The African slave-trade was born of the desire of certain Europeans to
acquire wealth without working. It was to fill the need for a cheap
labor supply in developing new territory that Negro slaves were first
brought to the western world by the Spanish, Dutch, and English during
the 16th and 17th centuries. Contact of white with black was thus
established on the basis of the economic subjection of the one to the
other. This subjection extended to every sphere of life, physical,
mental and social. Out of this contact there arose certain definite
relations and consequent problems of adjustment. It is the sum of
these relations which we (rightly or wrongly) describe as the Negro
Problem.
Unfortunately, the spell of mere words is still very strong, and when
people speak of the Negro Problem they carry over into the discussion
a certain mental attitude derived from the original meaning of the
word, Problem. In arithmetic, a sum to be worked out; in chemistry, to
find by experiment a certain re-agent; in geography, to chart a
puzzling current—all these are problems in the primary sense, and all
these involve the idea of solution by him who approaches them. That is
to say, they can be solved =by thinking=. And those who think loosely
call up this idea of solution by thinking whenever they see the word
"problem". So we have been pestered with this, that, and the other
"solution" of the Negro problem. Therefore, it is well to bear in mind
that a race problem is always the sum of the relations between two or
more races in a state of friction.
Because when we understand this we are in a fair way to find that
these relations are not to be explained on the basis of the thinking
or feeling of either party. They must be interpreted in terms of human
relations and in the order in which human relations are established:
(1) economic, (2) social, (3) political and (4) civic. So understood,
a knowledge of the historical conditions under which these relations
developed is seen to be of the greatest value in understanding the
problem. For this is all that our intellects can do in the case of a
racial problem—to help us to understand. The actual work of adjustment
must be fought out or worked out; becomes, that is to say, a struggle
to be settled by the contending races with forces more complex than
the purely intellectual ones of argument and proof. Let us first
consider, then, the conditions under which the relations between the
black and white races were established in America.
During the period of colonization the land of America was granted by
European kings to certain gentlemen who had no intention of working
with the hands. Nevertheless working with the hands was the only
method of extracting that wealth which was the object of their
ownership, it was necessary, then, to obtain a supply of those persons
who could do this work for them; and to insure this, it was imperative
that these persons should not own land themselves: they must be a
permanently landless class; since it was unthinkable then as now that
one should work the land of others for a part of the fruits if he
could work his own land for all of the fruits. So there was begun in
America the process of establishing such a class. Confining ourselves
to the territory which became the United States, we may say that the
first attempt was made to enslave the Indians, and when this failed to
work, white people were imported from Europe as chattel slaves. All
through the colonial period this importation continued with its
consequent effects on the social and political life of the colonies.
Most people will be surprised to learn that the first Fugitive Slave
Law was framed, not in the south, but in the north, and was made not
for black but for white laborers. This was the Massachusetts act of
1630 "Respecting Masters, Servants and Laborers". A reading of this
one act would destroy all those pretty illusions about "our fathers
and Freedom" which we get from the official fairy tales—I mean the
school histories.
Side by side with the economic subjection of white men there grew up
the economic subjection of black men, and for the same reason. These
were of alien blood—and cheaper. Therefore, the African slave trade
outgrew the European slave trade, although the latter continued, in a
lessening degree, down to the third or fourth decade of the 19th
century. Negroes were brought here to work, to be exploited; and they
were allowed no illusions as to the reason for their being here. Those
white men who owned the land brought them here to extract the wealth
which was in the land. The white aristocrat did not buy black slaves
because he had a special hatred or contempt for anything black, nor
because he believed that Negroes were inferior to white people. On the
contrary he bought them precisely because, as working cattle, they
were superior to whites.
Being of alien blood, these black people were =outside= of the social
and political system to which they were introduced and, quite
naturally, beyond the range of such sympathies as helped to soften the
hard brutalities of the system. They were, from the beginning, more
ruthlessly exploited than the white workers. Thus they had their place
made for them—at the bottom.
Now it is a social law—not yet proclaimed by our college
sociologists—that whenever a certain social arrangement is beneficial
to any class in a society, that class soon develops the psychology of
its own advantage and creates insensibly the ethics which will justify
that social arrangement. Men to whom the vicarious labor of slaves
meant culture and refinement, wealth, leisure and education, naturally
came—without any self-deception, to see that slavery was =right=. As
Professor Loria points out, there is an economic basis to moral
transformations in any society which is built on vicarious production.
We turn now to the resulting conditions of the slaves. They were at
the bottom, the most brutally exploited and, therefore, the most
despised section of the laboring class. For it is a consequent of the
law stated above that those who are exploited must needs be despised
by those who exploit them. This mental attitude of the superior class
(which makes the laws of that society in which it is dominant) will
naturally find its expression in those actions by which they establish
their relations to the inferior class. And whenever anyone is to be
kicked it is usually the man farthest down who gets it, because he is
most contiguous to the foot. So the Negro having been given a place at
the bottom in the economic life of the nation, came to occupy
naturally the place at the bottom in the nation's thinking. I say, the
nation's advisedly; because the dominant ideas of any society which is
already divided into classes are as a rule the ideas preservative of
the existing arrangements. But since those arrangements include a
class on top, the dominant ideas will generally coincide with the
interest of that class. The ethics of its own advantage, then, will be
diffused by that class throughout that society—will be, if need arise
imposed upon the other classes, since every ruling class has always
controlled the public instruments for the diffusion of ideas.
In this way the slave-holding section of the dominant class in America
first diffused its own necessary contempt for the Negro among the
other sections of the ruling class, and the ideas of this class as a
whole became through the agency of press, pulpit and platform, the
ideas of "the American People" on the Negro.
In further application of the materialistic method to this subject, it
is curious and interesting to note how the southern attitude toward
the Negro changed with the changing industrial system. When the
wasteful agricultural methods of chattel slavery had exhausted the
soil of the south and no new land loomed up on the horizon of the
system, slavery began to decay. The planters of that section settled
down into the patriarchal type of family relations with their slaves,
who were then simply a means of keeping the master's hands free from
the contamination of work and not a means of ever-increasing profits.
Slavery was then in a fair way to die of its own weight. But with the
invention of Whitney's cotton-gin, which enabled one man to do the
work of three hundred, cotton came to the front as the chief
agricultural staple in America. The black slave became a source of
increasing revenue as a fertilizer of capital. The idyllic relations
of the preceding forty years came to a sudden end. Increased profits
demanded increased exploitation and the ethics of advantage dictated
the despising of the Negro.
De Bow's Review, the great organ of southern opinion, appeared, and in
serious scientific articles maintained the proposition that the Negro
was not a man but a beast. About that time (and conformably to that
opinion) the practice was begun of spelling the word, Negro, with a
small "n"—a practice still current in America, even in the socialist
press.
In the meanwhile, the system of industrial production known as the
machine system developed in the north. The factory proletariat whose
condition determined that of the other northern workers could
fertilize capital more rapidly and cheaply than the slaves. This form
of production (and its products) came into competition with the slave
system and the tremendous conflict reflected itself upon the political
field as a struggle for the restriction of slavery within its original
bounds. The Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, the Missouri
Compromise, the Dred Scot Decision, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill,—all
these were political episodes in the competition between the two main
sections of the dominant class; and in the conflict each used the
army, the navy, the executive, the courts and the legislature to
strengthen its own position.
When the business interests of the north had definitely captured the
powers of government in the general election of 1860, the southerners
seceded because they knew too well what governmental power was
generally used for. They wanted a government which would be the
political reflex of their own economic dominance. One can see now why
the northern statesmen like Lincoln insisted that the preservation of
the Union was the paramount issue and not the freedom of slaves.
Indeed, Lincoln punished those officers of the army who in the early
days of the war dared to act upon that assumption. And not all the
arguments of Greeley, Conway and Governor Andrews could make any
change in his attitude. Not until he saw that it was expedient "as a
war measure" did he issue the "Emancipation Proclamation" which
brought 187,000 Negro soldiers into the northern army.
Emancipation gave to the Negroes a new economic status—the status of
free wage-laborers, competing with other wage-laborers for work. They
who had worked to create wealth for others were now turned loose
without wealth or land to shift for themselves in a world already
hostile to them. The mental attitude of the white south had been
shaped by three centuries of slavery and was hard to get rid of. It
was difficult for them to think of black labor under any form but that
of slavery and they naturally turned to compulsion as the proper mode
of obtaining work from their former slaves. This attitude was well
expressed in the Black Codes of the southern states during the fall
and winter of 1865–66. As soon as the end of the hostilities gave them
a free hand at home they began to give legislative expression to the
new conditions. They framed new constitutions and new laws. "But it
was seen that the Negro had no privilege of voting in the first
instance, and it was not to be expected that the right would be
accorded him under the new state constitutions; no guarantee that
justice should be done him was exacted. These new constitutions were
formed, the legislatures met, laws were made, senators and
representatives to Congress were chosen; but the Negro was not only
not admitted to any participation in the government, but the new
legislatures shocked the northern sense of justice by the cruel and
revengeful laws which they enacted. The barbarity of the most odious
slave-code was, under various disguises, applied to the Negro in his
new condition of freedom". Even before the resentment of the national
legislature had taken form, the Ku-Klux Klan, the Knights of the White
Camelias, the Society of the Pale Faces, and other bands of organized
representatives of culture had begun to do their bloody work of
terrorizing Negroes into economic and social subjection. And all this
before any steps had been taken to extend the suffrage to Negroes.
When the northerners investigated these conditions they met with such
fierce and unreasoning hostility on the part of the south that they
found it necessary to arm the Negro with the ballot in his own
defense. And yet, professional southerners like Tom Dixon, Tom Watson,
Ben Tillman Vardaman and Blease pretend to their ignorant or forgetful
countrymen that the present attitude of the south was caused in the
first instance by a reaction against "Negro domination", social and
political which the north had forced upon it.
The subsequent developments can not be explained by those amiable
enthusiasts who see in the "freedom" of Negroes an act of genuine
humanitarianism on the part of the north. For, after northern
business-men had secured the government—and their thousands of miles
of railroad-grants—they promptly dropped the mask of humanitarian
hypocrisy, and left the Negroes to shift for themselves. During the
disputed count of the votes in the Hayes-Tilden electoral contest in
1877 a deal was arranged by which the northerners agreed to withdraw
the army which protected the Negroes, newly-granted franchise in the
south, on condition that the southerners should concede the election
to Hayes. The new industrial order wanted above all things to retain
control of the government which it had captured during the war, and
upon the altar of this necessity it sacrificed the Negro in the south,
just as Lincoln had done in the early days of the war. From that time
the suppression of the Negro vote, the growth of "Jim Crow"
legislation, lynching and segregation have continued with the
continuing consent of Republican congressman, presidents and supreme
courts. And through it all, Negro "leaders" like Mr. Washington have
found it very much worth their while to administer anodynes both to
the Negro and the Nation, to reconcile the one to a bastard democracy
and the other to a mutilated manhood.
It would be well to trace here the nature of the economic changes
which have given certain new and malignant features to the relations
between black and white in America. The effect upon the free laborers
of the sudden influx of black competitors in the labor-market; the
consequent attitude of the labor-unions; the political and social
reflex of all this, with the vestiges of the old, re-developing under
the new conditions—all these are parts of the problem. But space will
not permit, and these considerations will be taken up in a second
paper. Yet I may indicate here the gist of my conclusions by quoting
the words of a well-known Southerner, the Rev. Quincy Ewing. "The race
problem—is not that the Negro is what he is in relation to the white
man—the white man's inferior—but this, rather: How to keep him what he
is in relation to the white man; how to prevent his ever achieving or
becoming that which would justify the belief on his part, or on the
part of other people, that he and the white man stand on common human
ground."
The economic necessities of a system of vicarious production led to
the creation of a racial labor-caste; the social adjustment consequent
upon this and upon its development created a social sentiment inimical
to this class, and its continuance requires a continuance of this
sentiment in our society; this is the pivotal fact. And the
unavoidable conclusion is, that when this system of vicarious
production disappears, the problem which is its consequence will
disappear also—and not till then, in spite of all the culture,
individual or collective, which that class may achieve.