The journey from there to here
Published on January 24, 2006 By Gideon MacLeish In Current Events

OK, in light of some of our discussions, I have an interesting quote I'd like to throw before you. Anyone want to venture a guess who made this comment, and when (no fair googling)?

There is [a] class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.  Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. . . . [And] there is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.


Comments
on Jan 24, 2006
Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs...


Well, it certainly was not Jesse Jackson...
on Jan 24, 2006
Sounds like something a black intellectual would have said between reconstruction and perhaps the 1930's based on the diction and syntax, though not from someone from the Harlem Renaissance. Other than that, I can't really place it. If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say it was someone like W.E.B Dubois or Booker T. Washington.
on Jan 24, 2006
I was wrong as well.  I thought Martin Luther King Jr.
on Jan 24, 2006

Booker T. Washington.

Damn you are good!

on Jan 24, 2006

Damn you are good!

Yes, he is, and he even got the time frame right. It was 1911.

Imagine a black leader saying that NOW!