IN THE BLACK BELT: THE NEGRO FARMER
The cotton picking season was drawing to its close when I left for the
black belt of Georgia. So many friends in Atlanta had said:
"The city Negro isn't the real Negro. You must go out on the cotton
plantations in the country; there you'll see the genuine black African in
all his primitive glory."
It is quite true that the typical Negro is a farmer. The great mass of the
race in the South dwells in the country. According to the last census, out
of 8,000,000 Negroes in the Southern states 6,558,173, or 83 per cent.,
lived on the farms or in rural villages. The crowded city life which I
have already described represents not the common condition of the masses
of the Negro race but the newer development which accompanies the growth
of industrial and urban life. In the city the races are forced more
violently together, socially and economically, than in the country,
producing acute crises, but it is in the old agricultural regions where
the Negro is in such masses, where ideas change slowly, and old
institutions persist, that the problem really presents the greatest
difficulties.
There is no better time of year to see the South than November; for then
it wears the smile of abundance. The country I went through--rolling red
hills, or black bottoms, pine-clad in places, with pleasant farm openings
dotted with cabins, often dilapidated but picturesque, and the busy little
towns--wore somehow an air of brisk comfort. The fields were lively with
Negro cotton pickers; I saw bursting loads of the new lint drawn by mules
or oxen, trailing along the country roads; all the gins were puffing
busily; at each station platform cotton bales by scores or hundreds stood
ready for shipment and the towns were cheerful with farmers white and
black, who now had money to spend. The heat of the summer had gone, the
air bore the tang of a brisk autumn coolness. It was a good time of the
year--and everybody seemed to feel it. Many Negroes got on or off at every
station with laughter and snouted good-byes.
_What Is the Black Belt?_
[Illustration: THE BLACK BELT
In the region shaded more than half of the inhabitants are Negroes.]
And so, just at evening, after a really interesting journey, I reached
Hawkinsville, a thriving town of some 3,000 people just south of the
centre of Georgia. Pulaski County, of which Hawkinsville is the seat, with
an ambitious new court-house, is a typical county of the black belt. A
census map which is here reproduced well shows the region of largest
proportionate Negro population, extending from South Carolina through
central Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi. More than half the inhabitants
of all this broad belt, including also the Atlantic coastal counties and
the lower Mississippi Valley (as shaded on the map), are Negroes, chiefly
farm Negroes. There the race question, though perhaps not so immediately
difficult as in cities like Atlanta, is with both white and coloured
people the imminent problem of daily existence. Several times while in
the black belt I was amused at the ardent response of people to whom I
mentioned the fact that I had already seen something of conditions in
Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:
"Why, they haven't any Negro problem. They're _North_."
In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant--as it
is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New
York City--but it is not the life and death question that it is in the
black belt or in the Yazoo delta.
All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County
was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered
sparse. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion
of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes,
leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which
will some day become immensely valuable.
_A Southern Country Gentleman_
At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In
many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In
every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the
improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State
Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman
of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in
the new progressive movement in the South.
One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor
hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story illustrating the
attitude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years
ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson
Davis's cabinet was called the "backbone of the confederacy," the spirit
of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was
a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with
enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the
largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:
"What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes to town I will
entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don't want!"
That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not
get its hotel.
One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good
hotel; and what is rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel
building really worthy architecturally.
Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation--a drive of some eight miles. In
common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in
Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown
makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable
confidence in assuming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer,
or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country.
From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I
concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns
was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent
prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than retarded the movement.
White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the
comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly
difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another
potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and
especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where
white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed
in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear
was not absent even among these people.
I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi,
which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:
I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people
in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any
friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty
years and I never heard of but one case of attempted assault by a
Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said
that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it's because we never
take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife
and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o'clock at
night--because I am afraid.
As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees
many plantation houses, even those built in recent years, standing vacant
and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of
the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.
Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course,
remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too,
grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town,
they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in
other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of
comfort that they never before imagined possible.
_Story of the Mill People_
Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out
through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting
glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a
number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the
older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old
fellow said rather pathetically:
"When it comes to cotton picking time and I know that they are grinding
cane and hunting possums, I jest naturally get lonesome for the country."
But nothing would persuade the women and children to go back to the old
hard life. Hawkinsville has a small cotton mill and just such a community
of white workers around it. Owing to the scarcity of labour, wages in the
mills have been going up rapidly all over the South, during the last two
or three years, furnishing a still more potent attraction for country
people.
All these various tendencies are uniting to produce some very remarkable
conditions in the South. A natural segregation of the races is apparently
taking place. I saw it everywhere I went in the black belt. The white
people were gravitating toward the towns or into white neighbourhoods and
leaving the land, even though still owned by white men, more and more to
the exclusive occupation of Negroes. Many black counties are growing
blacker while not a few white counties are growing whiter.
[Illustration: WHERE WHITE MILL HANDS LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA]
[Illustration: WHERE SOME OF THE POORER NEGROES LIVE IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA
COMPANION PICTURES
to show that there is comparatively little difference in the material
comfort of the two classes]
Take, for example, Pulaski County, through which I drove that November
morning with Mr. Brown. In 1870 the coloured and white population were
almost exactly equal--about 6,000 for each. In 1880 the Negroes had
increased to 8,225 while the whites showed a loss. By 1890 the towns had
begun to improve and the white population grew by about 700, but the
Negroes increased nearly 2,000. And, finally, here are the figures for
1900: Negroes 11,029; Whites 7,460.
I have not wished to darken our observations with too many statistics, but
this tendency is so remarkable that I wish to set down for comparison the
figures of a "white county" in northern Georgia--Polk County--which is
growing whiter every year.
Negroes Whites
1880 4,147 7,805
1890 4,654 10,289
1900 4,916 12,940
_Driving out Negroes_
One of the most active causes of this movement is downright fear--or race
repulsion expressing itself in fear. White people dislike and fear to live
in dense coloured neighbourhoods, while Negroes are often terrorised in
white neighbourhoods--and not in the South only but in parts of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, as I shall show when I come to treat of Northern race
conditions. I have accumulated many instances showing how Negroes are
expelled from white neighbourhoods. There is a significant report from
Little Rock, Arkansas:
(_Special to the Georgian._)
Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 1.--Practically every Negro in Evening Shade,
Sharp County, in this state, has left town as the result of threats
which have been made against the Negroes. For several years a small
colony of Negroes has lived just on the outskirts of the town. A
short time ago notices were posted warning the Negroes to leave the
town at once. About the same time Joe Brooks, a Negro who lived with
his family two miles north of town, was called to his door and fired
upon by unknown persons. A load of shot struck the house close by his
side and some of the shot entered his arm. Brooks and his family have
left the country, and practically every member of the Negro colony
has gone. They have abandoned their property or disposed of it for
whatever they could get.
From the New Orleans _Times Democrat_ of March 20, 1907, I cut the
following dispatch showing one method pursued by the whites of Oklahoma:
BLACKS ORDERED OUT
Lawton, Okla., March 20.--"Negroes, beware the cappers. We, the Sixty
Sons of Waurika, demand the Negroes to leave here at once. We mean
Go! Leave in twenty-four hours, or after that your life is
uncertain." These were the words on placards which the eighty Negroes
of the town of Waurika, forty miles south of Lawton, saw posted
conspicuously in a number of public places this morning.
Dispatches from here to-night stated that the whites are in earnest,
and that the Negroes will be killed if they do not leave town.
Not a few students of Southern conditions like John Temple Graves among
the whites and Bishop Turner among the coloured people have argued that
actual physical separation of the races (either by deportation of the
Negroes to Africa or elsewhere, or by giving them certain reservation-like
parts of the South to live in) is the only solution. But here is, in
actuality, a natural segregation going forward in certain parts of the
South, though in a very different way from that recommended by Mr. Graves
and Bishop Turner; for even in the blackest counties the white people own
most of the land, occupy the towns, and dominate everywhere politically,
socially, and industrially.
Mr. Brown's plantation contains about 5,000 acres, of which some 3,500
acres are in cultivation, a beautiful rolling country, well watered, with
here and there clumps of pines, and dotted with the small homes of the
tenantry.
As we drove along the country road we met or passed many Negroes who bowed
with the greatest deference. Some were walking, but many drove horses or
mules and rode not infrequently in top buggies, looking most prosperous,
as indeed, Mr. Brown informed me that they were. He knew them all, and
sometimes stopped to ask them how they were getting along. The outward
relationships between the races in the country seem to me to be smoother
than it is in the city.
Cotton, as in all this country, is almost the exclusive crop. In spite of
the constant preaching of agricultural reformers, like Mr. Brown himself,
hardly enough corn is raised to supply the people with food, and I was
surprised here and elsewhere at seeing so few cattle and hogs. Sheep are
non-existent. In Hawkinsville, though the country round about raises
excellent grass, I saw in front of a supply store bales of hay which had
been shipped in 400 miles--from Tennessee. Enough sugar cane is raised,
mostly in small patches, to supply syrup for domestic uses. At the time of
my visit the Negroes were in the cane-fields with their long knives,
getting in the crop. We saw several little one-horse grinding mills
pressing the juice from the cane, while near at hand, sheltered by a
shanty-like roof, was the great simmering syrup kettle, with an expert
Negro at work stirring and skimming. And always there were Negroes round
about, all the boys and girls with jolly smeared faces--and the older ones
peeling and sucking the fresh cane.
It was a great time of year!
How does the landlord--and a lord he is in a very true sense--manage his
great estate? The same system is in use with slight variations everywhere
in the cotton country and a description of Mr. Brown's methods, with
references here and there to what I have seen or heard elsewhere, will
give an excellent idea of the common procedure.
_A Country of Great Plantations_
The black belt is a country of great plantations, some owners having as
high as 30,000 acres, interspersed with smaller farms owned by the poorer
white families or Negroes. In one way the conditions are similar to those
prevailing in Ireland; great landlords and a poor tenantry or peasantry,
the tenants here being very largely black.
It requires about 100 families, or 600 people, to operate Mr. Brown's
plantation. Of these, 90 per cent. are coloured and 10 per cent. white. I
was much interested in what Mr. Brown said about his Negro tenants, which
varies somewhat from the impression I had in the city of the younger Negro
generation.
"I would much rather have young Negroes for tenants," he said, "because
they work better and seem more disposed to take care of their farms. The
old Negroes ordinarily will shirk--a habit of slavery."
Besides the residence of the overseer and the homes of the tenants there
is on the plantation a supply store owned by Mr. Brown, a blacksmith shop
and a Negro church, which is also used as a school-house. This is, I found
all through the black belt, a common equipment.
Three different methods are pursued by the landlord in getting his land
cultivated. First, the better class of tenants rent the land for cash, a
"standing rent" of some $3 an acre, though in many places in Mississippi
it ranges as high as $6 and $8 an acre. Second, a share-crop rental, in
which the landlord and the tenant divide the cotton and corn produced.
Third, the ordinary wage system; that is, the landlord hires workers at so
much a month and puts in his own crop. All three of these methods are
usually employed on the larger plantations. Mr. Brown rents 2,500 acres
for cash, 400 on shares, and farms 600 himself with wage workers.
All the methods of land measurement are very different here from what they
are in the North. The plantation is irregularly divided up into what are
called one-mule or one-plough farms--just that amount of land which a
family can cultivate with one mule--usually about thirty acres. Some
ambitious tenants will take a two-mule or even a four-mule farm.
_The Negro Tenant_
Most of the tenants, especially the Negroes, are very poor, and wholly
dependent upon the landlord. Many Negro families possess practically
nothing of their own, save their ragged clothing, and a few dollars' worth
of household furniture, cooking utensils and a gun. The landlord must
therefore supply them not only with enough to live on while they are
making their crop, but with the entire farming outfit. Let us say that a
Negro comes in November to rent a one-mule farm from the landlord for the
coming year.
"What have you got?" asks the landlord.
"Noting', boss," he is quite likely to say.
The "boss" furnishes him with a cabin to live in--which goes with the land
rented--a mule, a plough, possibly a one-horse waggon and a few tools.
He is often given a few dollars in cash near Christmas time which
(ordinarily) he immediately spends--wastes. He is then allowed to draw
upon the plantation supply store a regular amount of corn to feed his
mule, and meat, bread, and tobacco, and some clothing for his family. The
cost of the entire outfit and supplies for a year is in the neighbourhood
of $300, upon which the tenant pays interest at from 10 to 30 per cent.
from the time of signing the contract in November, although most of the
supplies are not taken out until the next summer. Besides this interest
the planter also makes a large profit on all the groceries and other
necessaries furnished by his supply store. Having made his contract the
Negro goes to work with his whole family and keeps at it until the next
fall when the cotton is all picked and ginned. Then he comes in for his
"settlement"--a great time of year. The settlements were going forward
while I was in the black belt. The Negro is credited with the amount of
cotton he brings in and he is charged with all the supplies he has had,
and interest, together with the rent of his thirty acres of land. If the
season has been good and he has been industrious, he will often have a
nice profit in cash, but sometimes he not only does not come out even, but
closes his year of work actually in deeper debt to the landlord.
[Illustration: A "POOR WHITE" FAMILY
"Among them is a spirit of pride and independence which, rightly directed,
would uplift and make them prosperous, but which, misguided and blind, as
it sometimes is, keeps them in poverty."]
[Illustration: A MODEL NEGRO SCHOOL
Inspired by Tuskegee; different, indeed, from the ordinary country Negro
school in the South]
Some Negroes, nowadays usually of the poorer sort, work for wages. They
get from $12 to $15 a month (against $5 to $8 a few years ago) with a
cabin to live in. They are allowed a garden patch, where they can, if they
are industrious and their families help, raise enough vegetables to feed
them comfortably, or part of a bale of cotton, which is their own. But it
is sadly to be commented upon that few Negro tenants, or whites either, as
far as I could see, do anything with their gardens save perhaps to raise a
few collards, peanuts, and peppers--and possibly a few sweet potatoes.
This is due in part to indolence and lack of ambition, and in part to the
steady work required by the planter. The wife and children of an
industrious wage-working Negro nearly always help in the fields, earning
an additional income from chopping cotton in spring and picking the lint
in the fall.
This is the system as it is in theory; but the interest for us lies not in
the plan, but in the actual practice. How does it all work out for good
or for evil, for landlord and for tenant?
Tenantry in the South is a very different thing from what it is in the
North. In the North, a man who rents a farm is nearly as free to do as he
pleases as if he were the owner. But in the South, the present tenant
system is much nearer the condition that prevailed in slavery times than
it is to the present Northern tenant system. This grows naturally out of
slavery; the white man had learned to operate big plantations with
ignorant help; and the Negro on his part had no training for any other
system. The white man was the natural master and the Negro the natural
dependent and a mere Emancipation Proclamation did not at once change the
_spirit_ of the relationship.
To-day a white overseer resides on every large plantation and he or the
owner himself looks after and disciplines the tenants. The tenant is in
debt to him (in some cases reaching a veritable condition of debt slavery
or peonage) and he _must_ see that the crop is made. Hence he watches the
work of every Negro (and indeed that of the white tenants as well) sees
that the land is properly fertilised, and that the dikes (to prevent
washing) are kept up, that the cotton is properly chopped (thinned) and
regularly cultivated. Some of the greater landowners employ assistant
overseers or "riders" who are constantly travelling from farm to farm. On
one plantation I saw four such riders start out one day, each with a rifle
on his saddle. And on a South Carolina plantation I had a glimpse of one
method of discipline. A planter was telling me of his difficulties--how a
spirit of unruliness sometimes swept abroad through a plantation, inspired
by some "bigoty nigger."
"Do you know what I do with such cases?" he said. "Come with me, I'll show
you."
He took me back through his house to the broad porch and reaching up to a
shelf over the door he took down a hickory waggon spoke, as long as my
arm.
"When there's trouble," he said, "I just go down with that and lay one or
two of 'em out. That ends the trouble. We've got to do it; they're like
children and once in a while they simply have to be punished. It's far
better for them to take it this way, from a white man who is their
friend, than to be arrested and taken to court and sent to the
chain-gang."
_Troubles of the Landlord_
Planters told me of all sorts of difficulties they had to meet with their
tenants. One of them, after he had spent a whole evening telling me of the
troubles which confronted any man who tried to work Negroes, summed it all
up with the remark:
"You've just got to make up your mind that you are dealing with children,
and handle them as firmly and kindly as you know how."
He told me how hard it was to get a Negro tenant even in the busy season
to work a full week--and it was often only by withholding the weekly food
allowance that it could be done. Saturday afternoon (or "evening," as they
say in the South) the Negro goes to town or visits his friends. Often he
spends all day Sunday driving about the country and his mule comes back so
worn out that it cannot be used on Monday. There are often furious
religious revivals which break into the work, to say nothing of "frolics"
and fish suppers at which the Negroes often remain all night long. Many of
them are careless with their tools, wasteful of supplies, irresponsible in
their promises. One planter told me how he had built neat fences around
the homes of his Negroes, and fixed up their houses to encourage them in
thrift and give them more comfort, only to have the fences and even parts
of the houses used for firewood.
Toward fall, if the season has been bad, and the crop of cotton is short,
so short that a Negro knows that he will not be able to "pay out" and have
anything left for himself, he will sometimes desert the plantation
entirely, leaving the cotton unpicked and a large debt to the landlord. If
he attempts that, however, he must get entirely away, else the planter
will chase him down and bring him back to his work. Illiterate, without
discipline or training, with little ambition and much indolence, a large
proportion of Negro tenants are looked after and driven like children or
slaves. I say "a large proportion"--but there are thousands of industrious
Negro landowners and tenants who are rapidly getting ahead--as I shall
show in my next chapter.
In this connection it is a noteworthy fact that a considerable number of
the white tenants require almost as much attention as the Negroes, though
they are, of course, treated in an entirely different way. One planter in
Alabama said to me:
"Give me Negroes every time. I wouldn't have a low-down white tenant on my
place. You can get work out of any Negro if you know how to handle him;
but there are some white men who won't work and can't be driven, because
they are white."
_Race Troubles in the Country_
In short, when slavery was abolished it gave place to a sort of feudal
tenantry system which continues widely to-day. And it has worked with
comparative satisfaction, at least to the landlords, until within the last
few years, when the next step in the usual evolution of human
society--industrial and urban development--began seriously to disturb the
feudal equilibrium of the cotton country. It was a curious idea--human
enough--that men should attempt to legislate slaves immediately into
freedom. But nature takes her own methods of freeing slaves; they are
slower than men's ways, but more certain.
The change now going on in the South from the feudal agricultural life to
sharpened modern conditions has brought difficulties for the planter
compared with which all others pale into insignificance. I mean the
scarcity of labour. Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited
supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural
laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering
other occupations, migrating west or north--where more money is to be
made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively,
have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with
wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more
serious crisis.
_Cry of the South: "More Labour"_
If the South to-day could articulate its chief need, we should hear a
single great shout:
"More labour!"
Out of this struggle for tenants, servants, and workers has grown the
chief complications of the Negro problem--and I am not forgetting race
prejudice, or the crimes against women. Indeed, it has seemed to me that
the chief difficulty in understanding the Negro problem lies in showing
how much of the complication in the South is due to economic readjustments
and how much to instinctive race repulsion or race prejudice.
_A Tenant Stealer_
In one town I visited--not Hawkinsville--I was standing talking with some
gentlemen in the street when I saw a man drive by in a buggy.
"Do you see that man?" they asked me. I nodded.
"Well, he is the greatest tenant-stealer in this country."
I heard a good deal about these "tenant stealers." A whole neighbourhood
will execrate one planter who, to keep his land cultivated, will lure away
his neighbours' Negroes. Sometimes he will offer more wages, sometimes he
will give the tenants better houses to live in, and sometimes he succeeds
by that sheer force of a masterful personality which easily controls an
ignorant tenantry.
I found, moreover, that there was not only a struggle between individual
planters for Negro tenants, but between states and sections. Many of the
old farms in South Carolina and Alabama have been used so long that they
require a steady and heavy annual treatment of fertiliser, with the result
that cotton growing costs more than it does in the rich alluvial lands of
Mississippi, or the newer regions of Arkansas and Texas. The result is
that the planters of the West, being able to pay more wages and give the
tenants better terms, lure away the Negroes of the East. Georgia and other
states have met this competitive disadvantage in the usual way in which
such disadvantages, when first felt but not fully understood, are met, by
counteracting legislation. Georgia has made the most stringent laws to
keep her Negroes on the land. The Georgian code (Section 601) says:
Any person who shall solicit or procure emigrants, or shall attempt
to do so, without first procuring a licence as required by law, shall
be guilty of a misdemeanour.
Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, one of the ablest statesmen of Georgia,
said:
"Land and other forms of capital cannot spare the Negro and will not give
him up until a substitute is found. His labour is worth millions upon
millions. In Georgia we now make it a crime for anyone to solicit
emigrants without taking out a licence, and then we make the licence as
nearly prohibitive as possible. One of the most dangerous occupations for
any one to follow in this state would be that of an emigrant agent--as
some have found by experience."
In this connection I have an account published in April, 1907, in an
Augusta newspaper of just such a case:
The heaviest fine given in the city court of Richmond County within
the last two years was imposed upon E. F. Arnett yesterday morning.
He was sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand dollars or serve six
months in the county jail.
Arnett was convicted of violating the state emigration laws regarding
the carrying of labour out of the state. He was alleged to have
employed thirteen Negroes to work on the Georgia and Atlantic
Railroad, which operates in this state and Alabama. The jury on the
case returned a verdict of guilty when court convened yesterday,
although it had been reported that a mistrial was probable.
_"Peg Leg" Williams_
A famous railroad emigration agent called "Peg Leg" Williams, who promoted
Negro emigration from Georgia to Mississippi and Texas a few years ago,
was repeatedly prosecuted and finally driven out of business. In a letter
which he wrote some time ago to the Atlanta _Constitution_ he said:
I know of several counties not a hundred miles from Atlanta where
it's more than a man's life is worth to go in to get Negroes to move
to some other state. There are farmers that would not hesitate to
shoot their brother were he to come from Mississippi to get "his
niggers," as he calls them, even though he had no contract with them.
I know personally numbers of Negro men who have moved West and after
accumulating a little, return to get a brother, sister, or an old
father or mother, and they were compelled to return without them,
their lives being imperilled; they had to leave and leave quick.
In view of such a feeling it may be imagined how futile is the talk of the
deportation of the Negro race. What the Southern planter wants to-day is
not fewer Negroes but more Negroes--Negroes who will "keep their place."
_Laws to Make the Negro Work_
Many other laws have been passed in the Southern states which are designed
to keep the Negro on the land, and having him there, to make him work.
The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is
an excellent example--which I shall discuss more fully in the next
chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro
convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to
keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy
laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are
here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last
legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must
prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man
is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the
burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not
upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also passed a stringent game
law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from
pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.
_Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity_
One of the most significant things I saw in the South--and I saw it
everywhere--was the way in which the white people were torn between their
feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and
fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they
yet want him to work for them; they can't get along without him. In one
impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the
country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is
becoming educated, acquiring property and "getting out of his place"; and
in the next impulse laws are passed or other remarkable measures taken to
keep him at work--because the South can't get along without him. From the
Atlanta _Georgian_ I cut recently a letter which well illustrates the way
in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.
TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK
But aren't there two sides to every question? Here we are out here in
the country, right in the midst of hundreds of Negroes, and do you
know, sir, that all this talk about lynching and ku-kluxing is
frightening the farm hands to such an extent we begin to fear that
soon the farmers will sustain a great loss of labour, by their
running away? Already it is beginning to have its effect. After night
the Negroes are afraid to leave their farm to go anywhere on errands
of business. Why, sir, two miles from this town, the Negroes are
afraid to come here to trade at night. The country merchants are
feeling the force of it very sorely, and if this foolishness isn't
stopped their losses in fall trade will be very heavy.
Even some of the ladies of our community are complaining of this
rashness. That it is demoralising the labour in the home department.
So in conclusion, in behalf of my community and other country
communities, I feel it my duty to raise a warning voice against all
such new foolish ku-kluxism.
Mableton, Ga.
T. J. LOWE.
While I was in Georgia a case came up which threw a flood of light upon
the inner complexities of this problem. In the county of Habersham in
North Georgia the population is largely of the type known as "poor
white"--the famous mountain folk who were never slave-owners and many of
whom fought in the Union army during the Civil War. Habersham is one of
the "white counties" which is growing whiter. It has about 2,000 Negroes
and 12,000 whites--many of the latter having come in from the North to
grow peaches and raise sheep. One of the Negroes of Habersham County was
Frank Grant, described by a white neighbour as "a Negro of good character,
a property owner, setting an example of thrift and honesty that ought to
have made his example a benefit to any community."
Grant had saved money from his labour and bought a home. He was such a
good worker that people were willing sometimes to pay him twice the wages
of the average labourer, white or black. On the night of December 16,
1906, the Negro's house was fired into by a party of white men who then
went to the house of his tenant, Henry Scism, also a Negro, and shot
promiscuously around Scism's house, and warned him to leave the country in
one week, threatening him with severe penalties if he did not go. As a
result Grant had to sell out his little home, won after such hard work,
and he and his tenant Scism with their families both fled the county.
"In Grant," said his white neighbour, "the county lost a capable
labourer--in its present situation, a most valuable asset--and a good
citizen."
Here, then, we have race hatred versus economic necessity. The important
citizens and employers of Habersham County came to Atlanta and presented
a petition to Governor Terrell, January 18, 1907, as follows:
TO HIS EXCELLENCY, J. M. TERRELL,
GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA, ATLANTA:
Whereas, on the night of December 16, 1906, parties unknown came to
the quiet home of one Frank Grant, coloured, a citizen of this
county, and shot into his residence, and then went to the home of
Henry Scism, coloured, a tenant of said Frank Grant, and shot
promiscuously around his (the said Scism's) house, and demanded of
him to leave the county under severe penalty.
This has caused the tenant, Henry Scism, to leave, and Frank Grant to
sell his little house at a sacrifice and leave. It comes to us that
Frank Grant is a quiet, innocent, hard-working citizen. Therefore,
we, the undersigned officers and citizens of Habersham County,
Georgia, pray you to offer a liberal reward for the arrest and
conviction or these unknown parties--say $100 for the first and $50
for each succeeding one.
(Signed) C. W. GRANT,
_County School Commissioner_.
J. A. ERWIN CLERK, S. C.,
M. FRANKLIN, Ordinary
J. D. HILL, T. C. H. C.
But, of course, nothing could be done that would keep the Negroes on the
land under such conditions.
_Why Negroes Are Driven Out_
What does it all mean? Listen to the explanation given by a prominent
white man of Habersham County--not to me--but to the Atlanta _Georgian_,
where it was published:
"It is not a problem of Negro labour, because there is little of that kind
there. The white labour will not work for the fruit growers at prices they
can afford, even when it is a good fruit year. Often they decline to work
at any price. They have many admirable qualities; among them is a spirit
of pride and independence, which, rightly directed, would uplift and make
them prosperous, but which misguided and blind, as it sometimes is, keeps
them in poverty and puts the region in which they live at great
disadvantage.
"Landowners and employers, native, and new, are indignant but helpless.
They are in the power of the shiftless element of the whites, who say, 'I
will work or not, as I please, and when I please, and at my own price; and
I will not have Negroes taking my work away from me.' This is not a race
question, pure and simple; it is an industrial question, a labour issue,
not confined to one part of the country."
Here, it will be observed, the same complaint is made against the "poor
white" as against the Negro--that he is shiftless and that he won't work
even for high wages.
Generally speaking, the race hatred in the South comes chiefly from the
poorer class of whites who either own land which they work themselves or
are tenant farmers in competition with Negroes and from politicians who
seek to win the votes of this class of white men. The larger landowners
and employers of labour, while they do not love the Negro, want him to
work and work steadily, and will do almost anything to keep him on the
land--so long as he is a faithful, obedient, unambitious worker. When he
becomes prosperous, or educated, or owns land, many white people no longer
"have any use for him" and turn upon him with hostility, but the best type
of the Southern white men is not only glad to see the Negro become a
prosperous and independent farmer but will do much to help him.
_Vivid Illustration of Race Feeling_
I have had innumerable illustrations of the extremes to which race feeling
reaches among a certain class of Southerners. In a letter to the Atlanta
_Constitution_, November 5, 1906, a writer who signs himself Mark Johnson,
says:
The only use we have for the Negro is as a labourer. It is only as
such that we need him; it is only as such that we can use him. If the
North wants to take him and educate him we will bid him godspeed and
contribute to his education if schools are located on the other side
of the line.
And here are extracts from a remarkable letter from a Southern white
working man signing himself Forrest Pope and published in the Atlanta
_Georgian_, October 22, 1906:
When the skilled negro appears and begins to elbow the white man in
the struggle for existence, don't you know the white man rebels and
won't have it so? If you don't it won't take you long to find it out;
just go out and ask a few of them, those who tell you the whole
truth, and see what you will find out about it.
_What Is the Negro's Place?_
All the genuine Southern people like the Negro as a servant, and so
long as he remains the hewer of wood and carrier of water, and
remains strictly in what we choose to call his place, everything is
all right, but when ambition, prompted by real education, causes
the Negro to grow restless and he bestir himself to get out of that
servile condition, then there is, or at least there will be, trouble,
sure enough trouble, that all the great editors, parsons and
philosophers can no more check than they can now state the whole
truth and nothing but the truth, about this all-absorbing,
far-reaching miserable race question. There are those among Southern
editors and other public men who have been shouting into the ears of
the North for twenty-five years that education would solve the Negro
question; there is not an honest, fearless, thinking man in the South
but who knows that to be a bare-faced lie. Take a young Negro of
little more than ordinary intelligence, even, get hold of him in
time, train him thoroughly as to books, and finish him up with a good
industrial education, send him out into the South with ever so good
intentions both on the part of his benefactor and himself, send him
to take my work away from me and I will kill him.
[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
Old and new cabins for Negro tenants on the Brown plantation]
The writer says in another part of this remarkable letter, giving as it
does a glimpse of the bare bones of the economic struggle for existence:
I am, I believe, a typical Southern white workingman of the skilled
variety, and I'll tell the whole world, including Drs. Abbott and
Eliot, that I don't want any educated property-owning Negro around
me. The Negro would be desirable to me for what I could get out of
him in the way of labour that I don't want to have to perform myself,
and I have no other uses for him.
_Who Will Do the Dirty Work?_
One illustration more and I am through. I met at Montgomery, Alabama, a
lawyer named Gustav Frederick Mertins. We were discussing the "problem,"
and Mr. Mertins finally made a striking remark, not at all expressing the
view that I heard from some of the strongest citizens of Montgomery, but
excellently voicing the position of many Southerners.
"It's a question," he said, "who will do the dirty work. In this country
the white man won't: the Negro must. There's got to be a mudsill
somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won't stay where they belong;
and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it
makes the others discontented."
Mr. Mertins presented me with a copy of his novel called "The Storm
Signal," in which he further develops the idea (p. 342):
The Negro is the mudsill of the social and industrial South to-day.
Upon his labour in the field, in the forest, and in the mine, the
whole structure rests. Slip the mudsill out and the system must be
reorganised.... Educate him and he quits the field. Instruct him in
the trades and sciences and he enters into active competition with
the white man in what are called the higher planes of life. That
competition brings on friction, and that friction in the end means
the Negroe's undoing.
Is not this mudsill stirring to-day, and is not that the deep reason for
many of the troubles in the South--and in the North as well, where the
Negro has appeared in large numbers? The friction of competition has
arrived, and despite the demand for justice by many of the best class of
the Southern whites, the struggle is certainly of growing intensity.
And out of this economic struggle of whites and blacks grows an ethical
struggle far more significant. It is the struggle of the white man with
himself. How shall he, who is supreme in the South as in the North, treat
the Negro? That is the _real_ struggle!