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The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to
have new exemplification during the new century. Indeed, the
characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with
the world’s undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of
such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action
not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination,
and debauchery,—this has again and again been the result of carrying
civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the
heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy the conscience
of the modern world to be told complacently that all this has been
right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, of
righteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would
certainly be soothing if one could readily believe all this; and yet
there are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily
explained away. We feel and know that there are many delicate
differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain
much of history and social development. At the same time, too, we know
that these considerations have never adequately explained or excused
the triumph of brute force and cunning over weakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century
to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the
fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the
true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that
is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium
on greed and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we
are compelled daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of
the phenomena of race-contact,—to a study frank and fair, and not
falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we have in the
South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords,—a field,
to be sure, which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath
his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all
about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous
race complications with which God seems about to punish this nation
must increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought, we
must ask, what are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the
South? and we must be answered, not by apology or fault-finding, but by
a plain, unvarnished tale.
In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their relations
to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication:
there is, first, the physical proximity of home and dwelling-places,
the way in which neighborhoods group themselves, and the contiguity of
neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there are the
economic relations,—the methods by which individuals cooperate for
earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the
production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the
cooperation in social control, in group government, in laying and
paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and
commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and conference,
through periodicals and libraries; and, above all, the gradual
formation for each community of that curious _tertium quid_ which we
call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various forms of
social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theatres, in house
gatherings, in marrying and giving in marriage. Finally, there are the
varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent
endeavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in the same
communities are brought into contact with each other. It is my present
task, therefore, to indicate, from my point of view, how the black race
in the South meet and mingle with the whites in these matters of
everyday life.
First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw in
nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on
the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The
winding and intricacy of the geographical color-line varies, of course,
in different communities. I know some towns where a straight line drawn
through the middle of the main street separates nine-tenths of the
whites from nine-tenths of the blacks. In other towns the older
settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in
still other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up
amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each street has its
distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close
proximity. Even in the country something of this segregation is
manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of
the Black Belt.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural
clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may
be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is
quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable
Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the
whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like
close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town and
city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other. This
is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the
close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house,
one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while
at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the
field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One
can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father’s
parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to
grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand,
the settled belief of the mass of the Negroes that the Southern white
people do not have the black man’s best interests at heart has been
intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the
better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white
race.
Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground
made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic
effort. And yet with all this there are many essential elements in the
cooperation of Negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too
readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood. The average American
can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of making
efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving them the requisite
technical skill and the help of invested capital. The problem, however,
is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that these
workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit,
therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training; they are
willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful.
If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed to the
verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of
workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of
the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of
the modern self-reliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer
needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts
in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty.
Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to
prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race
have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous
education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After
Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group
leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to
inquire whose duty it was—whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose
edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but
I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were
not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without
skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection
of law, order, and decency,—left in a great land, not to settle down to
slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost
immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best of
modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is
fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or
welfare of his neighbor.
For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day
which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of
the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their
trade-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten
commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy of
that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory
acts,—the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern
gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has
never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who have come
to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,—the
sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power,
thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into the
hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen;
and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such, there is in these
new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor
romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a
system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not
yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain
themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The
results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the
black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which
varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a
frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I
have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen
from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to
learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new
opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.
Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or
oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst
and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system which
is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of
shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of
cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which
can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until
escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I have
seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and
pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the
face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him
pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor
on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a black farmer fall
in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and
strip it of every single marketable article,—mules, ploughs, stored
crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,—and all this
without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead
exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible person any
account or reckoning. And such proceedings can happen, and will happen,
in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom
and race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So
long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to
protect and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they
leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all
advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of black
landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are
accumulating property and making good citizens. But it does mean that
this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system might
easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are
handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and
that, above all, the _personnel_ of the successful class is left to
chance and accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable
methods of selection. As a remedy for this, there is but one possible
procedure. We must accept some of the race prejudice in the South as a
fact,—deplorable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and
dangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time
can efface. We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several
generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that
close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which
their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such
social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves. For
some time men doubted as to whether the Negro could develop such
leaders; but to-day no one seriously disputes the capability of
individual Negroes to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern
civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their
fellows. If this is true, then here is the path out of the economic
situation, and here is the imperative demand for trained Negro leaders
of character and intelligence,—men of skill, men of light and leading,
college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of
culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization,
and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by
force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of
common blood and ideals. But if such men are to be effective they must
have some power,—they must be backed by the best public opinion of
these communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such
weapons as the experience of the world has taught are indispensable to
human progress.
Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the power
of the ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of the third form
of contact between whites and blacks in the South,—political activity.
In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be
traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of government.
In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution
to believe pretty thoroughly in universal suffrage. We argued, as we
thought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so
true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political
destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of
their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that
it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,—with the right to have a
voice in the policy of the state,—that the greatest good to the
greatest number could be attained. To be sure, there were objections to
these arguments, but we thought we had answered them tersely and
convincingly; if some one complained of the ignorance of voters, we
answered, “Educate them.” If another complained of their venality, we
replied, “Disfranchise them or put them in jail.” And, finally, to the
men who feared demagogues and the natural perversity of some human
beings we insisted that time and bitter experience would teach the most
hardheaded. It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in
the South was raised. Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free.
How were they to be protected from those who did not believe in their
freedom and were determined to thwart it? Not by force, said the North;
not by government guardianship, said the South; then by the ballot, the
sole and legitimate defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of
the Nation. No one thought, at the time, that the ex-slaves could use
the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did think that
the possession of so great power by a great class in the nation would
compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.
Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of
moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the
wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that
reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently
became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to
do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who
regarded public office as a private perquisite. In this state of mind
it became easy to wink at the suppression of the Negro vote in the
South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to leave politics entirely
alone. The decent and reputable citizens of the North who neglected
their own civic duties grew hilarious over the exaggerated importance
with which the Negro regarded the franchise. Thus it easily happened
that more and more the better class of Negroes followed the advice from
abroad and the pressure from home, and took no further interest in
politics, leaving to the careless and the venal of their race the
exercise of their rights as voters. The black vote that still remained
was not trained and educated, but further debauched by open and
unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro voter was
thoroughly inoculated with the idea that politics was a method of
private gain by disreputable means.
And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the
perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the
purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the
raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic
citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children’s
children,—in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic
virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are
we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless
form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up
their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not
saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of
ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the
present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a
purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case
that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the
black man from politics.
Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question
of the industrial and intellectual development of the Negro? Can we
establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the
South who, by law and public opinion, have absolutely no voice in
shaping the laws under which they live and work? Can the modern
organization of industry, assuming as it does free democratic
government and the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel
respect for their welfare,—can this system be carried out in the South
when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and
powerless in its own defence? To-day the black man of the South has
almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those
taxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they
shall do it; as to who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made.
It is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to
get law-makers in some States even to listen to the respectful
presentation of the black man’s side of a current controversy. Daily
the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as
protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression.
The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are
executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black
people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused
law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would
rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings
of the Negro people; I should be the last to withhold sympathy from the
white South in its efforts to solve its intricate social problems. I
freely acknowledged that it is possible, and sometimes best, that a
partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their
stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as
they can start and fight the world’s battles alone. I have already
pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance
the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if the
representatives of the best white Southern public opinion were the
ruling and guiding powers in the South to-day the conditions indicated
would be fairly well fulfilled. But the point I have insisted upon and
now emphasize again, is that the best opinion of the South to-day is
not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negro helpless and without a
ballot to-day is to leave him not to the guidance of the best, but
rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that this is
no truer of the South than of the North,—of the North than of Europe:
in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any
class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at
the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful
fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and
seldom will withstand.
Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely
connected with the question of Negro crime. There can be no doubt that
crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years,
and that there has appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct
criminal class among the blacks. In explaining this unfortunate
development, we must note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of
Emancipation was to increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the
police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. As
to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict slave system
there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But when these variously
constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on the sea of
life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or
down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. So great an
economic and social revolution as swept the South in ’63 meant a
weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the
beginning of a differentiation of social grades. Now a rising group of
people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass,
but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still
clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal
was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should
not occasion surprise.
Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful and
delicate dealing with these criminals. Their offences at first were
those of laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity
or ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating
treatment, firm but reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full
proof of guilt. For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the
South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police
system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that
every white man was _ipso facto_ a member of that police. Thus grew up
a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue
leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred
on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of
discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South was
originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of
criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was
convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and
almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving
the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of
color, that settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge. Thus
Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and
oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.
When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty
stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary,
murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the
color-line: the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white
witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest
deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one’s own social caste, was
lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.
On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt
or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion
beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to increase
crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are
being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the
latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economic
development often impossible.
But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the
punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being
trained to crime. And here again the peculiar conditions of the South
have prevented proper precautions. I have seen twelve-year-old boys
working in chains on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front
of the schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and this
indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children makes the
chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery. The struggle for
reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other
States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of some
communities to the suicidal results of this policy.
It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the
homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens.
We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and
the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school
system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five dollars
spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white schools
get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the white
public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for reform.
If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am becoming more
and more convinced, as I look upon the system of common-school training
in the South, that the national government must soon step in and aid
popular education in some way. To-day it has been only by the most
strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South that the
Negro’s share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in
some half-dozen States; and that movement not only is not dead, but in
many communities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason does
this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in
severe economic competition, without political rights, and with
ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but
crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles
of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the
hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?
I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and
political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have
conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and
education. But after all that has been said on these more tangible
matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a
proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or
fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the
atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one
little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it
is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most
essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole.
What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South,
where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has
been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human
souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of
spirit, as ever a people experienced. Within and without the sombre
veil of color vast social forces have been at work,—efforts for human
betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and
comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and
sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled
sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.
The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of
black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound up
with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South
sees at first little of this. He notes the growing frequency of dark
faces as he rides along,—but otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun
shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as other
worlds he has visited. Indeed, on the question of questions—the Negro
problem—he hears so little that there almost seems to be a conspiracy
of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and then usually in a
far-fetched academic way, and indeed almost every one seems to forget
and ignore the darker half of the land, until the astonished visitor is
inclined to ask if after all there IS any problem here. But if he
lingers long enough there comes the awakening: perhaps in a sudden
whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity; more
likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at first
noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the shadows of the
color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is
suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single dark face; or again at
the close of a day’s wandering he may find himself in some strange
assembly, where all faces are tinged brown or black, and where he has
the vague, uncomfortable feeling of the stranger. He realizes at last
that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great
streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle
their waters in seeming carelessness,—then they divide and flow wide
apart. It is done quietly; no mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the
swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as
when the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for
talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two
worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is
almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where
the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and
sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and
directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic
servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of
intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the
races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often
attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other. But
the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant
the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of
ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent
farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of
the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites,
there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate
churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated
in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are
beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries,
lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at
all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes
who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings
of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so
on, throughout the category of means for intellectual
communication,—schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and
the like,—it is usually true that the very representatives of the two
races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be
in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one
side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks
educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the
tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for
obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation
is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro,
is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of
friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous
fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody
has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous
force of unwritten law against the innovators.
It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social
contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer
sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the
radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent
years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a world where it
means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look
frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a
world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than
legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine
the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities
between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and
streetcars.
Here there can be none of that social going down to the people,—the
opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst, in generous
acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny. On the other
hand, in matters of simple almsgiving, where there can be no question
of social contact, and in the succor of the aged and sick, the South,
as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is generous
to a fault. The black beggar is never turned away without a good deal
more than a crust, and a call for help for the unfortunate meets quick
response. I remember, one cold winter, in Atlanta, when I refrained
from contributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes should be
discriminated against, I afterward inquired of a friend: “Were any
black people receiving aid?” “Why,” said he, “they were _all_ black.”
And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human
advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of
sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity. And
here is a land where, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher
striving for the good and noble and true, the color-line comes to
separate natural friends and coworkers; while at the bottom of the
social group, in the saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, that
same line wavers and disappears.
I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations between the
sons of master and man in the South. I have not glossed over matters
for policy’s sake, for I fear we have already gone too far in that sort
of thing. On the other hand, I have sincerely sought to let no unfair
exaggerations creep in. I do not doubt that in some Southern
communities conditions are better than those I have indicated; while I
am no less certain that in other communities they are far worse.
Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest and
perplex the best conscience of the South. Deeply religious and
intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites, they feel acutely
the false position in which the Negro problems place them. Such an
essentially honest-hearted and generous people cannot cite the
caste-levelling precepts of Christianity, or believe in equality of
opportunity for all men, without coming to feel more and more with each
generation that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat
contradiction to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as
they come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro
stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded: if
there were nothing to charge against the Negro but his blackness or
other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be
comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance,
shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold
anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and
survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of
our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so put is of
great strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of
thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of our masses
is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate historical cause
for this, and unmistakable evidence that no small number have, in spite
of tremendous disadvantages, risen to the level of American
civilization. And when, by proscription and prejudice, these same
Negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of their people,
simply because they are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages
thrift and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premium on
the very things you complain of,—inefficiency and crime. Draw lines of
crime, of incompetency, of vice, as tightly and uncompromisingly as you
will, for these things must be proscribed; but a color-line not only
does not accomplish this purpose, but thwarts it.
In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South depends on
the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and
appreciate and sympathize with each other’s position,—for the Negro to
realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the
masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than
they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a
color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same
despised class.
It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the
sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply
that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both
act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will
bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to
any great extent. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary
tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color-line indefinitely
without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the
Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination. Only by a union of
intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period
of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,
“That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.”
X.
Of the Faith of the Fathers
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see,
Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled,—
There, there alone for thee
May white peace be.
Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
Who cry with little noises ’neath the thunder
Of Ages ground to sand,
To a little sand.