THE NEGRO IN POLITICS
The discussion of the Negro in politics will of necessity deal chiefly
with conditions in the South; for it is there, and there only, that the
Negro is, at the present time, a great political problem. Negroes in the
North are indeed beginning to play a conscious part in politics; but they
are only one element among many. They take their place with the "Irish
vote," the "German vote," the "Polish vote," the "labour vote," each of
which must be courted or placated by the politicians. I have looked into
Negro political conditions in several cities, notably Indianapolis and
Philadelphia, and I cannot see that they are in any marked way different
from the condition of any other class of our population which through
ignorance, or fear, or ambition, votes more or less _en masse_. Many
Negroes do not vote at all; some are as conscientious and incorruptible as
any white citizen; but a large proportion, ignorant and short-sighted, are
disfranchised by the use of money in one form or another at every
election. One of the broadest observers in Indianapolis said to me:
"The Negro voters are no worse and no better than our foreign voting
population."
Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the
Negro vote of Cleveland:
"I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or
dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in
the same walks of life."
_Negro a National Problem_
I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional
but a _national_ problem. Anything that affects the South favourably or
unfavourably reacts upon the whole country. And the same latent race
feeling exists in the North that exists in the South (for it is human,
not Southern). The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters,
confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to
understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the
South. Nothing short of the patient cooeperation of the entire country,
North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.
In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two
opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.
Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic,
Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an
Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive
party. The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has
been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should
control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products
of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in
it.
The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle.
Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John
Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or
superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.
_What Slavery Did_
This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about
one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or
slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise
learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land
and nearly all of the wealth. Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery,
but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called "poor whites," whom
even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs. It was
in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning.
If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared
just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading
abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery
and liberated both Negro and poor white men.
Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change
human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or
legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education,
religion, thought.
When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account
of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed
in name from "slave" to "freeman," but not changed in nature. It found the
poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost
both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all,
are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as
impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was
for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. And this is what so many
legal-minded men will not or cannot see.
What happened?
Exactly what might have been predicted. Southern society had been turned
wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force. The Ku Klux
Klan, the Patrollers, the Bloody Shirt movement, were the agencies
(violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the
relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle,
and the Negroes at the bottom. In short, society instinctively reverted to
its old human relationships. I once saw a man shot through the body in a
street riot. Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust,
but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he
finally fell dead. Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up
and ran again.
_The Struggle in South Carolina_
The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the
different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where
the old aristocratic regime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent
in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern
states.
In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to
political supremacy.
General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old
regime, became governor of the state. A similar tendency developed, of
course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen
(and they _were_ statesmen) appeared in politics--Hill and Gordon of
Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan
of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.
Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran
as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal
wound. There _had_ been a revolution; society _had_ been overturned. The
institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the
aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic
advantage of _owning_ his labourers. He was reduced to an economic
equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom
could _hire_ labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial
plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now
the millstone of his doom.
Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed,
the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The
disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly
prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity
came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater _feeling_ of
independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of
freedom and power.
Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the
people.
How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of
revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all
silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.
_Tillman, the Prophet_
So Tillman came in South Carolina. I can see him as he rode to the
farmers' fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced,
shaggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye. He had been long
preparing in silence for his task--struggling upward in the
poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without
schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness
which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library.
Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read
Carlyle's "French Revolution" and Gibbon's "Rome." He had in him, indeed,
the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers,
he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes. He had seen the aristocracy come
again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the
poor whites. And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him
screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all
gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government
be restored to the "plain people!" On one of the transparencies of those
days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!):
"Awake! arise! or be forever fallen."
He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats
in the heart of the aristocracy. At Charleston, one of the proudest of
Southern cities, he said:
"Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most
self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the
sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley. It shines all over
the state.... If the tales that have been told me or the reports which
have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards
God ever made."
And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal:
"Organise, organise, organise. With organisation you will become free once
more. Without it, you will remain slaves."
Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate,
Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his
fiery utterances.
"I am a rude man," he said, "and don't care."
That is Tillman. They tried to keep him and his followers out of the
political conventions; but he would not be kept out, nor kept down. Years
later he himself expressed the spirit of revolt in the United States
Senate. Zach McGhee tells how he had been making one of his fierce
attacks, an ebullition in general against things as they are. A senator
arose to snuff him out in the genial senatorial way.
"I would like to ask, Mr. President, what is before the Senate?"
"_I_ am before the Senate," screamed Tillman.
In 1890 Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina: the poor white, at
last, was in power.
The same change was going on all over the South. In Mississippi the rise
of the people (no longer poor) was represented by Vardaman, in Arkansas by
Jeff Davis, and Georgia and Alabama have experienced the same overturn in
a more complicated form. It has become a matter of pride to many of the
new leaders of the "plain people" that they do not belong to the "old
families" or to the "aristocracy." Governor Comer told me that he was a
"doodle-blower"--a name applied to the poor white dwellers on the sand
hills of Alabama. Governor Swanson of Virginia is proud of the fact that
he is the first governor of the state wholly educated in the public
schools and colleges. Call these men demagogues if you will, and some of
them certainly are open to the charge of appealing to the prejudices and
passions of the people, they yet represent a genuine movement for a more
democratic government in the South.
The old aristocrats gibe at the new leaders even to the point of bitter
hatred (in South Carolina at least one murder has grown out of the
hostility of the factions); they see (how acutely!) the blunders of
untrained administrators, their pride in their states is rubbed blood-raw
by the unblushing crudities of the Tillmans, the Vardamans, the Jeff
Davises. Go South and talk with any of these men of the ancient order and
you will come away feeling that conditions in the South are without hope.
_"High Men" of the Old South_
And those old aristocrats had their virtues. One loves to hear the names
still applied at Richmond, Montgomery, Macon, and Charleston to the men of
the old type, by other men of the old type. How often I have heard the
terms a "high man," an "incorruptible man." Beautiful names! For there was
a personal honour, a personal devotion to public duties among many of
these ante-bellum slave-owners that made them indeed "high men."
When they were in power their reign was usually skilful and honest: the
reign of a beneficent oligarchy. But it was selfish: it reigned for
itself--with nine-tenths of the people serfs or slaves. Its luxuries, its
culture, its gentleness, like that of all aristocracies, was enjoyed at
the fearful cost of poverty, ignorance, and slavery of millions of human
beings. It had no sympathy, therefore it perished from off the earth.
The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but
for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they
wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they
went crudely at the work of getting it. In spite of the bitterness against
Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one
accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration. On the
whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment.
And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not
ruin the state. Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in
extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college,
regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has
since degenerated). Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the
South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went
into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education
been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low. The "highest
citizen" may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and
culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly
higher.
Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider
the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South. Where
does _he_ come in?
_Where the Negro Comes In_
Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less
literally true that up to the present time the Negro's real influence in
politics in the South has been almost negligible. He has been an _issue_,
but not an _actor_ in politics. In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no
Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power
of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men. The Negroes
did not even follow poor old John Brown. And since the war, as I have
shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites.
They have talked _about_ the Negro, but they have not let _him_ talk. Even
in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like
Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue
of the power of the North. As a class, the Negroes were not self-directed
but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most
of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.
In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South
in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out
of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction,
practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in
everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.
The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the
Negro slaves. Men must enfranchise themselves.
And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development,
caused many of the woes of Reconstruction.
Two distinct impulses mark the effort of the South to disfranchise the
Negro. The first was the blind revolt of Reconstruction times, in which
force and fraud were frankly and openly applied. The effort to eliminate
the Negro brought the white people together in one dominant party and the
"Solid South" was born. For years this method sufficed; but in the
meantime the Negro was getting a little education, acquiring
self-consciousness, and developing leaders of more or less ability. It
became necessary, therefore, both because the Negro was becoming more
restive, less easily controlled by force, and because the awakening white
man disliked and feared the basis of fraud on which his elections rested,
to establish legal sanction for disfranchisement, to define the political
status of the Negro by law.
Now, the truth is that the mass of Southerners have _never believed that
the Negro has or should have any political rights_. The South as a whole
does not now approve and never has approved of the voting Negro. A few
Negroes vote everywhere, "but not enough," as a Southerner said to me, "to
do any hurt."
The South, then, has been placed in the position of _providing by law for
something that it did not really believe in_.
[Illustration: COLONEL JAMES LEWIS United States Receiver at New Orleans]
[Illustration: W. T. VERNON Register of the United States Treasury
Photograph by G. V. Buck]
[Illustration: RALPH W. TYLER An auditor of the Government at Washington]
It was prophesied that when the Negro was disfranchised by law and
"eliminated from politics" the South would immediately stop discussing the
Negro question and divide politically along new lines. But this has not
happened. Though disfranchisement laws have been in force in Mississippi
for years there is less division in the white party of that state than
ever before.
Why is this so? Because the Negro, through gradual education and the
acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a real as well as a
potential factor in politics. For he is just beginning to be _really_
free. And the South has not yet decided how to deal with a Negro who owns
property and is self-respecting and intelligent and who demands rights.
The South is suspicious of this new Negro: it dreads him; and the
politicians in power are quick to play upon this sentiment in order that
the South may remain solid and the present political leadership remain
undisturbed.
For the South, however much it may talk of the ignorant masses of Negroes,
does not really fear them; it wants to keep them, and keep them ignorant.
It loves the ignorant, submissive old Negroes, the "mammies" and "uncles";
it wants Negroes who, as one Southerner put it to me, "will do the dirty
work and not fuss about it." It wants Negroes who are really inferior and
who _feel_ inferior. The Negro that the South fears and dislikes is the
educated, property-owning Negro who is beginning to demand rights, to take
his place among men as a citizen. This is not an unsupported statement of
mine, but has been expressed over and over again by speakers and writers
in every part of the South. I have before me a letter from Charles P.
Lane, editor of the Huntsville (Alabama) _Daily Tribune_, written to
Governor Comer. It was published in the Atlanta _Constitution_. The writer
is arguing that the Negro disfranchisement laws in Alabama are too
lenient, that they permit too many Negroes to vote. He says:
We thought then (in 1901, when the new Alabama Constitution
disfranchising the Negro was under discussion), as we do now, that
the menace to peace, the danger to society and white supremacy was
not in the illiterate Negro, but in the upper branches of Negro
society, the educated, the man who, after ascertaining his political
rights, forced the way to assert them.
He continues:
We, the Southern people, entertain no prejudice toward the ignorant
per se inoffensive Negro. It is because we know him and for him we
entertain a compassion. But our blood boils when the educated Negro
asserts himself politically. We regard each assertion as an
unfriendly encroachment upon our native superior rights, and a
dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.
In this are we not speaking the truth? Does not every Southern
Caucasian "to the manor born" bear witness to this version? Hence we
present that the way to dampen racial prejudice, avert the impending
horrors, is to emasculate the Negro politically by repealing the XV
Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
I use this statement of Mr. Lane's not because it represents the broadest
and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it
undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the _majority_
of Southern people. It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia
last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has
elected other governors. Hoke Smith's argument was essentially this:
_Hoke Smith's Views_
The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; "he is contented to occupy the
natural status of his race, the position of inferiority." The educated and
intelligent Negro, who wants to vote, is a disturbing and threatening
influence. We don't want him down here; let him go North.
This feeling regarding the educated Negro, who, as Mr. Lane says,
"ascertains his rights and forces his way to assert them," is the basic
fact in Southern politics. It is what keeps the white people welded
together in a single party; it is what sternly checks revolts and
discourages independence.
Keeping this fact in mind, let us look more intimately into Southern
conditions.
Following ordinary usage I have spoken of the Solid South. As a matter of
fact the South is not solid, nor is there a single party. The very
existence of one strong party presupposes another, potentially as strong.
In the South to-day there are, as inevitably as human nature, two parties
and two political points of view. And one is aristocratic and the other is
democratic.
It is noteworthy in the pages of history that parties which were once
democratic become in time aristocratic. We are accustomed for example, to
look back upon Magna Charta as a mighty instrument of democracy; which it
was; but it was not democracy according to our understanding of the word.
It merely substituted a baronial oligarchy for the divine-right rule of
one man, King John. It did not touch the downtrodden slaves, serfs and
peasants of England. And yet that struggle of the barons was of profound
moment in history, for it started the spirit of democracy on its way
downward, it was the seed from which sprung English constitutionalism,
which finally flowered in the American republic.
Tillman, as I have shown, wrung democracy from the old slave-owning
oligarchy. He conquered: he established a democracy in South Carolina
which included poor whites as well as aristocrats. But Tillman in his
fiery pleas for the rights of men no more considered the Negro than the
old barons considered the serfs of their day in the struggle against King
John. It was and is incomprehensible to him that the Negro "has any rights
which the white man is bound to respect."
In short we have in the South the familiar and ancient division of social
forces, but instead of two white parties, we now see a white aristocratic
party, which seeks to control the government, monopolise learning, and
supervise the division of labour and the products of labour, struggling
with a democratic party consisting of a few white and many coloured
people, which clamours for a part in the government. That, in plain words,
is the true situation in the South to-day.
_Has the Spirit of Democracy Crossed the Colour Line?_
For democracy is like this: once its ferment begins to work in a nation it
does not stop until it reaches and animates the uttermost man. Though
Tillman's hatred and contempt of the Negro who has aspirations is without
bounds, the spirit which he voiced in his wild campaigns does not stop at
the colour line. Movements are so much greater than men, often going so
much further than men intend. A prophet who stands out for truth as
Tillman did cannot, having uttered it, thereafter limit it nor recall it.
As I have been travelling about the country, how often I have heard the
same animating whisper from the Negroes that Tillman heard in older days
among the poor whites:
"We are free; we are free."
Yes, Tillman and Vardaman are right; education, newspapers, books,
commercial prosperity, are working in the Negro too; he, too, has the
world-old disease of restlessness, ambition, hope. And many a Negro leader
and many a Negro organisation--and that is what is causing the turmoil in
the South, the fear of the white aristocracy--are voicing the equivalent
of Tillman's bold words:
"Awake! arise! or be forever fallen."
Now we may talk all we like about the situation, we may say that the Negro
is wrong in entertaining such ambitions, that his hopes can never be
gratified, that he is doomed forever to menial and inferior
occupations--the plain fact remains (as Tillman himself testifies), that
the democratic spirit _has_ crossed the colour line irrespective of laws
and conventions, that the Negro is restless with the ambition to rise, to
enjoy all that is best, finest, most complete in this world. How humanly
the ancient struggle between aristocracy seeking to maintain its
"superiority" and democracy fighting for "equality" is repeating itself!
And this struggle in the South is complicated, deeply and variously, by
the fact that the lower people are black and of a different race. They
wear on their faces the badge of their position.
What is being done about it?
As every student of history is well aware, no aristocracy ever lets go
until it is compelled to. How bitterly King John fought his barons; how
bitterly the South Carolina gentlemen fought the rude Tillman! Having
control of the government, the newspapers, the political parties, the
schools, an aristocracy surrounds and fortifies itself with every possible
safeguard. It maintains itself at any cost. And that is both human and
natural; that is what is happening in the South to-day. Exactly the same
conflict occurred before the war when the old slave-owning aristocracy
(which everyone now acknowledges to have been wrong) was defending itself
and the institution upon which its existence depended. The old
slave-owning aristocrats believed that they were made of finer clay than
the "poor whites," that their rule was peculiarly beneficent, that if
anything should happen to depose them the country would go to ruin and
destruction. It was the old, old conviction, common to kings and
oligarchies, that they were possessed of a divine right, a special and
perpetual franchise from God.
_The White South Defends Itself_
The present white aristocratic party in the South is defending itself
exactly after the manner of all aristocracies.
In the first place, having control of the government it has entrenched
itself with laws. The moment, for example, that the Negro began to develop
any real intelligence and leadership, the disfranchisement process was
instituted. Laws were so worded that every possible white man be admitted
to the franchise and every possible Negro (regardless of his intelligence)
be excluded. These laws now exist in nearly all the Southern states.
Although the XV Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares that the
right to vote shall not be "denied or abridged ... on account of race or
colour or previous condition of servitude," the South, in defence of its
white aristocracy, has practically nullified this amendment. Governor Hoke
Smith of Georgia, for example, said (June 9, 1906):
Legislation can be passed which will ... not interfere with the right
of any white man to vote, and get rid of 95 per cent. of the Negro
voters.
Not only do the enacted laws disfranchise all possible Negroes, but many
other Negroes who have enough property or education to qualify, are
further disfranchised by the dishonest administration of those laws. For
the machinery of government, being wholly in white hands, the registers
and judges of election have power to keep out any Negro, however fit he
may be. I know personally of many instances in which educated and
well-to-do Negroes have been refused the right to register where ignorant
white men were readily admitted.
The law, after all, in this matter, plays very little figure. The white
majority has determined to control the government utterly and to give the
Negro, whether educated or not, no political influence. That is the plain
truth of the matter. Listen to Hoke Smith in his campaign pledge of last
year:
"I favour, and if elected will urge with all my power, the elimination of
the Negro from politics."
Let us also quote the plain-speaking Vardaman in his address of April,
1907, at Poplarville, Miss.:
How is the white man going to control the government? The way we do
it is to pass laws to fit the white man and make the other people
(Negroes) come to them.... If it is necessary every Negro in the
state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white
supremacy.... The XV Amendment ought to be wiped out. We all agree on
that. Then why don't we do it?
It may be argued that this violent expression does not represent the best
sentiment of the South. It does not; and yet Vardaman, Tillman, Jeff
Davis, Hoke Smith, and others of the type are _elected_, the _majority_ in
their states support them. And I am talking here of politics, which deals
with majorities. In a following chapter I shall hope to deal with the
reconstructive and progressive minority in the South as it expresses
itself especially in the more democratic border states like North
Carolina.
Thus the spirit of democracy has really escaped among the coloured people
and it is running abroad like a prairie fire. Tillman, the prophet, sees
it:
"Every man," he says, "who can look before his nose can see that with
Negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who
can read and write among the coloured race ... will in time encroach upon
our white men."
_Demand Repeal of XV Amendment_
In order, then, to prevent the Negro getting into politics, the Tillmans,
Vardamans, and others declare that the South must strike at the foundation
of his political liberty: the XV Amendment must be repealed. In short, the
moment the Negro meets one test of citizenship, these political leaders
advance a more difficult one: now proposing to take away entirely every
hope of ultimate citizenship. In the recent campaign for the United States
senatorship in Mississippi, Vardaman and John Sharp Williams were quite in
accord on this point, though they disagreed on methods of accomplishing
the purpose. When the political liberty of the Negro has thus been finally
removed, the South, say these men, will again have two parties, and will
be able to take the place it should occupy in the counsels of the nation.
Take the next point in the logic of the political leaders. It is a fact
of common knowledge in history that aristocracies cannot long survive when
free education is permitted among all classes of people. Education is more
potent against oligarchies and aristocracies than dynamite bombs. Every
aristocracy that has survived has had to monopolise learning more or less
completely--else it went to the wall. It is not surprising that there
should have been no effective public-school system in the South before the
war where the poor whites could get an education, or that the teaching of
Negroes was in many states a crime punishable by law. Education enables
the Negro, as Mr. Lane says, to "ascertain his rights and force his way to
assert them." Therefore to prevent his ascertaining his rights he must not
be educated. The undivided supremacy of the white party, it is clearly
discerned, is bound up with Negro ignorance. Therefore we have seen and
are now seeing in certain parts of the South continuous agitation against
the education of Negroes. That is one reason for the feeling in the South
against "Northern philanthropy" which is contributing money to support
Negro schools and colleges.
"What the North is sending South is not money," says Vardaman, "but
dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes. They're demanding
equality."
_A Southern View of Negro Education_
When I was in Montgomery, Ala., a letter was published in one of the
newspapers from Alexander Troy, a well-known lawyer. It did not express
the view of the most thoughtful men of that city, but I am convinced that
it represented with directness and force the belief of a large proportion
of the white people of Alabama. The letter says:
All the millions which have been spent by the state since the war in
Negro education ... have been worse than wasted. Should anyone ask
"Has not Booker Washington's school been of benefit to the Negro?"
the so-called philanthropists of the North would say "yes," but a
hundred thousand white people of Alabama would say "no."... Ask any
gentleman from the country what he thinks of the matter, and a very
large majority of them will tell you that they never saw a Negro
benefited by education, but hundreds ruined. He ceases to be a hewer
of wood and a drawer of water....
Exclude the air and a man will die, keep away the moisture and the
flower will wither. Stop the appropriations for Negro education, by
amendment to the Constitution if necessary, and the school-house in
which it is taught will decay. Not only that, but the Negro will
take the place the Creator intended he should take in the economy of
the world--a dutiful, faithful, and law-abiding servant.
These are Mr. Troy's words and they found reflection in the discussions of
the Alabama legislature then in session. A compulsory education bill had
been introduced; the problem was to pass a law that would apply to white
people, not to Negroes. In this connection I heard a significant
discussion in the state senate. I use the report of it, for accuracy, as
given the next morning in the _Advertiser_:
Senator Thomas said ... he would oppose any bills that would compel
Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge
that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their
children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his
supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.
At this point Senator Lusk arose excitedly to his feet and said:
"Does the Senator from Barbour mean to say that the Negro race is
more ambitious and has more aspirations than the white race?"
"The question of the gentleman ... is an insult to the senate of
Alabama," replied Senator Thomas deliberately. "It is an insult to
the great Caucasian race, the father of all the arts and sciences, to
compare it to that black and kinky race which lived in a state of
black and ignorant savagery until the white race seized it and lifted
it to its present position."
The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an
actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in
Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the
rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of
the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.
In cutting off an $8,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured)
Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said:
"I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic.
God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the
white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn
College."
Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I
have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political
leadership in the South.
_Economic Cause for White Supremacy_
Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to
monopolise government and learning, is because it wishes to supervise the
division of labour and the products of labour. That is the bottom fact.
In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely
and took _all_ the profits. In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage,
he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits. But as the Negro
has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his
own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour. He is no
longer willing to be an abject "hewer of wood and a drawer of water" as he
was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own
business, employ his own professional men, and so on. He will not "keep
his place" as a servant. And that is the basis of all the trouble.
Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into
a statement of this position.
At the American Bankers' Association last fall Governor Swanson of
Virginia said:
"At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions
are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God's help and
our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is."
In other words, the white man will by force hold all political, business
and financial positions; he will be boss, and the Negro must do the menial
work; he must be a servant.
Hoke Smith says in his speech (the italics are mine):
"Those Negroes who are contented to occupy the natural status of their
race, the position of inferiority, _all competition being eliminated
between the whites and the blacks_, will be treated with greater
kindness."
In other words, if the Negro will be contented to keep himself inferior
and not compete with the white man, everything will be all right. And
thus, curiously enough, while Hoke Smith in his campaign was thundering
against railroad corporations for destroying competition, while he was
glorifying the principle of "free and unrestricted trade," he was
advocating the formation of a monopoly of all white men by the elimination
of the competition of all coloured men.
Indeed, we find sporadic attempts to pass laws to compel the Negro to
engage only in certain sorts of menial work. In Texas not long ago a bill
was introduced in the legislature "to confine coloured labour to the farm
whenever it was found in city and town communities to be competing with
white labour." In the last session of the Arkansas legislature Senator
McKnight introduced a bill providing that Negroes be forbidden "from
waiting on white persons in hotels, restaurants, or becoming barbers, or
porters on trains, and to prevent any white man from working for any
Negro."
In a number of towns respectable, educated, and prosperous Negro doctors,
grocers, and others have been forcibly driven out. I visited Monroe, La.,
where two Negro doctors had been forced to leave town because they were
taking the practice of white physicians. In the same town a Negro grocer
was burned out, because he was encroaching on the trade of white grocers.
Neither of the laws above referred to, of course, was passed; and the
instances of violence I have given are sporadic and unusual. For the South
has not followed the dominant political leaders to the extremes of their
logic. Human nature never, finally, goes to extremes: it is forever
compromising, never wholly logical. While perhaps a large proportion of
Southerners would agree perfectly with Hoke Smith or Tillman in his
_theory_ of a complete supremacy of all white men in all respects, as a
matter of fact nearly every white Southerner is encouraging some practical
exception which quite overturns the theory. Tens of thousands of white
Southerners swear by Booker T. Washington, and though doubtful about Negro
education, the South is expending millions of dollars every year on
coloured schools. Vardaman, declaiming violently against Negro colleges,
has actually, in specific instances, given them help and encouragement. I
told how he had cut off an $8,000 appropriation from Alcorn College
because he did not believe in Negro education: but he turned around and
gave Alcorn College $14,000 for a new lighting system, _because he had
come in personal contact with the Negro president of Alcorn College, and
liked him_.
And though the politicians may talk about complete Negro disfranchisement,
the Negro has nowhere been completely disfranchised: a few Negroes vote in
every part of the South.
I once heard a Southerner argue for an hour against the participation of
the Negro in politics, and then ten minutes later tell me with pride of a
certain Negro banker in his city whom we both knew.
"Dr. ----'s all right," he said. "He's a sensible Negro. I went with him
myself when he registered. He ought to vote."
So personal relationships, the solving touch of human nature, play havoc
with political theories and generalities. Mankind develops not by rules
but by exceptions to rules. While the white aristocracy has indeed
succeeded in controlling local government in the South almost completely,
it has not been able to dominate the federal political organisations,
which include many Negroes. And though often opposing education for the
Negro, the aristocracy has not, after all, monopolised education; and the
Negro, in spite of Jim Crow laws and occasional violence, has actually
been pushing ahead, getting a foothold in landownership, entering the
professions, even competing in some lines of business with white men. So
democracy, though black, is encroaching in the world-old way on
aristocracy; how far Negroes can go toward real democratic citizenship in
the various lines--industrial, political, social--no man knows. We can see
the fight; we do not know how the spoils of war will finally be divided.