IV

If we listen vainly for the heart-throb of the race problem in the

Negro's laziness, and criminality, and brutality, and ignorance, and

inefficiency, do we detect it with clearness and certainty in the

personal aversion felt by the white people for the black people,

aversion which the white people can no more help feeling than the black

people can help exciting? Is this the real trouble, the real burden, the

real tragedy and sorrow of our white population in those sections of the

country where the Negroes are many,--that they are compelled to dwell

face to face, day by day, with an inferior, degraded population,

repulsive to their finer sensibilities, obnoxious to them in countless

ways inexplicable? Facts are far from furnishing an affirmative answer.

However pronounced may be the feeling of personal aversion toward the

Negroes in Northern communities, where they are few, or known at long

range, or casually, there is no such thing in Southern communities as

personal aversion for the Negro pronounced enough to be responsible for

anything resembling a problem. How could there be in the South, where

from infancy we have all been as familiar with black faces as with

white; where many of us fell asleep in the laps of black mammies, and

had for playmates Ephrom, Izik, Zeke, black mammy's grandchildren; where

most of us have had our meals prepared by black cooks, and been waited

on by black house-servants and dining-room servants, and ridden in

carriages and buggies with black hostlers? We are so used to the black

people in the South, their mere personal presence is so far from being

responsible for our race problem, that the South would not seem Southern

without them, as it would not without its crape myrtles, and live-oaks,

and magnolias, its cotton and its sugar-cane!

It is very easy to go astray in regard to the matter of personal

aversion toward the members of alien races, to magnify greatly the

reality and importance of it. What seems race-aversion is frequently

something else, namely, revulsion aroused by the presence of the

strange, the unusual, the uncanny, the not-understood. Such revulsion is

aroused, not only by the members of alien races, alien and unfamiliar,

but as certainly by strange animals of not more terrifying appearance

than the well-loved cow and horse; and it would be aroused as really

and as painfully, doubtless, by the sudden proximity of one of Milton's

archangels. It was not necessarily race-aversion which made Emerson,

and may have made many another Concord philosopher, uncomfortable in the

presence of a Negro, any more than it is race-aversion which makes the

Fifth Avenue boy run from the gentle farmyard cow; any more than it is

race-aversion which would make me uncomfortable in the presence of Li

Hung Chang. The Negro, simply, it may be, was a mystery to Emerson, as

the farmyard cow is a mystery to the Fifth Avenue boy, as the Chinaman

is a mystery to me.

The Negro is NOT a mystery to people whom he has nursed and waited on,

whose language he has spoken, whose ways, good and bad, he has copied

for generations; and his personal presence does not render them

uncomfortable, not, at any rate, uncomfortable enough to beget the sense

of a burden or a problem.

It may be very difficult for Northern readers, to whom the Negro is in

reality a stranger, a foreigner, to appreciate fully the force of what

has just been said; but appreciated by them it must be, or they can

never hope to realize the innermost meaning of the race problem in the

South.

So much for what the race problem is not. Let me without further delay

state what it is. The foundation of it, true or false, is the white

man's conviction that the Negro as a race, and as an individual, is his

inferior: not human in the sense that he is human, not entitled to

the exercise of human rights in the sense that he is entitled to the

exercise of them. The problem itself, the essence of it, the heart

of it, is the white man's determination to make good this conviction,

coupled with constant anxiety lest, by some means, he should fail to

make it good. The race problem, in other words, is NOT that the Negro is

what he is in relation to the white man, the white man's inferior; but

this, rather: How to keep him what he is in relation to the white man;

how to prevent his ever achieving or becoming that which would justify

the belief on his part, or on the part of other people, that he and the

white man stand on common human ground.

That such is the heart of the problem should be made evident by this

general consideration alone: namely, that everywhere in the South

friction between the races is entirely absent so long as the Negro

justifies the white man's opinion of him as an inferior; is grateful for

privileges and lays no claim to RIGHTS. Let him seem content to be as

the South insists he shall be, and not only is he not harshly treated,

not abused, and never boycotted, but he is shown much kindness and

generosity, and employment awaits him for the asking. Trouble brews when

he begins to manifest those qualities, to reveal those tastes, to

give vent to those ambitions, which are supposed to be characteristic

exclusively of the higher human type, and which, unless restrained,

would result in confounding the lower with the higher. The expression

"Good Nigger" means everywhere in the South a real Negro, from the

Southern standpoint, one who in no respect gets out of focus with that

standpoint; the expression "Bad Nigger" means universally one who in

some respect, not necessarily criminal, does get out of focus with it.

So, stated differently, the race problem is the problem how to keep the

Negro in focus with the traditional standpoint.

But we are very far from needing to rely upon any general consideration

in support of the proposition advanced above. It is supported by

evidences on every hand, waiting only the eye of recognition. Scarcely

a day passes but something is said or done with this end in view, to

emphasize, lest they forget, the conviction for both white man and Negro

that the latter is and must remain an inferior. Let me instance a few

such evidences.

Consider, first, the "Jim Crow" legislation in the manner of its

enforcement. Such legislation is supposed to have for its object the

separation of the races in trains, street-cars, etc., to save the

white people from occasional contact with drunken, rowdy, ill-smelling

Negroes, and to prevent personal encounters between the whites and

blacks. How is this object attained in the street cars of Southern

cities? Members of the different races occupy the same cars, separated

only by absurdly inadequate little open-mesh wire screens, so tiny and

light that a conductor can move them from one seat to another with the

strength of his little finger. Needless to add, these screens would

serve to obscure neither sound, sight, nor smell of drunken rowdies

who sat behind them! In summer cars black and white passengers may be

separated not even by a make-believe screen; they are simply required,

respectively, to occupy certain seats in the front or the back end of

the cars.

In Birmingham, Alabama, the front seats are assigned to Negroes in all

closed cars, and the back seats in all open ones. Why the front seats

in the one case, and the back seats in the other, it is not easy to

understand in the light of the letter and alleged spirit of the Jim Crow

law! The underlying purpose of the law is clearly not the separation

of the races in space; for public sentiment does not insist upon its

fulfillment to that end. The underlying purpose of it would seem to be

the separation of the races in status. The doctrine of inequality would

be attacked if white and black passengers rode in public conveyances on

equal terms; therefore the Negro who rides in a public conveyance

must do so, not as of undoubted right, but as with the white man's

permission, subject to the white man's regulation. "This place you may

occupy, that other you may not, because I am I and you are you, lest to

you or me it should be obscured that I am I and you are you." Such is

the real spirit of the Jim Crow laws.

Why is it that in every Southern city no Negro is allowed to witness a

dramatic performance, or a baseball game, from a first-class seat? In

every large city, there are hundreds of Negroes who would gladly pay

for first-class seats at the theatre and the baseball game, were they

permitted to. It can hardly be that permission is withheld because

theatres and baseball games are so well attended by half the population

that first-class seats could not be furnished for the other half. As a

matter of fact, theatre-auditoriums and baseball grand-stands are seldom

crowded; the rule is, not all first-class seats occupied, but many

vacant. Surely as simple as moving from seat to seat a make-shift screen

in a street-car, would it be to set apart a certain number of seats

in the dress-circle of every theatre, and in the grand-stand of every

baseball park, for Negro patrons. The reason why this is not done is

perfectly obvious: it would be intolerable to the average Southern

man or woman to sit through the hours of a theatrical performance or a

baseball game on terms of equal accommodation with Negroes, even with a

screen between. Negroes would look out of place, out of status, in the

dress circle or the grand-stand; their place, signifying their status,

is the peanut-gallery, or the bleachers. There, neither they nor others

will be tempted to forget that as things are they must continue.

How shall we account for the "intense feeling" (to quote the language

of the mayor or New Orleans) occasioned in that city one day, last July,

when it was flashed over the wires that the first prize in the National

Spelling Contest had been won by a Negro girl, in competition with white

children from New Orleans and other Southern cities? The indignation of

at least one of the leading New Orleans papers verged upon hysterics;

the editor's rhetoric visited upon some foulest crime could hardly

have been more inflamed than in denunciation of the fact that, on the

far-away shore of Lake Erie, New Orleans white children had competed at

a spelling bee with a Negro girl. The superintendent of the New Orleans

schools was roundly denounced in many quarters for permitting his wards

to compete with a Negro; and there were broad hints in "Letters from the

People" to the papers that his resignation was in order.

Certainly in the days following the National Spelling Contest the race

problem was in evidence, if it ever was, in New Orleans and the South!

Did it show itself, then, as the problem of Negro crime, or brutality,

or laziness? Assuredly not! Of the Negro's personal repulsiveness? By

no means! There was no evidence of Negro criminality, or brutality, or

laziness in the Negro child's victory; and every day in the South,

in their games and otherwise, hundreds of white children of the best

families are in closer personal contact with little Negroes than were

the white children who took part in the Cleveland spelling bee. The

"intense feeling" can be explained on one ground only: the Negro girl's

victory was an affront to the tradition of the Negro's inferiority;

it suggested--perhaps indicated--that, given equal opportunities, all

Negroes are not necessarily the intellectual inferiors of all white

people. What other explanation is rationally conceivable? If the race

problem means in the South to its white inhabitants the burden and

tragedy of having to dwell face to face with an intellectually and

morally backward people, why should not the Negro girl's triumph have

occasioned intense feeling of pleasure, rather than displeasure, by its

suggestion that her race is not intellectually hopeless?

Consider further that while no Negro, no matter what his occupation,

or personal refinement, or intellectual culture, or moral character, is

allowed to travel in a Pullman car between state lines, or to enter as

a guest a hotel patronized by white people, the blackest of Negro nurses

and valets are given food and shelter in all first-class hotels, and

occasion neither disgust, nor surprise in the Pullman cars. Here again

the heart of the race problem is laid bare. The black nurse with a white

baby in her arms, the black valet looking after the comfort of a white

invalid, have the label of their inferiority conspicuously upon them;

they understand themselves, and everybody understands them, to be

servants, enjoying certain privileges for the sake of the person served.

Almost anything, the Negro may do in the South, and anywhere he may go,

provided the manner of his doing and his doing is that of an inferior.

Such is the premium put upon his inferiority; such his inducement to

maintain it.

The point here insisted on may be made clearer, if already it is not

clear enough, by this consideration, that the man who would lose social

caste for dining with an Irish street-sweeper might be congratulated for

dining with an Irish educator; but President Roosevelt would scarcely

have given greater offense by entertaining a Negro laborer at the White

House than he gave by inviting to lunch there the Principal of Tuskegee

Institute. The race problem being what it is, the status of any Negro is

logically the status of every other. There are recognizable degrees

of inferiority among Negroes themselves; some are vastly superior to

others. But there is only one degree of inferiority separating the Negro

from the white person, attached to all Negroes alike. The logic of the

situation requires that to be any sort of black man is to be inferior to

any sort of white man; and from this logic there is no departure in the

South.

Inconsistent, perhaps, with what has been said may seem the defeat

in the Louisiana Legislature (1908) of the anti-miscegenation bill, a

measure designed to prohibit sexual cohabitation between white persons

and Negroes; to be specific, between white men and Negro women. But

there was no inconsistency whatever in the defeat of that bill. In all

times and places, the status of that portion of the female population,

Lecky's martyred "priestesses of humanity," whose existence men have

demanded for the gratification of unlawful passion, has been that of

social outcasts. They have no rights that they can insist upon; they

are simply privileged to exist by society's permission, and may be

any moment legislated out of their vocation. Hence the defeat of an

anti-miscegenation measure by Southern legislators cannot be

construed as a failure on their part to live up to their conviction

of race-superiority. It must be construed, rather, as legislative

unwillingness to restrict the white man's liberty; to dictate by statute

the kind of social outcast which he may use as a mere means to the

gratification of his passion. To concede to Negro women the status of

a degraded and proscribed class, is not in any sense to overlook or

obscure their racial inferiority, but on the contrary, it may be, to

emphasize it. Precisely the same principle, in a word, compasses the

defeat of an anti-miscegenation bill which would compass the defeat of a

measure to prohibit Negro servants from occupying seats in Pullman cars.

At the risk of reiteration, I must in concluding this article take sharp

issue with the view of a recent very able writer, who asks the question,

"What, essentially, is the Race Problem?" and answers it thus: "The race

problem is the problem of living with human beings who are not like us,

whether they are in our estimation our 'superiors' or inferiors,

whether they have kinky hair or pigtails, whether they are slant-eyed,

hook-nosed, or thick-lipped. In its essence, it is the same problem,

magnified, which besets every neighborhood, even every family."

I have contended so far, and I here repeat, that the race problem is

essentially NOT what this writer declares it to be. It is emphatically

not, in the South, "the problem of living with human beings who are not

like us, whether they are in our estimation our superiors or inferiors."

It may be, it probably is, that in the North, where the Negro is largely

a stranger, a foreigner, very much to the same degree that the Chinese

are strangers and foreigners in the South; and where, consequently, the

Negro's personal repulsiveness is a much more significant force than

it is in the South. Assuredly there would be no race problem, anywhere,

were there no contact with others unlike ourselves! The unlikeness

of the unlike is everywhere its indispensable foundation. But we get

nowhither unless we carefully distinguish between the foundation of the

problem and the problem itself. There is nothing in the unlikeness of

the unlike that is necessarily problematical; it may be simply accepted

and dealt with as a fact, like any other fact. The problem arises only

when the people of one race are minded to adopt and act upon some policy

more or less oppressive or repressive in dealing with the people of

another race. In the absence of some such policy, there has never been a

race problem since the world began. It is the existence of such a

policy become traditional, and supported by immovable conviction, which

constitutes the race problem of the Southern states.

There was an immensely tragic race problem distressing the South fifty

years ago; but who will suggest that it was the problem of "living with

human beings who are not like us?" The problem then was, clearly, how to

make good a certain conviction concerning the unlike, how to maintain a

certain policy in dealing with them. What else is it today? The problem,

How to maintain the institution of chattel slavery, ceased to be at

Appomattox; the problem, How to maintain the social, industrial, and

civic inferiority of the descendants of chattel slaves, succeeded it,

and is the race problem of the South at the present time. There is no

other.

Whether the policy adopted by the white South, and supported, as I have

said, by immovable conviction, is expedient or inexpedient, wise or

unwise, righteous or unrighteous, these are questions which I have not

sought to answer one way or another in this article. Perhaps they cannot

be answered at all in our time. Certain is it, that their only real and

satisfactory answer will be many years ahead of the present generation.

In the mean time, nothing could be more unwarranted, than to suppose

that the race problem of one section of this country is peculiar to

that section, because its white inhabitants are themselves in some

sense peculiar; because they are peculiarly prejudiced, because they

are peculiarly behind the hour which the high clock of civilization has

struck. Remove the white inhabitants of the South, give their place to

the white people of any other section of the United States, and, beyond

a peradventure, the Southern race problem, as I have defined it, would

continue to be--revealed, perhaps, in ways more perplexing, more intense

and tragic.