THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
I
Harsh Judgments
I seem to find the same hastiness and something of the same note
of harshness that strike me in the cases of MacQueen and Gorky
in America's treatment of her colored population. I am aware how
intricate, how multitudinous, the aspects of this enormous question
have become, but looking at it in the broad and transitory manner I
have proposed for myself in these papers, it does seem to present
many parallel elements. There is the same disposition towards an
indiscriminating verdict, the same disregard of proportion as between
small evils and great ones, the same indifference to the fact that the
question does not stand alone, but is a part, and this time a by no
means small part, in the working out of America's destinies.
In regard to the colored population, just as in regard to the great
and growing accumulations of unassimilated and increasingly unpopular
Jews, and to the great and growing multitudes of Roman Catholics whose
special education contradicts at so many points those conceptions of
individual judgment and responsibility upon which America relies, I
have attempted time after time to get some answer from the Americans
I have met to what is to me the most obvious of questions. "Your
grandchildren and the grandchildren of these people will have to
live in this country side by side; do you propose, do you believe
it possible, that under the increasing pressure of population and
competition they should be living then in just the same relations that
you and these people are living now; if you do not, then what relations
do you propose shall exist between them?"
It is not too much to say that I have never once had the beginnings
of an answer to this question. Usually one is told with great gravity
that the problem of color is one of the most difficult that we have
to consider, and the conversation then breaks up into discursive
anecdotes and statements about black people. One man will dwell upon
the uncontrollable violence of a black man's evil passions (in Jamaica
and Barbadoes colored people form an overwhelming proportion of the
population, and they have behaved in an exemplary fashion for the last
thirty years); another will dilate upon the incredible stupidity of the
full-blooded negro (during my stay in New York the prize for oratory
at Columbia University, oratory which was the one redeeming charm of
Daniel Webster, was awarded to a Zulu of unmitigated blackness); a
third will speak of his physical offensiveness, his peculiar smell
which necessitates his social isolation (most well-to-do Southerners
are brought up by negro "mammies"); others, again, will enter upon the
painful history of the years that followed the war, though it seems a
foolish thing to let those wrongs of the past dominate the outlook for
the future. And one charming Southern lady expressed the attitude of
mind of a whole class very completely, I think, when she said, "You
have to be one of us to feel this question at all as it ought to be
felt."
There, I think, I got something tangible. These emotions are a cult.
My globe-trotting impudence will seem, no doubt, to mount to its
zenith when I declare that hardly any Americans at all seem to be in
possession of the elementary facts in relation to this question. These
broad facts are not taught, as of course they ought to be taught,
in school; and what each man knows is picked up by the accidents of
his own untrained observation, by conversation always tinctured by
personal prejudice, by hastily read newspapers and magazine articles
and the like. The quality of this discussion is very variable, but
on the whole pretty low. While I was in New York opinion was greatly
swayed by an article in, if I remember rightly, the _Century Magazine_,
by a gentleman who had deduced from a few weeks' observation in the
slums of Khartoum the entire incapacity of the negro to establish a
civilization of his own. He never had, therefore he never could; a
discouraging ratiocination. We English, a century or so ago, said all
these things of the native Irish. If there is any trend of opinion at
all in this matter at present, it lies in the direction of a generous
decision on the part of the North and West to leave the black more and
more to the judgment and mercy of the white people with whom he is
locally associated. This judgment and mercy points, on the whole, to an
accentuation of the colored man's natural inferiority, to the cessation
of any other educational attempts than those that increase his
industrial usefulness (it is already illegal in Louisiana to educate
him above a contemptible level), to his industrial exploitation through
usury and legal chicanery, and to a systematic strengthening of the
social barriers between colored people of whatever shade and the whites.
Meanwhile, in this state of general confusion, in the absence
of any determining rules or assumptions, all sorts of things
are happening--according to the accidents of local feeling. In
Massachusetts you have people with, I am afraid, an increasing sense of
sacrifice to principle, lunching and dining with people of color. They
do it less than they did, I was told. Massachusetts stands, I believe,
at the top of the scale of tolerant humanity. One seems to reach the
bottom at Springfield, Missouri, which is a county seat with a college,
an academy, a high school, and a zoological garden. There the exemplary
method reaches the nadir. Last April three unfortunate negroes were
burned to death, apparently because they were negroes, and as a general
corrective of impertinence. They seem to have been innocent of any
particular offence. It was a sort of racial sacrament. The edified
Sunday-school children hurried from their gospel-teaching to search
for souvenirs among the ashes, and competed with great spirit for a
fragment of charred skull.
It is true that in this latter case Governor Folk acted with vigor
and justice, and that the better element of Springfield society was
evidently shocked when it was found that quite innocent negroes had
been used in these instructive pyrotechnics; but the fact remains
that a large and numerically important section of the American public
does think that fierce and cruel reprisals are a necessary part of
the system of relationships between white and colored man. In our
dispersed British community we have almost exactly the same range
between our better attitudes and our worse--I'm making no claim of
national superiority. In London, perhaps, we out-do Massachusetts in
liberality; in the National Liberal Club or the Reform a black man
meets all the courtesies of humanity--as though there was no such thing
as color. But, on the other hand, the Cape won't bear looking into for
a moment. The same conditions give the same results; a half-educated
white population of British or Dutch or German ingredients greedy
for gain, ill controlled and feebly influenced, in contact with a
black population, is bound to reproduce the same brutal and stupid
aggressions, the same half-honest prejudices to justify those
aggressions, the same ugly, mean excuses. "Things are better in Jamaica
and Barbadoes," said I, in a moment of patriotic weakness, to Mr.
Booker T. Washington.
"Eh!" said he, and thought in that long silent way he has.... "They're
worse in South Africa--much. Here we've got a sort of light. We know
generally what we've got to stand. _There_--"
His words sent my memory back to some conversations I had quite
recently with a man from a dry-goods store in Johannesburg. He gave me
clearly enough the attitude of the common white out there; the dull
prejudice; the readiness to take advantage of the "boy"; the utter
disrespect for colored womankind; the savage, intolerant resentment,
dashed dangerously with fear, which the native arouses in him. (Think
of all that must have happened in wrongful practice and wrongful law
and neglected educational possibilities before our Zulus in Natal were
goaded to face massacre, spear against rifle!) The rare and culminating
result of education and experience is to enable men to grasp facts, to
balance justly among their fluctuating and innumerable aspects, and
only a small minority in our world is educated to that pitch. Ignorant
people can think only in types and abstractions, can achieve only
emphatic absolute decisions, and when the commonplace American or the
commonplace colonial Briton sets to work to "think over" the negro
problem, he instantly banishes most of the material evidence from his
mind--clears for action, as it were. He forgets the genial carriage
of the ordinary colored man, his beaming face, his kindly eye, his
rich, jolly voice, his touching and trusted friendliness, his amiable,
unprejudiced readiness to serve and follow a white man who seems to
know what he is doing. He forgets--perhaps he has never seen--the dear
humanity of these people, their slightly exaggerated vanity, their
innocent and delightful love of color and song, their immense capacity
for affection, the warm romantic touch in their imaginations. He
ignores the real fineness of the indolence that despises servile toil,
of the carelessness that disdains the watchful aggressive economies,
day by day, now a wretched little gain here and now a wretched little
gain there, that make the dirty fortune of the Russian Jews who prey
upon color in the Carolinas. No; in the place of all these tolerable
every-day experiences he lets his imagination go to work upon a
monster, the "real nigger."
"Ah! You don't know the _real_ nigger," said one American to me when I
praised the colored people I had seen. "You should see the buck nigger
down South, Congo brand. Then you'd understand, sir."
His voice, his face had a gleam of passionate animosity.
One could see he had been brooding himself out of all relations to
reality in this matter. He was a man beyond reason or pity. He was
obsessed. Hatred of that imaginary diabolical "buck nigger" blackened
his soul. It was no good to talk to him of the "buck American,
Packingtown brand," or the "buck Englishman, suburban race-meeting
type," and to ask him if these intensely disagreeable persons justified
outrages on Senator Lodge, let us say, or Mrs. Longworth. No reply
would have come from him. "You don't understand the question," he would
have answered. "You don't know how we Southerners feel."
Well, one can make a tolerable guess.
II
The White Strain
I certainly did not begin to realize one most important aspect of this
question until I reached America. I thought of those eight millions
as of men, black as ink. But when I met Mr. Booker T. Washington,
for example, I met a man certainly as white in appearance as our
Admiral Fisher, who is, as a matter of fact, quite white. A very large
proportion of these colored people, indeed, is more than half white.
One hears a good deal about the high social origins of the Southern
planters, very many derive indisputably from the first families of
England. It is the same blood flows in these mixed colored people's
veins. Just think of the sublime absurdity, therefore, of the ban.
There are gentlemen of education and refinement, qualified lawyers
and doctors, whose ancestors assisted in the Norman Conquest, and they
dare not enter a car marked "white" and intrude upon the dignity of the
rising loan-monger from Esthonia. For them the "Jim Crow" car....
One tries to put that aspect to the American in vain. "These people,"
you say, "are nearer your blood, nearer your temper, than any of those
bright-eyed, ringleted immigrants on the East Side. Are you ashamed of
your poor relations? Even if you don't like the half, or the quarter
of negro blood, you might deal civilly with the three-quarters white.
It doesn't say much for your faith in your own racial prepotency,
anyhow."...
The answer to that is usually in terms of mania.
"Let me tell you a little story just to illustrate," said one deponent
to me in an impressive undertone--"just to illustrate, you know.... A
few years ago a young fellow came to Boston from New Orleans. Looked
all right. Dark--but he explained that by an Italian grandmother. Touch
of French in him, too. Popular. Well, he made advances to a Boston
girl--good family. Gave a fairly straight account of himself. Married."
He paused. "Course of time--offspring. Little son."
His eye made me feel what was coming.
"Was it by any chance very, very black?" I whispered.
"Yes, _sir_. Black! Black as your hat. Absolutely negroid. Projecting
jaw, thick lips, frizzy hair, flat nose--everything....
"But consider the mother's feelings, sir, consider that! A pure-minded,
pure white woman!"
What can one say to a story of this sort, when the taint in the blood
surges up so powerfully as to blacken the child at birth beyond even
the habit of the pure-blooded negro? What can you do with a public
opinion made of this class of ingredient? And this story of the
lamentable results of intermarriage was used, not as an argument
against intermarriage, but as an argument against the extension
of quite rudimentary civilities to the men of color. "If you eat
with them, you've got to marry them," he said, an entirely fabulous
post-prandial responsibility.
It is to the tainted whites my sympathies go out. The black or mainly
black people seem to be fairly content with their inferiority; one sees
them all about the States as waiters, cab-drivers, railway porters, car
attendants, laborers of various sorts, a pleasant, smiling, acquiescent
folk. But consider the case of a man with a broader brain than such
small uses need, conscious, perhaps, of exceptional gifts, capable
of wide interests and sustained attempts, who is perhaps as English
as you or I, with just a touch of color in his eyes, in his lips, in
his fingernails, and in his imagination. Think of the accumulating
sense of injustice he must bear with him through life, the perpetual
slight and insult he must undergo from all that is vulgar and brutal
among the whites! Something of that one may read in the sorrowful
pages of Du Bois's _The Souls of Black Folk_. They would have made
Alexandre Dumas travel in the Jim Crow car if he had come to Virginia.
But I can imagine some sort of protest on the part of that admirable
but extravagant man.... They even talk of "Jim Crow elevators" now in
Southern hotels.
At Hull House, in Chicago, I was present at a conference of colored
people--Miss Jane Addams efficiently in control--to consider the
coming of a vexatious play, "The Clansman," which seems to have been
written and produced entirely to exacerbate racial feeling. Both men
and women were present, business people, professional men, and their
wives; the speaking was clear, temperate, and wonderfully to the point,
high above the level of any British town council I have ever attended.
One lady would have stood out as capable and charming in any sort of
public discussion in England--though we are not wanting in good women
speakers--and she was at least three-quarters black....
And while I was in Chicago, too, I went to the Peking Theatre--a
"coon" music-hall--and saw something of a lower level of colored life.
The common white, I must explain, delights in calling colored people
"coons," and the negro, so far as I could learn, uses no retaliatory
word. It was a "variety" entertainment, with one turn, at least, of
quite distinguished merit, good-humored and brisk throughout. I watched
keenly, and I could detect nothing of that trail of base suggestion
one would find as a matter of course in a music-hall in such English
towns as Brighton and Portsmouth. What one heard of kissing and
love-making was quite artless and simple indeed. The negro, it seemed
to me, did this sort of thing with a better grace and a better temper
than a Londoner, and shows, I think, a finer self-respect. He thinks
more of deportment, he bears himself more elegantly by far than the
white at the same social level. The audience reminded me of the sort of
gathering one would find in a theatre in Camden Town or Hoxton. There
were a number of family groups, the girls brightly dressed, and young
couples quite of the London music-hall type. Clothing ran "smart,"
but not smarter than it would be among fairly prosperous north London
Jews. There was no gallery--socially--no collection of orange-eating,
interrupting hooligans at all. Nobody seemed cross, nobody seemed
present for vicious purposes, and everybody was sober. Indeed, there
and elsewhere I took and confirmed a mighty liking to these gentle,
human, dark-skinned people.
III
Mr. Booker T. Washington
But whatever aspect I recall of this great taboo that shows no signs
of lifting, of this great problem of the future that America in her
haste, her indiscriminating prejudice, her lack of any sustained study
and teaching of the broad issues she must decide, complicates and
intensifies, and makes threatening, there presently comes back to mind
the browned face of Mr. Booker T. Washington, as he talked to me over
our lunch in Boston.
He has a face rather Irish in type, and the soft slow negro voice. He
met my regard with the brown sorrowful eyes of his race. He wanted
very much that I should hear him make a speech, because then his words
came better; he talked, he implied, with a certain difficulty. But I
preferred to have his talking, and get not the orator--every one tells
me he is an altogether great orator in this country where oratory is
still esteemed--but the man.
He answered my questions meditatively. I wanted to know with an active
pertinacity. What struck me most was the way in which his sense of the
overpowering forces of race prejudice weighs upon him. It is a thing he
accepts; in our time and conditions it is not to be fought about. He
makes one feel with an exaggerated intensity (though I could not even
draw him to admit) its monstrous injustice. He makes no accusations. He
is for taking it as a part of the present fate of his "people," and for
doing all that can be done for them within the limit it sets.
Therein he differs from Du Bois, the other great spokesman color
has found in our time. Du Bois, is more of the artist, less of the
statesman; he conceals his passionate resentment all too thinly.
He batters himself into rhetoric against these walls. He will not
repudiate the clear right of the black man to every educational
facility, to equal citizenship, and equal respect. But Mr. Washington
has statecraft. He looks before and after, and plans and keeps his
counsel with the scope and range of a statesman. I use "statesman"
in its highest sense; his is a mind that can grasp the situation and
destinies of a people. After I had talked to him I went back to my
club, and found there an English newspaper with a report of the opening
debate upon Mr. Birrell's Education Bill. It was like turning from the
discussion of life and death to a dispute about the dregs in the bottom
of a tea-cup somebody had neglected to wash up in Victorian times.
I argued strongly against the view he seems to hold that black and
white might live without mingling and without injustice, side by
side. That I do not believe. Racial differences seem to me always to
exasperate intercourse unless people have been elaborately trained to
ignore them. Uneducated men are as bad as cattle in persecuting all
that is different among themselves. The most miserable and disorderly
countries of the world are the countries where two races, two
inadequate cultures, keep a jarring, continuous separation. "You must
repudiate separation," I said. "No peoples have ever yet endured the
tension of intermingled distinctness."
"May we not become a peculiar people--like the Jews?" he suggested.
"Isn't that possible?"
But there I could not agree with him. I thought of the dreadful
history of the Jews and Armenians. And the negro cannot do what the
Jews and Armenians have done. The colored people of America are of a
different quality from the Jew altogether, more genial, more careless,
more sympathetic, franker, less intellectual, less acquisitive, less
wary and restrained--in a word, more Occidental. They have no common
religion and culture, no conceit of race to hold them together. The
Jews make a ghetto for themselves wherever they go; no law but their
own solidarity has given America the East Side. The colored people are
ready to disperse and inter-breed, are not a community at all in the
Jewish sense, but outcasts from a community. They are the victims of a
prejudice that has to be destroyed. These things I urged, but it was,
I think, empty speech to my hearer. I could talk lightly of destroying
that prejudice, but he knew better. It is the central fact of his life,
a law of his being. He has shaped all his projects and policy upon
that. Exclusion is inevitable. So he dreams of a colored race of decent
and inaggressive men silently giving the lie to all the legend of their
degradation. They will have their own doctors, their own lawyers, their
own capitalists, their own banks--because the whites desire it so. But
will the uneducated whites endure even so submissive a vindication as
that? Will they suffer the horrid spectacle of free and self-satisfied
negroes in decent clothing on any terms without resentment?
He explained how at the Tuskegee Institute they make useful men,
skilled engineers, skilled agriculturalists, men to live down the
charge of practical incompetence, of ignorant and slovenly farming and
house management....
"I wish you would tell me," I said, abruptly, "just what you think of
the attitude of white America towards you. Do you think it is generous?"
He regarded me for a moment. "No end of people help us," he said.
"Yes," I said; "but the ordinary man. Is he fair?"
"Some things are not fair," he said, leaving the general question
alone. "It isn't fair to refuse a colored man a berth on a
sleeping-car. I?--I happen to be a privileged person, they make an
exception for me; but the ordinary educated colored man isn't admitted
to a sleeping-car at all. If he has to go a long journey, he has to sit
up all night. His white competitor sleeps. Then in some places, in the
hotels and restaurants--It's all right here in Boston--but southwardly
he can't get proper refreshments. All that's a handicap....
"The remedy lies in education," he said; "ours--_and theirs_.
"The real thing," he told me, "isn't to be done by talking and
agitation. It's a matter of lives. The only answer to it all is for
colored men to be patient, to make themselves competent, to do good
work, to live well, to give no occasion against us. We feel that. In a
way it's an inspiration....
"There is a man here in Boston, a negro, who owns and runs some big
stores, employs all sorts of people, deals justly. That man has done
more good for our people than all the eloquence or argument in the
world.... That is what we have to do--it is all we _can_ do."...
Whatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I doubt if she
can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast
effort hundreds of black and colored men are making to-day to live
blamelessly, honorably, and patiently, getting for themselves what
scraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their
hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied. They do it not
for themselves only, but for all their race. Each educated colored
man is an ambassador to civilization. They know they have a handicap,
that they are not exceptionally brilliant nor clever people. Yet every
such man stands, one likes to think, aware of his representative
and vicarious character, fighting against foul imaginations,
misrepresentations, injustice, insult, and the naïve unspeakable
meannesses of base antagonists. Every one of them who keeps decent and
honorable does a little to beat that opposition down.
But the patience the negro needs! He may not even look contempt. He
must admit superiority in those whose daily conduct to him is the
clearest evidence of moral inferiority. We sympathetic whites, indeed,
may claim honor for him; if he is wise he will be silent under our
advocacy. He must go to and fro self-controlled, bereft of all the
equalities that the great flag of America proclaims--that flag for
whose united empire his people fought and died, giving place and
precedence to the strangers who pour in to share its beneficence,
strangers ignorant even of its tongue. That he must do--and wait. The
Welsh, the Irish, the Poles, the white South, the indefatigable Jews
may cherish grievances and rail aloud. He must keep still. They may
be hysterical, revengeful, threatening, and perverse; their wrongs
excuse them. For him there is no excuse. And of all the races upon
earth, which has suffered such wrongs as this negro blood that is still
imputed to him as a sin? These people who disdain him, who have no
sense of reparation towards him, have sinned against him beyond all
measure....
No, I can't help idealizing the dark submissive figure of the negro in
this spectacle of America. He, too, seems to me to sit waiting--and
waiting with a marvellous and simple-minded patience--for finer
understandings and a nobler time.