IS THE NEGRO RISING?
That the Negro is inferior to the Whites among whom he lives is a cause of
apprehension to the whole land; that his labor is in steadiness and
efficiency much below that of his intelligent white neighbors is a
drawback to his section. Yet neither deficiencies of character nor of
industry really settle his place in the community. A race may be as high
as the Greeks and yet go to nothingness; a race may be as industrious as
the Chinese, and have little to show for it. The essential question with
regard to the Negro is simply: Is the race in America moving downward or
upward? No matter if it be low, has it the capacity of rising?
To answer these questions requires some study both of present and past
conditions. A very considerable number of Southern Whites are sure that
physically and morally the Negro is both low and declining; and some go so
far as to assert that every Negro is physically so different from the
white man that he ought not to be considered a member of the human race.
The argument was familiar in slavery times, and has been recently set
forth by F. L. Hoffman in his "Race Traits of the American Negro"; from
chest measurements, weight, lifting strength, and power of vision, he is
convinced that "there are important differences in the bodily structure of
the two races, differences of far-reaching influence on the duration of
life and the social and economic efficiency of the colored man." Professor
Smith, of Louisiana, in his "The Color Line, A Brief for the Unborn," goes
much farther in an argument intended to show that the brain capacity of
the Negro, the coarseness of his features, the darkness of his color, the
abnormal length of his arm, his thick cranium, woolly hair and early
closing of the cranial sutures, prove that he may be left out of
consideration as a member of a civilized community.
The tendency of scientific investigators during the last forty years has
been to minimize the distinctions between races; and the argument that the
Negro is to be politically and socially disregarded because of structural
peculiarities, though the stock in trade of the proslavery writers two
generations ago, now seems somewhat forced. To the Northern mind there is
a kind of unreality in the whole argument of physical inferiority; it is
like trying to prove by anatomy, physiology, and hygiene that the
Hungarian laborer is always going to be an ignorant and degraded element
in our population.
These technical arguments throw very little light upon the real African
problem, which is not, what does the structure of the Negro indicate that
he must be, but what is he really and what does he perform? If the Negro
can work all day in the cotton field, save his wages, buy land, bring up
his children, send them to school, pay his debts, and maintain a decent
life, no cranial sutures or prognathism will prevent his being looked upon
as a man; and the whole physical argument, much of which is intended to
affect the public mind against amalgamation, cannot do away with the plain
fact that the white and the black races are so near to each other that
some hundreds of thousands of people come of white fathers and negro or
mulatto mothers. The Negro is entitled to be measured, not by brain
calipers, nor by two-meter rods, but by what he can do in the world.
What he can do in the world depends upon the inner man and not the outer;
and here we approach one of the most serious problems connected with the
race. Has the Negro character? Can he conceive a standard and adhere to
it? Can he fix his mind on a distant good and for its sake give up present
indulgences? Can he restrain the primal impulses of human nature?
That the Negroes as a race are impure and unregulated is the judgment of
most white observers whether ill-wishers or fair-minded men. Thomas Nelson
Page, for instance, declares that the immorality of the negro race has
increased since slavery times. Thomas, himself a Negro, asserts that the
sexual impulse "constitutes the main incitement to the degeneracy of the
race, and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting." Kelsey, a
Northern observer, says: "Many matings are consummated without any regular
marriage ceremony and with little reference to legal requirements." On
this subject as on all others the most preposterous exaggerations are
rife; a plantation manager will tell you that not two in a hundred couples
on his plantation are married; a stock statement, a thousand times
repeated, is that there is no such thing as a virtuous negro woman. Yet
the truth is gruesome enough; there are plenty of plantations where barely
half the families are married; bastard children are very numerous; and
this condition applies not only in the cities and towns where people are
put into new and trying environments, but everywhere among the Negroes
upon the land. It is the most discouraging thing about the race, because
it saps the foundation of civilization. Nor is it an explanation to say
that under slavery family ties were disregarded. The race has now had
forty years of freedom and undisturbed religious training, such as it is.
Still they ought to show decided improvement in morals if the race is
capable of living on a high moral plane.
This is a gloomy and delicate subject, but cannot be allowed to pass
without a few positive illustrations. When Kelsey suggested to a Negro
that he might go back to the plantation and board in a negro family, he
replied: "Niggers is queer folks, boss. 'Pears to me they don' know what
they gwine do. Ef I go out and live in a man's house like as not I run
away wid dat man's wife." A girl whose mistress was trying to put before
her a higher standard of conduct said: "It's no use talking to us colored
girls like we were white. A colored girl that keeps pure ain't liked
socially. We just think she has had no chance." A negro boy twelve years
old has been known to reel off two hundred different obscene rhymes and
songs. Divorce is frequent, particularly the easy form which consists of
the husband throwing his wife out of doors and bringing in another woman.
The negro preachers are universally believed to be the worst of their
kind, and very often are. If the things that are regularly told by white
people and sometimes admitted by colored people are true, the majority of
the Southern Negroes, rural and urban, are in a horribly low state both
physically and morally.
The more credit to those members of the race who are pure and upright; who
are showing that it is a libel to brand as hopelessly corrupt ten million
people, including probably two million mulattoes; to say nothing of the
numerous examples of chaste and self-respecting Negroes of both sexes in
the Northern states. The most furious assailant of negro character will
usually tell you of one or two Negroes that he knows to be perfectly
straightforward; and the writer can bear personal testimony to the
apparent wholesomeness of family life in negro homes that he has chanced
to visit. Here, a young mother in her scrupulously clean log house
hovering over her little children as affectionately as though she and they
were white; there, gathered around the hearth of a new house with good
furniture and pretty pictures, a family of seven children, neat, clean,
attractive, respectful, intelligent, and apparently attached to father and
mother. Again, a fine specimen of the thrifty colored man who boasts that
he has lived forty-one years with one wife: "I got a good wife, she take
keer of me." Where such homes are, all is not vile. It is a favorite
Southern delusion that education and Christian teaching have no effect on
the animal propensities of Negroes; there are thousands of examples to the
contrary.
It would do no good to anybody to minimize the terrible truth that the
Negroes as a race are in personal morality far below the Anglo-Saxons as a
race, that the heaviest dead weight upon them is their own passions; but
it would be equally futile to blink at the fact that the Whites do not set
them in this respect a convincing example. Anglo-Saxons the world over are
not unreasonably virtuous; and the divorce cases of Pittsburg might not be
safe reading for impressionable people like the blacks. If the negro race
is depraved it cannot but have a demoralizing effect on the white race,
most of whom have colored nurses; and the male half of whom have all their
life been exposed to a particularly facile temptation. Heaven has somehow
shielded the white woman of the South from the noxious influences of a
servile race; in slavery times and now there is not a fairer flower that
blooms than the white Southern girl; although it is a delusion that she is
never pursued by men of her own race. No visitor, no clean Southern man,
knows the abysses in both races or can fix the proportion in which both
need to rise if the Southland is to be redeemed from its most fearful
danger. Great numbers of the Negroes are immoral, and great numbers of
white men can testify to their immorality, for the building up of
character is a long and weary process in both races.
So far as the future of the Negro is concerned, the real problem is
whether he can suppress his bad traits and emphasize his higher nature,
but that is a question with regard to all other races. The blacks are
ignorant, not only of books, but of the world, of life, of the experience
of the race. They are untrustworthy, but at the same time faithful; as one
of their own number says: "They'll loaf before your face and work behind
your back with good-natured honesty. They'll steal a watermelon, and hand
you back your lost purse intact."
In any case, it may safely be affirmed that the Negro is not retrograding.
On the Sea Islands, where it has been reported that the Negroes had sunk
to savagery, where on one small island a white face had not been seen for
ten years, there is undoubtedly a widespread belief in magic, or what a
fluent colored preacher, in a discourse apparently intended for white
ears, referred to as "Hindooism." On such subjects the Negroes are
reticent; but no evidence of paganism is visible to long-time residents on
the islands. When it comes to fortune-telling and charms, and a fetich
that will insure you against having your mortgage foreclosed, about the
same thing may be found among otherwise intelligent people in any
Northern city. Degradation is frequent; and marital relations are loose on
the islands, though no more so than on the plantations of Mississippi, or
among the Negroes of the cities of Georgia. The population is in general
healthier than on the mainland, though much exposed to severe malaria. Two
or three of the African superstitions do survive; one is that you must
always keep a door open during the day so that you may not shut the bad
spirit in with you; but at night doors and shutters must be closed to keep
the spirit out. Another superstition is the "Basket-name," which is the
plague of the Northern teachers, who are a long time in learning that
Louisa's basket name is "Chug," or that when you call Ezra, "Mantchey"
will come. Churches of various denominations are kept up, and, together
with the various lodges, furnish the principal social life of the people.
To be sure they often have African dances at their religious services; but
these are very like the Shaker dances, which can hardly be called pagan
worship.
The error as to the progress of the Negro arises both from an unfounded
notion of the virtues and the civilization of the Negroes under slavery,
and an equally unfounded idea that the average conditions of the Negro
to-day are hopeless. The Negro was busier in slavery times than now
because there was always the whip in the background, but there is no
reason to suppose that his average annual product was as great as that of
the present freeman. Falsehood, thriftlessness, and immorality are the
charges which were constantly brought against the slaves, both by
outsiders and by their own masters. Judged by the standards which the
white man most readily applies to himself--namely, the proportion of
educated and progressive men and women, the average amount of property,
the interest in the welfare of the race--there is no reason to doubt that
the Negro is higher up than he was half a century ago.
How far does the desire for uplift extend, and how far is it effective?
The negro population shows a distinct interest in the future of the race.
The field hand who has the ambition to save and improve, to buy his own
land, feels that he is benefiting not only himself, but giving an object
lesson of the power of his race. Some of the leaders have personal ends to
gain, but they all expect to gain them by showing a power to improve the
conditions of their fellows. Yet even though the Negro may be working
steadily, he may also be gaining nothing from generation to generation; if
he gets better wages, he may be squandering them; a small part of the race
might conceivably be going forward, while a large part was dropping back.
A piece of testimony on the highest phases of negro character which is too
often forgotten in the South is that on the occasion when the race had the
best opportunity to show black-heartedness it gave the world a noble
example of patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. As that great
Southerner, Grady, wrote: "History has no parallel to the faith kept by
the negro in the South during the war. Often five hundred negroes to a
single white man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and
children walked in safety, and the unprotected homes rested in peace.
Unmarshalled, the black battalions moved patiently to the fields in the
morning to feed the armies their idleness would have starved, and at night
gathered anxiously at the big house to 'hear the news from marster,'
though conscious that his victory made their chains enduring. Everywhere
humble and kindly. The body guard of the helpless. The rough companion of
the little ones. The observant friend. The silent sentry in his lowly
cabin. The shrewd counsellor. And when the dead came home, a mourner at
the open grave. A thousand torches would have disbanded every Southern
army, but not one was lighted." That achievement was a vast advance above
the savagery of the native African; and why should the capacity for
improvement stop there?
Keeping in mind the fact that with all his patience the slave in the best
days of slavery was still a low and vicious type in whom his slavehood
strengthened native propensities to lying, theft, and lust, it is
undeniable that the greater part of the race has made great advances; even
John Temple Graves, a harmful enemy of the Negro, admits that "The leaders
of no race in history have ever shown greater wisdom, good temper and
conservative discretion than distinguishes the two or three men who stand
at the head of the negro race in America to-day." Under slavery no such
success or influence was possible; there could be no negro orators, or
reformers, or leaders in the South.
An invariable answer to the plea that the character of the negro leaders
is a proof of the capacity for uplift is that they are substantially white
men. At the same moment the critics deny to those substantially white men
the privileges of actual white men. But may not "substantially white men"
have an uplifting influence such as indubitably white men had in earlier
times? Most candid white observers, however hostile to the race, admit
that somewhere from a tenth to a fourth of all the Negroes are doing well
and moving upward; and this applies to the Negro on the land as well as in
cities. In many scattered areas in the South, groups of plantation
Negroes have bought land and are saving money. Here are a few examples
taken from the writer's notebook:
At Calhoun, Ala., may be found nearly a hundred Negroes who have bought or
are buying their own farms, and have made $60,000 of savings to do it. A
negro woman on one of those farms said of her new house: "We don't need no
rider (overseer) now, dis house is our rider. It will send us into the
field, it will make us work, and it will make us plan. We's got to plan.
When Ise out in the pit I has to stop to look up at dis house, and den Ise
so pleased I don't know how I am working." Near Nixburg, Ala., is another
settlement started by a Negro, Rev. John Leonard, soon after the war,
which is called thereabouts "Niggerdom," because the blacks have acquired
the best tract of land in the region, have put up the best schoolhouse in
the county, and as a neighbor said of them: "They have got to the place
now where they're no more service to the Whites. They want to work for
themselves." At Kowaliga, Ala., is the Benson settlement, where a Negro
has bought his former master's plantation, largely extended it, has built
a dam and mill, owns three thousand acres of land with many tenants, and
is one of the few large planters of that section who combines cattle
raising with cotton. He gave land and assistance to a good school with
commodious buildings, carried on entirely by Negroes (including Tuskegee
graduates); is building what is probably the best planter's house in the
county, and has plenty of outside investments. At Mound Bayou, Miss., is
another purely negro settlement, with a population of about two thousand,
among whom not a single white man lives. Under the guidance of two
brothers named Montgomery, they bought their land direct from the
railroad company, claim to own 130,000 acres, and have paid for
considerable parts of it; maintain their own stores, carry on a little
bank, and elect a negro municipal government. The results show as much
capacity for managing their own affairs as the neighboring white towns.
There are two or three settlements of the same kind in the South, on a
smaller scale, as at Goldsboro, Fla., and one in Alabama. Different in
type, but a proof of prosperity, are the negro settlements on the Sea
Islands; here is no personal leader like Leonard, or Benson, or
Montgomery; but on several of the islands is a large group of colored
landowners who have been there ever since the Civil War, and whose houses
are much superior to the usual negro cabins. While not progressive, they
hold on to their land with great tenacity, and are not running into debt.
These specific examples prove beyond question that Africans can advance.
Every one of the settlements above mentioned is planted in an unpromising
region, among Negroes presumably of a lower type than the average. Lowndes
County, in which Calhoun is situated, is one of the most backward in the
South; the Sea Islands have the densest negro population to be found
anywhere. Similar instances, on a smaller scale may be found in every
state and almost every county of the South. However backward the people,
you are everywhere told that a few save money, buy land, and try to give
their children better conditions. Nor is it the mulattoes only who show
this disposition to get on in the world; the pure Negroes sometimes are
the most industrious and sensible of their race.
Houses and lands are not the only measure of uplift; and the numerous
Negroes who, according to the impression of white men not likely to
exaggerate, are really thrifty, might be unable to raise the average of
their race; but it seems clear that the Negro is nowhere reverting to
barbarism; that a considerable part of the race, certainly one fourth to
one fifth, is doing about as well as the lowest million or two of the
Southern Whites; though perhaps a fifth (of whom a great part are to be
found in towns and cities) are distinctly doing ill; that the Negroes on
the land, though on the average low, ignorant, and degraded, are working
well, making cotton, and helping to enrich the South. For, as one of
themselves puts it: "The native ambition and aspiration of men, even
though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt
with." The real negro problem is the question of the character and the
future of the laborer.
But deep in the breast of the Average Man
The passions of ages are swirled,
And the loves and the hates of the Average Man
Are old as the heart of the world--
For the thought of the Race, as we live and we die,
Is in keeping the Man and the Average high.
The only real measure of uplift is character, but character cannot be
reduced to statistical tables. The accumulation of property, especially by
a race nearly pauperized when it first acquired the right to hold
property, can be traced and throws much light on the important question
whether the Negroes are rising or falling. It is difficult to separate out
the contribution which the Negro makes to the wealth of the South, and to
estimate his own savings, because the only available census figures on
this subject deal with the three classes of owners, renters, and croppers
of land; and do not, and probably cannot, make a separate account of negro
wage hands on the plantations, and workmen and jobbers of every
description. As nearly as can be judged, more than half the cotton comes
off plantations tilled by negro laborers, or tenants; and for the rest, a
notable portion is raised by independent negro farmers, chiefly on the
hills--some on the lowlands. The wage hands and the town Negroes have, in
general, little to show for their work at the end of the year. They
receive or are credited with wages, live on them, and they are gone.
Negroes are extravagant, tempted by peddlers and instalment-goods men, and
fond of spending for candy, tobacco, and liquor. There are few savings
banks in the South, and the failure of the Freedman's Bank in
Reconstruction times was a terrible blow to the long process of building
up habits of thrift. It seems to be the conviction of the best friends of
the Negro in the South that the great majority of the day laborers have
made little or no advance in habits of saving during the last forty years,
although most of them have more to show in the way of clothing and
furniture than their fathers had.
This is a great misfortune to the race, because, as Booker Washington
never wearies of pointing out, now is the golden time for the Negro to
acquire land. After the war, good farm land could be bought up at from $1
to $5 an acre; and to-day a family with $500 in cash, and saving habits,
can, in most parts of the South, pick up an out-of-the-way corner of land,
with a poor house on it, and begin the kind of struggle to support the
family and pay for improvements which has been the practice of the
Northwest. It is true that good land has now become expensive; there are
under-drained Delta lands which are held at $50 to $100 an acre, and
although planters grumble at the trouble and loss of making cotton with
shiftless hands, not one in a hundred wants to break up his plantation and
sell it out to the Negroes. The successful communities of negro farmers
who have acquired land during the last ten years have, with half a dozen
exceptions, been organized by Northern capitalists, or philanthropists who
have bought estates in order to sell them out. The reason for this
reluctance of the planter is very simple: his business is to raise cotton
on a large scale; if he sells out even at a good figure, he loses his
occupation; and the South, as a community, has not yet seized the great
principle that the prosperity of everybody is enhanced by an increase in
the productive and purchasing power of the laborer.
No figures can be found for the city real estate holdings of Negroes, but
in 1900 there were 188,000 so-called farms owned by Negroes, subject, of
course, like white property, to mortgages for part of the purchase money,
or for debts afterward incurred. In addition, 560,000 negro families were
working plots of land, as croppers and renters, and received either a
share or the whole of the crop that they made. These people altogether
were working 23,000,000 acres, an average of about 30 acres to a family;
and produced $256,000,000 worth of products. These 750,000 "farmers"
represent something over 3,000,000 individuals, which figures to an annual
output of $80 per head; and it is difficult to see how that value could
possibly be produced if the Negroes were not there. The families of the
day laborers count up to at least 3,000,000 more; and their product was
probably somewhere near as large as that of the renters and croppers,
although the share of the planter is rather greater. It would seem
reasonable to assert that $500,000,000 of the $1,200,000,000 of farm
products in the South was raised by negro labor; and that by their work in
the cities and towns they probably add another $200,000,000 to the annual
product.
It is not, however, certain that the Negroes have accumulated in their own
hands so much as the value of one year's output. A. H. Stone, a practical
planter, says that, on his plantation, negro property was irregularly
subdivided; his renters had property accumulated to an average of $400 a
family, while the share hands did not average $50 a family. That is, the
greater part of the negro property is owned by the smaller part of the
population. That is not peculiar to Negroes; in New York City nearly the
whole property is said to be owned by 20,000 people; and in Galveston most
of the valuable real estate is said to be in the hands of, or controlled
by, a score of individuals. In the cities and towns, many prosperous
Negroes are rent payers, and own no real estate, but there may be 50,000
owners besides the 190,000 farm owners. In Kentucky half the Negroes who
are working land independently own their farms. Even in Mississippi the
owners and renters together are more than the share hands.
Since no Negro can successfully rent unless he owns mules and farm tools,
and the renters are considerably more numerous than the owners, we may add
250,000 more families on the land who have accumulated something. That
makes 550,000 families, or between a third and a fourth of the Southern
Negroes, who are getting ahead. If the 550,000 families averaged $900 each
of land and personal property they would hold $500,000,000; $900 is,
however, a high figure, and it may be roughly estimated that negro land
owners and renters had accumulated in 1900 not more than $300,000,000 or
$400,000,000 worth of property. The rest of the Southern Negroes are about
7,000,000 in number; at the low average of $15 a head of accumulations
they would count up nearly $150,000,000 more. A fair estimate of negro
wealth in the South, therefore, would be something above $500,000,000, and
constantly rising.
This estimated proportion is confirmed by investigations into taxes paid
by Negroes. In 1902 the 2,100,000 Negroes in the four states of Virginia,
North Carolina, Georgia, and Arkansas were assessed for taxes on
$54,000,000. At the same proportion throughout the South, their assessment
would have been about $170,000,000, which by this time has probably
increased to over $200,000,000; and $200,000,000 is a fortieth of the
present total assessment. The sum is great, but the proportion to the
wealth of the South is small. At best it can be said that the Negroes, who
are a third of the population, own a fortieth of the property in the
South; and that one fourth of the Negroes own four fifths of all the negro
property. The taxes do not tell the whole story, and there are probably
rich Northern cities in which the poorest third of the population does not
directly pay more than a fortieth of the taxes. If a race is to be held up
as worthless because it is not on the tax books, what will become of some
of the most lively members of the Boston City Council and New York Board
of Aldermen? Everybody knows that in every community the poorest people
pay the largest proportionate taxes through their rent, and through the
increased cost of living which is pushed down upon them by landlords and
storekeepers. If the colored people were all to move out of their
tenements and farms and to go on general strike and earn nothing with
which to buy their supplies, the taxpayers of record would very quickly
find out who paid a part of their taxes for them. Nevertheless, whatever
excuses are made for him, it is undeniable that the Negro has no such
spirit of acquisition, no such willingness to sacrifice present delight
for future good, as the Northern immigrant, or even the Southern Poor
White.