student of history have to resort to any intangible and indefinite thing
like a feeling of revenge or a desire for political and party advantage
as an explanation of the motives of those who conceived and passed by
the Fourteenth Amendment? This Amendment was passed by the friends of
freedom to keep the Thirteenth Amendment from being a mere farce. They
sought thereby to secure for the Negro the protecting power of the
ballot, as the only effective means of influencing his civil and
political interests in a government like this. There was no thought or
hope of making him dominant in a country that was predominantly white.
But the backers of the Amendment sought to lead the state governments to
this reasonable end by inducing rather than by compelling them. The
effect of this amendment was to be based on impartial mathematics, and
the choice was to be left to the majority of voters of the state. The
state was simply not to have a power in the national government based on
a population which the state itself did not recognize as a part of its
own citizenry.
Up to 1865 nearly all the states of the Union had restricted the right
to vote to white men. After the Negro was freed some Northern states
voluntarily removed this restriction. The friends of freedom hoped that
the Fourteenth Amendment would induce others to do so, by making it to
the advantage of their national representative power. But from the
ratification of the Amendment in 1868 to 1870 not a single state, with
the sole exception of Minnesota, heeded the warning or yielded to the
inducement of the suffrage clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it
might be noted in passing that there were not enough Negroes in
Minnesota to make any difference either way. Up to 1870 fourteen states
still restricted the suffrage to white men. This obstinacy on the part
of the reactionaries caused the friends of freedom in 1870 to ratify the
Fifteenth Amendment, which substituted _must_ for persuasion and
virtually penalized discriminations against any race in the matter of
the suffrage. What evidence is there that any of these steps were taken
in a spirit of revenge? Revenge usually acts in haste and without
waiting on the development of other sufficient causes. The persuasion of
the Fourteenth Amendment was not resorted to till three years after the
close of the war, and when there had risen the plainest need for even
more than persuasion in the interests of justice and humanity. And the
Fifteenth Amendment did not appear till five years after the war, when
even the Fourteenth Amendment had failed to persuade. Why should revenge
wait so long and advance so reluctantly? It seems that the friends of
freedom, who had the political power in their hands, were slow to anger
and plenteous in hope.
This suffrage amendment was to be a bulwark to the liberties not only of
black men but of all men in America; it was directed not only against
the "Black Laws" of the South but against political and civil slavery
everywhere in the nation. It is interesting to note that of the states
who were members of the Union up to 1865, only five can be listed in the
honor roll of those who have never discriminated against the Negro
voter: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
The constant question raised by these discriminating laws is: What is a
Negro? When are we are going to discriminate against a fellow, we must
be careful and definite in pointing him out. And so each set of
discriminating laws contains its own definition of the word _Negro_, and
the definitions have differed widely. At first in some parts of the
North the Negro was defined as any person who was _visibly_ colored. It
is plain, however, that if the matter is left to the eyes, millions of
American "Negroes" will have to be taken into the Caucasian race,--and
so most of the state legislatures reduced their definition to the finer
discriminations of mathematics. These mathematical definitions vary all
the way from one fourth of the blood of the black man to a mere one
sixteenth; but some laws of the gallant South go so far as to say that
if one has even one drop of Negro blood in his veins he is a Negro. Thus
it is seen that "the Negro," so far as the United States are concerned,
is an arbitrary creature of law and includes within its scope hundreds
of thousands of people who by every law of God and nature and reason are
members of the Caucasian race, principally Anglo-Saxons. For whatever
the legal definition, it is the common practice in the United States to
class as Negroes all persons known to have any part of Negro blood. The
white American therefore ascribes the same potency to Negro blood which
he ascribes to the blood of Jesus Christ,--that it only takes one drop
"to make you whole." The statement needs no proof that there are
thousands of people in America who are related to the Negro and do not
know it, and others who know it but also know that its acknowledgment
would not increase their comforts in life.
It was especially necessary to define the term _Negro_ when the
intermarriage laws were being considered. These queer laws have always
had the support of the vast majority of white people, wherever the Negro
has become a considerable part of the population, and especially after
the Negro was freed. I call them "queer laws" because they always, in
spirit and in effect if not in letter, tend to make the naturally
honorable relation of marriage a worse crime than the naturally
dishonorable practice of illicit intercourse,--which abuse, however, is
practiced chiefly by the men of the stronger against the women of the
weaker group. For this illicitness there is in practice no punishment,
while the sure penalties of intermarriage range all the way from a fine
of one hundred dollars to ten years in the penitentiary,--and the danger
of still more horrible extra-legal penalties. There could be but one
result of thus outlawing decency and tolerating indecency,--of putting
honor under the foot of dishonor,--and that result has been attained in
the United States: namely, millions of interracial illegitimates, and
some admixture of Caucasian blood in at least nine-tenths of the
American Negro group.
Such is the American group against which these discriminating laws have
directly and indirectly aimed. In the historic decade (1860 to 1870)
many forms of discrimination and distinction began to appear in the laws
of the South: in public travel, in the courts and in the matter of the
suffrage. In 1865 and 1866 "Jim Crow" laws were passed in Florida,
Mississippi and Texas, but not in the other states until 1881 when
Tennessee started the new era of "Jim Crow," which has since overrun the
whole South and threatens, as did slavery itself, to invade the North.
Is it not queer that this passion should have gained such headway so
long after slavery? It would seem that the more the Negro advances in
education and refinement, the less acceptable he becomes to a large
number of white people. In North Carolina or South Carolina a Negro may
be taken into the white people's car if he be a criminal or a lunatic;
but if he be a gentleman and a scholar, it will be a serious offense
against earth and heaven, subject to heavy fines,--and when his train
reaches Georgia, even the conductor may be fined one thousand dollars!
This race distinction on the cars serves no useful, honorable purpose
which classified passenger tickets would not serve. But of all the
humiliation, wrong and robbery possible against a free people, the devil
and the Sicilian tyrants working together could never have devised a
more ingenious scheme than the "Jim Crow" car.
As to the courts. Until 1870 the laws of Iowa forbade the Negro to
practice law; many states sought to invalidate or restrict the testimony
of a Negro witness against a white person; and most reluctantly of all
has any state conceded the Negro the right to be a juror, even where
both parties to the suit are Negroes. In law and in theory the Fifteenth
Amendment, March 30, 1870, repealed all statutes and nullified all
constitutional clauses discriminating against people on account of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude, but in practice in the United
States the Negro is still handicapped as a lawyer, discredited as a
witness and almost universally excluded from juries. This is queer again
in the face of the almost unanimous testimony of the courts to the
effect that the Negro juryman is more inclined to convict a real Negro
criminal than is the white juryman.
The Reconstruction constitutions of the South, in 1868 and 1869,
following the Fourteenth Amendment, gave the Negroes the ballot. It is
needless to say that this was not the will of the white majority. And it
must always be said of these Reconstruction governments that, whatever
faults they may have had, they made the first, and up to the present
time the _last_ serious and straight-going efforts to establish real
democratic-republican organization in the South. In this era the
Congress of the United States was in the hands of the friends of
freedom, and in 1866 the Negro was given the ballot in all the
territories of the United States. On June 8, 1867, the Congress gave the
ballot to the Negroes of the District of Columbia, over the President's
veto and against the will of the white inhabitants. In a popular vote on
the proposition the city of Washington returned 6521 votes against
enfranchising the blacks and 35 votes for it; while Georgetown returned
the interesting figures of 812 votes against the proposition, and for it
one vote. This record of fifty years ago is sufficient to indicate what
would be the conditions in Washington, D. C., if it were left to its own
devices.
Such are the facts of obstinate resistance to the Negro's actual
freedom, which brought the friends of freedom in Congress rather slowly
around to the necessity of adopting the Fourteenth, and when that
failed, the Fifteenth Amendment. I repeat that if, after the passage of
the Thirteenth Amendment, the legislatures and courts and other
creatures of the popular suffrage had shown a genius for doing justice
to the Negro, it is likely that his friends in Congress would have
forgotten him entirely, that the two subsequent Amendments would not
have been proposed and that he would have been left outside of the
Constitutional pale of citizenship indefinitely. The Thirteenth,
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments put the enemies of freedom
successively on trial and each time they failed. Yea, even against the
decree of the Fifteenth Amendment have they defeated democracy by
indirection and duplicity. If the aim of the Fifteenth Amendment should
be finally defeated, it would be the ultimate failure of democracy,--but
there are late indications that in the end it will not fail. And of all
the many-angled struggles which the colored people are supporting in
this country for their advancement and ultimate security, the central
aim of every fighting line should be full-fledged citizenship.
There is no doubt about the truth of the plain statement that the Negro
race in the United States of America does not get a "square deal." But
we observe frequent efforts to minimize the appearance of the great
wrong by the ambiguous statement that it is "natural" under the
circumstances. I call the statement ambiguous, because in one sense of
the word every fact of life and history is _natural_: all virtue and
vice, lust and love are natural. Many natural things are very
undesirable, and fortunately some of them are not indestructible or
unalterable. It may be natural for the white race to disfranchise,
"Jim-Crow" and burn Negroes, but the Negro is _naturally_ opposed to
that procedure. Is it not natural for the victim to be uncomfortable
under these things, to complain against them, to organize and fight
them? The naturalness of injustice, if it be natural, does not make it
one whit more just. It is natural, or at least it is historic, that men
will rob and commit murder and bastardy--but there seems to be something
in man which is higher than nature and which fights against these
things.
The same sort of fallacy in reasoning is resorted to when the effort is
made to palliate the wrongs done in one section by stating the fact that
the same or similar wrongs have been done, are being done or will be
done to the Negro in other sections or eventually in all sections of the
United States. What on earth has this to do with the wrong, except to
make it more horrible? Does it justify wrong to show that other people
did it, do it or may do it? If so, then sin itself ought to be the
fairest thing in the world, for all men in all ages and all countries
have committed it. The poor sinning South pains-takingly points out and
tabulates every single instance of its own wrongs against black men
which can be found repeated in the North,--and when the North slips from
virtue in the same path, it cries out Pharisaically that such horrors
are common or even popular in the South. If mere ubiquity justifies,
remember that the devil's work is ubiquitous, too.
Again, I have read books and arguments that sought to minimize the
importance of industrial, civic and political discriminations against
the Negro by saying not only that these practices are "not confined to
any section of the country," but also that such-and-such an evil did not
even "originate" in the South. We are told with great unction that
Philadelphia and San Francisco once excluded Negroes from street cars
altogether, that slavery originated in the commerce of the North, and
that Jim-Crowism was first met in Massachusetts. I have heard that the
devil was first met in the Garden of Eden, but he is none the less the
devil. And as to origin, who cares where the smallpox or the yellow
fever originated? It is their nature, not their origin, which makes them
horrible.
There is really no room for one section to boast or to proudly accuse
the other. So far as the Negro's experiences go, both sections need to
improve perhaps in their ideals but certainly in their practices
respecting democratic liberties and human brotherhood. Let the Negro and
his friends realize that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the
United States Constitution represent not a backward step but a stride
forward in civilization, and that they were fostered and ratified, not
for the sake of the temporary burden which they may have put upon the
white race in the South, but for the benefit of all races, at all times,
in all America.
John W. Cromwell. The American Negro Bibliography of the Year
The following resolution adopted at the last meeting is
self-explanatory: "That the Academy publish a list of books, pamphlets,
magazines and newspaper articles bearing on the Negro Question, with
appropriate comment." A letter sent to the Library of Congress brought
from the Chief Bibliographer the following reply: "Titles of books
relating to the Negro may be found by means of the Cumulative Book
Index, published monthly; articles in magazines, etc., are listed in the
Readers' Guide to periodical literature and its supplements, and in the
annual magazine subject index; legal literature is indexed in the index
to legal periodicals and the literature of medicine in the Index
Medicus. These publications are all subject indexes and to approach the
matter from the side of Negro authorship it would be necessary to start
with some such book as "Who's Who of the Colored Race," which would
enable the compiler to pick out the Negro authors. It would then be
necessary to go through the indexes to see whether these authors had
published anything during the current year. A source of additional
titles," continues the letter, "would be the periodicals devoted to the
interests of the Negro race. These frequently note pamphlets, privately
or obscurely printed books which do not get into the regular lists."
This reference to "Who's Who," a book just issued, shows that the
Academy is beginning this work at a very propitious time. One year ago
"Who's Who" was only a prospect; now it is a realization, the most
important this year in this field of bibliography. Its price, $6.00, may
restrict its circulation to public libraries, colleges and universities
until some worthier publication appears to take its place by the side of
similarly named publications which include leaders of thought and action
the world over.
Scarcely less important is the Negro Year Book, by Monroe N. Work, in
charge of Division of Records and Research at Tuskegee. This is an
annual encyclopedia of the Negro, for its scope includes the population
of the earth by races, the periodicals published by Africans, "where
black men govern," Negroes and Spanish Explorers, Negro Slavery in
Colonies and in States, Abolition, Agitation, Slavery and Religious
Denominations, Slave Insurrections, the Underground Railroad, Civil
Status, Civil and Political Rights, Negro Soldiers, The Church,
Education Before and Since the Civil War, Arts, Occupations, Inventions,
Agriculture, Crime, Health, Population, National and Fraternal
Organizations, Social Settlements, Periodical publications and
bibliographies pertaining to the Negro. In no other publication of more
than four hundred pages is so much information assembled. The price, 35
cents, should warrant its circulation wherever there is found school,
college or church, student or professional man who affects a serious
study of our relative conditions and their adaptation to the broader
ones of country and civilization.
"The Negro," by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Ph. D., No. 91 in the Home
University Library of H. Holt & Co., New York, traces in twelve chapters
the evolution of the race from Ethiopia and Egypt, from its original
habitat, from the Cross and the Crescent to the period when the power
and the influence of the race were generally recognized, up to the rise
of the slave trade, with its blighting effect on conditions in the New
World, and the introduction of the Negro Problem in the United States.
Suggestions for further reading follow. An index and maps add to its
adaptation and value.
"Education of the Negro Before 1860," by Carter G. Woodson, Ph. D.
(Macmillan), embraces the results of an intensive study of educational
conditions prevalent in the United States from Colonial days to the
Civil War. The influence of the Quaker, the Jesuit and the Abolitionist
is traced to its fruitage, contributory to the laws which gave the
public school system in the South. This book deserves to be consulted by
the investigator and the student.
"The Black Man's Burden," by William H. Holtzclaw, principal of the
Utica (Miss.) N & I. Institute for the training of colored young men and
women, is also a book of the year. The introduction is written by Booker
T. Washington. It tells the story of the establishment of a school in
the black belt of Mississippi hardly less thrilling though on a smaller
scale than that of Tuskegee itself, of which the author is a graduate.
Among publications of a sociological nature are "Colored People of
Chicago, Ill.," L. H. Bowen; "Industries Among Negroes in St. Louis," by
W. A. Crossland; "The Negro as a Dependent, Defective and Delinquent,"
by C. H. McChord; "Urban Conditions in Harlem," by E. F. Dycloff
(Outlook, 108:949-54); ditto, by E. D. Jones (Outlook, 109:597); "Manual
of Freedmen's Progress," by Francis H. Warren, Secretary of Freedmen's
Progress Commission. This volume of 372 pages was authorized by Act 47,
Public Acts of Michigan, 1915.
Political conditions of the Negro Problem are discussed in the
"Aftermath of the Civil War," by Powell Clayton; "Political History of
Slavery," by J. Z. George; "Studies in South: Parties and Politics of
Georgia," by C. M. Thompson; "President Lincoln's Attitude," by H. W.
Wilbur; "Police Control in South Carolina," by H. M. Henry; "Slavery
Early Heritage of the South"; "America's Greatest Problem," R. W.
Shufeldt. Though all these are white authors, they are in an objective
sense inclusive in an American Negro Bibliography.
"Negro Wit and Humor," by. M. F. Harmon; "Mexico as an Asylum for the
Negro," by O. M. Donaldson; "Morals and Manners Among Negro Americans,"
by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois are other titles that reflect current thought.
When we invade the realm of the magazine, the newspaper or other
periodical we find a variety of topics and different, phases of the same
general subject. The range discussed in the magazine intensifies popular
thought to a greater degree than the reading of books by the relatively
smaller number of individuals.
"Thinking White Down South," in Outlook 111:9-10, does not on its face
suggest its pertinence to this question.
"My View of Segregation Laws," by Booker T. Washington, in New Republic,
51:113-14.
The Negro Exposition at Richmond is given greater prestige in the Review
of Reviews (52:85-8) than elsewhere. "The Country's Attitude Towards the
Negro," by Oswald G. Villard, in Nation (99:788-40), and the same
publication (100:187-8); the conferring of the Spingarn medal to E. E.
Just, member of this Academy; "The Education of the Mind of the Negro
Child in School and Society" (1:357-60), and "The Southern Tribute to a
Negro," in Dial (59:409-10).
"Segregation and the Vote" embraces more than a third of fifty titles
not otherwise mentioned. The recent opinion of the United States Supreme
Court dealing with what is popularly known as the Grandfather clauses of
Southern constitutions and statutes, is discussed in 8 Law and
Bankruptcy, 8:236-6. The Literary Digest (Vol. 15:5) gives a symposium
on the subject. The Nation prophesies the end of the Negro politically
in 100 years (100:443 of April 12, 1915). The Independent on the other
hand (Vol. 88:3-4), sees the wrong of these clauses righted. The Outlook
in 110:486-7 (June 30, 1915), gives another view.
Other ways of discrimination by which the purpose of the Fifteenth
Amendment may yet be defeated will be found in "Everybody" (33:251-2).
"The South and the Negro Vote" forms the title of an elaborate article
in the North American Review, by J. C. Hemphill (202:213-19), while "Our
Debt to the Negro" is the theme in Miss. R. 38:772. Sociological
features, Homes and Housing, as a general proposition, is considered in
Survey, 34:67, 158-9; Business Men, in 34:550; and Loosening of
Louisiana, in 34:266-9. Titustown, a new community near Norfolk, Va., is
given special notice in 34:531, and B. T. Washington, in Conference,
Charities and Correction, 1914:121-7.
The Separate Coach Statutes and Their Constitutionality are discussed in
Central Law Journal, 43:44 (January 15, 1915); 18 Law Notes, 182 213
(January 7, 1915); 20 Va. Law Register, 781-785 (February 15, 1915).
These will tend to such race discrimination as to affect Civil Rights,
and as such are treated in 50 Nat. Cor. Reg., 595.
"The Saloon as a Place of Public Amusement" is brought under review in
49 Amer. Law Review, 131. "Segregation: A Burning Question in Southern
Social Adjustments," is made the subject of an article by Philip A.
Bruce, the well-known Southern author, in Hibberts Journal, 13 V.
867-86. B. F. Benson, in Va. L. Reg. n. s. 330-356, treats the local
segregation ordinances. Their application to rural Southern communities
is the theme in Survey, 33:375-7. The constitutionality of these
ordinances is briefly considered in 13 Mich. Rev., 599-600; in Harper's
Weekly, 59:620, 1D. and in New Republic, November 22-29, 1915. "The
Roots of the War in the Race Question" is a very illuminating article by
W. E. B. Du Bois in the Atlantic Monthly for May.
Three notable books, the product of the year 1915, are deserving of
special mention. They are all devoted to Negroes of the Eighteenth
Century, and are the outcome of the activities, the enterprise and the
research of the Twentieth Century, and that by white Americans. The
titles are (1) "Phillis Wheatley (Phillis Peters) Poems and Letters:
First Collected Edition," edited by Charles Fred Heartman, with an
appreciation by Arthur A. Schomburg, 112 pages. Ben Day paper, 50 on
Fabriano hand-made paper, and 10 on Japan vellum.
(2) "Phillis Wheatley (Phillis Peters): A Critical Attempt and a
Bibliography of Her Writings," by Charles Fred Heartman; 99 copies of
this were printed by the author on Alexandra Japan paper. There are 50
pages in this bibliography, from which we learn that there are 43 titles
of different editions of Phillis Wheatley's poems. The forty-third is
that of six broadsides relating to Phillis Wheatley, with portrait and
fac-simile of her handwritings; 25 copies of this were printed for the
same publisher. They consist of four pages and eight productions on
eight leaves.