken because the building of a causeway and bridge from Beaufort to the island was about to break down the long isolation of the people on the island. The study was supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for Research in Social Science of the University of North Carolina. Out of it came four books: Black Yeomanry, by J. T. Woofter, Jr.; A Social History of the Sea Island, by my wife Guion G. Johnson; Sea Island to City, a study of out-migrants by Clyde V. Kiser; and my own Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, which dealt with dialect, music, and folklore. The Negro people of the Sea-Island and tidewater area of South Carolina and Georgia have popularly been called Gullahs, and their language is known as the Gullah dialect. This dialect has intrigued many people, because it is without doubt the most distinctive English dialect in North America. There has been considerable controversy about the dialect, particularly in the context of Negro-white acculturation in

United States Eric Foner. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Pp. vi, 250. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

note the political conformism of moct veterans who appear to have adapted as easily to the Restoration as they had to the Revolution itself. He also perceives that, regardless of the regime that administered it, the Hotel des Invalides guaranteed a longer and more comfortable life to those poor and disabled veterans who were able to gain admittance to it than they could secure for themselves in the world outside. From this mundane-but far from irrelevantpoint of view, the French state’s experiment in social welfare must be pronounced a success; and so much Isser Woloch’s book, which is an example of the new social history at its best.

15.95

to participate in important aspects of the wider society. The alternative hypothesis can also be entertained, namely, that they show high participation in police courts, armed services, and schools, but show low participation in political parties and labor unions-where they are not sufficiently encouraged. Then he constructs three models that have grown out of the literature he has discussed. The first pictures the lower-class poor as possessing an unhealthy, self-perpetuating subculture; the second, as living an externally imposed exploited subculture, and the third-which he believes to be superior-as exhibiting a variably adaptive subculture ripe for change through a revitalization movement that will derive strength from the poor while involving the whole society. A conflict that torments many men of good will pervades this book. The conflict involves, on the one hand, the conviction that poverty must go and, on the other hand, the fear that in banishing it, outworn, unworthy, middle-class standards will be imposed on the lower class when nobody has a right to impose anything on another group without its informed consent and free co-operation. Thus, we are faced with the dilemma: how can we deal with

WINTHROP D. JORDAN. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Pp. xx, 651. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968.

plight of Negroes in other parts of the Nation in undeniable. The similarity between the economic policies of &dquo;Republocrats&dquo; and Dixiecrats certainly reveals the alliance between these two powerful forces. But to make the Black Belt and Northern capital alone responsible for the secondclass status of most Negroes is to overlook other pertinent factors. Among these is the hostility to Negroes of successive waves of European immigrants-especially many of the Irish after 1845, many Germans after 1848, and many Greeks and Italians after 1890. But the acceptance of the unmistakable evidence in these cases

12.50:

cline in net farm income (both cash and kind) between 1929 and 1932 amounted to 70 per cent, while on the second basis it amounted to only 52 per cent. Of almost equal importance with Dr. Martin’s recognition of these two distinct principles of valuation is his recognition of the need for separate indexes of net income for different sections of the country. These have been worked out by him and are presented for the first time in his book. The other adjustments he has made are relatively of much less importance. By way of a caution to the readers of this excellent book, it is only necessary to suggest that the leaders in the Department of Agriculture have undoubtedly, in their practical programs, taken more account of the deficiencies in their income statistics than is indicated in the text. JOHN M. CASSELS Harvard University

WEAVER, ROBERT C. The Negro Ghetto. Pp. xviii, 404. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948.

THE NORTHWARD movement of the negro attracts attention, not because it is a migration, but because it is a negro migration. What is there about the shifting of a mere half-million negroes from the South to the North to cause the nation more anxiety than did the arrival annually of one million foreign-born in the pre-war days? Why should it be considered more serious than the great urban migration which has in the last forty years transformed us from a rural to an urban nation? Such a phenomenon indeed calls for intelligent explanation. The various explanations which have been propounded are more partisan than scientific. At one extreme there is the belief that the migration is primarily a flight from persecution. The following is an example of a some what prejudiced judgment: