MATERIAL AND POLITICAL REMEDIES
The methods of dealing with the race question discussed in the last
chapter all go back to the idea that the Negro can be improved only by
some process distasteful to him. Race separation he dislikes, expatriation
he shudders at, and violence brings on him more evils than it removes, to
say nothing of the effect on the Whites. The world has tried many
experiments of civilizing people by the police, and they are all failures,
from the Russian Empire to the West Side of New York, especially since
both the Cossacks and the metropolitan police have faults of their own. In
the South and in Russia alike there is doubtless a feeling that the people
at the bottom of the scale are things below the common standard, that
force is necessary because they will not listen to reason.
None of the forcible remedies meets the most obvious difficulty in the
South--that the present condition of the lower race is not a foundation
for great wealth and high prosperity. If the Negro has reached his pitch,
if he is to remain at his present average of morals and industry and
productivity, the South may well be in despair, for it is far below that
of the low Southern White, and farther below that of the Northwestern
farmer. The condition of the black is a menace to society--if it must stay
at the present level.
In the chapter on "Is the Negro Rising?" some reasons are given for
believing that the status of the race has much improved in the last forty
years and is still gaining. Upon this critical point numbers of both races
testify. Kelly Miller says of the achievements of his people: "Within
forty years of only partial opportunity, while playing as it were in the
backyard of civilization, the American negro has cut down his illiteracy
by over fifty per cent; has produced a professional class some fifty
thousand strong, including ministers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, editors,
authors, architects, engineers and all higher lines of listed pursuits in
which white men are engaged; some three thousand negroes have taken
collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from the best institutions in
the North and West established for the most favored white youth; ... negro
inventors have taken out some four hundred patents as a contribution to
the mechanical genius of America; there are scores of negroes who, for
conceded ability and achievements, take respectable rank in the company of
distinguished Americans."
This opinion is not confined to members of the negro race; even so cordial
an enemy of the Negro as John Temple Graves 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"; and elsewhere he
declares that there are two good Negroes for every bad Negro, a proportion
which does not obtain in every race. Thomas Nelson Page is of opinion
that, "Unquestionably, a certain proportion of the Negro race has risen
notably since the era of emancipation," and John Sharp Williams commits
himself to the statement that "Fully ninety per cent of the negro race is
behaving itself as well as could be expected; it is at work in the
fields, on the railroads, and in the sawmills, and does not, for the most
part, know that there is a fifteenth amendment." A cloud of witnesses
confirm the belief that a fourth to a fifth of all the Negroes in the
South are somewhat improving and slowly saving. Some of them have
hearkened to the advice of an English writer: "Try to realize two things:
first, that you are living in a commercial republic; a country whose
standard, in all things, is material; second, that you are the greatest
economic power in this country."
The possibility of a general industrial uplift depends upon several
factors which are not easy to fix. It is a question whether the lower four
fifths of the negro race has anything like the potentiality of the upper
fraction, for it is made up mostly of plantation Negroes, who have
certainly advanced a long way from slavery times, are better clothed,
better fed, better housed, better treated, but are still a long way below
most of the Whites in their own section. The most appalling thing about
the negro problem is, this mass of people on the land who are doing well
in the sense that they work, make cotton, yield profits, help to make the
community prosperous, but who are ignorant, stupid, and have no horizon
outside the cotton field and the cornfield. In spirit they still hark back
to Whittier's plantation song,
De yam will grow, de cotton blow,
We'll hab de rice an' corn;
O nebber you fear if nebber you hear
De driver blow his horn.
Is there anything stirring in the minds of that great, good-natured, inert
and unthinking mass which will bring them up where the reproach now
heaped upon them shall fade away? Still more, if they try to arise, will
the Whites permit them? That is no idle question, for rising means that
some of them will seek other pursuits, and the white people have already
given notice that certain avenues of labor are closed to them. Contrary to
many assertions confidently made, the Negroes are not as a race crowded
out of the skilled trades in the South; but the trades union is bound to
appear and the effort will be to shut negro mechanics out of the unions
altogether, as has been done in some Northern places. The Negro as he
rises to higher possibilities may find those possibilities withdrawn.
Listen to the philosophy of Thomas Dixon, Jr., a Christian minister: "If
the Negro is made master of the industries of the South he will become the
master of the South. Sooner than allow him to take the bread from their
mouths, the white men will kill him here, as they do North, when the
struggle for bread becomes as tragic.... Make the Negro a scientific and
successful farmer, and let him plant his feet deep in your soil, and it
will mean a race war.... The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, or the
leopard his spots. Those who think it possible will always tell you that
the place to work this miracle is in the South. Exactly. If a man really
believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a Negro
in marriage. That is the test." This is nothing more nor less than the
negro preacher's exhortation to his congregation: "My dear hearers, dar is
two roads a-lyin' straight before you, and a-branchin' off de one from de
odder at the nex' corners; one of 'em leads to perdition, and de odder to
everlastin' damnation. Oh, my friends, which will you choose?" If the
Negro will not rise, argues Dixon, he gives nothing to the community,
away with him! If he does rise, he may take work that otherwise some
white man might do, lynch him!
The real argument of competition works just the other way. The inferior
Negro is not likely to take the bread out of the mouth of the superior
white man; but, when relieved from the abnormal conditions of slavery and
of Reconstruction, he may still be able to hold his own in the struggle
for existence. Emancipation threw upon the Negro the responsibility for
his own keeping. The most that he can ask is a fair field without
artificial hindrances or limitations; and in such a field a race on the
average inferior may nevertheless find tasks in which it excels, and may
maintain its race life unimpaired. Kelly Miller says: "You were born with
a silver spoon in your mouth, I was born with an iron hoe in my hand"; and
the world needs the hoe hand just as much as the silversmith.
It would appear that for the uplift of the Negro something is needed on
the white side: remembrance of the foundations of American liberty, of the
workings of Christianity, of the economic truth that you are not made poor
because your neighbor gets on in the world. The curse of the South is that
its people do not more genuinely realize that the more active,
industrious, and thrifty a people become, the more their neighbors receive
out of the enlarged contribution to the community. If the Negroes were all
as intelligent as Roscoe Conkling Bruce, as forehanded as Benson of
Kowaliga, as lyric as Paul Dunbar, the Whites in the South might get rich
out of the trade of the Negro, and some of them see it so. For instance,
President Winston, of the Agricultural College of North Carolina: "Greater
industrial efficiency would prove an everlasting bond between the races in
the South. It is the real key to the problem. Let the Negro make himself
indispensable as a workman, and he may rely upon the friendship and
affection of the whites.... Public sentiment in the South still welcomes
the Negro to every field of labor that he is capable of performing. The
whole field of industry is open to him. The Southern whites are not
troubled by his efficiency but by his inefficiency." Meantime the really
industrious Negroes, of whom there are a couple of million or more, follow
the advice of Paul Dunbar:
I've a humble little motto
That is homely, though it's true,--
Keep a-pluggin' away.
It's a thing when I've an object
That I always try to do,--
Keep a-pluggin' away.
When you've rising storms to quell,
When opposing waters swell,
It will never fail to tell,--
Keep a-pluggin' away.
The self-interest of the planter in the efficiency of his labor does not
necessarily lead him to see the highest interests either of the negro race
or of the South, under the present industrial system, which makes a
plantation a workshop rather than a farm. The ownership of rich cotton
lands only means wealth if you can find negro laborers and keep them at
work. One of the most powerful uplifting agencies in all agricultural
countries is the desire to own land, and one of the most frequent texts of
Booker Washington is that now is the time for the Negro to acquire land,
for it will never again be so cheap; but where is the land to be found?
Although ownership has almost completely changed since the Civil War, good
lands are aggregating more and more into large tracts. The white farmer
finds it difficult to hold his own against the capitalist and the
syndicate, and even the thrifty black is beset by special difficulties.
In the first place, the rural Negro has, unless by his saving from sawmill
and turpentine work, little opportunity to make money with which to buy a
farm, except from the farm itself: hence he buys on time, pays a heavy
interest charge, and is at every disadvantage. In the second place, few
planters are willing to break up their land into small tracts; to do so
takes away their livelihood, their only opportunity of making available
their knowledge of cotton planting and of dealing with cotton hands. Some
of them are absolutely opposed to letting the Negroes have land. Mr. Bell,
of Alabama, one of the largest landowners in the South, is credited with
saying that he "has no use for a Nigger that pays out." That is to say, he
prefer his hands to be unprogressive and in debt. Perhaps the South fails
to realize that the wealth of the Western, Middle, and New England states
comes from encouraging people to do the best they know how. The more
industrious the people are, the more business there is of every kind and
for everybody. The South would be happier and more prosperous if it could
accept the Western system of moderate-sized detached farms, on each of
which there is an intelligent owner or tenant.
The large number of negro landowners (though many of them perhaps are
mortgaged) and the evident prosperity of those communities in which the
greatest number of them hold their land, seems to show that landowning is
a motive that ought to be strongly set before them. The old notion of
Reconstruction times that the federal government ought to furnish "forty
acres and a mule" was not so far wrong; it would have been perfectly
possible for the nation to acquire land in large tracts, to subdivide it,
and give or sell it at nominal rates, so as to offer every thrifty Negro
the chance of proprietorship; but that opportunity, if it ever existed,
has long gone by, and the Negro must depend upon himself if he wishes to
buy land.
The present system is not only industrial; it tends to make a peasant out
of the Negro, and peasant is a term of reproach in the United States,
though in France, Germany, and Italy there are rich peasants as well as
poor ones, peasants who employ labor as well as those who have nothing but
their hands. The American objection to a peasant system is its fixity; the
peasant is an hereditary laborer on the land, usually the land of another;
he leaves it to other people to carry on the state, to elevate the
community. Nevertheless, it is simply the truth that under the present
system of tenancy employment and day wages, nearly half of the negro race
in the South is in effect a peasantry. Perhaps that is their fate. Perhaps
the Alabama lawyer's doctrine, so comfortable for the white man, is to
prevail: "It's a question who will do the dirty work. In this country the
white man won't: the Negro must. There's got to be a mudsill somewhere. If
you educate the Negroes they won't stay where they belong; and you must
consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it makes the others
discontented."
The question of who is to do the crude, disagreeable and dirty work, has
solved itself in the North which has had one stratum after another of
immigrants who were willing to take it, each shoving his predecessor
higher up in the scale of employment; but no foreigners will come into the
South in order to relieve the Negro of hewing of wood and drawing of
water. It looks as though the majority of the race would be compelled to
accept some condition on the land, without a share in the government and
without much prospect of getting into other kinds of life. The prospect is
discouraging in itself, and it readily shades into restraint, subjection,
and peonage--the worst of remedies for a race low in origin, which has
just emerged from a debasing servitude, and which needs all the stimulus
of ambition and opportunity.
The South has proved its capacity for organizing and directing ignorant
labor, but a peasant system has more dangers for the upper than the lower
class. The gentlemen of eighteenth-century France, with all their high
breeding, did not understand the people under them and were hated of their
peasants; the Pashas of Egypt were degraded by their mastery over
thousands of fellahin; the Russian boyars have so alienated the peasants
that they have almost rent the empire in twain. To accept a peasant system
would be a confession that the South must remain in the lower stage of
economic progress which goes with such a system. The duty and the
privilege of the South is still to seek the way of enlightment; to make
the Negro a better laborer instead of crystallizing him into a race of
dependents.
Material progress is necessary for the Negro and equally for the Poor
White, not simply that he may be better clad and have better health, but
because it brings with it other influences which go to elevate mankind.
You cannot make good citizens and virtuous people out of a dirty, ill-fed
family in a one-room house; the remedy of intellectual and moral uplift is
as important as the material side. Thrift works both ways: the man who
buys good clothes for his children wants to send them to Sunday school;
the poor children in Sunday school beg their fathers to give them good
clothes. Such intellectual and moral agencies are at work, though here
again some white leaders object to them. For instance, John Temple Graves
asks: "Will the negro, with his increasing education and his surely and
steadily advancing worth and merit, be content to accept, in peace and
humility, anything less than his full and equal share in the government of
which he is a part?" Here is one of the stumbling blocks in the way of the
progress of the race.
For thrift and saving habits the South has always lacked one of the
approved aids; it has few savings banks, few ordinary banks which attract
the deposits of Negroes, and few steady investments in small
denominations. For this reason the proposed Postal Savings Banks would be
a boon to the South, and would help toward the purchase of land and other
property. The Negroes' own fraternal orders and stock companies furnish
some opportunities for savings. Regulation of drinking and gambling places
will also make saving likelier among the laborers. That difficulties and
conflicts of interest would rise between Whites and Negroes was foreseen
at the time of Reconstruction, and it was honestly supposed by the
thinking people of the North that the ballot would at the same time
protect the black against white aggression, and would educate him into the
sense of such responsibility that there would not be negro aggression.
Giving the negro suffrage, however, while at the same time through the
Reconstruction state constitutions disfranchising his former master,
brought about a condition of unstable equilibrium, and the strongest, best
organized, and most determined race of course prevailed. For some years
after the restoration of white supremacy in the Southern states, colored
men were still allowed to vote in districts like the Sea Islands of South
Carolina, and the Delta of Mississippi, where they were predominant, but
since 1885 there has not been any genuine negro suffrage in any state of
the South, in the sense that Negroes were assured that their votes could
be cast and would be counted even if they made a difference in the result.
The last remnant of a successful combination of negro voters with a
minority of the Whites was in the North Carolina election of 1896.
By the series of constitutional amendments begun in 1890, and since spread
through the South, a property or intelligence qualification has
practically been established for Negroes while not applying to poor or
illiterate Whites. In the Northern states race difficulties, so far as
they take form in politics, are settled by the usual course of elections;
in the South it is the unalterable intention of the Whites that the
Negroes shall not participate in choosing officials or in making laws
either for white men or for themselves.
Furthermore, the South is bitterly opposed to the holding of offices by
Negroes except the small local appointments. Though Negroes are one third
in number in the South, and more than one half the population in two
states, they have not a single state administrative official, member of
legislature, or judge. The opposition to negro office holding extends to
federal appointments, although a considerable number of places, some of
them important, are still held by Negroes. They obtain appointments as
railway mail clerks and letter carriers by competitive examination, and a
few of them are selected for collectorships of internal revenue and of
customs, on the basis that the Negroes are part of the community and
entitled to some recognition. To exclude them altogether from the public
service, as they have been almost excluded from the suffrage, may somewhat
diminish race friction, but it is a mark of inferiority which the whole
negro race resents.