Considering the two hundred and forty-five years of his slavery and the
comparatively short time he has enjoyed the opportunities of freedom,
his place in American life at the present day is creditable to him and
promising for the future.
[Illustration: T. THOMAS FORTUNE.]
There can be no healthy growth in the life of a race or a nation without a
self-reliant spirit animating the whole body; if it amounts to optimism,
devoid of egotism and vanity, so much the better. This spirit necessarily
carries with it intense pride of race, or of nation, as the case may be,
and ramifies the whole mass, inspiring and shaping its thought and effort,
however humble or exalted these may be,--as it takes "all sorts and
conditions of men" to make up a social order, instinct with the ambition
and the activity which work for "high thinking and right living," of which
modern evolution in all directions is the most powerful illustration in
history. If pride of ancestry can, happily, be added to pride of race and
nation, and these are re-enforced by self-reliance, courage and correct
moral living, the possible success of such people may be accepted, without
equivocation, as a foregone conclusion. I have found all of these
requirements so finely blended in the life and character of no people as
that of the Japanese, who are just now emerging from "the double night of
ages" into the vivifying sunlight of modern progress.
What is the Negro's place in American life at the present day?
The answer depends entirely upon the point of view. Unfortunately for the
Afro-American people, they have no pride of ancestry; in the main, few of
them can trace their parentage back four generations; and the "daughter of
an hundred earls" of whom there are probably many, is unconscious of her
descent, and would profit nothing by it if this were not true. The blood
of all the ethnic types that go to make up American citizenship flows in
the veins of the Afro-American people, so that of the ten million of them
in this country, accounted for by the Federal census, not more than four
million are of pure negroid descent, while some four million of them, not
accounted for by the Federal census, have escaped into the ranks of the
white race, and are re-enforced very largely by such escapements every
year. The vitiation of blood has operated irresistibly to weaken that
pride of ancestry, which is the foundation-stone of pride of race; so that
the Afro-American people have been held together rather by the segregation
decreed by law and public opinion than by ties of consanguinity since
their manumission and enfranchisement. It is not because they are poor and
ignorant and oppressed, as a mass, that there is no such sympathy of
thought and unity of effort among them as among Irishmen and Jews the
world over, but because the vitiation of blood, beyond the honorable
restrictions of law, has destroyed, in large measure, that pride of
ancestry upon which pride of race must be builded. In no other logical
way can we account for the failure of the Afro-American people to stand
together, as other oppressed races do, and have done, for the righting of
wrongs against them authorized by the laws of the several states, if not
by the Federal Constitution, and sanctioned or tolerated by public
opinion. In nothing has this radical defect been more noticeable since the
War of the Rebellion than in the uniform failure of the people to sustain
such civic organizations as exist and have existed, to test in the courts
of law and in the forum of public opinion the validity of organic laws of
States intended to deprive them of the civil and political rights
guaranteed to them by the Federal Constitution. The two such organizations
of this character which have appealed to them are the National
Afro-American League, organized in Chicago, in 1890, and the National
Afro-American Council, organized in Rochester, New York, out of the
League, in 1898. The latter organization still exists, the strongest of
its kind, but it has never commanded the sympathy and support of the
masses of the people, nor is there, or has there been, substantial
agreement and concert of effort among the thoughtful men of the race along
these lines. They have been restrained by selfish, personal and petty
motives, while the constitutional rights which vitalize their citizenship
have been "denied or abridged" by legislation of certain of the States and
by public opinion, even as Nero fiddled while Rome burned. If they had
been actuated by a strong pride of ancestry and of race, if they had felt
that injury to one was injury to all, if they had hung together instead of
hanging separately, their place in the civil and political life of the
Republic to-day would not be that, largely, of pariahs, with none so poor
as to do them honor, but that of equality of right under the law enjoyed
by all other alien ethnic forces in our citizenship. They who will not
help themselves are usually not helped by others. They who make a loud
noise and courageously contend for what is theirs, usually enjoy the
respect and confidence of their fellows and get, in the end, what belongs
to them, or a reasonable modification of it.
As a consequence of inability to unite in thought and effort for the
conservation of their civil and political rights, the Afro-American
Negroes and colored people have lost, by fundamental enactments of the old
slave-holding States, all of the civil and political rights guaranteed
them by the Federal Constitution, in the full enjoyment of which they were
from the adoption of the War Amendments up to 1876-7, when they were
sacrificed by their Republican allies of the North and West, in the
alienation of their State governments, in order to save the Presidency to
Mr. Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. Their reverses in this matter in the old
slave-holding States, coupled with a vast mass of class legislation,
modelled on the slave code, have affected the Afro-American people in
their civil and political rights in all of the States of the Republic,
especially as far as public opinion is concerned. This was inevitable,
and follows in every instance in history where a race element of the
citizenship is set aside by law or public opinion as separate and distinct
from its fellows, with a fixed status or caste.
It will take the Afro-American people fully a century to recover what they
lost of civil and political equality under the law in the Southern States,
as a result of the re-actionary and bloody movement begun in the
Reconstruction period by the Southern whites, and culminating in
1877,--the excesses of the Reconstruction governments, about which so much
is said to the discredit of the Negro, being chargeable to the weakness
and corruption of Northern carpet-baggers, who were the master and
responsible spirits of the time and the situation, rather than to the
weakness, the ignorance and venality of their Negro dupes, who, very
naturally, followed where they led, as any other grateful people would
have done. For, were not these same Northern carpet-baggers the direct
representatives of the Government and the Army which crushed the slave
power and broke the shackles of the slave? Even so. The Northern
carpet-baggers planned and got the plunder, and have it; the Negro got the
credit and the odium, and have them yet. It often happens that way in
history, that the innocent dupes are made to suffer for the misdeeds and
crimes of the guilty.
The recovery of civil and political rights under the Constitution, as
"denied or abridged" by the constitutions of the States, more especially
those of the old slave holding ones, will be a slow and tedious process,
and will come to the individual rather than to the race, as the reward of
character and thrift; because, for reasons already stated, it will hardly
be possible in the future, as it has not been in the past, to unify the
mass of the Afro-American people, in thought and conduct, for a proper
contention in the courts and at the ballot-box and in the education of
public opinion, to accomplish this purpose. Perhaps there is no other
instance in history where everything depended so largely upon the
individual, and so little upon the mass of his race, for that development
in the religious and civic virtues which makes more surely for an
honorable status in any citizenship than constitutions or legislative
enactments built upon them.
But even from this point of view, I am disposed to believe that the
Negro's civil and political rights are more firmly fixed in law and public
opinion than was true at the close of the Reconstruction period, when
everything relating to him was unsettled and confused, based in
legislative guarantees, subject to approval or disapproval of the dominant
public opinion of the several States, and that he will gradually work out
his own salvation under the Constitution,--such as Charles Sumner,
Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F. Butler, Frederick Douglass, and their
co-workers, hoped and labored that he might enjoy. He has lost nothing
under the fundamental law; such of these restrictions, as apply to him by
the law of certain of the States, necessarily apply to white men in like
circumstances of ignorance and poverty, and can be overcome, in time, by
assiduous courtship of the schoolmaster and the bank cashier. The extent
to which the individual members of the race are overcoming the
restrictions made a bar to their enjoyment of civil and political rights
under the Constitution is gratifying to those who wish the race well and
who look beyond the present into the future: while it is disturbing the
dreams of those who spend most of their time and thought in abortive
efforts to "keep the 'nigger' in his place"--as if any man or race could
have a place in the world's thought and effort which he did not make for
himself! In our grand Republic, at least, it has been so often
demonstrated as to become proverbial, that the door of opportunity shall
be closed to no man, and that he shall be allowed to have that place in
our national life which he makes for himself. So it is with the Negro now,
as an individual. Will it be so with him in the future as a race? To
answer that we shall first have to determine that he has a race.
However he may be lacking in pride of ancestry and race, no one can accuse
the Negro of lack of pride of Nation and State, and even of county.
Indeed, his pride in the Republic and his devotion to it are among the
most pathetic phases of his pathetic history, from Jamestown, in 1620, to
San Juan Hill, in 1898. He has given everything to the Republic,--his
labor and blood and prayers. What has the Republic given him, but blows
and rebuffs and criminal ingratitude! And he stands now, ready and eager,
to give the Republic all that he has. What does the Republic stand ready
and eager to give him? Let the answer come out of the mouth of the future.
It is a fair conclusion that the Negro has a firmer and more assured civil
and political status in American life to-day than at the close of the
Reconstruction period, paradoxical as this may appear to many, despite the
adverse legislation of the old slave-holding States, and the tolerant
favor shown such legislation by the Federal Supreme Court, in such
opinions as it has delivered, from time to time, upon the subject, since
the adoption of the War amendments to the Federal Constitution.
Technically, the Negro stands upon equality with all other citizens under
this large body of special and class legislation; but, as a matter of
fact, it is so framed that the greatest inequality prevails, and was
intended to prevail, in the administration of it by the several States
chiefly concerned. As long as such legislation by the States specifies, on
the face of it, that it shall operate upon all citizens equally, however
unequally and unjustly the legislation may be interpreted and administered
by the local courts, the Federal Supreme Court has held, time and again,
that no hardship was worked, and, if so, that the aggrieved had his
recourse in appeal to the higher courts of the State of which he is a
citizen,--a recourse at this time precisely like that of carrying coal to
New Castle.
Under the circumstances, there is no alternative for the Negro citizen
but to work out his salvation under the Constitution, as other citizens
have done and are doing. It will be a long and tedious process before the
equitable adjustment has been attained, but that does not much matter, as
full and fair enjoyment of civil and political rights requires much time
and patience and hard labor in any given situation, where two races come
together in the same governmental environment; such as is the case of the
Negro in America, the Irishman in Ireland, and the Jew everywhere in
Europe. It is just as well, perhaps, that the Negro will have to work out
his salvation under the Constitution as an individual rather than as a
race, as the Jew has done it in Great Britain and as the Irishman will
have to do it under the same Empire, as it is and has been the tendency of
our law and precedent to subordinate race elements and to exalt the
individual citizens as indivisible "parts of one stupendous whole." When
this has been accomplished by the law in the case of the Negro, as in the
case of other alien ethnic elements of the citizenship, it will be more
gradually, but assuredly, accomplished by society at large, the
indestructible foundation of which was laid by the reckless and brutal
prostitution of black women by white men in the days of slavery, from
which a vast army of mulattoes were produced, who have been and are,
gradually, by honorable marriage among themselves, changing the alleged
"race characteristics and tendencies" of the Negro people. A race element,
it is safe and fair to conclude, incapable, like that of the North
American Indian, of such a process of elimination and assimilation, will
always be a thorn in the flesh of the Republic, in which there is,
admittedly, no place for the integrality and growth of a distinct race
type. The Afro-American people, for reasons that I have stated, are even
now very far from being such a distinct race type, and without further
admixture of white and black blood, will continue to be less so to the end
of the chapter. It seems to me that this view of the matter has not
received the consideration that it deserves at the hands of those who set
themselves up as past grand masters in the business of "solving the race
problem," and in accurately defining "The Negro's Place in American Life
at the Present Day." The negroid type and the Afro-American type are two
very distinct types, and the sociologist who confounds them, as is very
generally done, is bound to confuse his subject and his audience.
It is a debatable question as to whether the Negro's present industrial
position is better or worse than it was, say, at the close of the
Reconstruction period. As a mass, I am inclined to the opinion that it is
worse, as the laws of the States where he is congregated most numerously
are so framed as to favor the employer in every instance, and he does not
scruple to get all out of the industrial slave that he can; which is, in
the main, vastly more than the slave master got, as the latter was at the
expense of housing, feeding, clothing and providing medical service for
his chattel, while the former is relieved of this expense and trouble.
Prof. W.E.B. DuBois, of Atlanta University, who has made a critical study
of the rural Negro of the Southern States, sums up the industrial phase of
the matter in the following ("The Souls of Black Folk," pp. 39-40):
"For this much all men know: Despite compromise, war and struggle, the
Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and
miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the
whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to
an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the
Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule
of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must
have been, lawlessness and crime."
It is a dark and gloomy picture, the substitution of industrial for
chattel slavery, with none of the legal and selfish restraints upon the
employer which surrounded and actuated the master. And this is true of the
entire mass of the Afro-American laborers of the Southern States. Out of
the mass have arisen a large number of individuals who own and till their
own lands. This element is very largely recruited every year, and to this
source must we look for the gradual undermining of the industrial slavery
of the mass of the people. Here, too, we have a long and tedious process
of evolution, but it is nothing new in the history of races circumstanced
as the Afro-American people are. That the Negro is destined, however, to
be the landlord and master agriculturist of the Southern States is a
probability sustained by all the facts in the situation; not the least of
which being the tendency of the poor white class and small farmers to
abandon agricultural pursuits for those of the factory and the mine, from
which the Negro laborer is excluded, partially in the mine and wholly in
the factory. The development of mine and factory industries in the
Southern States in the past two decades has been one of the most
remarkable in industrial history.
In the skilled trades, at the close of the War of the Rebellion, most of
the work was done by Negroes educated as artisans in the hard school of
slavery, but there has been a steady decline in the number of such
laborers, not because of lack of skill, but because trade unionism has
gradually taken possession of such employments in the South, and will not
allow the Negro to work alongside of the white man. And this is the rule
of the trade unions in all parts of the country. It is to be hoped that
there may be a gradual broadening of the views of white laborers in this
vital matter and a change of attitude by the trade unions that they
dominate. Can we reasonably expect this? As matters now stand, it is the
individual Negro artisan, often a master contractor, who can work at his
trade and give employment to his fellows. Fortunately, there are a great
many of these in all parts of the Southern States, and their number is
increasing every year, as the result of the rapid growth and high favor of
industrial schools, where the trades are taught. A very great deal should
be expected from this source, as a Negro contractor stands very nearly on
as good footing as a white one in the bidding, when he has established a
reputation for reliability. The facts obtained in every Southern city bear
out this view of the matter. The individual black man has a fighting
chance for success in the skilled trades; and, as he succeeds, will draw
the skilled mass after him. The proper solution of the skilled labor
problem is strictly within the power of the individual Negro. I believe
that he is solving it, and that he will ultimately solve it.
It is, however, in the marvellous building up of a legal, comfortable and
happy home life, where none whatever existed at the close of the War of
the Rebellion; in the no less stupendous development of the church life,
with large and puissant organizations that command the respect and
admiration of mankind, and owning splendid church property valued at
millions of dollars; in the quenchless thirst of the mass of the people
for useful knowledge, displayed at the close of the War of the Rebellion,
and abating nothing of its intense keenness since, with the remarkable
reduction in the illiteracy of the mass of the people, as is eloquently
disclosed by the census reports--it is in these results that no cause for
complaint or discouragement can be found. The whole race here stands on
improved ground over that it occupied at the close of the War of the
Rebellion; albeit, even here, the individual has outstripped the mass of
the race, as it was but natural that he should and always will. But, while
this is true and gratifying to all those that hope the Afro-American
people well, it is also true, and equally gratifying that, as far as the
mass is concerned, the home life, the church and the school house have
come into the life of the people, in some sort, everywhere, giving the
whole race a character and a standing in the estimation of mankind which
it did not have at the close of the war, and presaging, logically, unless
all signs fail, a development along high and honorable lines in the
future; the results from which, I predict, at the end of the ensuing half
century, builded upon the foundation already laid, being such as to
confound the prophets of evil, who never cease to doubt and shake their
heads, asking: "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" We have the
answer already in the social and home life of the people, which is so vast
an improvement over the conditions and the heritage of slavery as to
stagger the understanding of those who are informed on the subject, or
will take the trouble to inform themselves.
If we have much loose moral living, it is not sanctioned by the mass,
wedlock being the rule, and not the exception; if we have a vast volume of
illiteracy, we have reduced it by forty per cent. since the war, and the
school houses are all full of children eager to learn, and the schools of
higher and industrial training cannot accommodate all those who knock at
their doors for admission; if we have more than our share of criminality,
we have also churches in every hamlet and city, to which a vast majority
of the people belong, and which are insistently pointing "the way, the
light and the truth" to higher and nobler living.
Mindful, therefore, of the Negro's two hundred and forty-five years of
slave education and unrequited toil, and of his thirty years of partial
freedom and less than partial opportunity, who shall say that his place in
American life at the present day is not all that should be reasonably
expected of him, that it is not creditable to him, and that it is not a
sufficient augury for better and nobler and higher thinking, striving and
building in the future? Social growth is the slowest of all growth. If
there be signs of growth, then, there is reasonable hope for a healthy
maturity. There are plenty of such signs, and he who runs may read them,
if he will.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Negro Problem, by Booker T. Washington, et al.