THE SOUTHERN CITY NEGRO
After my arrival in Atlanta, and when I had begun to understand some of
the more superficial ramifications of the colour line (as I related in the
last chapter,) I asked several Southern men whose acquaintance I had made
where I could best see the poorer or criminal class of Negroes. So much
has been said of the danger arising from this element of Southern
population and it plays such a part in every discussion of the race
question that I was anxious to learn all I could about it.
"Go down any morning to Judge Broyles's court," they said to me, "and
you'll see the lowest of the low."
So I went down--the first of many visits I made to police and justice
courts. I chose a Monday morning that I might see to the best advantage
the accumulation of the arrests of Saturday and Sunday.
The police station stands in Decatur Street, in the midst of the very
worst section of the city, surrounded by low saloons, dives, and
pawn-shops. The court occupies a great room upstairs, and it was crowded
that morning to its capacity. Besides the police, lawyers, court officers,
and white witnesses, at least one hundred and fifty spectators filled the
seats behind the rail, nearly all of them Negroes. The ordinary Negro
loves nothing better than to sit and watch the proceedings of a court.
Judge Broyles kindly invited me to a seat on the platform at his side
where I could look into the faces of the prisoners and hear all that was
said.
_In a Southern Police Court_
It was a profoundly interesting and significant spectacle. In the first
place the very number of cases was staggering. The docket that morning
carried over one hundred names--men, women, and children, white and
black; the court worked hard, but it was nearly two o'clock in the
afternoon before the room was cleared. Atlanta, as I showed in a former
chapter, has the largest number of arrests, considering the population, of
any important city in the United States. I found that 13,511 of the total
of 21,702 persons arrested in 1906 were Negroes, or 62 per cent., whereas
the coloured population of the city is only 40 per cent. of the total.[2]
A very large proportion of the arrests that Monday morning were Negroes,
with a surprising proportion of women and of mere children. In 1906 3,194
Negro women were arrested in Atlanta. It was altogether a pitiful and
disheartening exhibition, a spectacle of sodden ignorance, reckless vice,
dissipation. Most of the cases, ravelled out, led back to the saloon.
"Where's your home?" the judge would ask, and in a number of cases the
answer was:
"Ah come here fum de country."
Over and over again it was the story of the country Negro, or the Negro
who had been working on the railroad, in the cotton fields or in the
sawmills, who had entered upon the more complex life of the city. Most of
the country districts of the South prohibit the sale of liquor; and
Negroes, especially, have comparatively little temptation of this nature,
nor are they subjected to the many other glittering pitfalls of city life.
But of late years the opportunities of the city have attracted the black
people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers. Atlanta had many
saloons and other places of vice; and the results are to be seen in Judge
Broyles's court any morning. And not only Negroes, but the "poor whites"
who have come in from the mountains and the small farms to work in the
mills: they, too, suffer fully as much as the Negroes.
_Negro Cocaine Victims_
Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or
morphine poisoning--the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO WORKINGMAN'S HOME, ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEGRO HOME OF THE POOREST SORT IN
INDIANAPOLIS]
"What's the trouble here?" asked the judge.
"Coke," said the officer.
"Ten-seventy-five," said the judge, naming the amount of the fine.
They buy the "coke" in the form of a powder and snuff it up the nose; a
certain patent catarrh medicine which is nearly all cocaine is sometimes
used; ten cents will purchase enough to make a man wholly irresponsible
for his acts, and capable of any crime. The cocaine habit, which seems to
be spreading, for there are always druggists who will break the law, has
been a curse to the Negro and has resulted, directly, as the police told
me, in much crime. I was told of two cases in particular, of offences
against women, in which the Negro was a victim of the drug habit.
So society, in pursuit of wealth, South and North, preys upon the ignorant
and weak--and then wonders why crime is prevalent!
One has only to visit police courts in the South to see in how many
curious ways the contact of the races generates fire.
"What's the trouble here?" inquires the judge.
The white complainant--a boy--says:
"This nigger insulted me!" and he tells the epithet the Negro applied.
"Did you call him that?"
"No sah, I never called him no such name."
"Three-seventy-five--you mustn't insult white people."
And here is the report of the case of a six-year-old Negro boy from the
_Georgian_:
Because Robert Lee Buster, a six-year-old Negro boy, insulted Maggie
McDermott, a little girl, who lives at 507 Simpson Street, Wednesday
afternoon, he was given a whipping in the police station Thursday
morning that will make him remember to be good.
The case was heard in the juvenile court before Judge Broyles. It was
shown that the little Negro had made an insulting remark to the
little girl.
_Story of a Negro Arrest_
The very suspicion and fear that exist give rise to many difficulties. One
illuminating case came up that morning. A strapping Negro man was brought
before the judge. He showed no marks of dissipation and was respectably
dressed. Confronting him were two plain-clothes policemen, one with his
neck wrapped up, one with a bandage around his arm. Both said they had
been stabbed by the Negro with a jack-knife. The Negro said he was a hotel
porter and he had the white manager of the hotel in court to testify to
his good character, sobriety, and industry. It seems that he was going
home from work at nine o'clock in the evening, and it was dark. He said he
was afraid and had been afraid since the riot. At the same time the two
policemen were looking for a burglar. They saw the Negro porter and
ordered him to stop. Not being in uniform the Negro said he thought the
officers were "jes' plain white men" who were going to attack him. When he
started to run the officers tried to arrest him, and he drew his
jack-knife and began to fight. And here he was in court! The judge said:
"You mustn't attack officers," and bound him over to trial in the higher
court.
_A White Man and a Negro Woman_
Another case shows one of the strange relationships which grow out of
Southern conditions. An old white man, much agitated and very pale, was
brought before the judge. With him came a much younger, comely appearing
woman. Both were well dressed and looked respectable--so much so, indeed,
that there was a stir of interest and curiosity among the spectators. Why
had they been arrested? As they stood in front of the judge's desk, the
old man hung his head, but the woman looked up with such an expression,
tearless and tragic, as I hope I shall not have to see again.
"What's the charge?" asked the judge.
"Adultery," said the officer.
The woman winced, the old man did not look up.
The judge glanced from one to the other in surprise.
"Why don't you get married?" he asked.
"The woman," said the officer, "is a nigger."
She was as white as I am, probably an octoroon; I could not have
distinguished her from a white person, and she deceived even the
experienced eye of the judge.
"Is that so?" asked the judge.
The man continued to hang his head, the woman looked up; neither said a
word. It then came out that they had lived together as man and wife for
many years and that they had children nearly grown. One of the girls--and
a very bright, ambitious girl--as I learned later, was a student in
Atlanta University, a Negro college, where she was supported by her
father, who made good wages as a telegraph operator. Some neighbour had
complained and the man and woman were arrested.
"Is this all true?" asked the judge.
Neither said a word.
"You can't marry under the Georgia law," said the judge; "I'll have to
bind you over for trial in the county court."
They were led back to the prisoners' rooms. A few minutes later the
bailiff came out quickly and said to the judge:
"The old man has fallen in a faint."
Not long afterward they half led, half carried him out across the court
room.
One thing impressed me especially, not only in this court but in all
others I have visited: a Negro brought in for drunkenness, for example,
was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same
offence. The injustice which the weak everywhere suffer--North and
South--is in the South visited upon the Negro. The white man sometimes
escaped with a reprimand, he was sometimes fined three dollars and costs,
but the Negro, especially if he had no white man to intercede for him, was
usually punished with a ten or fifteen dollar fine, which often meant that
he must go to the chain-gang. One of the chief causes of complaint by the
Negroes of Atlanta has been of the rough treatment of the police and of
unjust arrests. After the riot, when the Civic League, composed of the
foremost white citizens of Atlanta, was organised, one of the first
subjects that came up was that of justice to the Negro. Mr. Hopkins, the
leader of the League, said to me: "We complain that the Negroes will not
help to bring the criminals of their race to justice. One reason for that
is that the Negro has too little confidence in our courts. We must give
him that, above all things."
In accordance with this plan, the Civic League, heartily supported by
Judge Broyles, employed a young lawyer, Mr. Underwood, to appear
regularly in court and look after the interests of Negroes.
_Convicts Making a Profit for Georgia_
One reason for the very large number of arrests--in Georgia
particularly--lies in the fact that the state and the counties make a
profit out of their prison system. No attempt is ever made to reform a
criminal, either white or coloured. Convicts are hired out to private
contractors or worked on the public roads. Last year the net profit to
Georgia from its chain-gangs, to which the prison commission refers with
pride, reached the great sum of $354,853.55.
Of course a very large proportion of the prisoners are Negroes. The demand
for convicts by rich sawmill operators, owners of brick-yards, large
farmers, and others is far in advance of the supply. The natural tendency
is to convict as many men as possible--it furnishes steady, cheap labour
to the contractors and a profit to the state. Undoubtedly this explains in
some degree the very large number of criminals, especially Negroes, in
Georgia. One of the leading political forces in Atlanta is a very
prominent banker who is a dominant member of the city police board. He is
also the owner of extensive brick-yards near Atlanta, where many convicts
are employed. Some of the large fortunes in Atlanta have come chiefly from
the labour of chain-gangs of convicts leased from the state.
_Fate of the Black Boy_
As I have already suggested, one of the things that impressed me strongly
in visiting Judge Broyles's court--and others like it--was the astonishing
number of children, especially Negroes, arrested. Some of them were very
young and often exceedingly bright-looking. From the records I find that
in 1906 1 boy six years old, 7 of seven years, 33 of eight years, 69 of
nine years, 107 of ten years, 142 of eleven years, and 219 of twelve years
were arrested and brought into court--in other words, 578 boys and girls,
mostly Negroes, under twelve years of age!
"I should think," I said to a police officer, "you would have trouble in
taking care of all these children in your reformatories."
"Reformatories!" he said, "there aren't any."
"What do you do with them?"
"Well, if they're bad we put 'em in the stockade or the chain-gang,
otherwise they're turned loose."
I found, however, that a new state juvenile reformatory was just being
opened at Milledgeville--which may accommodate a few Negro boys. An
attempt is also being made in Atlanta to get hold of some of the children
through a new probation system. I talked with the excellent officer, Mr.
Gloer, who works in conjunction with Judge Broyles. He reaches a good many
white boys, but very few Negroes. Of 1,011 boys and girls under sixteen,
arrested in 1905, 819 were black, but of those given the advantage of the
probation system, 50 were white and only 7 coloured. In other words, out
of 819 arrests of Negro children only 7 enjoyed the benefit of the
probation system.
Mr. Gloer has endeavoured to secure a coloured assistant who would help
look after the swarming Negro children who are becoming criminals. The
city refused to appropriate money for that purpose, but some of the
leading coloured citizens agreed to contribute one dollar a month each,
and a Negro woman was employed to help with the coloured children brought
into court. Excellent work was done, but owing to the feeling after the
riot the Negro assistant discontinued her work.
_Care of Negro Orphans_
With many hundreds of Negro orphans, waifs, and foundlings, the state or
city does very little to help them. If it were not for the fact that the
Negroes, something like the Jews, are wonderfully helpful to one another,
adopting orphan children with the greatest willingness, there would be
much suffering. Several orphanages in the state are conducted by the
coloured people themselves, either through their churches or by private
subscription. In Atlanta the Carrie Steele orphanage, which is managed by
Negroes, has received an appropriation yearly from the city, and has taken
children sent by the city charities department. After the riot the
appropriation was suddenly cut off without explanation, but through the
activities of the new Civic League, it was, I understand, restored.
Without proper reformatories or asylums, with small advantage of the
probation system, hundreds of Negro children are on the streets of Atlanta
every day--shooting craps, stealing, learning to drink. A few, shut up in
the stockade, or in chain-gangs, without any attempt to reform them or
teach them, take lessons in crime from older offenders and come out worse
than they went in. They spread abroad the lawlessness they learn and
finally commit some frightful crime and get back into the chain-gang for
life--where they make a profit for the state!
Every child, white or coloured, is getting an education somewhere. If that
education is not in schools, or at home, or, in cases of incorrigibility,
in proper reformatories, then it is on the streets or in chain-gangs.
_Why Negro Children Are Not in School_
My curiosity, aroused by the very large number of young prisoners, led me
next to inquire why these children were not in school. I visited a number
of schools and I talked with L. M. Landrum, the assistant superintendent.
Compulsory education is not enforced anywhere in the South, so that
children may run the streets unless their parents insist upon sending them
to school. I found more than this, however, that Atlanta did not begin to
have enough school facilities for the children who wanted to go. Like many
rapidly growing cities, both South and North, it has been difficult to
keep up with the demand. Just as in the North the tenement classes are
often neglected, so in the South the lowest class--which is the Negro--is
neglected. Several new schools have been built for white children, but
there has been no new school for coloured children in fifteen or twenty
years (though one Negro private school has been taken over within the last
few years by the city). So crowded are the coloured schools that they have
two sessions a day, one squad of children coming in the forenoon, another
in the afternoon. The coloured teachers, therefore, do double work, for
which they receive about two-thirds as much salary as the white teachers.
Though many Southern cities have instituted industrial training in the
public schools, Atlanta so far has done nothing. The president of the
board of education in his last published report (1903) calls attention to
this fact, and says also:
While on the subject of Negro schools, permit me to call your
attention to their overcrowded condition. In every Negro school many
teachers teach two sets of pupils, each set for one-half of a school
day.
The last bond election was carried by a majority of only thirty-three
votes. To my personal knowledge more than thirty-three Negroes voted
for the bonds on the solemn assurance that by the passage of the
bonds the Negro children would receive more school accommodations.
The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children
to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all
sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education.
One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer
classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied
by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them,
and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her
children to school!
_How Negroes Educate Themselves_
Here is a curious and significant thing I found in Atlanta. Because there
is not enough room for Negro children in public schools, the coloured
people maintain many private schools. The largest of these, called Morris
Brown College, has nearly 1,000 pupils. Some of them are boarders from the
country, but the greater proportion are day pupils from seven years old up
who come in from the neighbourhood. This "college," in reality a grammar
school, is managed and largely supported by tuition and contributions from
Negroes, though some subscriptions are obtained in the North. Besides this
"college" there are many small private schools conducted by Negro women
and supported wholly by the tuition paid--the Negroes thus voluntarily
taxing themselves heavily for their educational opportunities. One
afternoon in Atlanta I passed a small, rather dilapidated home. Just as I
reached the gate I heard a great cackling of voices and much laughter.
Coloured children began to pour out of the house. "What's this?" I said,
and I turned in to see. I found a Negro woman, the teacher, standing in
the doorway. She had just dismissed her pupils for recess. She was holding
school in two little rooms where some fifty children must have been
crowded to suffocation. Everything was very primitive and
inconvenient--but it was a school! She collected, she told me, a dollar a
month tuition for each child. Mollie McCue's school, perhaps the best
known private school for Negroes in the city, has 250 pupils.
Many children also find educational opportunities in the Negro colleges of
the city--Clark University, Atlanta University and Spellman Seminary,
which are supported partly by the Negroes themselves but mostly by
Northern philanthropy.
Mr. Landrum gave me a copy of the last statistical report of the school
board (1903), from which these facts appear:
School No. of With Without
Population Schools Teachers Seats Seats
White 14,465 20 200 10,052 4,413
Coloured 8,118 5 49 2,445 5,673
Even with a double daily session for coloured pupils nearly half of the
Negro children in Atlanta, even in 1903, were barred from the public
schools from lack of facilities, and the number has increased largely in
the last four years. Some of these are accommodated in the private schools
and colleges which I have mentioned, but there still remain hundreds, even
thousands, who are getting no schooling of any kind, but who are
nevertheless being educated--on the streets, and for criminal lives.
_White Instruction for Black Children_
I made a good many inquiries to find out what was being done outside of
the public schools by the white people toward training the Negro either
morally, industrially or intellectually--and I was astonished to find that
it was next to nothing. The Negro is, of course, not welcome at the white
churches or Sunday schools, and the sentiment is so strong against
teaching the Negro that it is a brave Southern man or woman, indeed, who
dares attempt anything of the sort. I did find, however, that the Central
Presbyterian Church of Atlanta conducted a Negro Sunday School. Of this
Dr. Theron H. Rice, the pastor, said:
"The Sunday School conducted in Atlanta by my church is the outcome of the
effort of some of the most earnest and thoughtful of our people to give
careful religious training to the Negroes of this generation and thus to
conserve the influence begun with the fathers and mothers and the
grandfathers and grandmothers of these coloured children when they were
taught personally by their devoted Christian masters and mistresses. The
work is small in point of the number reached, but it has been productive
of sturdy character and law-abiding citizenship."
A white man or woman, and especially a Northern white man or woman, in
Atlanta who teaches Negroes is rigorously ostracised by white society. I
visited one of the Negro colleges where there are a number of white
teachers from the North. We had quite a talk. When I came to leave one of
the teachers said to me:
"You don't know how good it seems to talk with some one from the outside
world. We work here year in and year out without a white visitor, except
those who have some necessary business with the institution."
Explaining the attitude toward these Northern teachers (and we must
understand just how the Southern people feel in this matter), a prominent
clergyman said that a lady who made a social call upon a teacher in that
institution would not feel secure against having to meet Negroes socially
and that when the call was returned a similar embarrassing situation might
be created.
_Apologising for Helping Negroes_
Just in this connection: I found a very remarkable and significant letter
published in the Orangeburg, S. C., _News_, signed by a well-to-do white
citizen who thus apologises for a kind act to a Negro school:
I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles
below, on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince
Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to
make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not
thinking that publicity would be given to it or that I was doing
anything that would offend anyone. I wish to say here and now that I
am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble
confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended
will forgive me.
The sentiment indicated by this letter, while widely prevalent, is by no
means universal. I have seen Southern white men address Negro schools and
Negro gatherings many times since I have been down here. Some of the
foremost men in the South have accepted Booker T. Washington's invitations
to speak at Tuskegee. And concerning the very letter that I reproduce
above, the _Charlotte Observer_, a strong Southern newspaper, which copied
it, said:
A man would better be dead than to thus abase himself. This man did
right to address the pupils of a coloured school, but has spoiled all
by apologising for it. Few people have conceived that race prejudice
went so far, even in South Carolina, as is here indicated. Logically
it is to be assumed that this jelly-fish was about to be put under
the ban, and to secure exemption from this, published this abject
card. To it was appended a certificate from certain citizens, saying
they 'are as anxious to see the coloured race elevated as any people,
but by all means let it be done inside the colour line.'... The
narrowness and malignity betrayed in this Orangeburg incident is
exceedingly unworthy, and those guilty of it should be ashamed of
themselves.
The Rev. H. S. Bradley, for a long time one of the leading clergymen of
Atlanta, now of St. Louis, said in a sermon published in the Atlanta
_Constitution_:
... We have not been wholly lacking in our effort to help. There are
a few schools and churches supported by Southern whites for the
Negroes. Here and there a man like George Williams Walker, of the
aristocracy of South Carolina, and a woman like Miss Belle H.
Bennett, of the blue blood of Kentucky, goes as teacher to the Negro
youth, and seeks in a Christly spirit of fraternity to bring them to
a higher plane of civil and moral manhood, but the number like them
can almost be counted on fingers of both hands.
Our Southern churches have spent probably a hundred times as much
money since the Civil War in an effort to evangelise the people of
China, Japan, India, South America, Africa, Mexico, and Cuba, as they
have spent to give the Gospel to the Negroes at our doors. It is
often true that opportunity is overlooked because it lies at our
feet.
_Concerning the Vagrant Negro_
Before I get away from observations of the low-class Negro, I must speak
of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of
the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes--idle while every industry
and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour.
And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many
idle or partly idle Negroes--even after the riot, which served, I
understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last
September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one
afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men)
drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these
saloons--conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city
authorities--pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added
attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women?
After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in
January, 1908, all the saloons were closed.
Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the
marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been
and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply--the Negro. Now Negroes,
though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any
degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of
every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the
increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With
this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has,
relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have
bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became
professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and
bankers--always draining away the best and most industrious men of the
race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In
short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the
unskilled Irishman and German in the North--upward through the door of
education--but, unlike the North, there have been no other labourers
coming in to take their places.
What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture
and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they
had.
_Negro Monopoly on Labour_
So they bid against one another--it was as though the Negro had a monopoly
on labour--and within the last few years day wages for Negro workers have
jumped from fifty or sixty cents to $1.25 and $1.50, often more--a pure
matter of competition. A similar advance has affected all sorts of servant
labour--cooks, waiters, maids, porters.
High wages, scarcity of labour, and the consequent loss of opportunity for
taking advantage of the prevailing prosperity would, in any community,
South or North, whether the labour was white or black, produce a spirit of
impatience and annoyance on the part of the employing class. I found it
evident enough last summer in Kansas where the farmers were unable to get
workers to save their crops; and the servant problem is not more
provoking, certainly, in the South than in the North and West. Indeed, it
is the labour problem more than any other one cause, that has held the
South back and is holding it back to-day.
But the South has an added cause of annoyance. Higher wages, instead of
producing more and better labour, as they would naturally be expected to
do, have actually served to reduce the supply. This may, at first, seem
paradoxical: but it is easily explainable and it lies deep down beneath
many of the perplexities which surround the race problem.
Most Negroes, as I have said, were (and still are, of course)
farm-dwellers, and farm-dwellers in the hitherto wasteful Southern way.
Their living is easy to get and very simple. In that warm climate they
need few clothes; a shack for a home. Their living standards are low; they
have not learned to save; there has not been time since slavery for them
to attain the sense of responsibility which would encourage them to get
ahead. And moreover they have been and are to-day largely under the
discipline of white land owners.
What was the effect, then, of a rapid advance in wages? The poorer class
of Negroes, naturally indolent and happy-go-lucky, found that they could
make as much money in two or three days as they had formerly earned in a
whole week. It was enough to live on as well as they had ever lived: why,
then, work more than two days a week? It was the logic of a child, but it
was the logic used. Everywhere I went in the South I heard the same story:
high wages coupled with the difficulty of getting anything like continuous
work from this class of coloured men.
On the other hand the better and more industrious Negroes, who would work
continuously--and there are unnumbered thousands of them, as faithful as
any workers--occasionally saved their surplus, bought little farms or
businesses of their own and began to live on a better scale. One of the
first things they did after getting their footing was to take their wives
and daughters out of the white man's kitchen, and to send their children
from the cotton fields (where the white man needed them) to the
school-house where the tendency (exactly as with white children) was to
educate them away from farm employment. With the development of ambition
and a higher standard of living, the Negro follows the steps of the rising
Irishman or Italian: he has a better home, he wants his wife to take care
of it, and he insists upon the education of his children.
In this way higher wages have tended to cut down the already limited
supply of labour, producing annoyance, placing greater obstacles in the
way of that material development of which the Southerner is so justly
proud. And this, not at all unnaturally, has given rise on the one hand to
complaints against the lazy Negro who will work only two days in the week
that he may loaf the other five; and on the other hand it has found
expression in blind and bitter hostility to the education which enables
the better sort of Negro to rise above the unskilled employment and the
domestic service of which the South is so keenly in need. It is human
nature to blame men, not conditions. Here is unlimited work to do: here is
the Negro who has been for centuries and is to-day depended upon to do it;
it is not done. The natural result is to throw the blame wholly upon the
Negro, and not upon the deep economic conditions and tendencies which have
actually caused the scarcity of labour.
_Immigrants to Take the Negroes' Places_
But within the last year or two thinking men in the South have begun to
see this particular root of the difficulty and a great new movement
looking to the encouragement of immigration from foreign countries has
been started. In November, 1906, the first shipload of immigrants ever
brought from Europe directly to a South Carolina port were landed at
Charleston with great ceremony and rejoicing. If a steady stream of
immigrants can be secured and if they can be employed on satisfactory
terms with the Negro it will go far toward relieving race tension in the
South.
Of course idleness leads to crime, and one of the present efforts in the
South is toward a more rigid enforcement of laws against vagrancy. In this
the white people have the sympathy of the leading Negroes. I was struck
with one passage in the discussion at the last Workers' Conference at
Tuskegee. William E. Holmes, president of a coloured college at Macon,
Georgia, was speaking. Some one interrupted him:
"I would like to ask if you think the Negro is any more disposed to become
a loafer or vagrant than any other people under the same conditions?"
"Well," said Mr. Holmes, taking a deep breath, "we cannot afford to do
what other races do. We haven't a single, solitary man or woman among us
we can afford to support as an idler. It may be that other races have made
so much progress that they can afford to support loafers. But we are not
yet in that condition. Some of us have the impression that the world owes
us a living. That is a misfortune. I must confess that I have become
convinced that at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers
than any other race of people on this continent."
These frank remarks did not meet with the entire approval of the members
of the conference, but the discussion seemed to indicate that there was a
great deal more of truth in them than the leaders and teachers of the
Negro are disposed to admit.
_The Worthless Negro_
I tried to see as much as I could of this "worthless Negro," who is about
the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American
life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day
with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking
cotton. He has lost his white friends--his "white folks," as he calls
them--and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand
alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he
dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women
with whom they live--for morality and the home virtues among this class
are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take
enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him
in idleness--or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of
beatitude:
"I doan has to work so ha'd
I's got a gal in a white man's ya'd;
Ebery night 'bout half pas' eight
I goes 'round to the white man's gate:
She brings me butter and she brings me la'd--
I doan has to work so ha'd!"
This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the
neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness
around saloons and depots--this Negro provokes the just wrath of the
people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is,
of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who
perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern
prosperity.
_How the Working Negro Lives_
Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle
class, comprising the great body of the race--the workers. They are
crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few
owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good
wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime.
Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the
crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is
irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and
laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good
humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A
banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him
real joys. Most of the families of this middle class, some of whom are
deserted wives with children, have their "white folks" for whom they do
washing, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church
connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a
certain code of self-respect.
I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the
poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a
dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For
the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many
visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was
chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and
weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms
meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or
on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits,
inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon--the
first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the
graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and
the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly
for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated
mirror--paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized
when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single
note. Installment houses prey upon them, pawnbrokers suck their blood, and
they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed,
that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more
bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes
for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern
newspapers, must be enormous--millions of dollars. I had an interesting
side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most
fashionable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone
residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion,
who was a resident of the city:
"That's a fine home."
"Yes; stop a minute," he said, "I want to tell you about that. The
anti-kink man lives there."
"Anti-kink?" I asked in surprise.
"Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here.
He made his money by selling to Negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks
out of their wool. They're simply crazy on that subject."
"Does it work?"
"You haven't seen any straight-haired Negroes, have you?" he asked.
Ignorance carries a big burden and climbs a rocky road!
_Old Mammies and Nurses_
The mass of coloured people still maintain, as I have said, a more or less
intimate connection with white families--frequently a very beautiful and
sympathetic relationship like that of the old mammies or nurses. To one
who has heard so much of racial hatred as I have since I have been down
here, a little incident that I observed the other day comes with a charm
hardly describable. I saw a carriage stop in front of a home. The expected
daughter had arrived--a very pretty girl indeed. She stepped out eagerly.
Her father was halfway down to the gate; but ahead of him was a very old
Negro woman in the cleanest of clean starched dresses.
"Honey," she said eagerly.
"Mammy!" exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other's arms,
clasping and kissing--the white girl and the old black woman.
I thought to myself: "There's no Negro problem there: that's just plain
human love!"
_"Master" Superseded by "Boss"_
Often I have heard Negroes refer to "my white folks" and similarly the
white man still speaks of "my Negroes." The old term of slavery, the use
of the word "master," has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen,
not without significance, the round term "Boss," or sometimes "Cap," or
"Cap'n." To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro,
"Jim" or "Susie"--or if the Negro is old or especially respected: "Uncle
Jim" or "Aunt Susan."
To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat
amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over
the use of the word "Mr." or "Mrs." No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by
a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man
told me with humour of his difficulties:
"Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I
couldn't call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a
doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him 'Dr.'
Washington now."
Sure enough! I don't think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I
came down here. It is always "Dr." or just "Booker." They are ready to
call a Negro "Professor" or "Bishop" or "The Reverend"--but not "Mr."
In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar "Miss
Mary," but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The
formal "Miss Smith" would imply social equality.
I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all
gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and
the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and,
correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense
hostility.
I must tell, in spite of lack of room, one beautiful story I heard at
Atlanta, which so well illustrates the old relationship. There is in the
family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old
servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the
family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot
last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So
Miss Louise, the doctor's daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark
streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much
alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.
"What are you doing out here this time of night?" he asked.
"Why," she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, "I
had to take Uncle Billy safely home."
Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky
newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:
_Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a
Sleeping Car_
Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky's Jim Crow law
into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car.
When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C.
H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in
Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New
Mexico, and his wife preparing to retire for the night. He demanded
that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor
refused.
After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station
and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to
undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train
was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured
compartment.
I have now described two of the three great classes of Negroes: First, the
worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers
but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle class of Negroes who do
the manual work of the South. Above these, a third class, few in numbers,
but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning
Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white
people--and who have been getting further and further away from them.
_A White Man's Problem_
It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man's problem than it is a
Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire.
The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially,
industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his
helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the
Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have
already described, many men have said to me:
"Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the
education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education
in taxes."
Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities.
They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their
improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is
better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as
to become a menace to society. The present _kind_ of education in the
South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as
necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.
When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal--through lack
of proper training--I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance
finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.