"And, instead of going to the Congress of the United States and saying
there is no distinction made in Mississippi, because of color or
previous condition of servitude, tell the truth, and say this: 'We
tried for many years to live in Mississippi, and share sovereignty and
dominion with the Negro, and we saw our institutions crumbling.... We
rose in the majesty and highest type of Anglo-Saxon manhood, and took
the reins of government out of the hands of the carpet-bagger and
the Negro, and, so help us God, from now on we will never share any
sovereignty or dominion with him again.'"--Governor JAMES K. VARDAMAN,
Mississippi, 1904.
During the past decade, newspaper and magazine articles galore, and not
a few books, have been written on what is called the "Race Problem," the
problem caused by the presence in this country of some ten millions of
black and variously-shaded colored people known as Negroes. But, strange
as it may sound, the writer has no hesitation in saying that at this
date there appears to be no clear conception anywhere, on the part of
most people, as to just what the essential problem is which
confronts the white inhabitants of the country because they have for
fellow-citizens (nominally) ten million Negroes. Ask the average man,
ask even the average editor or professor anywhere, what the race problem
is, the heart of it; why, in this land with its millions of foreigners
of all nationalities, THE race problem of problems should be caused
by ten million Negroes, not foreigners but native to the soil through
several generations; and in all probability you will get some such
answer as this:--
"The Negroes, as a rule, are very ignorant, are very lazy, are very
brutal, are very criminal. But a little way removed from savagery, they
are incapable of adopting the white man's moral code, of assimilating
the white man's moral sentiments, of striving toward the white man's
moral ideals. They are creatures of brutal, untamed instincts,
and uncontrolled feral passions, which give frequent expression of
themselves in crimes of horrible ferocity. They are, in brief, an
uncivilized, semi-savage people, living in a civilization to which they
are unequal, partaking to a limited degree of its benefits, performing
in no degree its duties. Because they are spatially in a civilization to
which they are morally and intellectually repugnant, they cannot but be
as a foreign irritant to the body social. The problem is, How shall the
body social adjust itself, daily, hourly, to this irritant; how feel
at ease and safe in spite of it? How shall the white inhabitants of
the land, with their centuries of inherited superiority, conserve their
civilization and carry it forward to a yet higher plane, hampered by
ten million black inhabitants of the same land with their centuries of
inherited inferiority?"
To the foregoing answer, this might now and again be added, or advanced
independently in reply to our question: "Personal aversion on the part
of the white person for the Negro; personal aversion accounted for by
nothing the individual Negro is, or is not, intellectually and morally;
accounted for by the fact, simply, that he is a Negro, that he has a
black or colored skin, that he is different, of another kind."
Now, certainly, there are very few average men or philosophers, to whom
the answer given to our question would not seem to state, or at any rate
fairly indicate, the race problem in its essence. But, however few they
be, I do not hesitate to align myself with them as one who does not
believe that the essential race problem as it exists in the South
(whatever it be in the North) is stated, or even fairly indicated, in
the foregoing answer. In Northern and Western communities, where he
is outnumbered by many thousands of white people, the Negro may be
accounted a problem, because he is lazy, or ignorant, or brutal, or
criminal, or all these things together; or because he is black
and different. But in Southern communities, where the Negro is not
outnumbered by many thousands of white people, the race problem,
essentially, and in its most acute form, is something distinct from
his laziness or ignorance, or brutality, or criminality, or all-round
intellectual and moral inferiority to the white man. That problem as
the South knows and deals with it would exist, as certainly as it does
to-day, if there were no shadow of excuse for the conviction that the
Negro is more lazy, or more ignorant, or more criminal, or more brutal,
or more anything else he ought not to be, or less anything else he
ought to be, than other men. In other words, let it be supposed that
the average Negro is as a matter of fact the equal, morally and
intellectually, of the average white man of the same class, and the
race problem declines to vanish, declines to budge. We shall see why,
presently. The statements just made demand immediate justification. For
they are doubtless surprising to a degree, and to some readers may prove
startling.
I proceed to justify them as briefly as possible, asking the reader to
bear in mind that very much more might be said along this line than I
allow myself space to say.
I
That the Negro is not a problem because he is lazy, because he declines
to work, is evidenced by the patent fact that in virtually every
Southern community he is sought as a laborer in fields, mills, mines,
and that in very many Southern communities the vexing problem for
employers is not too many, but too few Negroes. In certain agricultural
sections, notably in the Louisiana sugar district, quite a number of
Italians ("Dagoes") are employed. The reason is not dissatisfaction
with Negro labor, but simply that there is not enough of it to meet the
requirements of the large plantations. There is, perhaps, not one
of these plantations on which any able-bodied Negro could not get
employment for the asking; and as a rule, the Negroes are given, not
the work which demands the lowest, but that which demands the highest,
efficiency: they are the ploughmen, the teamsters, the foremen. If any
one doubts that Negroes are wanted as laborers in Southern communities,
very much wanted, let him go to any such community and attempt to
inveigle a few dozen of the laziest away. He will be likely to take his
life in his hands, after the usual warning is disregarded!