The negroes have to-day in the United States 450 newspapers and four
magazines; 350 books have been written by negroes; half of all the negro
children are regularly taught in schools; there are 30,000 black
teachers, school-houses worth more than $10,000,000, forty-one
seminaries for teachers, and churches worth over $25,000,000. There are
ten thousand black musicians and hundreds of lawyers. The negroes own
four large banks, 130,000 farms, and 150,000 homes, and they pay taxes
on $650,000,000 worth of real and personal property. The four past
decades have therefore brought some progress to the freedman. And yet,
in studying the situation, one is obliged to say that these figures are
somewhat deceptive. The majority of negroes are still in such a state of
poverty and misery, of illiteracy and mental backwardness, that the
negroes who can be at all compared with the middle class of Americans
are vanishingly few. Even the teachers and the doctors and pastors seem
only very little to differ from the proletariat; and although there is
many a negro of means, it is still a question whether he is able to
enjoy his property, whether the dollar in his hand is the same as in the
hand of a white man.
A part of the black population has certainly made real progress, but a
larger part is humanly more degraded than before the slaves were freed;
and if one looks at it merely as a utilitarian, considering only the
amount of pleasure which the negroes enjoy, one cannot doubt that the
general mass of negroes was happier under slavery. Their temperament is
crueller to them than any plantation master could have been. The
negro—we must have no illusions on that point—has partly gone backward.
The capacity for hard work which he acquired in four generations of
slavery, he has in large part lost again during forty years of freedom;
although, indeed, the tremendous cotton harvests from the Southern
States are gathered almost wholly by negro labour. It must be left to
anthropology to find out whether the negro race is actually capable of
such complete development as the Caucasian race has come to after
thousands of years of steady labour and progress. The student of social
politics need not go into such speculations; he faces the fact that the
African negro has not had the thousands of years of such training, and
therefore, although he might be theoretically capable of the highest
culture, yet practically he is still unprepared for the higher duties of
civilization. Under the severe discipline of slavery he overcame his
lazy instincts and learned how to work both in the field and in the
shop, according as the needs of his master required, and became in this
way a useful member of society; but he was relieved of all other cares.
His owner provided him with house and nourishment, cared for him in
illness, and protected him like any other valuable piece of property.
All this was suddenly changed on the great day when freedom was
declared; no one compelled the negro to work then; he was free to follow
his instinct to do nothing; no one punished him when he gave himself
over to sensuality and indolence. But on the other side nobody now took
care of him; in becoming his own master he remained his own slave. He
was suddenly pushed into the struggle for existence, and the less he was
forced to learn the less he was ready for the fight. There thus grew up
an increasing mass of poverty-stricken negroes, among whom immorality
and crime could thrive; and oftentimes the heavy weight of this mass has
dragged down with it those who would have been better. Worst of all, it
has strengthened the aversion of the whites a hundred-fold, and the best
members of the negro race have had to suffer for the laziness, the
sensuality, and the dishonesty of the great masses.
The real tragedy is not in the lives of the most miserable, but in the
lives of those who wish to rise, who feel the mistakes of their
fellow-negroes and the injustice of their white opponents, who desire to
assimilate everything high and good in the culture about them, and yet
who know that they do not, strictly speaking, belong to such a culture.
The negroes of the lower type are sunk in their indifference; they while
away the hours in coarse enjoyments, and are perfectly content with a
few watermelons while they dance and sing. The onlooker is disheartened,
but they themselves laugh like children. The better negroes, on the
other hand, feel all the hardship and carry the weight of the problem on
their souls. They go through life fully conscious of an insoluble
contradiction in their existence; they feel that it is denied them to
participate immediately in life, and that they must always see
themselves with the eyes of others, and lead in a way a double
existence. As one of them has recently said, they are always conscious
of being a problem.
They themselves have not chosen their lot, they did not come of their
own accord from Africa, nor gladly take on the yoke of slavery; nor were
they by their own efforts saved from slavery. They have been passive at
every turn of fortune. Now they wish to commence to do their best and to
give their best, and they have to do this in an environment for which
they are wholly unprepared and which is wholly beyond them in its
culture They have not themselves worked out this civilization; they
belong historically in another system, and remain here at best mere
imitators. And the better they succeed in being like their neighbours,
the more they become unlike what they ought naturally to develop into.
This feeling of disparateness leads directly to the feeling of
embitterment. In the general masses, however, it is the feeling of
incompetence to support the struggle for existence successfully which
turns necessarily into a bitter hatred of the whites. And the more the
lack of discipline and the laziness of the black cause the whites to
hold him in check, so much the more brightly burns this hatred. But all
students of the South believe that this hatred has come about wholly
since the negro was declared free. The slave was faithful and devoted to
his master, who took care of him; he hated work, but did not hate the
white man, and took his state of slavery as a matter of course, much as
one takes one’s inability to fly. A patriarchal condition prevailed in
the South before the war, in spite of the representations made by
political visionaries. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult not to doubt
whether it was necessary to do away with slavery so suddenly and
forcibly; whether a good deal of self-respect would not have been saved
on both sides, and endless hatred, embitterment, and misery spared, if
the Northern States had left the negro question to itself, to be solved
in time through organic rather than mechanical means. Perhaps slavery
would then have gone gradually over into some form of patriarchal
relation.
It is too late to philosophize on this point; doctrinarianism has shaped
the situation otherwise. The arms of the Civil War have decided in
favour of the North. It is dismal, but it must be said that the actual
events of the ensuing years of peace have decided rather in favour of
the view of the South. To comprehend this fully, it is not enough to ask
merely, as we have done so far, how the negro now feels; but more
specially to ask what the American now thinks.
What is to-day the relation between the white man and the negro? There
is a difference here between the North and the South, and yet one thing
is true for both: the American feels that the cleft between the white
and black races is greater now than ever before. So far as the North is
concerned, the political view of the problem has probably changed very
little. Specially the New England States, whose exalted ethical motives
were beyond all doubt—as perhaps is not so certain of the Middle
States—still sympathize to-day with the negro as a proper claimant of
human rights. But unfortunately one may believe in the negro in the
abstract, and yet shrink from contact with him in the concrete. The
personal dislike of the black man, one might even call it an æsthetic
antipathy, is really more general and wide-spread in the North than in
the South. South of Washington one can scarcely be shaved except by a
negro, while north of Philadelphia a white man would quite decline to
patronize a coloured barber. A Southerner is even not averse to having a
black nurse in the house, while in the Northern States that would never
be thought of. Whenever the principle is to be upheld, the negro is made
welcome in the North. He is granted here and there a small public
office; he delivers orations, and is admitted to public organizations;
he marches in the parades of war veterans, and a few negroes attend the
universities. And still there is no real social intercourse between the
races. In no club or private house and on no private occasions does one
meet a negro. And here the European should bear specially in mind that
negroes are not seldom men and women whose faces are perhaps as white as
any Yankee’s, and who often have only the faintest taint of African
blood.
At the very best the Northerner plays philanthropist toward the negro,
takes care of his schools and churches, helps him to help himself, and
to carve out his economic freedom. But even here the feeling has been
growing more and more in recent years that the situation is somehow
fundamentally false, and that the North has acted hastily and
imprudently in accepting the emancipated negro on terms of so complete
equality. The feeling of dissatisfaction is growing in the North, and it
is not an accident that the negro population of the North grows so
slowly, although the negro is always ready to wander, and would crowd in
great numbers to the North if he might hope to better his fortunes
there. The negro feels, however, intensely that he is still less a match
for the energetic Northerner in the industrial competition than for the
white man of the South, and that it is often easier to endure the hatred
of the Southerner than the coldly theoretical sufferance of the
Northerner when joined, as it is, with a personal distaste so
pronounced.
In the South it is quite different. There could hardly be an æsthetic
aversion for the race, when for generations blacks and whites have lived
together, when all the servants of the home have been coloured, and the
children have grown up on the plantations with their little black
playmates. There has been a good deal in the easy good-nature of the
negro which the Southern white man has always found sympathetic, and he
responded in former times to the disinterested faithfulness of the
slaves with a real attachment. And although this may have been such
fondness as one feels for a faithful dog or an intelligent horse, there
was in it, nevertheless, no trace of that physical repulsion felt by the
Northerner. The same is fundamentally true to-day, and the rhetorical
emphasis of the physical antipathy toward the black which one finds in
Southern speeches is certainly in part hypocritical. It is true that
even to-day the poorest white man would think himself too good to marry
the most admirable coloured woman; but the reason of this would lie in
social principles, and not, as politicians would like to make it appear,
in any instinctive racial aversion, since so long as the negroes were in
slavery the whites had no aversion to such personal contamination.
The great opposition which now exists is two-fold: it is on the one hand
political and on the other social. The political situation of the South
has been indeed dominated in the last forty years by the negro question.
There have been four distinct periods of development; the first goes
from the end of the Civil War to 1875. It was the time when the negro
had first received the suffrage and become a political factor, the most
dreary time which the South ever knew. It was economically ruined, was
overrun with a disgusting army of unscrupulous politicians, who wanted
nothing but to pervert the ignorant coloured voters for the lowest
political ends. The victorious party in the North sent its menials down
to organize the coloured quarry, and by mere numbers to outdo all
independent activities of the white population.
One can easily understand why a Southern historian should say that the
Southern States look back without bitterness on the years of the war,
when brave men met brave men on the field of battle; but that they are
furious when they remember the years which followed, when the victors,
partly out of mistaken philanthropy, partly out of thoughtlessness and
indifference, and partly out of evil intent, hastened to put the reins
of government into the hands of a race which was hardly out of African
barbarism; and thus utterly disheartened the men and women who had built
up the splendid culture of the Old South. Perhaps there was no phase of
American history, he says, so filled with poetry and romantic charm as
the life of the South in the last ten years before the war; and
certainly no period has been so full of mistakes, uncertainties, and
crime as the decade immediately following. A reaction had to come, and
it came in the twenty years between 1875 and 1895. The South betook
itself to devious methods at the ballot-box. It was recognized that
falsification of election returns was an evil, but it was thought to be
a worse evil for the country to be handed over to the low domination of
illiterate negroes. The political power of the negro has been broken in
this way. Again and again the same method was resorted to, until finally
the public opinion of the South approved of it, and those who juggled
with the ballot-box were not pursued by the arm of the law, because the
general opinion was with them.
There has been another and more important fact. Slowly all party
opposition between the whites vanished, and the race question became the
sole political issue. To be sure, there have been free-traders and
protectionists in the South, and representatives of all other party
principles; but all genuine party life flagged and all less important
distinctions vanished at the ballot-box when the whites rallied against
the blacks, and since the negroes voted invariably with the Republican
party, which had set them free, the entire white population of the South
has become Democratic. By this political consolidation, the power of the
negro has been further restricted.
People have gradually become convinced, however, that political life
stagnates when large states have only the one fixed idea, as if
hypnotized by the race issue. The need has been felt anew of
participating once more in all the great problems which interest the
nation and which create the parties. The South looks back longingly on
the time when it used to furnish the most brilliant statesmen of the
nation. The South has become also aware that so soon as public opinion
allows a systematic corruption of the ballot-box, then every kind of
selfishness and corruption has an easy chance to creep in.
Let once the election returns be falsified in order to wipe out a negro
majority, and they may be falsified the next time in favour of some
commercial conspiracy. An abyss opens up which is truly bottomless. So a
third period has arrived. In place of nullifying the negro suffrage by
illegal means, the South has been thinking out legal measures for
limiting it. The Constitution prescribes merely that no one shall be
deprived of his vote by reason of his colour, but it has been left to
the several states to determine what the other conditions shall be which
govern the right to vote. Thus any state is free to place a certain
property condition, or to require a certain degree of education from
every man who votes; but all such conditions must apply to all
inhabitants of the state alike; thus, for instance, in four states, and
only in those four, do women enjoy the suffrage. Now the Southern States
have commenced to make extensive use of this state privilege. They are
not allowed to exclude the negro as a negro since the Northern States
have added the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution, and there would
be no hope of altering this. But so long as the educational status of
the negro is so far behind that of the white man, the number of those
who cannot read is still so large that a heavy blow is struck at negro
political domination when a state decides to restrict the suffrage to
those who can read and understand the Constitution. It is clear that at
the same time the test of this which necessarily has to be made leaves
the coveted free-play to the white man’s discretion.
The last few years have witnessed a great advance of this new movement.
The political power of the negro is less than ever, and the former
illegal measures to circumvent it are no longer needed. It cannot be
denied that in two ways this works directly in the interests of
civilization. On the one hand, it incites the negro population to take
measures for the education of its children, since by going to school the
negro can comply with the conditions of suffrage. On the other hand, it
frees Southern politics from the oppressive race question, and allows
real party problems to become once more active issues among the whites.
The political contrast is, therefore, to-day somewhat lessened, although
both parties regard it rather as a mere cessation of hostilities; since
it is by no means certain that Northern political forces at Washington
will not once more undo this infringement on the negroes’ rights, and
whether once more, in case of a real party division between the Southern
whites, the negroes will not have the deciding vote. If the
doctrinarianism of the North should actually prevail and be able to set
aside these examinations in reading and in intelligence which have been
aimed against the negro, on the ground that they are contrary to the
Constitution, it would indeed frustrate a great movement toward
political peace. When the abolitionists at the end of the Civil War
granted the suffrage to the negroes, they were at least able to adduce
one very good excuse; they claimed that the Southern States would
continue in some new form to hold the negro in subjection if he was not
protected by either a military guard or by his right to vote, and since
the army was to be disbanded the right to vote was given him. To-day
there is no such danger; the legal exclusion of the Southern negro from
the ballot-box must be accounted an advance.
The social question, however, is even more important to-day than the
political one, and it is one which grows day by day. We have said
already that the Southerner has no instinctive aversion to the negro
race, and his desire for racial purity is not an instinct but a theory,
of which the fathers of the present white man knew nothing. To be sure,
the situation cannot be simply formulated, but it probably comes nearest
to the truth to say that the white man’s hatred is the inherited
instinct of the slave-holder. In all his sentiments the Southerner is
dominated by the once natural feeling that the negro is his helpless
subject. The white man is not cruel in this; he wants to protect the
negro and to be kind, but he can allow him no will of his own. He has
accustomed himself to the slavish obedience of the negro, as the
opium-eater is accustomed to his opium. And to give up the paralyzing
drug is intolerable to his nervous system.
The everywhere repeated cry that the purity of the race is in danger, if
social equality is established, is only a pretext; it is in truth the
social equality itself which calls forth the hysterical excitement. No
white man, for instance, in the South would go into the dining-room of a
hotel in which a single negro woman should be sitting; but this is not
because a mere proximity would be disagreeable, as it would actually be
to the Northerner, but because he could not endure such appearance of
equality. So soon as a little white child sits beside the negro woman,
so that she is seen to be a servant and her socially inferior station is
made plain, then her presence is no longer felt to be at all
disagreeable.
In his fight against social equality with the negro, the Southerner
resorts to more and more violent means; and while he works himself up to
an increasing pitch of excitement by the energy of his opposition, the
resulting social humiliation increases the embitterment of the negro.
That no white hotel, restaurant, theatre, or sleeping-car is open to the
black is a matter of course; this is virtually true also in the North.
But it has contributed very much to renewed disaffection, that also the
ordinary railroad trains and street cars begin to make a similar
distinction.
The South is putting a premium on every kind of harsh social affront to
the black man, and relentlessly punishes the slightest social
recognition. When the president of a negro college was the guest of a
Northern hotel and the chamber-maid refused to put his room to rights
and was therefore dismissed, the South got together, by a popular
subscription, a large purse for this heroine. It is only from this point
of view that one can understand the great excitement which swept through
the South when President Roosevelt had the courage to invite to his
table Booker T. Washington, the most distinguished negro of the country.
Professor Basset, the historian, has declared, amid the fierce
resentment of the South, that, with the exception of General Lee, Booker
Washington is the greatest man who has been born in the South for a
hundred years. But who inquires after the merits of a single man when
the principle of social inequality is at stake? If the President had
worked for several months from early to late at his desk with Booker T.
Washington, the fact would have passed unnoticed. But it is simply
unpardonable that he invited him to the luncheon table, and even very
thoughtful men have shaken their heads in the opinion that this affront
to the social superiority of the white man will very sadly sharpen the
mutual antagonism.
We must not overlook in this connection the various minor circumstances
which have strengthened the lingering feeling of the slave-owner. First
of all, there is the unrestrained sensuality of the negro, which has led
him time after time to attempt criminal aggressions on white women, and
so contributed infinitely to the misery of his situation. It is a gross
exaggeration when the Southern demagogue reiterates again and again that
no man in the South can feel that his wife, his sister, or daughter is
secure from the bestiality of the blacks; and yet it cannot be denied
that such crimes are shockingly frequent, and they are the more
significant, since the continual fear of this danger seriously threatens
the growth of farming life with its lonely farm-houses. Here the
barbarities of lynch law have come in, and the rapid growth of racial
hatred may be seen in the increased number of lynchings during recent
years. But every lynching reacts to inoculate hatred and cruel ferocity
in the public organism, and so the bestial instincts and the lawless
punishments work together to debase the masses in the Southern States.
It is not only a question of the immorality of the negro and the lynch
courts of the white man, but in other ways the negro shows himself
inclined to crime, and the white man to all sorts of lawless acts
against him. The negroes are disproportionately represented in Southern
prisons, although this comes partly from the fact that the black man is
punished for the slightest misdemeanour, while the white man is readily
let off. In fact, it is difficult in the South to find a jury to convict
a white man of any crime done against a negro. This application of a
two-fold standard of justice leads quickly to a general arbitrariness
which fits only too well with the natural instincts of the slave-holder.
Arbitrary privileges in place of equal rights have always been the
essential point in his existence, and so it happens that even where no
negroes are in question Southern juries hand down verdicts which
scandalize the whole country. Indeed, there is no doubt that secret
attempts have even been made, in all sorts of devious forms, to
re-establish the state of slavery. For some small misdemeanour negroes
are condemned to pay a very heavy fine, and to furnish this they have to
let themselves out to some sort of contract labour under white masters,
which amounts to the same thing as slavery. Here again the whole country
is horrified when the facts come to be known. But no means have yet been
thought of for lessening the bitter hatred which exists, and so long as
the sharp social contrast remains there will continue to be evasions and
violations of the law, to give vent to the hatred and bitter feeling.