curred, by spreading widely stories of such cases and stirring abnormal persons to attempt the same thing. One can do all this, but for a depressingly high percentage of Southern whites, and even of those who are not Southern, the efforts will be fruitless. Too tightly have their minds been bound by the old prejudices and crowd-mindedness.
In his excellent The Behavior of Crowds Everett Dean Martin points out that only through liberation from prejudices can come release from crowd-mindedness. Lynching, disfranchisement, "Jim Crow" cars, disgraceful school facilities for Negroes, blindly bitter press and pulpit, court injustice, and a multitude of other methods of keeping the Negro "in his place" have done incalculable harm to the white South in more rigidly fastening upon it a moral, spiritual, and intellectual sterility and blindness. In creating a psychology of oppression of the Negro it has hamstrung itself. Not for the salvation of the Negro, but for its own sake must the South break away from its deadening mental inertia, acquire a vigorous intellectual curiosity which will smash or at least crack the shell of its crowd-mindedness. Fortunately for the white South, for the Negro, and for the United States, there are signs at the University of North Carolina, to a lesser degree at other educational centres, and here and there among individuals, of this new intellectual curiosity, which may save even the most hopelessly backward of the Southern communities. It
