What effect have these disfranchising enactments had upon the status of
the Negro? Has he lost nothing more than the bare right to vote? Has he
been deprived of nothing but an abstract right to a voice in the affairs
of government and of no other privilege than the possibility of a share
of political power?
Surely the loss of any one of the foregoing is not unimportant in a
democratic form of government. But he has lost much more, and the
probabilities are that, if these obvious discriminations are allowed to
continue, he will be brought to his deepest humiliation. The law which
deprives him of the badge of citizenship, changes at once his legal
status and cuts him off from respect. His disqualification as an elector
shuts him out of the jury box in courts where what few rights he has
left are adjudicated and his grievances redressed. His disqualification
as an elector and as a juror discredits him as a witness. In the states
which have adopted these disfranchising constitutions, more than three
hundred thousand citizens have been thereby disqualified as jurors. This
is all the more outrageous, because in the same states advantage has
been taken in criminal legislation of what the Supreme Court of
Mississippi has termed "certain peculiarities of habit and character of
the Negro" whereby "furtive offenses," which in other communities are
treated as mere misdemeanors, are made felonies and are usually visited
with greater punishment than are the "robust crimes" of the whites. In
South Carolina, for instance, the breach of a labor contract has been
made a crime, the object being to reduce the Negro to a state of
serfdom.
Not only has the legal status of the Negro been gravely affected by
these disfranchising enactments; his economic status has also been
lowered. A Mississippian states the following as the reason for
disfranchising the Negro in his state:
"It is a question of political economy which the people of the
North can not realize nor understand _and which they have no right
to discuss as they have no power to determine_. If the Negro is
permitted to engage in politics his usefulness as a laborer is at
an end. _He can no longer be controlled or utilized._ The South has
to deal with him as an industrial and economic factor and _is
forced to assert its control over him in sheer self-defense_."[19]
Thus Negro labor must be managed, and control must be asserted over him.
His possession of the ballot would make him a free laborer and would
enable him to demand the wages of free labor. It is truly an "economic
problem," in which not only the Negro of the South is concerned, but
also the interests of free labor in every section of this country.
These disfranchising enactments in that they lower the legal and
economic status of the black man, also tend to lower his educational and
social status. The political and economic supremacy of the southern
oligarchy is dependent upon the ignorance and the social degradation of
the Negro. It is, therefore, not surprising that the politicians now
dominant in the South assert that education disqualifies him as a field
hand,--as a manageable factor,--and that consequently there must be a
decrease in the amount of money expended for his education or that his
education must be directed along lines which will make him more
adaptable to management as an economic factor for their sole benefit.
The educated Negro is not more desirable now than he was fifty years
ago. It is a marvel how the great body of southern white people, a great
many of whom are favorable to the advancement of the Negro, will permit
men of the type of the average politicians who now exercise control
among them to stand thus in the way of the true progress of the South.
First, it is asserted that the right to vote destroys his usefulness as
a laborer; then, that education turns his head and makes him
discontented with the plantation where wages reach the high water mark
of six dollars a month, which may or may not be paid according to the
whim of his employer; and finally that the privilege of respectable
accommodations furnished by common carriers which enjoy unusual public
franchises makes him impudent, noisy and self-respecting, the proper
remedy for which is a system of "Jim Crow Cars." Thus with the passing
away of the Negro's right to vote, begins the reappearance of the odious
system of Black Laws which are designed to degrade the womanhood and
manhood of the Negro race. The whole trend of southern legislation is to
fix what has been termed the "proper status of the Negro--subordination
to the superior race." Not a single line has been written upon the
statute books of a single southern state within the last decade in
recognition of the Negro as a man entitled to respect, or fair and just
consideration.
In 1857, Mr. Lincoln uttered the following words in reference to
slavery, which are not wanting in significance in their bearing upon the
present assault upon the Negro:
"To aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal,
it (the Declaration of Independence) is assailed and sneered at,
construed and hawked at and torn, till, if the framers could rise
from their graves, they would hardly recognize it. All the powers
of earth seem combined against him. Ambition follows, philosophy
follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining in the cry.
They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person
and left no prying instrument with him; and now they have him as it
were bolted with a lock of a hundred keys which can never be
unlocked, except by the concurrence of every key in the hands of a
hundred different men and they scattered to a hundred different
places. And now they stand musing as to what invention in all the
domain of mind and matter can be produced to make the impossibility
of his escape more complete than it is."