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Perhaps no leader among Afro-Americans has been so unfathomable and controversial a figure as Booker T. Washington. And yet few if any studies on Afro-Americans in the U.S. have been able to avoid some sort of inquiry into the nature of his leadership. This article attempts to present a specific typology of his role. Washington has written very much about himself. There are biographies of him, and his critics are many, but there is no definitive sociological analysis of his leadership as a situational type. The baffling diplomacy of Washington himself precludes any hasty generalization about his leadership. The involved mixture of ideas and policies attributed to him may be illustrated in Gunnar Myrdal's characterization. The description of author Gunnar Myrdal is suggestive, yet it appears to be quite indefinite. Leaders of Washington's type are exceedingly serviceable to the southern ruling class. They are vastly more effective than white spokesmen in controverting the movement for democracy among Afro-Americans. The value of Washington as an impediment to the efforts of both white and Afro-American pleaders for civil rights is related directly to his financial success and power over Afro-American affairs.

Race prejudice and intolerance are social attitudes that have not been clearly defined in discussions of inter-group antagonism. These attitudes have been confused particularly in descriptions and comparisons of Jews and African-Americans as "minority groups" and the result has been an accumulation of many spurious conclusions. In this attempt to distinguish these attitudes the article consider in illustration the social situations of African Americans and Jews. Anti-Semitism, to begin with, is clearly a form of social intolerance, which may be defined as an unwillingness on the part of a dominant group to tolerate the beliefs or practices of a subordinate group because it considers these beliefs and practices to be either inimical to group solidarity or a threat to the continuity of the status quo. Race prejudice, on the other hand, is a social attitude propagated among the public by an exploiting class for the purpose of stigmatizing some group as inferior so that the exploitation of either the group itself or its resources may be justified. Persecution and exploitation are the behavior aspects of intolerance and race prejudice respectively.

The article proposes to examine the position of caste school of race relations in the U.S. The school is interested in race relations in the southern part of the U.S. In the South, they maintain, Negroes from one caste and whites another, with an imaginary rotating caste line between them. Possibly, the most insidious analogy between race and caste relations rests in the idea of life membership in each group. The tendency of the school to conceive of itself as being original is a remarkable characteristic of this caste school of race relations.

The article focuses on farm tenancy and marital status with special status with emphasis upon African American marriages in the U.S. It has been shown that the percentage of persons married tends to decrease from rural communities to cities of over one million population. A gradation in early marriage has been observed among farmers according to their economic status. Women in the tenant class apparently marry at the earlier age than do women in the owner class; likewise the wives of farm laborers many at a younger age than do tenant wives. Farm tenancy is a specialized form of rural occupation, which for African Americans, is characterized by the plantation economy of the South. The tenant family is the unit of labor and the larger the family the more valuable it is to both landlord and tenant. Besides the peculiar economic value of women on independently owned farms, the wife of the tenant, because of the nature of plantation economy, assumes even greater domestic obligations. Generally the standard of living of the tenant farmer is extremely low and his agricultural methods are comparatively elementary.