THE WRONG WAY OUT
Except within the postulates stated in the last chapter, there can be no
rational expectation of improvement of race relations in the South. Even
within those conditions many suggestions are from time to time made which
are out of accord with white and negro character, with the physical
conditions, or with the general trend of American life. Before coming to
practical remedies, it is necessary to examine and set aside these
no-thoroughfares.
First of all, can the Southern race question be solved by any action of
the North? The Reconstruction amendments with the clause authorizing
Congress to enforce them by "appropriate legislation" seem intended to
give the federal government power to protect the Negro against either
state legislation or individual action; but the Supreme Court in the Civil
Rights decision of 1883 held that the action of Congress under those
amendments was confined to meeting positive official action by state
governments. The Fourteenth Amendment provides for a special penalty in
case of deprivation of political rights, by reducing the representation in
Congress of the states which limit their suffrage. Any such legislation
must be general in terms and would therefore apply to the Northern states
in which there are educational or tax qualifications. Beyond that
difficulty is the remembered ill effect of Reconstruction laws, and the
conviction in the North that the negro problem is not one simply of race
hostility and definition of rights--that the Negroes are in many ways a
menace. To take the matter a second time out of the hands of the people on
the ground, even though they are not solving their own problems, would
mean a storm in Congress, a weight on the administration, possibly a
contest with the Supreme Court, which no responsible Northern public man
likes to contemplate.
Through the control of Congress over federal elections there is another
opportunity to interfere in behalf of the Negro, but the federal laws put
on the statute book in Reconstruction times were repealed in 1894; and
nobody now proposes to renew them. By the recent experience of the nation
in the Philippines, Porto Rico, and Cuba, a lesson has been taught of the
difficulty of handling non-European races. The nation begins to doubt the
elevating power of self-government. For whatever reason, there is no
evidence of any intention in the North to make the Negro the ward of the
nation. The writer is one of those who believe that any general federal
legislation would revive friction between the sections, would sharpen the
race feeling in the South, and in the end could accomplish little for the
uplift of the Negro; even federal aid to education could hardly be so
managed as to keep up the feeling of white responsibility from which alone
proper education of the Negro can be expected.
Is there any likelihood of a private propaganda in behalf of the Negro
like that of the abolitionists? A considerable class of Northern people
have a warm sense of resentment at what they think the injustice and
cruelty of the superior race, especially in the withdrawal of the
suffrage by state constitutional amendments; and there is a lively
interest in the education of Negroes and in work among the Poor Whites. A
propaganda, with societies, public meetings, journals, and a literature
is, however, no longer possible--the North has too much on its own hands
in curing the political diseases of its cities, in absorbing the
foreigners; like Congress, it recognizes that the South is sincere, even
if somewhat exaggerated, in its nervousness about the Negroes. The most
that can be expected of Northern individuals in the way of bettering
Southern conditions is attempts like that of this volume to get into the
real nature of the problems and to offer good advice.
Notwithstanding the horror felt toward amalgamation, from time to time in
unexpected Southern quarters reappears the suggestion that it is
impossible for the two races to live alongside each other separate, and
that the logical and unavoidable outcome is fusion; that the relentless
force of juxtaposition is too much for law or prejudice or race instinct.
Over and over again one is told that nowhere in history is there an
example of two races living side by side indefinitely without uniting.
This is not historically true; Mohammedans and Hindoos (originally of the
same race) have lived separate hundreds of years in India; Boers and
Kaffirs have been side by side for near a century; the English colonists
and the American Indians were little intermixed. Amalgamation could only
be accomplished by a change in white sentiment about as probable as the
Mormonization of the Northern Whites; and if it were possible, it would
lead to a new and worse race question, the rivalry of a mixed race
occupying the whole South against a white race in the rest of the country,
which would make all present troubles seem a pleasant interlude.
Amalgamation as a remedy welcomed by the Southern Whites is unthinkable;
as a remedy against their convictions, brought about by time, it is highly
unlikely.
At the other extremity is the idea, now more than a century old, that the
way to get rid of the race question is to remove one of the races
altogether. This notion of curing the patient by sending him to a hospital
for incurables goes back to 1775. Jefferson favored it; the Colonization
Society organized it in 1816, and in the forty years from 1820 to 1860
succeeded in sending about ten thousand Negroes to Liberia. Abraham
Lincoln favored it. It is often suggested nowadays. This plan, if it could
be carried out, would so completely relieve the immediate difficulties
that it deserves the most careful consideration.
The first objection at the outset is ten million objections--namely, the
Negroes themselves, who have never taken kindly to expatriation, for the
simple reason that it is flying to evils that they know not of. The second
difficulty is to find a place to receive the exiles. Experiments in the
West Indies, in Central America, and in Africa have all been failures. No
European country or colonies will welcome people sent away on the ground
that they are inimical to white civilization; and the settlements of
American Negroes in savage Africa have been entire failures. As has been
shown above, Liberia, after nearly ninety years of existence, has no
influence on the back country; its trade is scanty, its health is
depleted, and its conditions are in every way less favorable to physical
and moral well-being than those of the United States.
Then follows the financial difficulty; to be sure a correspondent of a
Georgia newspaper suggests: "Let the government appropriate $20,000,000
for five successive years each for deportation, judiciously forcing off
first the ages from eighteen to forty-five, as far as can be done without
too violent a separation of dependent ages, and five years will
substantially settle the exodus. All separations can be reunited in a few
years and not a negro's heart broken." But a single hundred millions would
be only a drop in the bucket. To bring over the ten million foreigners now
in the United States, and get them started in a country abounding in work
and opportunities, has probably averaged a cost of a hundred dollars a
head, or one thousand millions. The thing must be done completely, if at
all; for from the point of view of its advocates, to expatriate a part of
the race would be like cutting out a portion of a cancer; and where are
you going to find, say, a thousand million dollars to carry away ten
million people upon the proceeds of whose continued labor in America you
must depend for the Southern share of the money?
In the next place, would a world which still has tears for the Acadians
deported from Nova Scotia in 1755, which is aroused by the banishment of
political suspects to Siberia, be impressed with the high civilization of
a nation which would send ten million people to their death in a continent
where as yet neither Briton, Frenchman, Portuguese, or German has ever
been able to establish any considerable colony of European emigrants? If
the superior race, with all its resources, prudence, and medical skill
cannot live in Africa, what would become of ten million Negroes deported
on the plea that they were not capable of participating in the white man's
civilization? Though descended from Africans there is no reason to suppose
that they have transmitted immunity from the deadly tropical diseases.
Again, there is not a state, city, or county populous with Negroes in the
South which would not resent, and if need be resist, the sudden taking
away of its laborers. Whenever the question is brought to an issue, the
Southern people admit that, with all the race difficulties, the Negro does
raise the cotton and drive the mule; and without him the white man must
take the hoe and the reins. As John Sharp Williams puts it: "The white
people of the South do not want to hasten the departure of the good
negroes; ... whenever you suggest that he leave the Southern darky replies
in Scriptural phrase, 'Ask me not to leave thee.' They are here, and they
are going to remain here so long as there is a cotton field in sight." The
people who preach expatriation, deportation, elimination, or whatever they
choose to call it, are not the people who employ the Negro or wish him
well, or would be pleased to see him succeed in any hemisphere.
A milder suggestion is that the essential Negro be slowly and quietly
replaced by somebody else. What somebody else? Shall it be Northerners?
Senator Williams, of Mississippi, says: "I would like to see established a
great land company with a capital of about a million dollars, to buy lands
in the cotton States and sell them out to home-seeking immigrants on a ten
years' instalment plan." In 1907 the Southern press was convinced that a
great flow of immigration had set in from the North, but in reality
outside of Florida and Texas nearly all colonies of Northerners have been
unsuccessful, though there is a slow stream of people, partly from the
Northwest, who take up farms in the South and mix with the Southern white
population. These people are prone to be dissatisfied with the schools;
they are in despair over the wretched domestic service; the women are
filled with terror by the lynchings and by the frequent cause of them; the
newcomers dislike the Negroes more than the Southern-born people dislike
them, and cannot be depended upon to remain a permanent part of the
population. In any case, they do not replace the negro laborer for wages.
The only hope of a substitute population of plantation hands is in the
foreign immigrants, who have been described in a previous chapter, and of
whom, up to 1909, the South seems to have expected a brisk influx. The
federal government even set out to build immigrant stations in Charleston
and Savannah. But in 1907 all the Southern ports (excepting Baltimore)
together received only 21,000 out of 1,300,000. To-day the whole scheme is
a failure and there is no prospect of importing large numbers of
foreigners to work for wages. A member of Congress from Mississippi
recently declared from his seat in the House that there was a conspiracy
of federal and Italian officials to prevent Italians from coming into his
state.
The first reason for the failure of the promising plan is the many
undoubted cases, and the more rumored and reported instances, of peonage
of white men. In the second place the Italians, who have been chiefly
relied upon, have no intention of spending their lives and bringing up
their children as plantation laborers; they work so well and are so
profitable to both the plantation owners and themselves that after a few
years they save money enough to do something that they like better, and
that is the end of their service on other people's land. The experience of
South Carolina in 1906, detailed in the chapter on Immigration, seems
conclusively to prove that most foreigners prefer the North because they
think they are better treated there.
The fundamental difficulty with the whole plan of immigration is that a
great many people in the South believe that the average foreigner is an
undesirable member of the community. They have no familiarity with that
grinding-down process by which even unpromising races are transformed into
Americans. They read of the "Black Hand," which is not very different from
some forms of the old Ku Klux Klan; of the Vendetta, which can be
paralleled in the Southern mountains; and they show little willingness to
receive even the better foreign elements on equal terms. It is a fair
question whether if the Italians, for example, should come to have a
majority of votes in Louisiana they would ever be permitted to elect and
inaugurate a governor out of their own number; whether the phrase "White
man's government" does not apply as much against the "Dago" as against the
Negro.
If the Negroes cannot be replaced, is it not possible to segregate them
into districts of their own? For forty years a process has been going on
by which the black counties grow blacker and the white counties become
whiter; Negroes move into the counties where there is most work and
therefore the greatest number of laborers, and the Whites gradually move
out of the districts in which the Negroes are very numerous. Could not
that process be carried still farther? Some people in despair predict that
the Whites will eventually find their way into the West and Northwest,
leaving the fruitful South to the Negro. Although there is a steady drift
of white people out of the Southern states, it is of the same kind as the
movement from New England and the Middle states to the West, and the
Whites have not the slightest intention of abandoning their section;
buildings go up, mills appear, skyscrapers intensify the city, and in
every Southern state the Whites grow richer and more powerful.
The desired result might be brought about if the Negroes would move to
other parts of the Union, and much is made of the present drift into the
Northern cities, but the conditions of life are not favorable to them
there, and their number is only kept up by new immigrations. Booker
Washington advises the Negro to stay in the South because "The fact that
at the North the Negro is confined to almost one line of employment often
tends to discourage and demoralize the strongest who go from the South,
and to make them an easy prey to temptation." Many of the keenest
observers in the South desire that the Negroes should spread through the
country, partly to relieve the pressure in the South, and partly in the
conviction that it would furnish an object lesson to the Northern people
of the disadvantage of the presence of Negroes. Whatever the number of
emigrant Negroes out of the South, the number left there goes on steadily
increasing from decade to decade; and whenever they show a disposition to
leave in large numbers, the Southerners oppose and resist, because they
see no hope of supplying their place with any other than more negro
laborers.
Could the two races divide the land into districts? Such a separation is
favored both by Bishop Turner, a negro leader, and by John Temple Graves,
of Atlanta, a negro hater, and there are a few examples of such separate
communities. Many white counties and a few white towns will not admit
Negroes; and in perhaps half a dozen colored villages no white man lives.
Here is perhaps an opportunity for considerably reducing race friction,
for there is no reason to suppose that such separate towns go backward in
civilization; and they give opportunities for negro business and
professional men, which are important for the encouragement of the best
members of the race. The most serious practical objection is, however,
that such towns take away laborers, actual or potential, from the white
plantations; and the industrial cotton system depends on keeping those
Negroes on other people's land.
A broader proposition is phrased by Reed in the "Brother's War"--"Let us
give the negro his own State in our union.... We are rich enough and have
land enough to give the negro this State, which is due from us. His
especial need is to exercise political and civil privileges, in his own
community, all the way up from the town meeting to congress." Possibly
this remedy might have been applied forty years ago, but it is now
absolutely unworkable. When Reed suggests that the Negro be allowed to
take over some state and carry it on as a negro community, the instant
question is, which state? Louisiana will not allow her laborers to go _en
masse_ to Texas; and Texas would drive them back with shotguns from the
border if they tried to move. The blackest states have the least
disposition to become blacker, the lighter states are just as determined
to remain light; and since there is no longer any great area of good land
not taken up by anybody, colonization of the Negro within the limits of
the United States is impossible.
Could the desired result of keeping Whites and Negroes from too confining
a contact be reached by a less drastic method? A favorite suggestion
eloquently championed by Grady is "race separation," which he defined to
mean: "That the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the
South. As near as may be, these paths should be made equal--but separate
they must be now and always. This means separate schools, separate
churches, separate accommodation everywhere--but equal accommodation where
the same money is charged, or where the State provides for the citizen."
That is, in every city Negroes are to occupy separate quarters, go to
separate schools, ride in separate sections of the street cars, use
separate sidewalks, buy in separate stores, have separate churches, places
of amusement, social organizations, banks, and insurance companies. This
system, which in many directions has already been carried out, rests upon
a conviction of the Negro's ability to maintain an economic and
intellectual life of his own, without danger to the white race. It has the
great disadvantage of cutting off the third of the population which most
needs uplift from the influences which bear for progress. It still further
diminishes that association of the superior with the inferior race, that
kindly interest of employer in employee, that infiltration of culture and
moral principles which is the mightiest influence among the white people.
Furthermore, where is the black man to acquire the skill to carry on his
own enterprises, to build cotton gins and oil mills, to stock stores, to
found banks, if he is to be separated from the white man? Where is he to
buy his goods? Here the whole system breaks down; the drummer is no
respecter of persons, and not only is willing to sell to a solvent Negro,
but is likely to insist that the negro merchant shall not give all his
orders to a colored wholesaler. Then what is to be done with the hundreds
of thousands of landowners, tenants, croppers, and wage hands, who depend
on advances from the Whites? There is no such thing as commercial
segregation; as in other directions, when any remedy is proposed which
means the cutting off of negro labor, or of the profits derived from negro
custom, the South invariably draws back.
On the other hand, race separation would give greater opportunities to the
Negroes and reduce the contact with the lower class of the Whites, out of
which comes most of the race violence in the South. It is substantially
the method applied in Northern cities, though nowhere to any such degree
as in the South. It is a method which, with all its hardship to Negroes of
the higher class, comes nearest being a _modus vivendi_ between the races.
As for white communities without Negroes, there are many such in the
mountain regions, and an unsuccessful effort was made in the town of
Fitzgerald, Ga., by Northern immigrants to keep the Negroes out of it, but
in such places who will do the odd jobs and perform the necessary rough
labor? How shall houses be built, drays be driven and dirt shoveled, if
there are no Negroes?
Try which way you may, there seems no method consonant with the interests
of the South and the principles of humanity by which Negroes can be set
apart from the white people. It was not the choice of their ancestors to
change their horizon; nor were the Africans now in the United States
consulted as to their neighbors; but they were born on American soil; they
have shared in the toil of conquering the continent; they have their
homes, their interests, and their traditions; they have never known any
life except in dependence on and close relations with the Whites. However
happier the South and the whole country might be were there no race
question, there seems no possibility of avoiding it by taking away all
race contact.
A method of supposed relief widely applied, frequently invoked, and
strenuously defended, is to terrorize the Negro. And the North is not free
from that spirit. As Mr. Dooley philosophizes: "He'll ayther have to go to
th' north an' be a subjick race, or stay in th' south an' be an objick
lesson. 'Tis a har-rd time he'll have, anyhow.... I'm not so much
throubled about th' naygur whin he lives among his opprissors as I am whin
he falls into th' hands iv his liberators. Whin he's in th' South he can
make up his mind to be lynched soon or late an' give his attintion to his
other pleasures iv composin' rag-time music on a banjo, an' wurrukin' f'r
th' man that used to own him an' now on'y owes him his wages. But 'tis the
divvle's own hardship ... to be pursooed by a mob iv abolitionists till
he's dhriven to seek police protection." Still the Northern police do give
protection against assaults on the Negro which Southern police sometimes
refuse. Lawlessness is the plague of the South. Attention has already been
called to the negro crime against person and life, the shocking frequency
of white crime, the weakness and timidity of the courts, and the resort to
lynching as an alleged protest against lawlessness. The number of
homicides and mob murders is not so serious as the continual appeals to
violence by editors and public men who are accepted as leaders by a large
minority and sometimes a majority of the white people. Thus John Temple
Graves calls for "a firm, stern, and resolute attitude of organization and
readiness on the part of the dominant race.... Is this black man from
savage Africa to keep on perpetually disturbing the sections of our common
country? Is this running sore to be nursed and treated and anodyned and
salved and held forever to our breasts?" Southern newspapers abound in
fierce and exciting headlines: "The Burly Black Brute Foiled!" "A Ham
Colored Nigger in the Hen House!" "The Only Place for You is Behind a
Mule," and so on--what somebody has called "The wholesale assassination of
negro character." Senator Tillman in a public lecture has said: "On one
occasion we killed seven niggers; I don't know how many I killed
personally, but I shot to kill and I know I got my share." And in another
speech, in November, 1907, in Chicago, the same man, who has repeatedly
been elected to the Senate from a once proud state, said: "No matter what
the people in the North may say or do, the white race in the South will
never be dominated by the Negro, and I want to tell you now that if some
state should ever make an attempt to 'save South Carolina,' we will show
them in their fanaticism that we will make it red before we make it
black."
Observe that this ferocity is not directed against the Negro simply
because he does ill, but equally if he does well. Thus a correspondent in
Georgia writes: "Let me tell you one thing,--every time you people of the
North countenance in any way, shape or form any form of social equality,
you lay up trouble, not for yourselves, or for us so much, but for the
negro. _Right or wrong the Southern people will never tolerate it, and
will go through the horrors of another reconstruction, before they will
permit it to be. Before we will submit to it, we will kill every negro in
the Southern states._ This is not idle boasting or fire-eating threats,
but the cold, hard facts stated in all calmness." Could hate, jealousy,
and meanness reach a higher pitch than in the following declaration of
Thomas Dixon, Jr., sent broadcast through the country in the _Saturday
Evening Post_ two years ago? "Does any sane man believe that when the
Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man, this
'arrogant,' 'rapacious,' and 'intolerant' race will allow the Negro to
master his industrial system, take the bread from his mouth, crowd him to
the wall and place a mortgage on his house? Competition is war--the most
fierce and brutal of all its forms. Could fatuity reach a sublimer height
than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and see this
performance? What will he do when put to the test? He will do exactly what
his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his
bread--kill him!" Could blind race hostility go farther than in the
Atlanta Riots of 1907, for which not one murderer has ever been subjected
to any punishment?
These violent utterances come almost wholly from the Superior Race. The
Negroes have their grievances; but any intemperate publication toward the
white race would almost certainly lead to a lynching. An instance has
actually occurred where a Negro was driven out of a community, and glad to
escape with his life, because he had in his newspaper said with regard to
a woman of his own race whose character had been assailed, that she was as
virtuous as any white woman. Doubtless some of the cruel and incendiary
language that has been quoted is intended for home consumption; it is
supposed to be a striking way of saying to the Negroes that they ought to
behave better; and alongside every one of these vindictive utterances
could be placed a message of hope and encouragement from Southern white
men to the blacks. These expressions of white ferocity in condemnation of
negro ferocity are overbalanced by such strong words as those of Senator
Williams: "It cannot be escaped by the extermination of either race by the
other. That thought is absolutely horrible to a good man, a believer in
the divine philosophy of Jesus Christ, who taught mutual helpfulness, and
not mutual hatred to mankind." Nevertheless, it remains true that a large
number of Southern people who are in places of influence and authority
advise that the race problem be settled by terrorizing the Negro.
The commonest form of terror is lynching, a deliberate attempt to keep the
race down by occasionally killing Negroes, sometimes because they are
dreadful criminals, frequently because they are bad, or loose-tongued, or
influential, or are acquiring property, or otherwise irritate the Whites.
A saucy speech by a Negro to a white man may be followed by swift,
relentless, and tormenting death. In every case of passionate conflict
between two races the higher loses most, because it has most to lose; and
lynch law as a remedy for the lawlessness of the blacks has the
disadvantage of occasionally exposing innocent white men to the
uncontrollable passion of other white men, of filling the mind with scenes
of horror and cruelty, of lowering the standard of the whole white race.
This subject is inextricably connected with the crimes by Negroes, for
which lynching is held to be an appropriate punishment. The statistics
collected by Mr. Cutler, and stated in a previous chapter, show in the
twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903 a record of 1,997 lynchings in the
South; of the Negroes lynched, 707 were charged with violence to women and
783 with murder. These figures absolutely disprove the habitual statements
in the South that lynching is common to all sections of the Union; that it
is almost always caused by rape; and that rape is a crime confined to
Negroes. The details of some of these cases would show that the mob not
infrequently gets an innocent person; that it is liable to be carried away
into the most horrible excesses of burning and torture; that a lynching is
really a kind of orgy in which not only the criminal class among the
Whites, but people who are ordinarily swayed by reason simply let go of
themselves and indulge the primeval brutishness of human nature. Said
Confucius: "The Master said, 'I hate the manner in which purple takes away
the luster of vermilion. I hate the way in which the songs of Ch'ing
confound the music of Gna. I hate those who with their sharp mouths
overthrow kingdoms and families.'"
Professor Smith, of Tulane University, is spokesman for thousands of
respectable and educated men when he says: "Atrocious as such forms of
rudimentary justice undoubtedly are, and severely reprehensible, to be
condemned always and without any reserve, it cannot be denied that they
have a certain rough and horrible virtue. Great is the insult they wreak
on the majesty of the law and brutalizing must be their effect upon human
nature, yet they do strike a salutary terror into hearts which the slow
and uncertain steps of the courts could hardly daunt. In witness stands
the fact that lynch-lightning seldom strikes twice in the same district or
community. Such frightful incidents tend to repeat themselves at wide
intervals, both of time and place."
They tend to repeat themselves immediately; it is not an accident that
Mississippi, in a large part of which the Negroes are renowned for their
freedom from the crime so much reprehended, nevertheless, has more
lynchings than any other state; it is because Mississippi has the lynching
habit. Strange that in a community like the South, so intelligent, so
proud of the superiority and the supremacy of the white race, the deeds of
fifty abandoned black men each year should throw millions of Whites into a
frenzy of excitement; and that for the crime of those fifty, ten million
innocent people are held responsible. Lynching is no remedy for race
troubles, and never has been; it intensifies the race feeling a
hundredfold; it is a standing indictment of the white people who possess
all the machinery of government, yet cannot prevent the fury of their own
race. "Surely," says President Roosevelt, "no patriot can fail to see the
fearful brutalization and debasement which the indulgence of such a spirit
and such practices inevitably portend.... The nation, like the
individual, cannot commit a crime with impunity. If we are guilty of
lawlessness and brutal violence, whether our guilt consists in active
participation therein or in mere connivance and encouragement, we shall
assuredly suffer later on because of what we have done. The corner stone
of this republic, as of all free governments, is respect for and obedience
to the law." That the South can get on without lynchings is shown by the
gradual diminution in the number of instances. In 1901 there were 135, in
1906 only 45, and in this good result the protests of the good people in
the South have been aided by the criticism of the North. Murders of Whites
by Negroes are probably just as frequent, but they are more likely to go
to the courts.
Some things can still be done to reduce the crime of the individual
without increasing the crime of the mob. John Temple Graves has suggested
for the Negro that: "Upon conviction of his crime he would cross a 'Bridge
of Sighs' and disappear into a prison of darkness and mystery, from which
he would never emerge, and in which he would meet a fate known to no man
save the Government and the excutioners of the law--that the very darkness
and mystery of this punishment would strike more terror to the soul of
superstitious criminals than all the vengeance of modern legal
retribution."
A kindred suggestion is that a special court of Whites shall be set up to
deal with certain aggravated crimes, outside of the technicalities of the
ordinary criminal law. If the Negroes would deliver up those of their own
number whom they suppose to have committed such crimes, they would relieve
themselves of the odium of protecting the worst criminals. The Whites are
right in insisting on a stronger feeling of race responsibility, but where
is their own sense of race responsibility when the Salisbury lynchers,
the Atlanta murderers and the scoundrel Turner, who practically kidnapped
and then tortured to death a Negro woman, are protected by public
sentiment? Extraordinary remedies are not necessary if the white people
will make their own courts and sheriffs do their duty, by speedy trials,
followed by swift and orderly punishment; and most of all by disgracing
and driving out of society men who take upon themselves the hangman's
office without the hangman's plea of maintaining the majesty of law.
Lynching is part of the same spirit as that which inspires peonage, the
meanest of all crimes in the calendar; for to steal a poor Negro's labor
is to rob a cripple of his crutches; to knock down the child for his
penny; it is the fleecing of the most defenseless by the most powerful.
One of the remedies for the ills of the South is that the white people
shall sternly set themselves against the crime of peonage, which exists in
every state of the Lower South, either with or without the color of law;
and which secures the most expensive labor that the South can possibly
employ, since it alarms and discourages a thousand for every man whose
forced labor is thus stolen.
The terrible thing about all the suggestions of violence and hatred as a
remedy is that they react upon the white race, which has most to lose in
property and in character. "There are certain things," said Governor
Vardaman, of Mississippi, in a public proclamation, "that must be done for
the control of the negro which need not be done for the government of the
white man. In spite of the provisions of the federal constitution the men
who are called upon to deal with this great problem must do that which is
necessary to be done, even though it may have the appearance at times of
going somewhat without the law.... If the people of the respective
communities of this state will only come together and resolve to convert
every negro into a laborer and self-supporter, even though it be necessary
to make him a laborer upon the county's or the state's property, they will
serve their communities and their state well." No idea is more futile than
that you can drive people with whips into the Kingdom of Heaven; that you
can teach an inferior race to observe laws by yourself breaking them; that
you can put one half the community outside the law, while claiming
American liberty for the other half. Though the negro race has little to
urge in public, it feels the degradation and the hurt. Violence solves no
problems; it does not even postpone the evil day. The race problem must be
solved by applying to Negroes the same kind of law and justice that the
experience of the Anglo-Saxon has found necessary for its own protection.