own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers
who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into
their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the
calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the
innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of
reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. The
Negroes and the Negro cause suffered also. The ex-slaves were given
votes and put on an electoral equality with white men. This was a
palpable injustice and indignity. The Negroes in 1863 were not prepared
in mind or in soul or in knowledge for the exercise of the franchise.
Neither were they gifted with the power of will and physical strength
necessary to hold the suffrage when it was given them. There was the
same exaltation nationally when the victory was won as there had been
locally when Sherman marched through, and the same disillusion and the
same destruction of bridges was to take place also. Where the white
man went the black man could not follow. For a brief space of time the
ex-slave dominated the white South. The black vote was exploited by
political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then
a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of
slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the
war should still have left the educated white man in authority and
not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just
freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not
sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon
America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. As is
usual after a war, the victors wanted a revolution in the land where
they had won. The white North revenged itself on the white South. But
a black revolution was a thing that could not be. Racial instinct came
to the help of the Whites, and through general tacit understandings
and organized conspiracies the new black masters were ousted from
their places. Then fear of what might be, and once more, revenge born
of the brief black dominion, went as far the other way in injustice.
Nigger baiting arose, mob violence took the place of the justice of
the courts. The central authority was flouted, first covertly and then
openly. The Negro was hustled back to peonage and servility, and one
might be tempted to think that the cause for which all the blood of
the Civil War had been shed was lost. It would have been lost had not
slavery become a complete anachronism in world society. The yoke could
not be reimposed upon the Negro’s neck. His freedom has persisted, it
has grown.
The maximum of persecution of the Negro in recent years does not equal
the misery of slavery. Even if all the lynchings and burnings and
humiliations and disabilities be put together they do not add up to
one year of servitude. Most Negroes understand that. They know that no
matter what may be the vicissitudes they pass through they are still
progressing to an ever fuller freedom.
In viewing the whole situation one is apt to underestimate the
unhappiness of slavery and to magnify the unhappiness of the present
era of freedom. It is blessed to be free. Even to be the worst possible
peon is far removed from slavery. The great significance of the
Emancipation is that the Negro slaves were set free—free for anything
and everything in the wide world. In the prison house of a national
institution of slavery there was no hope, no sense of the ultimate
possibilities latent in a man. But with freedom every baby became a
potential Alexander.
In 1863 a new life began to germinate, began to have promise. Some
thought that it must show forth at once. But that was fallacious. It
was bound to spend a long time underground before the first modest
shoots of the new should appear. Many have argued that the Negro would
come to nothing in his freedom, and even those who have believed in his
destiny have been impatient. Premature greetings have been given time
and oft to new Negro culture and responsibility. The only criticism
made here is that they were premature. The greatest of these was the
suffrage.
I have said that the denial of the Negro his legitimate vote is a
part of peonage, and I have also said that it was wrong to give the
freed-men votes at once. I should like to explain how Negro suffrage
stands to-day.
In the first place, it was wrong to enfranchise the ex-slaves, not
because they were not entitled to votes, but because they were not
ready to be intrusted with votes. In 1863 in England as well as in
America the world could be saved by the ballot box alone. It was a
rebellion against this belief that caused Carlyle to fulminate against
“Nigger Democracy.” In talking with Dean Brawley of Morehouse College
at Atlanta, I noticed a prejudice against Carlyle which is very
widespread among educated colored people. In the first place I should
like to assure them that the use by Carlyle of the expression “nigger”
has nothing in common with the brutal and contemptuous sense in which
that word is used in America. Thus we say “_working like a nigger_,”
an expression derived from the life of the slaves; “_nigger diploma_,”
a contemptuous English expression for a high degree such as Doctor of
Literature or Doctor of Divinity, thought to have been purchased in
America at a Negro university; the _ten little nigger boys_, the black
boys who come so swiftly to bad ends in the familiar rhyme of our
childhood. “Nigger” is in England a playful word for a Negro, and is
used always in the nursery. It is the children’s word for a black man,
preferably for one who has been thoroughly blacked. Carlyle was one of
the most reverent of men, and not accustomed to speak contemptuously of
God’s creatures. But he was contemptuous of the suffrage. To him and
to Ruskin and to many another it seemed absurd that the voice of the
educated man and the illiterate should have the same value; that the
many who are dull and ignorant should be allowed to outvote the few who
know. The enfranchisement of the freed Negroes furnished Carlyle with
an example of carrying an absurdity to its logical conclusion.
The alternative to government by ballot has, however, proved to
be government by the domination of a military caste, and mankind
generally in our time has shown that it prefers the former. The ballot
box with all its absurdity seems nevertheless our only means of
carrying on in freedom. It would be wrong to grant the suffrage to the
millions of savages under British rule in Africa, because they could
not use it. And it was wrong to enfranchise Negrodom in America with
a stroke of the pen after the Civil War. It has done the Negroes more
harm than good.
To have such a grievance as to be legally enfranchised and yet
physically denied the use of the vote is, of course, great harm. It
affects the social mind. It makes bitterness and brews agitation. To
be conscripted and called upon to fight for the country when this
grievance is in mind has aggravated the harm already done. “We are not
too low to fight the foe, but we’re too low to share in the spoil,” as
the story goes. I heard a Negro comedian indulging in funniosities at a
colored music hall win great applause by a chansonette:
Cullud folk will be ready to fight
When cullud folk has equal right.
I a’nt so foolish as I seem to be.
And it is a reasonable sentiment.
The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote. Half the
population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but the other
half has more than average capacity for citizenship. Yet in spite of
the Constitution and the Federal authority these many millions remain
practically without voice in all the Southern States. Physical force is
exerted to keep them from the ballot box.
The Southerner affects to believe that the educated Negro is even less
fitted to have a vote than the illiterate sort. But that is because
he hates to see the Negro rise. He will tell you that in certain
States the Negroes outnumber the Whites by ten to one. But that is a
characteristic misstatement. It is hard to find a city where the black
vote exceeds the white. In the last census the blackest cities were
Birmingham and Memphis, where the Negroes proved to be forty per cent.
of the population, while in
Richmond it was 37%
Atlanta 34%
Nashville 34%
Washington 29%
New Orleans 27%
And there are only two States where the Negro population exceeds that
of the White; namely, Mississippi and South Carolina, where the Negroes
were 57 per cent. and 55 per cent. of the total population.
If, as seems only fair, an illiteracy test were made legal by amendment
of the Constitution, white voters would outnumber black by a large
margin.
As for having anything to fear from the educated Negro vote, there is
of course one matter of anxiety. The Negro would be bound to fight for
social justice, and violence would be done to racial prejudice.
The South is, however, determined that the Negro shall never vote
again. Year by year the colored people as a whole grow in intelligence,
in capacity, and in the number of its intelligentsia, but the South is
not moved. It sees no explosion in the future, and makes no provision
for one—will not, till the explosion comes.
Racial fear, no doubt, plays a large part in this determination, but
there is a further consideration. The Solid South votes Democratic to a
man. The Negro, if he had a chance, would vote as solidly Republican.
I remember being present at a violent quarrel at a Negro meeting in
New Orleans—one Negro, though he had not a vote, had actually called
himself a Democrat. A remedying of the defective suffrage would be an
enormous access of strength to the Republican party. For this reason
Democrats exaggerate their racial fear. And also for that reason every
Republican politician who gains power is bound to make a bid to break
the solid South. Senator Lodge himself was the author of a “Force Bill”
which came near enactment some years ago, and it would have placed
Federal soldiers at every ballot box in the South, to protect black
voters.
The South defies anything which the Federal Government may devise. As
Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, said to his colleagues in the Senate:
“But there is one issue upon which the South is solid, and upon
which she will remain solid—the protection of her civilization from
subjection to an ignorant and servile race. And neither Federal honors
nor Federal bayonets can shake that solidity.”
President Wilson’s administration has been one which was dominated
by Southern Democrats, and as the Southern vote has been behind him
and them, there could hardly be any help given to the Negroes. The
Democratic failure has nevertheless been a real disappointment.
Wilson’s radical idealism; his plunge to the root of trouble wherever
trouble was, led many to believe that he would do something to remedy
the pitiable state of the Negroes. Some legal palliative would come
with a better grace from Democrats than a forceful measure enacted over
their heads by Republicans. Perhaps with the downfall of the Democratic
party and the coming triumph of the Republicans something practical
will be done during the next few years to help the Negro. The main hope
of color must lie in a Republican President and a Republican Senate
being in power together. November, 1920, and its elections will be as
fateful for the Negro as for the world.
Roosevelt gave his party a generous lead when he received Booker T.
Washington at the White House, and I heard young Colonel Roosevelt
one evening, with his father’s nerve and pluck, promise a vast Negro
audience a “square deal” if they would have patience. That square
deal is the Negro’s right, especially in the matter of the vote. It
is strange that the movement for the “rights of man” inaugurated
practically in the French Revolution should have stopped short about
1870, and the contrary ideal of the “privilege of individuals” begun to
progress. As Sutton Griggs very forcefully put it in his address to the
National Baptist Convention at Newark, New Jersey:
“In 1792 a motion was carried in the English House of Commons providing
for the gradual abolition of the slave traffic. In 1794 the French
Convention decreed that the rights of French citizens should be granted
to all slaves in French colonies. In 1834 the British abolished
slavery entirely within their dominions. In 1848 French slaves were
emancipated. In 1863 the Dutch set their slaves free. The South,
unmoved by world thought, clung to its slaves, but they were violently
torn from her grasp in the Civil War. Under the impulse of the doctrine
of the native equality of all men the Fifteenth Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States, forbidding the denial of the right
to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,
was adopted in the year 1869. In the year 1870, bills were passed by
Congress providing fines and imprisonment for anyone who even tried to
prevent the Negro from voting or to keep his vote from being counted.
“But all of the forces that could be marshaled have not, up to the
present time, been able to move our nation or the world one inch
forward in a straight line from this point. The action just mentioned
stands as the last recorded national act designed to incorporate
the Negro race in the governmental structure without reservations.
Further efforts were made by powerful forces, but all have proved to
be abortive. In 1875 a very comprehensive bill intended to make the
Negroes of the South secure in their rights passed the lower house of
Congress but was defeated in the Senate. Some years later, the Lodge
Election Bill, having the same purpose, passed the House but was
defeated in the Senate. The Republican party’s platform, upon which
President Taft was elected, contained an unequivocal declaration in
favor of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in letter and in spirit,
but no legislation in that direction was attempted during his term of
office.”
To-day, however, a world war and the greatest affirmation of the rights
of nations if not of man, has been made. There is an opportunity to
resume the interrupted advance.
VIII
IN ALABAMA: COLOR AND COLOR PREJUDICE
I made an expedition into Alabama from Atlanta, and again saw something
of that State when I got down to the Gulf of Mexico. In the matter of
Negro life it is first of all important because of Tuskegee Institute,
which, like the college at Hampton, is sometimes called the Mecca of
the American Negro. It was founded by Booker T. Washington, and is
the visible expression of the self-help idea. There, as at Hampton,
the ex-slave is taught to do something as the end of his schooling.
The establishment is now under the guidance of the beloved Dr. Moton,
a wise and genial African giant of pure Negro extraction: his father
is said to have been a prince who in selling his captives was himself
lured on to a slaver, and suddenly found himself in the position of
his own captive enemies. This was during Civil War time, and he came
to America a slave but to be made free. As a boy barely able to sign
his name young Moton first appeared at Hampton, and the authorities
were at first doubtful about accepting him as a student. But what they
would have missed! Dr. Moton is the very best type of Negro teacher,
the worthy successor of Booker Washington. Tuskegee, besides its
educational work, does much to combat race hatred, and keeps public
opinion in America well informed on the lynchings that take place. The
presence of the institute in the backward State of Alabama is very
important for the future of the South.
At Birmingham, Alabama, I was presented to a very charming young
widow who had been left rather rich, a well-educated lady of leisure,
who lived well and dressed well, and was possessed of a recognizable
American _chic_. I met her in town, and then in response to an
invitation called on her at her house. She was certainly a Negro
beauty, and I have no doubt was highly desired in marriage. There was
a clear five thousand a year besides her charms, and it was impossible
not to feel some of the glamour of that fact—
The belle of the season is wasting
an hour upon you.
_Mmmmmm_ she cooed to everything I said. She was shy as a pedestal
without its statue; her eyes burned, and I could not help feeling
all the atmosphere of “romance.” If she had been a shade lighter in
complexion any white man might have fallen in love with her.
Her children—or was it the children of one of her black
servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger
dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery, but colored
dolls, _after Nature_. This was very charming, and I should have
liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful
acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black
Madonna.
To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the
colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the
pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those
reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of
dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it
occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was
not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their
little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as
a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture
real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white
dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a
lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white
dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn
a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll.
It was also at Southern Brum that, calling on Reverend Williams, I
happened upon this singular conversation:
“Now, isn’t it absurd for us to have white angels?”
“You surely would not like them black?”
“We give Sunday-school cards to our children with white angels on them.
It’s _wrong_.”
“Black angels would be ugly.”
“No more ugly than white.”
I thought the whiteness of the angels was as the whiteness of white
light which contained all color. That, however, was lost on the
reverend, who happened to be a realist.
“Christ himself was not white. He would have had to travel in a Jim
Crow car,” said he. “But put it to yourself: isn’t it absurd for us to
be taught that the good are all white, and that sin itself is black?”
“It does seem to leave you in the shade,” said I.
“Expressions such as ‘black as sin’ ought to be deleted from the
language. One might as well say ‘white as sin.’”
I ransacked my brain rapidly.
“We say ‘pale as envy,’” said I.
“‘Black spite,’” he retorted. “Why should it be black?”
I could not say.
“Then Adam and Eve in the Garden,” he went on, “are always shown as
beautifully white creatures, whereas, considering the climate, they may
well have been as dark-skinned as any Negro couple in Alabama. Babylon
was built by Negroes.”
“Would you have Adam and Eve painted black?”
“Why, yes, I would.”
This struck me as rather diverting, but it was quite serious. Later, in
New York one night at Liberty Hall, before I was driven out as a white
interloper, I heard an orator say to an admiring host of Negroes: “Why,
I ask you, is God always shown as white? It is because He is the white
man’s God. It is the God of our masters. (Yes, brothers, that’s it.)
It’s the God of those who persecute and despise the colored people.
Brothers, we’ve got to knock that white God down and put up a black
God. We’ve got to rewrite the Old Testament and the New from a black
man’s point of view. Our theologians must get busy on a black God.”
This was what we Whites call clap trap, and irreverent as well. But it
seemed to take well with the Harlem brothers. Once more a lesson may be
derived for older children—— If you make God in your own image, it
does not follow that other children will agree that it is like——
It reminded me of the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they got home
from the war and took a good look at their own womenkind; they thought
them so much more good looking than French or German girls. Girls
and dolls, angels and Gods, we like them to correspond to our own
complexion.
Birmingham at night glows to the sky with furnaces. A hundred thousand
black proletarians earn their living on coal and steel, stirring up
soot to heaven. Though I met there the charming Mrs. J——, whom I have
mentioned, and also other educated Negroes, it is not to be supposed
that it is a place of culture, white or black. It is a straggling city
with an ugly, misshapen, ill-balanced interior or center part like
a table spread with small teacups and large jam pots. It will not
stand comparison with Atlanta or New Orleans or Richmond. Strictly
speaking, it is not a city, but an agglomeration of industrialism.
Nevertheless, the factories which surround it are owned by companies of
vast resources, and it is claimed that in the steel industry there are
some of the most extensive industrial plants in the world. Business is
little disturbed by strikes. On the gates of the vast factory estates
is written: _We do not want you unless you are able to look after
yourself. Careless men are always liable to accident._ Some notices
declare “Non-Union Shops,” others “Open Shops,” but it does not seem
to matter much. The unions have little power. Wages are high, though
not as high as in the North, but the cost of living is very much
less, and there is a lower standard of respectability. In some cases
the industrials are housed on the factory grounds, and you see Negro
dwellings which amount to industrial barracks. Every gate has its
porter or civilian sentry, and in order to reach your workingman you
may have to show what your business is with him. On the way to his
door you are met by the notice that trespassers will be prosecuted.
There is no encouragement to loiterers, but you may see the Negro gangs
at work, organized squads of workers hard at it, with Negro foremen or
white foremen. A myriad-fold Negro industrialism straggles near mines
and furnaces, blacker than in Nature. The coaly black Negro collier,
the sooted face of steel worker and tar operative are curious comments
on whether it is good to be Black or to be White. Coke products flame
and smoke at innumerable pipes, while locomotives are panting and
steaming forward and back, and a platoon of chimney stacks belches
forth dense blackness, which, enfolded in the breeze, wanders over the
heavens and one’s eyes.
I strayed in at the doors of some very dirty Negro houses. Here was
little of the _amour propre_ of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anti-kink
was not being generally applied, and as far as the little ones were
concerned, mother’s little Alabama coon seemed to be getting a little
bit too much for mother. It is not difficult to understand the disgust
of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled
up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy,
large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. The sight of them
was responsible for much of the feeling which inspired the Northern
riots. “We know our Northern Negroes,” they said in the North, “but
these from the South were like no Negroes we had ever seen.” There was
awakened much prejudice against these uncouth Africans, who seemed so
near to the savage and the beast. It was natural, perhaps. But high
wages and new hopes and ideals quickly improve the black immigrant.
He is being absorbed into the generality of black Negrodom, in its
established worthiness and respectability, above the Mason-Dixon line.
It would be difficult after a few years to pick out a Southern Negro in
a crowd in New York.
The little black children in the suburbs of Birmingham were alternately
very confiding and then suddenly scared and then confiding again as I
tried to talk to them. There was much fear in their bodies. They seemed
if anything to be blacker than their parents, and I volunteered the
opinion that a good deal of their color would come off in a course of
hot baths. But washing facilities were of a rudimentary kind, and the
passion for being fit and fresh could not readily be developed.
The white South could improve its Negroes infinitely if it cared to do
so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its Negroes to rise and
seems most happy when they can readily be identified with the beasts
that perish. But if it thought more highly of the Negro, the Negro
would rise.
I visited Professor K—— in his three-storied house. He had been
one of the Negro Four-Minute Men who had made popular addresses to
his people during the war fervor, inducing them to be “patriotic”
and subscribe their dollars to various funds. He said he was deeply
discouraged. He did not belong to Alabama and would much rather live in
a more civilized part of the world, but he gave his life for the uplift
of the children. He was doing what he could, but the Whites gave no
co-operation. In these factory areas the colored children outnumbered
the Whites five to one. Teaching was, of course, segregated; he had no
objection to that, but very, very little was done by comparison for the
black children. They had most need of blessing—but they shared only in
parsimony and curses. He showed me his school—a ramshackle building
of old, faded wood. “Oh, but our teachers have enthusiasm,” said he.
“They’re doing a work of God, and they love it. Yes, sir.”
I obtained an impression which I think is sound, that there was more
keenness to teach on the part of the colored people of Alabama than on
the part of the Whites. White schools find some difficulty in obtaining
good teachers; colored schools find no such difficulty. If colored
students only go on in the way they have begun, there is quite a good
prospect of their obtaining posts to teach white children in white
schools—not perhaps soon in Alabama, for it is strongly prejudiced,
but elsewhere first, and then in this State. To start off with, they
would be excellent with young children. There is a broad road of
conquest standing open there. As Booker T. Washington very sagaciously
pointed out to his people, there is no stronger argument in their favor
than personal attainment.