THE RACE QUESTION--GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY
1. Dense fogs from various sources have settled over this subject. The
root-and-branch abolitionists have made many believe that emancipation of
the slaves was the great object of the north in the brothers' war. The
authors and defenders of the three amendments--especially of the
fifteenth--have made many others believe that the inferiority of the
southern negro is the effect of American slavery; that the cause having
been removed by emancipation he became at once ready and well prepared for
the exercise of political privileges; and that the practical denial to him
of this exercise is a heinous crime of the southern whites. Politicians
want southern negro ballots in national conventions and the northern negro
vote in elections. The bounty, both public and private, founding,
sustaining, and multiplying colleges, schools, and other negro educational
institutions, finds a growing host of beneficiaries--such as site-owners,
who scheme to sell for two prices, those who want to be presidents,
principals, professors, teachers, even janitors and floor-scrubbers,
schoolbook publishers, and still others--who would keep it copiously
flowing; and so they all magnify the ability of the typical negro and the
benefit to him of the institutions mentioned. Respectable and influential
magazines and newspapers, with an increasing number of negro readers,
really believe that very many more can be added by a little effort, and so
they champion what these readers favor. Persuasive speakers and writers
like Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, unconsciously influenced either by
employers who would always have a wage-depressing lever at command, or by
those who would have Cuffee do what they ought themselves to do, overrate
the importance of negro labor as a southern resource. And the last fog
makers whom I shall mention are the inveterate optimists--amiable beyond
expression--who will not admit that there is now any serious menace to
either race in the south.
The several fogs enumerated overlay one another in an aggregate too opaque
for the uncleared eye to pierce. As examples of their obscuring effect,
consider anything said in the census as to the negro, and the articles
"Negro Education," "Negro in America," and especially "Hayti" in the
Encyclopedia Americana lately published. The authors of the fifteenth
amendment, in making voters and rulers of late negro slaves, repeated what
had been done in Hayti. It seems therefore that the Encyclopedia must tell
nothing of the island but what is good. So we read in the relevant article
that it abolished slavery in 1804, being "the first country to rid
humanity of such a sad practice;" that there education "is compulsory and
gratuitous," a sixth of the revenues being devoted to it, and the most
pleasant things concerning religion, liberal naturalization practice,
natural and artificial products, railroads, telegraph, and telephone. One
without other information would surely think the community greatly
advanced and blessed. Its true condition is thus told in Brockhaus by
somebody who does not swear by the fifteenth amendment: "It may be said in
general that the country is sparsely populated, partly because of
incessant civil wars, partly because of a high infant death rate."[147]
These fogs must be lifted. Great harm to each race will follow if we
persist in keeping the facts concealed.
2. Do not confound the feeling that you are different from Jew, European,
protestant, catholic, absolutist, socialist, anarchist, or any other
white, with the feeling that you are different from negroes; for to do
this is to keep you from all clear thinking upon our present subject. The
former are all of our own race, and we can and do intermarry with them to
the improvement of our population. If the per cent of negroes was no
greater in the south than in the north, fusion could not be a very grave
matter; for should it become complete, our lily-white would not be
diminished by the fraction of a shade. But to absorb the eight millions of
them now in our section would make us chocolate, if not mulatto. Their
color is the smallest racial objection. Although their schooling for two
centuries and more in American slavery has elevated them--as Mr.
Tillinghast proves--far above what they were in native slavery, still
their cranial capacity, brain convolutions, and moral, intellectual, and
social development--inherited without fault of theirs--from West African
ancestors, are still greatly inferior to ours. Remote generations of our
forefathers were much lower than the present American negroes, as Darwin
admits in the oft quoted passage, describing his first sight of the
Fuegians. We should never forget that the Caucasian was once on a level
with those Fuegians. The negroes when they came to America were little
better. And yet they have gone up so much higher, it is plain that
evolution, if only permitted to work in a proper environment, will do for
them what it has done for us.
But the whites cannot consent to intermarriage. That would greatly benefit
the negroes. While some who have never had good opportunity of actual
observation confidently contend that there are no backward or lower
races, we southerners have noted all our lives that a very great majority
of the negroes who climb above the level and prosper in occupation, have a
large admixture of white blood. It would be an enormous rise for the mass
if fusion were assured. But for us--why, we should disinherit our children
of their share in the grand destiny of the Caucasian race if we made
average negroes their fathers or mothers.
Southern dread of amalgamation is not to be scouted as a mere bugbear.
Think of the half-breeds that lined all the border between the States and
the Indians; of how the whites have mixed with native races in Mexico,
Central and South America; of white and negro intermingling in Cuba,
Hayti, Jamaica, in the United States, and especially in the south. Think
of whites and negroes now legally married and marrying in the neighboring
States of the Union. In 1902, eight white women were living with negro
husbands in Xenia, Ohio;[148] and there were children of all these mixed
marriages except one.[149] Consider also that prominent negroes advocate
these marriages. Douglass had a white wife. He preached that the American
negro must set before himself assimilation as his true goal. Professor
DuBois is really a disciple of Douglass, as appears from some of his
utterances. We give in a footnote what another prominent negro has
recently said in public.[150] The moment that the negro became an
influential factor in southern politics, a real agitation against the
anti-intermarriage laws would begin. There would come a small number of
negroes, controlling votes, of so much property and respectability that
their children would be regarded as eligible matches by some of the poorer
and more destitute whites. Marriages between such, solemnized on a visit
to a State permitting, would occur. And our laws last mentioned would be
more and more evaded and their repeal become gradually more probable. When
they had won political equality with the patricians, the Roman plebeians
repealed the prohibition of intermarriage which the former had stubbornly
maintained. These two orders were of the same race. Therefore
intermarriage could not be the boon to the plebeians that it would now be
to the southern negro, lifting him up as it would do. If he has
opportunity, he will struggle for it more resolutely than the plebeians
did. A small number of negroes have already been assimilated in America,
and a few more are still to be assimilated, as I shall explain later on.
This sure deliverance from the destruction which now threatens is more and
more sought after by the intelligent few. And if the vote of the negroes
was allowed to count, it would not be long until, under the example and
appeal of their leaders, all of them would be making for that haven of
refuge. Mongrelism beats upon the border all around the south; it
threatens to burst forth from an exhaustless source within. We know we
must keep it out as Holland does the ocean. Subconsciously discerning that
fusion would probably follow the entrance of the negro into government,
the whites have made of the race primary and other measures _de facto_
disfranchising him, dikes against the filthy waters of mongrelism which
they would not have to wash over themselves. This is not because we hate
the negro. We love and cherish him. It is not to be demanded of us that we
sacrifice ourselves, our children, and our children's children for his
sake. We will gladly do all that friends--nay, that near relatives--can
with justice ask of one another, to better his condition and rescue him.
We cannot give him political power at the cost of our degeneration.
I would enforce the foregoing contents of this section with these
profoundly true and very forcible words of a northern man, now residing in
Columbia, South Carolina:
"A word about race hatred, race revulsion, or race antipathy. Many
people in the north believe the devil is the author of it, and some
people in the south are more devoted to it than to religion. Race
antipathy is really a race instinct, a moral anti-toxin developed by
nature in the individual whose environment involves constant and close
contact with an inferior race in large numbers. It works for the
salvation of the purity of the superior race."[151]
Professor DuBois says that "legal marriage is infinitely better than
systematic concubinage and prostitution."[152] And some writers seem to
think it would be well to coerce miscegenators to legitimate their
relations by intermarrying. An innocent girl--a maid--undone; all good men
and women are agreed that her seducer should be made to marry her.[153]
But that is only where the marriage would be tolerated by society. Thus it
would not make man and wife of parties to an incestuous liaison. No
moralist contends that one who has received a favor from a public woman is
under obligation to become her husband. The miscegenation common is that
between white men and promiscuous black women. How idle is the attempt to
put these cases on a par with that of the ruin of a virtuous woman. And
Professor DuBois could not have rightly weighed the words in which he
represents them to be as criminal as those horrible offences which
especially provoke lynching; that is, that the negro woman who consented
most willingly to the embraces of her master was as foully wronged by him
as her mistress would be by a slave who outraged her against her
will.[154] No. Intermarriage of these mixed lovers is not demanded by any
principle of justice. But the public weal does demand that such a
tremendous evil as amalgamation be kept off by the surest and most
decisive measures. It is playing with plague and curse unspeakable for us
of the south to permit the existence of any condition which tends even in
the slightest degree to legalize intermarriage.[155]
3. Writers still under the spell of the root-and-branch abolitionists who
were wont to exalt Toussaint, the Haytian general, above our Washington,
strain hard to conceal the real cause of the lamentable conditions now
prevailing in Hayti and San Domingo. One tells us that because of the many
mountains, there being no railroad system, separate communities are
defended by almost impregnable natural barriers, and as neighboring
peoples are hereditary enemies, there is always war somewhere. The remedy
recommended is to build railroads in the island as the English have done
in Jamaica. Another writer tells us that we must not jump to the
conclusion that all the inhabitants of San Domingo are degraded negroes;
that while the population of the interior are sunk in ignorance,
superstition, and barbarism, yet in the capital and the coast towns there
are some people of apparently lily-white strain, well educated, speaking
two or three languages, who supply the mulatto republic with generals and
political leaders. The masses of these Dominicans are very patriotic, and
would indeed do finely if they were not divided into hostile parties by
self-seeking agitators. And you may consult many others who keep back the
real explanation. There is one cardinal fact which stands forth in the
history of Hayti as prominently as slavery does in the train of American
events which brought on the brothers' war. It is this: soon after the
outbreak of the French revolution the mulattoes were accorded political
privileges, and then a little later--it was in 1794--France equalized the
negroes of her colonies just freed with the whites in political and civil
rights. This made the negroes of Hayti, who were in intelligence and
development somewhat below those of the south when the latter were
emancipated, full-fledged self-governing republicans. The whites were but
few. What of them were not massacred at once by the blacks fled for their
lives. The history of both the Haytian and the Dominican republic (the
latter achieving its independence in 1844) is the same. Their people make
a hell on earth of the most beautiful and fertile of islands. As slavery
was plainly the cause of the southern confederacy, the grant of political
power to the mulattoes and negroes not at all qualified to use it is just
as plainly the cause and sole author of chronic civil war and anarchy in
Hayti and San Domingo.
This enfranchisement of semi-barbarians was from the 'prentice hand of a
new republic, without any experience in free institutions. The English did
far better when they emancipated the Jamaica negro by the act of 1833.
They gave him full protection of his liberty, person, and contract and
property rights. Five sixths of the 800,000 of its present population are
colored people or blacks. These--to quote the Encyclopedia
Americana--"have no share in the government whatever." It further says:
"The Jamaica negroes are fairly good laborers when well fed; the menial
work of the island is performed by them, and they are regarded as
cheerful, honest, and respectful servants."
This happy condition of quiet and content is not due to the fact that the
railroads prevent settlement of the negroes in separate neighboring
communities to quarrel and fight with one another; but it is because the
English never allowed them to get the taste of blood as the French
permitted to their brothers in Hayti; they have not been incited by
unseasonable political power to license and riot.
The negroes of Jamaica are evidently bettering in condition slowly. They
need only enough of Booker Washingtons to rise much faster. I beg
attention to this comparison of Jamaica and Hayti, made by a well-informed
negro, a native of the former, who lived there until some nine years ago,
and who has lately lived several years in Hayti:[156]
"They [the negroes of Jamaica] aim at rising, but many make the
mistake of not rising, _in_ but _out_ of labor: the most intelligent
flock to the professions, civil service, &c. Few turn their steps to
what is for the real upbuilding of the country, agriculture, that for
which it is best adapted.
"The people of Hayti and San Domingo are of a political turn of mind,
and sacrifice everything for politics, or are made to do so. That
island produces as fine coffee and cocoa as can be found anywhere, but
the most intelligent keep out and deprive these crops of scientific
cultivation."
The negroes of Hayti and San Domingo spurred by their politics into
perpetual fighting and bloodshed; the negroes of Jamaica peaceful and ripe
for industrial training, which it seems the English have resolved to give
them--if Booker Washington had to choose one of the two islands for his
future activity, do you not know that he would decide he could do great
things in Jamaica and nothing in the other?
The thirteenth amendment emancipated the slaves instantly and not
gradually, the fourteenth made them complete citizens of the United States
and of the particular State wherein they reside, and the fifteenth
practically conferred unlimited suffrage upon them. The Hayti, and not the
Jamaica, precedent was followed. The brothers that had conquered were
blind from civil fury: and they had been brought by the root-and-branch
abolitionists into full persuasion that the southern negroes were ready
for and entitled to these high privileges. By the amendments they
confidently tried to railroad the African slave in one instant of time up
the long steep to the topmost Caucasian who had established liberty and
self-government over a continent, and made it perpetual. We pray that they
be forgiven, for they knew not what they were doing. Had the white
population of the south been at the time as disproportionate to the black
as it was in Hayti in 1794, it would also have been massacred. But the
section was full of late confederate soldiers. When the fates had decided
against the dear cause for which they had fought for four years they
accepted peace in good faith. Now their conquerors turned loose a horde of
black plunderers to despoil the little that war had left. When I read
Professor Brown's inability to say whether the work of the Ku-Klux was
justifiable or not,[157] I thought of Christ's asking if it was right to
do good on the sabbath day.
The lesson to be learned here is that while it is now too late to make the
thirteenth amendment what it ought to have been, and there is perhaps no
need to alter the fourteenth, yet there must be abrogation of the
fifteenth as to the great mass of southern negroes. In fact this has
really come already through the white primary. Booker Washington is a
great, a decisive authority on this question. He counsels the negroes to
eschew politics. This is wise. It is the solid interest of the negro
masses that they accept the inevitable; just as the south gave up slavery
when we could hold on to it no longer.
4. The southern negroes have split into what I shall roughly distinguish
as an upper and a lower class. The former includes property owners and
such as are in higher occupations, trades, and professions. I do not
believe that the entire class contains three per cent, but I shall take it
to be five per cent of the whole negroes in the section. Exact accuracy
here is not important. It needs only to be remembered that the lower class
outnumbers the other many times over. They are moving in different
directions. The dominant inclination of the upper class is towards
incorporation as citizens, exercising all the rights of the white. The
dominant inclination of the lower class is towards segregation in their
own circles. A true representative of the former would always travel in a
white railroad car, while a true representative of the other is perfectly
content with the shabbiest Jim Crow, if the whites be kept out of it.
Thousands in the south never think of any negroes but those of the lower,
thousands in the north never think of any but those in the upper class.
The lower class subsists mainly upon agricultural, domestic, and day
labor. There is a rural and urban section of each one of the two. The
rural section of the upper class has little promise of permanence and
growth, but its urban section seems to have securer foothold. For a while
this urban section will probably increase and rise in condition--both
slowly. This upper class is now steadily sending some of its members from
country and town, to settle in the north. As I read the signs its destiny
is ultimate dispersion over the entire country and gradual disappearance.
The lower class settles downwards steadily. The outlook for it is gloomy
in the extreme.
5. Somewhere about 1890--which year we may regard as approximately
beginning the manufacturing era of the South--many whites in the section
had broken with the old ways and methods and resolved to substitute their
own for negro labor as far as possible. These awakened men and women
multiply. They are pushing the lower class out of all rural labor, and
both classes out of agriculture; and they are also pushing some of the
upper class out of the trades and more important occupations in both town
and country. Evidently the powers have decreed that the labor class of the
south shall be white and homogeneous with that of the north. These powers
who delivered the white laborers of the west from the Chinese will also
deliver the white laborers of the south from the negroes.
6. There is soon to be a New Industrial South, in which the most advanced
machinery and laborers of the very highest skill are to be chief factors.
A little later there is to be a still more important New Agricultural
South. In this, the empirical restorative methods of the Chinese, which
Liebig, in his day, showed to be ahead of the world, must be far
surpassed. Economy of the enormous mass of fertile elements now washing
into the sea; adequate exploitation of the nitrogen of the air and of all
accessible mineral elements needed; scientific dairy industry, stock
rearing, fruit culture, and all related branches; farmers of the most
efficient training, and laborers whose deft hands are the proper
instruments of the strongest brains--all these must combine to give the
south that perfect intensive culture which she will add to her blessings
of climate and soil in order to supply the fast growing demand of all the
world outside for her especial products. Further, as everything now seems
to indicate, the southern yield of the more important minerals and metals
will lead that of the entire country. Further again, the bulk of
transcontinental railroad traffic must be across the south on snow-free
routes, and the upbuilding which in time will follow from this is as yet
incalculable. And when the inter-ocean canal connects us with the Pacific
trade--what new impetus will this give to our development! What needs and
opportunities there will then be for skilled labor, for inventive talent,
for managerial ability, for every element of a most highly organized
community of unwontedly many diversified prospecting interests. The demand
will be for a vast population of the very best strain and breed, knowing
the best methods of physical, moral, and self-subsisting education of
their children, out of whom will come the best of all workers and
producers. To attempt to do the required tasks of the new south of the
near future and hold our own against the competition of the world--to try
to do these with negro laborers, negro farmers, negro producers, negro
employers, would be like substituting the ox-wagon for the present
railroad freight train. Nay, it would be more like one with a wooden leg,
and a millstone around his neck, offering to run against a trained racer.
The negro laborer, farmer, manufacturer, and contractor show more clearly
every day that they are hopelessly outclassed in the struggle with white
competitors. As a body where they now are they are becoming useless and an
incubus. They will soon be still more in the way, and a more serious
hindrance to southern development. They keep back the immigration which is
especially called for. That is the immigration of northern and European
farmers, producers, and manufacturers of all kinds to teach us their
advanced methods, and the most skilled labor in every department to
stimulate with example our native white labor to its highest
accomplishment. The northern people would come south very largely if there
were no negroes here. Their desire to come increases steadily, and so does
our desire to have them come. The whites of both sections naturally
co-operate more and more earnestly to effect their joint wishes. The
disinclination of the United States supreme court to overturn the recent
anti-negro amendments of the constitutions of southern States, and the
palpably growing favor showed these amendments at the north are very
significant signs that the south is to be made more to the liking of
northern settlers.
Since the last sentence was written that court has ruled it to be a crime,
punishable severely, to hold one to the performance of a contract to pay
his debt by laboring for you.[158] The average negro has no resource but
credit on the faith of such a contract. So soon as it becomes generally
known that he cannot be lawfully held to its performance, the credit will
be denied. As has been suggested to me by an observant and far-seeing man,
the decision overturns the main pillar of the negro's subsistence. It will
powerfully favor northern immigration, as well as the substitution of
white for black labor--that is, if it is vigorously enforced.
7. I believe that the two races together, in the same community as they
are now in the south, are oil and water. Meditate the course and portent
of these facts. Immediately upon emancipation the negroes set up their own
churches and schools; they manifested approval of the separate passenger
car for themselves, politely hinting in season that the whites ought to be
kept out of it; and they influenced the planter to remove their cabins out
of sight and hearing of the Big House. They showed a great
disinclination, the men to do agricultural work by the year for standing
wages, the women to hire as house servants. It was some while before the
whites really recognized this drift of the negro towards segregation, when
many of them--especially the wives and mothers--gave the rein to much
unreasonable resentment. Now, if you but know how to look, you will find
everywhere the proofs of deepening antagonism. The black driver will not
see even a white lady--not to mention a man--on the crossing, but he will
always see a negro of either sex. The face of the white inconveniently
stepping aside flushes with momentary anger. If your colored servant tells
you there is a lady at the door you may know it is a negro woman; he never
calls a "white 'oman" a lady. A negro woman is prone to make the most
prominent white lady give the street. In Atlanta, a negro man or a white
boy cannot safely go at night the former through the factory white
settlement, the latter through Summer Hill, a negro residence quarter. I
have been informed that where the mill operatives of Anderson, South
Carolina, have their cottages, there is conspicuously posted, "Nigger,
don't let the sun go down on you here." I hear that the same is true of
certain places in the Texas Panhandle; also that a negro settlement in the
Indian territory displays a similar warning to the white man.[159] Parties
of black and white children meeting on unfrequented streets of Atlanta
nearly always exchange opprobrious language, often throw stones at one
another, and sometimes fight--a proof so significant that, whenever I see
it, it always makes me serious. The most decided change from old times
that I note is that white society everywhere proscribes mixed sexual
intercourse and the procreation of mulattoes with rapidly increasing
severity. The advocate of mixed marriages is more and more regarded as a
fiend. The white woman seized by a negro man--how gladly would she change
place with the victim of the torturing savage or of the tiger that would
mangle and eat her alive! This menace is everywhere, and naturally it is
magnified by excited imagination. It increases in fact. The trial of
negroes for capital offences was given the superior court of Georgia in
1850. From then until the end of the brothers' war but two cases of rape
of white women by negroes are in the supreme court reports;[160] and I
never heard of but two other cases occurring in that time. But there have
been many since. It steadily becomes more frequent. Women more and more
dread to be left alone. And now there is hardly a man in the Black Belt
who, when he is to be a night away from wife, daughters, mother, and
sisters, without help at call, does not have uncomfortable thoughts of the
sooty desecrator. The increasing effect of these multiplying outrages and
the increasing horror which they cause is proved by a fact which ought to
receive more intelligent recognition from everybody. This fact is that
lynching of a negro for rape, and lately for other crimes of violence
against whites, whether in the south or in the north, seems to be every
time marked with a greater outburst of popular fury. The public grows more
decidedly anti-negro. They give as little heed to the appeals of the
papers in these matters as they do to the editorials always advocating the
projects of the machine and corporations. The mob sweeps aside the
military. The military will not load its rifles. If they were loaded it
would probably refuse to fire, or would fire into the air. A few exclaim
against lawlessness, while it is plain that the great mass of the whites
do not really condemn in their hearts.
Let us try to understand the real cause of these things. The plainest
parallel that occurs to me is the riots and violence excited by attempts
to execute the fugitive slave law. The greatest of our southern statesmen
misunderstood. What they thought to be lawlessness was in fact the
struggle of nature by which the social organism of the United States
expelled all cause of dissolution. These hostile demonstrations of the day
against negroes are, as they seem to me, far other than acts of
unenlightened and ignorant race prejudice, to which some writers ascribe
them. They indicate, I think, another struggle of nature to expel a
foreign and death-breeding substance out of the American body politic;
they are each the protest of the self-preserving instincts against keeping
the negro with us to counteract our progress, to debase our politics, to
corrupt our blood, to injure us more than even successful secession could
have done. How aptly has Matthew Arnold said, "O man, how true are thine
instincts, how overhasty thine interpretation of them!"
8. Plainly the disparity of the negro in the deadly struggle with the
white over every resource of subsistence fast becomes greater; plainly
does his stay in the south more and more injure both sections; plainly
under the effects of hard life, growing idleness and growing crime,
increasing ravages of disease, and the naturally engendered feeling of
helplessness, the average negro in the lower class gravitates downwards;
plainly this negro ought to have, in a sphere of his own, opportunity and
stimulus for self-recovery and progress. Plainly whites and negroes ought
to be separated. The latter seriously clog the evolution of the desired
southern labor class, and the southern whites completely exclude the
negroes from public life. The two are really each different communities in
juxtaposition, but not united. You may think of them as plants, one of
which has a diseased root, and the other has its top kept in the dark and
out of the sun. Both these evils result unavoidably from keeping the two
races together. So let us give the negro his own State in our union. That
will allow the root of the one plant to get well, and it will give the top
of the other permanently to the sun.
We are rich enough and have land enough to give the negro this State,
which is his due from us. His especial need is to exercise political and
civil privileges, in his own community, all the way up from town meeting
to congress.
If something like this is not done it is extremely probable that the great
mass of the lower class of the negroes will die out. Let not this crime be
committed by the American nation.
9. We should be extremely liberal to the negro in education--in primary,
in industrial, and also in the higher. Especially ought we to combine the
second with the first, and give it the lead for both races.
10. All the southern states should at once by proper constitutional and
legal provisions substitute judicial for mob lynching.