The American Negro as Ward of The Nation
Grover Cleveland once declared that one American problem for which he
saw no solution whatever was the problem of the Negro. If we were in
The land of the beginning again, that country of our dreams, we should,
of course, not bring the Negro to our shores. It is easy to idealize
our American ancestors, but no doubt they made enough errors in their
time. Their most gigantic blunder, one to make Providence himself
almost despair of humanity, was the Afro-American slave trade. "Man's
inhumanity to man" brings at last the greatest of all sorrows upon him
who works the inhumanity.
The first emotion that thought of the great problem of the Negro must
awaken in the hearts of all Americans is humility. Before Almighty God
we must resolve in this matter to do justice, and more than justice.
Here more than any other place, we must be moved by Christlike kindness
and love. The bane of us Americans, in all periods of our history,
has been carelessness. We have a tendency to let things drift from
bad to worse. Such has been particularly the case with reference to
our attitude toward the Negro. It is high time that we applied to our
public thinking some of that sounder knowledge of society and social
laws which recent years have given to us.
Why should the simple truth give offense to anybody? The Negro in
Africa is a childish barbarian. Left to himself, he has never at any
time or place evolved even the beginning of a civilization. Do what we
may in the way of an education, the mind of the pure Negro, compared to
the white, on the average does not get beyond the age of twelve years.
To ignore this fact is to get into error from the start. Continue
to ignore this fact, especially in the execution of larger national
policies, and we shall invite, as we have done in the past, trouble
that is deep and dangerous. Two facts should be remembered if we would
make real progress in this discussion. The first is that only those who
live among the Negro and so learn to know him at first hand can really
understand his manifold traits. To sit down five hundred miles from the
nearest considerable Negro population and write books about the Negro
is not likely to help much.
The second fact to be kept constantly in mind relates to our population
of mixed blood. Every distinguished leader of the Negro race in the
United States has been part white. In fact, a majority of the more
distinguished have contained only a small infusion of Negro blood. It
is the presence of this Mulatto element which clothes the whole problem
in porcupine quills. It is this portion of our colored population which
is restless and often unhappy to the point of bitterness because of our
present policy with reference to the Negro. If there were no mixed
population to consider our problem would not be nearly so difficult.
I have always felt that superficial minds have a peculiar tendency to
lay hold of the Negro problem. For instance, witness the illogical
claims of some of those who think they are the special friends of the
Negro and who continually emphasize the necessity for an enlarged
sphere for Negro opportunity. On the one hand they boast of the very
great progress the Negro has made during his half century of freedom.
On one page they will emphasize Negro accomplishment. More than half
of our adult Negro population, for instance, can read and write. Tens
of thousands of Negro families own their own farms or city homes. An
even greater number of Negroes are attending high schools and colleges.
Then, on the very next page, the same author will take pains to show
that the Negro is most foully treated. He is kept in ignorance and
poverty. The wicked white population which surrounds him denies him
every advantage and means of progress. Of course both of these tales
can not be true at the same time.
Those of us who grew up among the Negroes and have lived with them on
terms of mutual kindness and of helpfulness all our lives are inclined
to the conclusion that it is easy to exaggerate the progress of the
Negro. The record of what we people of the South have done and have
tried to do for the Negro during these fifty years is an open book to
all the world. It need not be described or analyzed here. Our task has
not been easy. In general, I think we have tried to do it in a way to
win both the approval of our own conscience and the commendation of our
fellow citizens of other sections of the country. Yet we have acted not
only according to our means, but also according to our knowledge of
what could be accomplished. In so far as we have failed we simply ask
that our fellow citizens of the North and West make special effort to
understand the true cause of our failure.
This brings us to the main issue of this discussion. The Negro problem
is not peculiar to the South. The Negro problem is the burden of the
nation as a whole. The Negro was brought here during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries on the merchant ships which sailed mostly from
the ports of Great Britain and New England. Some few put forth from
Philadelphia and New York, but none from the South. This was not due to
the fact that all Southern people were morally above taking advantage
of the African slave trade. It was because commerce on the high seas
was not developed in the South. We were then wholly agricultural.
But the fact remains. The Negroes were brought to us by the ships
of old England and New England. For this terrible error of all the
English-speaking world of colonial times we in the South have paid and
paid and paid. We have paid by reason of the very fact of slavery,
which continued so long among us because no one knew how to make an
end of it. We have paid and are still paying in the form of the most
inefficient labor force in the world. We paid in the War Between the
States and during the Reconstruction, until extinction threatened us;
and we still pay. Not the least portion of our bill is the disesteem
in which we are often so wrongly held by those of our own language and
blood throughout the world. Yet we patiently await the day of complete
understanding, of perfect reconciliation.
How long will it be before our modern knowledge of the fundamental
facts of American history are accepted and used in our political and
social thinking? Slavery continued in the South and died out in the
North not because our people were different at the start. They were
quite the same. But the climate was different. Crops were different. In
the South the slaves produced cotton, tobacco, and sugar-cane during
a long growing season, and hence slaves were profitable to their
masters. In the North where they produced only food and fodder crops
during a short growing season, slaves were an economic loss. Short
summers and long winters do not permit the Negro to become a permanent
inhabitant of Northern climes. So the few Northern slaves were mostly
sold South and total emancipation followed.
Meanwhile, let it not be forgotten that during the period when cotton
was king, the North shared with the South in the profits of slave
labor. The economic system of our country was based upon cotton
and tobacco. For a full generation it took the following form: the
South sent her products to Europe, America received, in return, not
commodities but capital. This capital was invested in railroads and
other public improvements. Pennsylvania, New York and New England
furnished the articles of manufacture which the South needed at prices
much higher than obtained in Europe. These high prices were maintained
through a protective tariff. The profits of slave labor were thus
divided between the South and the North. When, in the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, Virginia led the border states in demanding the
Constitutional prohibition of African slave trade, the New England
delegates joined with those of the far South in keeping this nefarious
traffic open for twenty-one years more. When we say to-day that the
problem is in every sense a national problem, we base our statement
not only upon present necessity--but also upon the basis of historical
facts which lead to definite conclusions.
Finally, the title of this chapter has a wider significance which I
would emphasize with all possible vigor. In maintaining that the Negro
is a ward of the nation I wish to place emphasis upon WARD. The Negro's
presence among us requires an ever greater interest and care on our
part. It is high time that the people of the South made a wider appeal
to their fellow citizens of the North and West. A stupendous moral
responsibility is involved in the presence of these ten millions of
black people. Not only the past, but the future, too, is looking down
upon us. All Americans may well realize that in this, as in so many
other matters, we are being weighed in the balance as a nation. As a
people we are fortunate in being quick to let bygones be bygones. We
of the South know that if other sections come to understand us and
our peculiar problem better, not only we, but they also, will be the
ultimate gainers. The sooner the nation unites in looking upon our
ten millions of colored folk as ten millions of children for whose
protection and care we are morally responsible, the sooner we shall all
be placed upon solid ground.
Let me repeat here what I have been constantly touching upon in
these chapters. The maxims of our democracy are not for universal
application. Some Europeans are a hundred years, others five hundred
years, behind us in the process of democratic evolution. We may
guess, but we can not know, how long they will be in catching up.
How far behind them the Negro may be in these things I leave for the
anthropologists to determine or surmise. But what we of the South
assuredly know, because of our experience, is just this--to treat the
Negro as the political equal of the white is to do grave injustice not
only to the white, but to the Negro as well. We can not justly enforce
the laws among children that we make for adults. To enforce the white
man's law, in all cases, upon the Negro is an injustice so great that
the effort often causes sorrow to every normal mind among us. Cared for
and protected as a child, the Negro's better qualities are developed
and made evident by his works. But when he is burdened by moral and
legal responsibilities which neither his mind nor his character is
prepared to bear, in the vast majority of cases he breaks and falls
under the load. The errors of our mistaken policies during the past
fifty years have caused unfathomable suffering among our Negroes. Our
country took its foolish fling and sowed its wild oats of democratic
Utopia during Reconstruction days. We proved then that the vote is
an unmitigated curse to the Negro. From this curse he still suffers.
We were forced by Federal act to make him everywhere subject to the
white man's civil and criminal law. Often enough the white man's law
sends him to the penitentiary for twenty years when twenty days of
hard work upon the public highway would be punishment enough for his
unthinking crime. In this matter we have simply tried to put a gallon
of water into a quart bottle. So we have spilled much water and come
near breaking the bottle. The people of the Philippine Islands are,
on the average, much more highly developed than our Negroes. Yet the
better advised among them realize that they are not yet ready to get on
without our supervision and help.
Let me not be misunderstood. I am not here trying to offer any
permanent solution for certain aspects of this problem. That solution
if ultimately sought will require, for many years, the painstaking and
united efforts of our best thinkers in all sections. I am now merely
stating certain facts and principles upon which any future solution
whatsoever must be based. All I ask is that we take these facts into
every phase of our argument. The Negro is not yet prepared, mentally or
morally, to share all the results of our civilization with us. Amid the
great complexities of modern social and political life, it is difficult
indeed to prepare our white electorate to bear the responsibilities
of government. Wherever the Negro numbers twenty per cent of our
population, his vote on election day would endanger democracy. In every
state where he lives there are and will be vicious white demagogues who
will work upon his credulity to mislead him and misuse him politically.
Where he numbers forty per cent of the population, his suffrage would
throw us back to Reconstruction times and make democracy impossible.
Let us not refuse to shoulder the full burden of this responsibility.
But the burden belongs rightfully to the Nation as a whole, not to
the people of the South alone. We of the South know full well that,
once rightly understood by thoughtful minds in other sections, we
can ask the nation to undertake those larger policies of reform and
readjustment which conditions undoubtedly require.
[Illustration: Revealing the Mysteries at Midnight]