SOUTHERN SOCIOLOGICAL CONGRESS[2]
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SOUTHERN SOCIOLOGICAL CONGRESS[2]
PHILIP WELTNER
The second Southern Sociological Congress came to a close on the night of April 29. Its four days were given over to solid criticism and constructive suggestion. Eight hundred delegates gathered together from all over the Southland to learn from the ninety-six specialists the congress brought to Atlanta. Most of the ninety-six were men and women of the South.
One fact the Congress made plain enough, and that was that the South knew its problems and was busy about their solution. Those present seemed to realize that they were the empire builders of a new South. While the questions coming before the several conferences were the same as those that confront the North and West, they were treated from the standpoint of the peculiar needs of the South. But this was done without the slightest sectional consciousness. The South was taking counsel of itself that the entire nation might profit by its advance. Although the field of the congress was sectional, its outlook was national.
The plan of organization followed was much the same as that of the National Conference of Charities and Correction. There were seven special conferences gathered under the name of the Southern Sociological Congress. Each was separately organized and met with the other divisions only in the general night session. The seven divisions were: organized charities, courts and prisons, public health, child welfare, travelers’ aid, race problems and the church and social service.
The latter was an innovation with the Southern Sociological Congress. It served to emphasize the fact that “the church is the fellowship of those who love in the service of those who suffer.” The discussions in this conference all served to bring out in sharp relief the new spirit beginning to dominate the old church. It was agreed that the social worker who can satisfy only the bare material needs of life is poorly equipped for his task, that religion must lend its strength to every effort towards individual or social reconstruction, and that the call of the church is a call to service.
The individual conference that enjoyed the greatest popularity was the one on race problems. Throughout its four days of almost continuous session there were in attendance about 400 persons, half white and half colored. Some of the Negro delegates, fearing an unjust discrimination against those of their race in the conference sessions, had prepared, while on the way to Atlanta, resolutions of protest. These were never tendered. No reason was intruded for their presentation. One of the Negro delegates expressed the situation most aptly. He said:
“The old order of whites understood the old black man. But it has remained for this Congress to demonstrate the possibility of the young white men of the new order sympathizing in and appreciating the hopes and aspirations of the Negro of today.”
Too great a significance can not be attached to this simple statement of fact. Its optimism is the culture-soil out of which we may expect to see develop that happy adaptation of the two races, which after all is the solution of the race problem.
This incident, and what it goes to show, would alone justify the existence of a southern congress separate and distinct from the National Conference of Charities and Correction. The peculiar problems that faced the conference on courts and prisons make this separate treatment even more desirable. In the South there are not many of those great central, highly organized penal institutions known as penitentiaries. For the most part we have county chain-gang camps engaged in road work. A distinct contribution was made to southern penology by Hooper Alexander, of Georgia, when he showed the absolute identity of the convict lease in Georgia with the system once known as the institution of slavery.
The conference discussion made clear the fact that the county convict road camp, prosecuted without a scintilla of effort at training or character building, is not less immoral than the old lease system; that the wrong of public exploitation is as great as exploitation at the hands of a private lessee.
The congress made a tremendous impression on Atlanta and the whole state of Georgia. Its influence will spread over the entire South. It served to quicken the civic consciousness of our people and to make them better acquainted with their common problems. It took the mask off sociology and unfrocked it of scholastic appearance. In pointing out our needs, the congress unified our aims and at the same time broadened our vision.