RACE PREJUDICE
As late as 1890, Senator Ingalls said: "The use of the torch and dagger is
advised. I deplore it, but as God is my judge, I say that no people on
this earth have ever submitted to the wrongs and injustice which have been
put upon the coloured men of the South without revolt and bloodshed."
Others spoke of the negro's use of torch and sword as his only way to
right himself in the South. When prominent men in Congressional and
legislative halls and small stump speakers everywhere fulminated such
sentiments, the marvel would have been if race prejudice had not come to
birth and growth. Good men, whose homes were safe, and who in heat of
oratory or passion for place, forgot that other men's homes were not, had
no realisation of the effect of their words upon Southern households,
where inmates lay down at night trembling lest they wake in flames or with
black men shooting or knifing them.
But for a rooted and grounded sympathy and affection between the races
that fierce and newly awakened prejudice could not kill, the Sepoy
massacres of India would have been duplicated in the South in the sixties
and seventies. Under slavery, the black race held the heart of the white
South in its hands. Second only in authority to the white mother on a
Southern plantation, was the black mammy; hoary-headed white men and
women, young men and maidens and little children, rendered her reverence
and love. Little negroes and little white children grew up together,
playing together and forming ties of affection equal to almost any
strain. The servant was dependent upon his master, the master upon his
servant. Neither could afford to disregard the well-being of the other. No
class of labour on earth today is as well cared for as were the negroes of
the Old South. Age was pensioned, infancy sheltered. There was a state of
mutual trust and confidence between employer and employee that has been
seen nowhere else and at no time since between capital and labour.
Had the negro remained a few centuries longer the white man's dependant,
often an inmate of his home, and his close associate on terms not raising
questions and conflicts, his development would have proceeded. Through the
processes of slavery, the negro was peaceably evolving, as agriculturist,
shepherd, blacksmith, mechanic, master and mistress of domestic science,
towards citizenship--inevitable when he should be ready for it;
citizenship all the saner, because those who were training him were
unconscious of what they were doing and contemplated making no political
use of him. They were intent only on his industrial and moral education.
His evolution was set back by emancipation.
Yet, if destruction of race identity is advancement, the negro will
advance. The education which he began to receive with other Greek gifts of
freedom has taught him to despise his skin, to loath his race identity, to
sacrifice all native dignity and nobility in crazy antics to become a
white man. "Social equality!" those words are to be his doom. It is a pity
that the phrase was ever coined. It is not to say that one is better than
the other when we say of larks and robins, doves and crows, eagles and
sparrows, that they do not flock together. They are different rather than
unequal. Difference does not, of itself, imply inequality. To ignore a
difference inherent in nature is a crime against nature and is punished
accordingly by nature.
The negro race in America is to be wiped out by the dual process of
elimination and absorption. The negro will not be eliminated as was the
Indian--though the way a whole settlement of blacks was made to move on a
few years ago in Illinois, looks as if history might repeat itself in
special instances. Between lynchings and race riots in the North and West
and those in the South there has usually been this difference: in the
former, popular fury included entire settlements, punishing the innocent
with the guilty; in the latter, it limited itself to the actual criminal.
Another difference between sectional race problems. I was in New York
during Subway construction when a strike was threatened, and overheard two
gentlemen on the elevated road discussing the situation: "The company
talks of bringing the blacks up here." "If they do, the tunnel will run
blood! These whites will never suffer the blacks to take their work." I
thought, "And negroes have had a monopoly of the South's industries and
have scorned it!" I thought of jealous white toilers in the slime of the
tunnel; and of Dixie's greening and golden fields, of swinging hoes and
shining scythes and the songs of her black peasantry. And I thought of her
stalwart black peasants again when I walked through sweat-shops and saw
bent, wizened, white slaves.
The elimination of the negro will be in ratio to the reduction of his
potentiality as an industrial factor. Evolutionary processes reject
whatever has served its use. History shows the white man as the exponent
of evolution. There were once more Indians here than there are now
negroes. Yet the Indian has almost disappeared from the land that belonged
to him when a little handful of palefaces came and found him in their
way. Had he been of use, convertible into a labourer, he would have been
retained; he was not so convertible, and other disposition was made of him
while we sent to Africa for what was required. The climate of the North
did not agree with the negro; he was not a profitable labourer; he
disappeared. He was a satisfactory labourer South; he throve and
multiplied. He is not now a satisfactory labourer in any locality. What is
the conclusion if we judge the white man's future by his past?
The white man does not need the negro as _littérateur_, statesman,
ornament to society. Of these he has enough and to spare, and seeks to
reduce surplus. What he needs is agricultural labour. The red man would
not till the soil, and the red man went; if the black man will not,
perhaps the yellow man will. Sporadic instances of exceptional negroid
attainments may interest the white man--in circumscribed circle--for a
time. But the deep claim, the strong claim, the commanding claim would be
that the negro filled a want not otherwise supplied, that the negro could
and would do for him that which he cannot well do for himself--for
instance, work the rice and cotton lands where the negro thrives and the
white man dies.
The American negro is passing. The mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, strike the
first notes in the octave of his evolution--or his decadence, or
extinction, or whatever you may call it. The black negro is rare North and
South. Negroes go North, white Northerners come South. In States
sanctioning intermarriage, irregular connections obtain as elsewhere
between white men and black women; and, in addition, between black men and
white women of most degraded type or foreigners who are without the saving
American race prejudice. Recent exposure of the "White Slave Syndicate" in
New York which kidnapped white girls for negro bagnios, is fresh in the
public mind.
Under slavery many negroes learned to value and to practice virtue; many
value and practice it now; but the freedwoman has been on the whole less
chaste than the bond. With emancipation the race suffered relapse in this
as in other respects. The South did not do her whole duty in teaching
chastity to the savage, though making more patient, persistent and heroic
struggle than accredited with. The charge that under slavery miscegenation
was the result of compulsion on the part of the superior race finds answer
in its continuance since. Because he was white, the crying sin was the
white man's, but it is just to remember that the heaviest part of the
white racial burden was the African woman, of strong sex instincts and
devoid of a sexual conscience, at the white man's door, in the white man's
dwelling.[28]
In 1900, negroes constituted 20.4 per cent. of the population of Texas,
the lowest rate for the Southern States; in Mississippi, 58.6, the
highest. In Massachusetts, they were less than two per cent. Questions of
social intermingling can not be of such practical and poignant concern to
Massachusetts as to Mississippi, where amalgamation would result in a
population of mulatto degenerates. Prohibitions are protective to both
races. Fortunately, miscegenation proceeds most slowly in the sections of
negro concentration, the sugar and cotton lands of the lower South. In
these, it is also said, there is lower percentage of negro crime of all
kinds than where negroes are of lighter hue.
Thinkers of both races have declared amalgamation an improbable,
undesirable conclusion of the race question; that it would be a
propagation of the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. In a
letter (March 30, 1865) to the Louisville "Courier-Journal," recently
reproduced in "The Outlook," Mr. Beecher said: "I do not think it wise
that whites and blacks should mix blood ... it is to be discouraged on
grounds of humanity." Senator Ingalls said: "Fred Douglas once said to me:
'The races will blend, coalesce, and become homogeneous.' I do not agree
with him. There is no affinity between the races; this solution is
impossible.... There is no blood-poison so fatal as the adulteration of
race."
At the Southern Educational Conference in Columbia, 1905, Mr. Abbott, in
one of the clearest, frankest speeches yet heard from our Northern
brotherhood, declared the thinking North and South now one upon these
points: the sections were equally responsible for slavery; the South
fought, not to perpetuate slavery, but on an issue "that had its beginning
before the adoption of the Federal Constitution;" racial integrity should
be preserved. In one of the broadest, sanest discussions of the negro
problem to which the American public has been treated, Professor Eliot, of
Harvard, has said recently: "Northern and Southern opinion are identical
with regard to keeping the races pure--that is, without admixture of the
one with the other ... inasmuch as the negroes hold the same view, this
supposed danger of mutual racial impairment ought not to have much
influence on practical measures. Admixture of the two races, so far as it
proceeds, will be, as it has been, chiefly the result of sexual vice on
the part of white men; it will not be a wide-spread evil, and it will not
be advocated as a policy or method by anybody worthy of consideration."
"It will not be a wide-spread evil!" The truth stares us in the face.
Except in the lower South the black negro is now almost a curiosity. In
any negro gathering the gamut of colour runs from ginger-cake to white
rivaling the Anglo-Saxon's; and according as he is more white, the negro
esteems himself more honourable than his blacker fellow; though these
gradations in colour which link him with the white man, were he to judge
himself by the white man's standard, would be, generally speaking, badges
of bastardy and shame.
In Florida, a tourist remarked to an orange-woman: "They say Southerners
do not believe in intermingling of the races. But look at all these
half-white coons!" "Well, Marster," she answered, "don't you give Southern
folks too much credit fuh dat. Rich Yankees in de winter-time; crap uh
white nigger babies in de fall. Fus' war we all had down here, mighty big
crap uh yaller babies come up. Arter de war 'bout Cuba, 'nother big crap
come 'long. Nigger gal ain' nuvver gwi have a black chile ef she kin git a
white one!" Blanch, my negro hand-maiden, is comely, well-formed, black;
the descendant of a series of honest marriages, yet feels herself at a
disadvantage with quadroons and octoroons not nearly her equals in point
of good looks or principle. "I'd give five hundred dollars ef I had it, ef
my ha'r was straight," she tells me with pathetic earnestness; and "I wish
I had been born white!" is her almost heart-broken moan.[29] She would
rather be a mulatto bastard than the black product of honest wedlock.
The integrity of the races depends largely upon the virtue of white men
and black women; also, it rests _on the negroid side upon the aspiration
to become white_, acknowledgment in itself of inferiority and
self-loathing. The average negress will accept, invite, with every wile
she may, the purely animal attention of a "no-count white man" in
preference to marriage with a black. The average mulatto of either sex
considers union with a black degradation. The rainbow of promise spanning
this gloomy vista is the claim that the noble minority of black women who
value virtue is on the increase as the race, in self-elevation, recognises
more and more the demands of civilisation upon character, and that dignity
of racehood which will not be ashamed of its own skin or covet the skin of
another. The virtuous black woman is the Deborah and the Miriam of her
people. She is found least often in crowded cities, North and South; most
often in Southern rural districts. Wherever found, she commands the white
man's respect.
Hope should rest secure in the white man. If the faith of his fathers, the
flag of his fathers, the Union of his fathers, are worthy of preservation,
is not the blood of his fathers a sacred trust also? Besides, before
womanhood, whatever its colour or condition, however ready to yield or
appeal to his grosser senses, the white man should throw the ægis of his
manhood and his brotherhood.
The recent framing of State Constitutions in the South to supersede the
Black and Tan creations revived the charge of race prejudice because their
suffrage restrictions would in great degree disfranchise the negro. As
compared with discussion of any phase of the race issue some years ago,
the spirit of comment was cool and fair. "The Outlook" led in justifying
the South for protecting the franchise with moderate property and
educational qualifications applying to both races, criticising, however,
the provision for deciding upon educational fitness--a provision which
Southerners admit needs amendment. One effect of these restrictions will
be to stimulate the negro's efforts to acquire the necessary education or
the necessary three hundred dollars' worth of property. Another effect
will be decrease of the white farmer's scant supply of negro labour; this
scarcity, in attracting white immigrants, provides antidote for
Africanisation of the South.
As to whether negro ownership of lands improves country or not, I will
give a Northern view. I met in 1903 at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, a
wealthy Chicagoan and his wife (originally from Massachusetts), who were
looking for a holiday residence in Tidewater Virginia. They made various
excursions with land agents, and one day reported discovery of their ideal
in all respects but one. "The people around are ruining property by
selling lands to negroes. A gentleman at whose house we stopped, a
Northerner, had just bought, as he told us, at much inconvenience, a
plantation adjoining his own to make sure it would not be cut up and sold
by degrees to negroes." I hear Southern farmers in black belts say: "I had
much rather have a quiet, orderly negro for neighbour than a troublesome
white." But the fact remains that negro ownership of property reduces
value of adjoining lands. Besides the social reason, the average negro
exhausts and does not improve lands.
"Why don't the negroes live up North?" one is asked; "they go up there and
make a little money and come back and buy lands."
"Land is cheap here. It is almost beyond their reach there. The climate
here appeals. Then, this is home." Thus I answered in 1902, in Southside,
Virginia. After further travel, I amend: Negroes do not wish to work for
white land-owners; they wish to remain in the South or to return to the
South, as land-owners. They are acquiring considerable property. But,
generally speaking, they are thinning out. One may journey miles along
Southern railroads and see but few in fields where once were thousands. In
Northern cities and pleasure resorts negroes increase. The race problem is
broadening, changing territory.
The daughter of an Ohioan gave me a glimpse of this changing base.
"Columbus negroes--those born there or who came there long ago, are very
different from Southern negroes. They will have nothing to do with the
negroes coming direct. The Southern negroes have nice, deferential
manners; the Northern negroes hate them for it. Columbus negroes--why,
they will push white ladies off the streets!" In a New York store in 1904,
I observed two negresses in a crowd near a window where articles of
baggage were on check. They pushed their way to the front and demanded
belongings without the courteous "please" which any Southerner, or which
Northern gentlefolks, would have used; the young white girl in charge--it
was a hot day and she looked faint--was doing her cheerful best to meet
the noon rush, but was not quick enough for the coloured persons; they
hurried and reproved her; as she turned about within, confused by their
descriptions and commands, they exclaimed: "That's it! Right befo' you!
Don't you see that case right there? What a fool!" She never thought of
resenting; came up humbly, loaded with their property, glad to have found
it. Their manners would have scandalised a black aristocrat of the Old
South.
We cannot afford to wrong this race as we wronged the Indian. We must aid
the negro's advancement in the right direction. But we should not
discriminate against the white race. Educational doors are open to the
negro throughout the land; the South is rich in noble institutions of
learning for him; in black belts Southerners are paying more to educate
black children than white. In black belts, in white belts, in the
mountains, white children are put into fields and factories when they
ought to be going to school. Educational odds are against the white
children. In regard to schools of manual training, to limit the negro to
these and these to the negro is to put a stigma on manual labor in the
eyes of white youth and to continue the negro's monopoly of a field which
he does not appreciate. We should do more educationally for the white
child and not less for the negro. The negro pays small percentage of the
Southern educational tax and enjoys full benefits. The negro needs to
realize that if the white man owes him a debt, he owes the white man one;
and that he cannot safely despise the school of service in house and field
which white people from Europe and yellow people from the Orient are eager
to enter.
I would close no door of opportunity to the negro. But I must say my
affection is for the negro of the old order. I owe reverence to the memory
of a black mammy and a debt to negroes generally for much kindness. The
real negro I like, the poet of the veldt and jungle, the singer in field
and forest, the tiller of the soil, the shepherd of the flocks, the
herdsman of the cattle, the happy, soft-voiced, light-footed servitor. The
negro who is a half-cut white man is not a negro, and it can be no offense
to the race to say that he is unattractive when compared with the dear old
darkey of Dixie who was worth a million of him! At Fort Mill, S. C., hard
by a monument to a forgotten people, the Catawba Indians, stands a
monument to the "Faithful Slaves of the Confederacy," type of a memorial
many hearts yet hold. The new negro, in reaching out for higher and
better things than the old attained, will be wise not to sacrifice those
qualities which told in his ancestor in spite of all shortcomings.
The one true plane of equalisation is that of mutual service, each race
doing for the other all it can. The old negro and the white man stood more
surely on this plane than do their descendants, yet not more surely than
all must wish their descendants to stand. My regard for the negro, my
pride in what he has really accomplished under the hammering of
civilisation, call, in his behalf, for a race pride and reserve in him
which shall match the Anglo-Saxon's. There are negroes who have it and who
deplore efforts placing them in the position of postulants for a social
intermingling which they do not consider essential to their dignity or
happiness.[30] Between blacks and whites South we constantly see race
pride maintained on one side as on the other while humanities are observed
in manifold exchanges of kindness and courtesy that make a bond of
brotherhood.[30] Whatever position the white Southerner takes
theoretically on manufactured race issues, he will usually fight rather
than see his inoffensive black neighbour or employe maltreated; his black
neighbour or employe will often do as much for him. This attitude is
sometimes an expression of the clan habit surviving the destruction of
clan-life (old plantation-life in which the white man was Chief and his
negroes his clansmen); also, it exists in the recognition of a common bond
of humanity more than skin deep. Upon this rock the future may be
builded.[30] As a useful, industrious, citizen, the negro is his own
argument and advocate.[30]
MEMORIAL DAY
Daughters of all the South! Sons of all the South! We, your own old
soldiers, pause a moment this day in our march and facing to the front,
touching eternity on our right, we stand erect before you as if on dress
parade. We know that the day of our personal presence has passed its noon,
but we would cast no shadow upon the land we leave to you and yours, nor
raise one barrier to your full possession of local and national rights. We
are but the living Color Guard of the great army of your Southern fathers,
and their history and honor are safely in your keeping. The war flag of
precious memory waves peacefully above us, and we ask you for our sakes,
and its own sake, to love it forever. The Star-spangled Banner of our
country waves over all of us and over all our States and people,
commanding the respect of every nation. Let it never be dishonored. With
the feeling of pride that we are Confederate soldiers, we salute you, not
by presenting arms, but with the salutations of our beating hearts. And
now we will march on, march forward in column: and, as we go you will hear
from us the echo of the angels' song--Peace on earth, good will to
men.--_From an address by General Clement A. Evans, Commander of the
Georgia Division, U. C. V., Memorial Day, 1905, Atlanta, Ga._