PART I

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THROUGH AFRO-AMERICA

THROUGH

AFRO-AMERICA

AN ENGLISH READING OF THE

RACE PROBLEM

BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

LONDON

CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.

1910

TO

H. G. WELLS

WITH WHOM I SO RARELY

DISAGREE THAT, WHEN

I DO, I MUST NEEDS

WRITE A BOOK ABOUT IT

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION ix

PART FIRST

SOUTHWARD HO!

I. ON THE THRESHOLD 3

II. THE BLACK MAN’S PARADISE 11

III. THE NIGHTMARE OF THE SOUTH 19

IV. RHETORIC IN LOUISVILLE 29

V. “DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS 38

VI. TWO LEADERS 45

VII. A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK 59

VIII. IN THE BLACK BELT 67

IX. EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM 76

X. NEW ORLEANS 85

XI. CRIME-SLAVERY AND DEBT-SERFDOM 94

XII. AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY 104

XIII. HAMPTON: AN AFTERMATH 114

XIV. BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA 126

XV. THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS 135

XVI. PROHIBITION 146

XVII. THE NEGRO HOME AND THE NEGRO CHURCH 156

XVIII. CHARLESTON 167

XIX. THE FRINGE OF FLORIDA 177

PART SECOND

THE PROBLEM FACED

PART THIRD

HAVANA TO PANAMA

I. THE AMERICAN IN CUBA 247

II. A GAME FOR GODS 257

III. A FRAGMENT OF FAIRYLAND 263

IV. THE PANAMA CANAL 276

INDEX 293

INTRODUCTION

“The problem of the twentieth century,” says Mr. W. B. Du Bois, “is the

problem of the colour line.” That, no doubt, is the view of a man born

“within the veil”; but, whatever our point of view, we cannot but admit

that racial adjustment is one of the two or three most urgent problems

of the near future.

Ought the colour-lines drawn by Nature to be enforced by human

ordinance, and even by geographical segregation? Or ought they to be

gradually obliterated by free intermingling and intermarriage? Or, while

intermarriage is forbidden (whether by law or public sentiment), is it

possible for people of different colours to dwell together in

approximately equal numbers and on terms of democratic equality? Or is

it for the benefit of both races that one race should always maintain,

by social and political discriminations, its superiority over the other?

Or is this opinion a mere hypocritical disguise of the instinct which

begot, and maintained throughout the ages, the “institution” of slavery?

These are questions which the coming century will have to answer, not

only in America, but in Africa. It is in the Southern United States,

however, that the problem presents itself in its acutest and most fully

developed form. In South Africa it is looming ahead, in America it is

present and hourly insistent. Though the conditions in the two countries

can never be precisely similar, yet the experience of the one ought

certainly to be of the utmost value in shaping the counsels of the

other. My interest, then, in the colour-question in the South was not a

mere abstract interest in an alien problem; nor was it due solely to the

special sympathy for America and all things American which (I am happy

to say) has been strong in me from my youth upward. It was a personal

interest which ought, I think, to be shared by every Englishman who is

so far an Imperialist as to feel that he cannot simply wash his hands of

the problems of Empire.

It was heightened, moreover, by the feeling that a great deal of what

passes in England as advanced thought on the subject of race-relations

is very superficial and remote from the realities of the case. This

suspicion had for some time beset me, and was perhaps the main factor in

inducing me to utilize a rare interval of leisure in getting into touch

with the facts of the problem as it presents itself in Afro-America.

Some thinkers display an almost furious antipathy to the very idea of

race. They hold it a mere superstition or illusion, and look forward,

not only with equanimity, but with eagerness, to an obliteration of all

race-boundaries in a universal “pan-mixture.” I cannot believe that this

is a true ideal of progress; nor does it seem to me that the world at

large is verging in that direction. No considerable fusion is taking

place between the European and the Asiatic races. No one dreams of

seeking on that line the solution of our difficulties in India. No

practical politician dreams of encouraging yellow immigration into

America or Australia on the same terms of permanent citizenship and free

intermixture that obtain in the case of white settlers. If the myriads

of China and Japan are to “expand” in the same sense in which the

European races have expanded, it must be by conquest and something like

extermination. That is, in fact, the “yellow peril” which haunts so many

dreams.

The truth is, it seems to me, that no race problem, properly so called,

arises until two races are found occupying the same territory in such an

approach to equal numbers as to make it a serious question which colour

shall ultimately predominate. A handful of white administrators, as in

India, or of white traders, as in China and Japan, may give rise, no

doubt, to important and difficult questions, but they are not

specifically questions of race. No one doubts that India belongs to the

Indians; that is the theory of the British “raj” no less than of the

most fervid Nationalist; the dispute is as to whether the Indian people

do or do not benefit by the British administration. So, too, in China

and Japan: it may be doubtful whether the privileges accorded to

foreigners are judicious, but neither the racial integrity nor the

political autonomy of the yellow races is for a moment in question. The

race problem means (in its only convenient definition) the problem of

adjustment between two very dissimilar populations, locally intermingled

in such proportions that the one feels its racial identity potentially

threatened, while the other knows itself in constant danger of economic

exploitation. Now these conditions, as a matter of experience, arise

only where a race of very high development is brought into contact with

a race of very low development, and only where the race of low

development is at the same time tenacious of life and capable of

resisting the poisons of civilization. In other words, the race problem,

as here defined, is a purely Afro-European or Afro-American problem.

Where civilization has met civilization, as in India, China, Japan,

there has never been any question of local intermixture in such

proportions as to give rise to the conditions indicated. Where

civilization has met savagery, elsewhere than in Africa, the savage race

has generally dwindled to a degraded and negligible remnant. The African

races alone have shown considerable tenacity of life and considerable

power of putting on at any rate a veneer of civilization. This is as

much as to say that only between Europeans and Africans has the active

competition arisen which is the essence of the race problem. In some

parts of Spanish America it has resulted in the practical fusion of the

races; a solution which, as above noted, commends itself to some

thinkers. But where fusion is resisted, the problem must one day become

acute; and that day has arrived in the Southern States. There the two

races are more nearly than anywhere else on a footing of numerical

equality; there, more than anywhere else, is the ambition of the African

race stimulated by political theory and seconded by education,

organization, and considerable material resources. The Southern States,

then, are, so to speak, the great crucible in which this experiment in

inter-racial chemistry is working itself out. There you can watch the

elements simmering. To some hopeful eyes they may even seem to be

clarifying and settling down. The following pages will show that I,

personally, am not confident of any desirable solution, unless a new

element of far-sighted statesmanship can be thrown into the brew.

Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, author of that admirable series of studies,

“Following the Colour-Line,” was good enough to map out for me a zig-zag

tour through the States east of the Mississippi, which enabled me to

employ my time to the best advantage. I was also much indebted to Mr.

Baker, as well as to Mr. Walter H. Page and Dr. Booker Washington, for

many valuable introductions. Wherever I went, my first preoccupation was

with the colour question; but I also welcomed the opportunity to see

something of the great agricultural, industrial, and educational revival

which is rapidly transmuting the South from a ghost-haunted region of

depression and impoverishment into one of the most eagerly progressive,

and probably one of the wealthiest, of modern communities. This book,

then, is mainly to be regarded as a series of rapid impressions of

travel, intermingled with conversations, in which I try to present the

colour-problem from various points of view, and to suggest the temper in

which it is approached by men of both races. In the middle of my

travel-sketches, however, at the point where I leave the American

Continent, I have inserted an essay of some length which embodies my

reflections on the preceding “choses vues” with such tentative

conclusions as I felt justified in drawing. This essay, which appeared

in _McClure’s Magazine_ for July, 1909, has elicited a good deal of

criticism in the South, which has led me to modify one or two passages.

I am happy to say, however, that none of the criticism which has reached

me, either privately or through the Press, has been in any sense

hostile. Many critics have declared impossible the only solution of the

problem which at all commends itself to me; but only one out of a

hundred or thereabouts has accused me of seriously misrepresenting the

conditions.

From Florida, I proceeded by way of Cuba and Jamaica to a detached but

very important section of the United States, the Canal Zone at Panama. I

make no apology for including in this book a few notes of that journey.

For one thing, I was still in Afro-America, still studying certain

aspects of the colour-problem. But another motive prompts the inclusion

of these sketches—the hope that some readers may be moved to follow in

my footsteps, and enjoy a very delightful and interesting tour. Anything

is worth doing, in my judgment, that tends to encourage Englishmen to

cross the Atlantic. If any considerable proportion of the English

travelling public could be induced to set their faces westward, we

should soon get rid of many of the little prejudices and ignorances

which still interpose themselves between the two branches of the

Anglo-Saxon stem. The route which I followed—roughly, New York,

Washington, Memphis, New Orleans, Charleston, Florida, Cuba, Jamaica,

Panama, Cartagena, Trinidad, Southampton—is as easy and comfortable as

it is interesting and instructive. No doubt the completion of the Canal

will carry a rush of travel in this direction. But even before the gates

of the Pacific are opened, I see no reason why the fascinating ferment

of the Southern States, in conjunction with the glorious beauty of the

West Indies, should not attract the travelling Briton.

The chapters in the First Part of this book appeared, with two

exceptions, in the _Westminster Gazette_; those in the Third Part, with

one exception, appeared either in the _Morning Leader_ or the _Pall Mall

Magazine_. The chapters on Hampton and on Jamaica are here printed for

the first time.

PART I

SOUTHWARD HO!

I

ON THE THRESHOLD

The scene is Chicago; the occasion, a luncheon-party at the

Cliff-Dwellers’ Club. All the intellect and talent of the Middle West (I

am credibly assured) are gathered round one long table. I mention to an

eminent man of letters that I am going into the South.

“Well,” he says, “you are going into a country that is more foreign to

me than most parts of Europe. I do not understand the Southern people,

or their way of looking at things. I never feel at home among them. The

one thing I have in common with them is a strong antipathy to the black

man.”

This, of course, is only an individual point of view; but many other men

are listening, and, while some nod assent, no one protests.

But here is another point of view. A few days later I met an old friend,

a Philadelphian, who said, “I like the South and the Southerners. They

are men of our own stock and our own tongue—even the ‘poor whites’ whom

slavery and the hookworm have driven to the wall. In the North we are

being jostled and elbowed aside by the foreigner, who murders our

speech, and knows nothing and cares nothing about our history or

traditions. Yes; give me the South. It is true that, intellectually, it

scarcely exists. The Southerner may be living in the twentieth century,

but he has skipped the nineteenth. His knowledge of literature, for

instance, if he have any at all, stops at the Waverley Novels and ‘The

Corsair.’ But I’m not sure that that isn’t part of the charm.”

Thus early did I learn that no two men can talk to you about the South

without flatly contradicting each other.

It was evident that my plan must be simply to gather views and

impressions as I went along, and trust to sifting and co-ordinating them

later.

An invitation, equivalent to a command, called me to Washington.

[Sidenote: Nearing the Colour-line.] For a whole day my slow train

dragged wearily through Northern Ohio; and in the course of that day two

young couples in succession got into my car, who interested me not a

little. In each case it seemed to me that the girl had a streak of black

blood in her, while the young man was in each case unimpeachably white.

As to one of the girls, I was practically certain; as to the other I may

have been mistaken. Her features were aquiline and she was uncommonly

handsome; but the tint of her skin, and more especially of her eyeballs,

strongly suggested an African strain. Both girls were lively,

intelligent, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-mannered—distinctly

superior, one would have said, to the commonplace youths by whom they

were accompanied. Yet I felt pretty certain that a few hours’ travel

would have taken them into regions where they would be forbidden by law

to sit in the same railroad-car, and where marriage between them would

be illegal.[1]

-----

Footnote 1:

“Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the

Southern States, and also in the following Northern and Western

States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana,

Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern

and Western States marriage between the races is lawful.”—Ray Stannard

Baker: “Following the Colour-Line.”

-----

At any rate, even supposing that in these particular cases my conjecture

was mistaken, it was not on the face of it improbable. On the other side

of the Ohio River, these girls would have had, so to speak, to clear

themselves of the suspicion of African blood, else any association on

equal terms between them and their male companions would have been

regarded as an outrage. This seemed a senseless and barbarous state of

affairs. But I was there to observe, not (as yet) to form conclusions;

and I kept my mind open, wondering whether, in the coming weeks, I

should discover any reason or excuse for the apparent barbarism.

In Indiana, rain; in Ohio, torrents; at Pittsburg, a deluge. But when I

awaken next morning, just on Mason and Dixon’s line, the sun is shining

on the woods of Maryland, and I feel at once that the South and the

spring are here. [Sidenote: “Summer is i-cumen in.”] These spring

coppices are far richer in colour than any of our English woods. They

run the whole gamut of green, from the blue-green of the pine to the

silver-green of the poplar and the gold-green of the birch; and the

greens are freely interspersed with red and yellow foliage, and with

white and pink blossoms. The red is that of the maple, whose blush at

birth is almost as vivid as its flush in death.

The new Union Station at Washington is a vast and grandiose palace of

shining white. Its “concourse” (a new American word for the central hall

of a station) seems a really impressive piece of architecture. But it is

a Sabbath Day’s journey from the platforms to the cabs; and the porters

seem to be making a Sabbath Day of it, for I cannot find a single one.

Let me not embark, however, on the endless story of a traveller’s

tribulations. Every country has its own inconveniences, and

recriminations are not only idle but mischievous.

The city of Washington is one great sea of exquisite green, out of which

the buildings rise like marble rocks and islands. Yes, I am in the

South; the leafless elms of New England and the shrewd, bracing blasts

of New York are left behind.

And this day of sunshine was the first of many days. Save for a few

thunder-showers, the South was to be all sunshine for me.

And with the sunshine—the Negro. Here he is in his thousands, and in his

deepest dye. [Sidenote: A Question of Elbow-room.] In the North one sees

him now and then, but he is swamped and submerged in the crowds of the

great cities. To be very clearly conscious of his presence you must go

to special quarters of New York or Chicago. “Coloured persons” (seldom

pure blacks) are waiters at hotels and clubs, but no longer at the best

hotels and clubs. The Pullman porter is always coloured; so are most, if

not all, of the ordinary railway porters—when there are any. But “at the

North” (as they say here) you have to go out of your way to find any

problem in the negro. The black strand in the web of life is not yet

particularly prominent—whatever it may be destined to become.

But here in Washington the web of life is a chequer of black-and-white—a

shepherd’s tartan, I think they call it. In 1900 there were over 85,000

negroes in the city—now there must be at least 100,000, in a total

population of considerably under a quarter of a million, or something

like the population of Nottingham.

Imagine nearly half the population of Nottingham suddenly converted into

black and brown people—people different not only in colour but in many

other physical characteristics from you and me. Imagine that all the

most striking of these differences are in the direction of what our

deepest instincts, inherited through a thousand generations, compel us

to regard as ugliness—an ugliness often grotesque and simian.[2] Imagine

that this horrible metamorphosis--or, if you shy at the word “horrible,”

let us say fantastic—imagine this fantastic metamorphosis to have taken

place as a punishment for certain ancestral crimes and stupidities, of

which the living men and women of to-day are personally innocent. Can

you conceive that, after the first shock of surprise was over,

Nottingham would take up life again as a mere matter of course, feeling

that there was no misfortune in this mingling of incongruities, no

problem in the adjustment of their relations?

-----

Footnote 2:

There is no doubt, I think, that the white man—and here I mean not the

Southerner, nor the American, but the white man as such—resents in

extremes of the negro type just that air of caricaturing humanity

which renders the monkey tribe so painful and humiliating to

contemplate. This seems an inhuman saying, but instinctive emotions

are fundamental facts which it is useless to blink. And the suggestion

of caricature is the stronger, the more closely the negro mimics the

white man in dress and bearing. In Washington, on a Sunday, one meets

scores of fat, middle-aged negro women, decked out in an exaggerated

extreme of European fashion, from whom one can only look away as from

something grotesque and degrading—a page of Swift at his bitterest.

Yet the same women in cotton gowns and bandana headgear might look far

from unpleasing. No doubt the like uneasy sense of humiliation besets

one on seeing white women decked in finery unsuited to their age or

their contours. But that does not alter the fact that the urban negro

of either sex, when he or she indulges in extremes of European

adornment, is a spectacle highly disturbing to Caucasian

self-complacency. Caricature is none the more agreeable for being, in

a certain sense, just.

-----

Do not object that in Washington there has been no sudden metamorphosis,

but that the condition of things has gradually come to pass through the

slow operation of historic forces. That makes no real difference, save

that the Washingtonian has no “first shock of surprise” to get over. The

essence of the matter is that half of the elbow-room of life is taken up

by an alien race. Even disregarding, as (perhaps) temporary and

corrigible, the condition of hostility between the races, we cannot but

see in the bare fact of their juxtaposition in almost equal numbers,

and, theoretically, on a standing of equal citizenship, an anomalous

condition of affairs, as to the probable outcome of which history

affords us no guidance.

Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize

that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American

writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice

of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience

and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible

difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.

It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our

breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. But there

they are, not to be ignored or sentimentalized away. They are part of

the stuff of human character, out of which the future must be shaped.

The wise statesman will no more disregard them than the wise carpenter

will disregard the grain of a piece of timber—or the knots in it.

One principle I arrived at very early in this investigation—namely, that

black is not always white, nor white invariably black.

II

THE BLACK MAN’S PARADISE

It was my good fortune to have for my hosts in Washington two active

sympathizers with the negro. The husband hails from a North-Western

State; the wife is a New Englander. They knew personally some of the

Abolitionist leaders, and are still full of their spirit.

They related to me cruel and deplorable incidents in the everyday life

of the streets.

“One afternoon,” said my host, “I was sitting peaceably in a street-car,

when I was suddenly conscious of an altercation between the conductor

and a coloured man. The absolute rights of the matter I don’t know, but

it had somehow arisen out of a recent modification of the ‘transfer’

system, which the coloured man probably did not understand. I had

scarcely realized what was happening, before men were standing on the

seats of the car, shouting, ‘Kill the d——d nigger! We’ll all stand by

you! All Virginia is behind you!’ The motor-man detached the heavy brass

handle by which he works the car, ran up to the negro, and had actually

raised it to strike. I interposed, and told the man that, if anything

happened, he would get into trouble for leaving his post. He replied:

‘The nigger’s abusive,’ but sullenly went back to his platform.”

“_Was_ the nigger abusive?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear him say anything; but it is quite possible

that he had been ‘sassy.’ All I know is that he stood his ground like a

man, with that yelling crowd around him.”

“And what happened?”

“Oh, the thing blew over. The negro walked away, and the crowd

dispersed. As I took my seat again in the car, the man next me said, ‘If

that had happened in South Carolina, he would have been a dead nigger.’”

“Not long ago,” my hostess said, “I was in a crowded street-car.

[Sidenote: Street-Car Episodes.] A black woman with a baby got in, and

had to stand. You know how our Washington cars are constantly rounding

corners; and at every curve the woman was nearly thrown from her feet.

Presently one of two white shop-girls who were sitting near her rose and

gave the mother her place. The two girls soon after got out; and as they

passed me, the one who had kept her seat said to the other, ‘I wonder

you would do such a thing!’ ‘Didn’t you see she had a baby?’ the other

replied; so, after all, we are not quite without humanity.”

“But tell about the two boys,” my host put in.

“Oh, that was two or three years ago. I noticed in a street-car a very

distinguished-looking old man with two boys of about fourteen and

twelve, evidently his grandsons. I thought what very nicely-mannered

boys they were. A white woman got in, and, the car being full, the elder

boy rose and gave her his seat. Immediately after, a mulatto woman got

in, very well and quietly dressed—entirely a lady in manner and

appearance. The younger boy was rising to give her his seat, when the

elder pushed him down angrily, saying quite aloud, ‘I thought you knew

better than to get up for a nigger.’”

“Did the lady hear?”

“Oh, perfectly. It was most painful.”

“And what said the distinguished grandfather?”

“He smiled, and nodded to the elder boy.”

[Sidenote: Mr. Roosevelt and the Washerwoman.]

I took out my pocket-book and handed my hostess a cutting I had made a

few days before. It was a letter signed “Edgar S. Walz,” and ran thus:

“To the Editor of the _New York Times_.

“I read in your Sunday’s issue an item headed ‘Subway Manners:

Boys keep their Seats rather than Give to a Sick Old Woman,’ which

reminds me of the first time I saw Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, about eight

or nine years ago. He was sitting next to me in a Broadway car, and

somewhere along about Thirtieth-street the car stopped to let some

people on. All secured seats except a coloured woman with a large

bundle of clothes. As soon as Mr. Roosevelt saw that she had to stand,

he jumped up, took off his hat, and bowed as graciously as though she

were the first woman in the land.”

“Yes,” said my hostess, as she handed back the cutting; “you will find

these differences.”

“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Roosevelt is a Northerner.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t always mean liberality of feeling nowadays,”

was the reply. “I should rather say Mr. Roosevelt is Mr. Roosevelt.”

My host is a chief of department in a large Government office.

[Sidenote: Sent to Coventry.]

“Have you any coloured people working under you?” I asked him.

“Not long ago,” he replied, “a coloured girl was sent to me—I think

because they knew that I would ‘kick’ less than any other chief of

department. It was suggested to me that I should assign her some special

work by herself. I refused. ‘No,’ I said, ‘if she comes to me at all,

she follows the regular routine.’ I made a point of speaking to the

three most responsible young women among my clerks—all girls of good

family and standing—and telling them they must behave well to her.”

“And how did they behave?”

“Oh, well enough, on the surface; there was no trouble; but she was

quietly sent to Coventry. Soon afterwards a Russian girl entered the

department, who knew nothing and cared nothing about our prejudices. She

made friends with the coloured girl; but when she sat at the same table

with her in the lunch-room, the quadroon herself said to her, ‘You

mustn’t do this; you’ll get into trouble with the others. They don’t

behave badly to me; but when I seat myself even at the other end of a

long table they make an excuse to move away.’”

“How are negroes placed in these positions?” I asked.

“Why, through various political ‘pulls.’”

“Do you think it a wise policy to try to break down the colour-line here

and there—at this point and that—by the nomination of negroes to

Government appointments?”

“Ah, that is just the question.”

“Meantime,” I asked, “are matters getting better or worse?”

“Oh, worse—decidedly worse,” said my hostess. “They are coming to

something like open war. For instance, I constantly see stone-fights

between white boys and black boys in the open space outside our house.

That doesn’t mean much, perhaps; for boys will be boys everywhere. But

sometimes lately the white boys have seemed to go frantic, and have

begun stoning black men and women who were going peaceably about their

business. Once I had to telephone to the police to interfere, or I

believe there would have been a riot.”

“I am told that in New York the white and black street-boys play

amicably together.”

“Yes,” said my host, “that is because the blacks are comparatively few.

The tension increases in the direct ratio of the number of negroes.”

This I find to be essentially, if not quite universally, true. What is

the inference? Is it not at bottom an instinct of self-preservation that

spurs the South to inhumanity—an unreasoning, or half-reasoned, panic

fear of racial submergence? There are many other factors in the

situation; but I think, beyond all doubt, this is one.

“You can see any day on the street-cars,” said my host, “the

embitterment of feeling. Formerly a black man would always rise and give

his seat to a white woman; now he aggressively refrains from doing so.”

I repeated this to a friend in Baltimore, a gentleman of an old Southern

family, who had fought for the Confederacy, even while he realized that

the institution of slavery was doomed. [Sidenote: A Pessimistic View.]

“You must remember,” he said, “that the problem is acute in Washington.

The Washington negro is particularly bumptious and intolerable.

Immediately after the war, Washington was the black man’s paradise. They

flocked there in their thousands, thinking that the Government was going

to do everything for them, and that there was nothing they had not a

right to expect. That spirit still survives and makes trouble.”

“And how do you feel as to the way things are shaping? Do you see any

actual or probable improvement in the relations of the races?”

“What shall I say?” he replied. “I do all I can to put the matter out of

my thoughts. I do not personally feel the pinch of the problem. My

children are in the North, and my life here pursues an even routine. I

have old coloured servants, with whom I get on very well. But I am

constitutionally a pessimist, and I confess I do not see how the thing

is going to work out.”

“Education?” I suggested.

“Education is all very well; but if it removes some difficulties it

raises others. It tends to make the negro unwilling to work where he is

wanted, and desirous of working where he is not wanted—at any rate by

the white artisan who is in the field before him. The industrial

education of the black race, which is in some quarters regarded as a

panacea, will no doubt do a great deal of good; but we cannot close our

eyes to the fact that it will intensify race-friction in the labour

market.”

“Still, you are not one of the Southerners who want to keep the black

ignorant—who think that education, as a whole, merely teaches him ‘not

to know his place’?”

“That is an outworn and impossible point of view. But you can understand

that even the reasonable Southerner feels a certain bitterness on the

subject of education when he sees the black child marching off to a

school provided by Northern philanthropy, while the child of the ‘poor

white’ goes into the cotton-factory.”[3]

-----

Footnote 3:

It is not only the child of the “poor white,” in the special Southern

sense of the term, that goes to the factory. Mr. Stannard Baker, in

“Following the Colour-Line,” says: “One day I visited the mill

neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people

lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill

employees. They hired a negro woman to cook for them, and while they

sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to

school!”

-----

“You say you have black servants?”

“Oh yes, I have; and many people still have. But you know the race as a

whole is turning against domestic service. I have friends in Mobile,

Alabama, who tell me that their servants make the most fantastic

conditions. For instance, they won’t do a stroke of work after three

o’clock. If you want a meal after that hour, you must prepare and serve

it yourself. As for the abstraction of household stuff from the kitchen,

it is carried on openly and systematically—they call it ‘Cook’s

excursion.’ In the case of domestic service, in fact, the difficult

conditions which are being felt all over the world are intensified

by—what shall I call it?—the race pride, or the race resentment, of the

black. Domestic service was one of the badges of slavery; and now, if he

or she will undertake it at all, it must be on such terms as shall

remove from it all taint of servility.”

“A very natural feeling,” I remarked.

“No doubt; but not calculated to relieve the friction between the

races.”

III

THE NIGHTMARE OF THE SOUTH

My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia,

and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established

by General Samuel Armstrong, the _alma mater_ of Mr. Booker Washington,

and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of

Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at

Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at

Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face

south-westward towards Kentucky and Tennessee. But I determined to “stop

off” for a day at Virginia Hot Springs, where some friends had invited

me to visit them.

Virginia Hot Springs is nothing but a huge rambling hotel, with a number

of “cottage” dependencies. [Sidenote: A Happy Valley.] The hotel company

has bought up the whole mountain-valley, and runs it like a little

kingdom. It is a delightful place; the air fresh and sparkling, the

hotel and cottages sufficiently picturesque, the basin of the valley

entirely given up to the brilliant sward of the golf-course. Around the

hotel runs a spacious “piazza,” with innumerable rocking-chairs. A score

of buggies and saddle-horses, at the disposition of the guests, gather

round the steps. Inside, every American luxury is at command. You move

noiselessly on deep-piled carpets; the news-stand is heaped with the

latest magazines and novels; there is a little row of shops where you

can buy hats and frocks, jewellery and bric-à-brac, at fifty per cent.

over Fifth-avenue prices; and—most indispensable luxury of all—there is

a stock- and share-broker’s office, and there are long-distance

telephones, whereby you can keep in touch with Wall Street and the

various Exchanges. That curious oval excrescence at one corner of the

building is the ballroom. It opens into the great hall of the hotel,

called “Peacock Walk”; for here the ladies assemble after dinner to air

their “rags” and their diamonds.

My friends chartered a buggy, and drove me after lunch to Warm Springs,

an old Colonial health-resort, where it is on record that General

Washington came to nurse his gout; and thence to a point called

Flagstaff Hill, or something of the sort, where we had a glorious view

over an endless stretch of hill-country, running far into West Virginia.

But, oh! the reckless, suicidal waste of timber that is going on here,

as almost everywhere in America. Here, however, it is sheer

thoughtlessness that is at work—not the criminal cupidity which is

converting the forests of Maine and New Hampshire into wood-pulp, and

ruining for generations to come the climate, the fertility, the

water-power of the country.

Our talk, of course, strays (not through my leading) to the question of

the negro.

[Sidenote: The Darkest Phase.]

“I have two cousins,” says Mrs. X., “who are sisters. One of them

devotes all her spare money to the amelioration of the black race, while

personally she loathes them and shrinks from them. The other has no

philanthropic feeling whatever; she regrets that slavery was ever

abolished; but she likes the black people personally; she goes among

them, and nurses them when they are ill—just as she would a favourite

horse or dog. That is in Philadelphia, where, as you know, I was born.”

“And you yourself—how do you feel on the subject?”

“I had lived so much abroad that I had no very definite feeling towards

the black race, one way or another, until a few summers ago, when I

spent some time at Aiken, South Carolina, where the bulk of the

population is black. I don’t think I am hysterical, but I assure you it

was an almost intolerable sensation to walk down the main street of

Aiken, even at midday, under the eyes of those hundreds of great hulking

blacks, staring at you with half-suppressed insolence. It gives me a

little shudder now to think of it.”

“Last year,” said her husband, “I was shooting in North Carolina, in a

district where the population is pretty evenly divided between white and

black. I boarded in a farmer’s family. The grandfather had fought in the

war, of course on the Confederate side; the father and mother were

solid, unpretending, intelligent people. There was a school-house only a

mile and a half away, but they could not let their two daughters go to

it. They could not let them stir away from home unprotected. They had to

pay for their education at home, while at the same time they were being

taxed for the education of the negro children of the district. That is

not a pleasant state of affairs.”

[Sidenote: A Significant Admission.]

Some time afterwards, I stated this case to a loading educator of

negroes, a man widely recognized as one of the best friends of the race.

“Do you think,” I asked him, “that these girls could not safely have

gone to school? Or was their parents’ action the result of groundless,

or, at any rate, exaggerated, panic—as of one who should forbid his

children to pass through a wood lest a tree should fall upon them?”

“It would depend on the district,” was the reply. “In some districts the

girls could have gone to school safely enough; in others, no!”

This, I think, was a terrible admission; for, after all, a “safe”

district can only be one in which no outrage has occurred; and that is

no guarantee against its occurring to-morrow.[4] What father, what

husband, is going to rest on such security?

-----

Footnote 4:

In a paper read in 1901, Mr. A. H. Stone said of the Yazoo Mississippi

Delta: “There is now no more feeling of fear on the white man’s part,

whether for himself or his wife or his children, than in the days of

slavery.” But he afterwards added: “Writing to-day, 1908, it would be

necessary to modify this statement somewhat—certainly for some part of

this territory.” “The American Race Problem,” p. 91. The footnotes to

Mr. Stone’s paper point out one or two other instances of a

deterioration of conditions.

-----

Here, then, I was face to face with the most hideous factor in the

problem—that which keeps popular sentiment in the South chronically

inflamed and exasperated. Again and again, at every turn, I came upon

it; not only in the shape of revolting stories, but in accounts of the

constant and most burdensome precautions which the state of affairs

imposes.

To give only one instance: I asked an American long resident in Havana

whether there was any trouble of this nature in Cuba. “No,” he said,

“practically none. It’s true that about a year ago a sort of half-witted

black was accused of an outrage on a mulatto woman, and committed

suicide in prison to escape the garotte; but I believe an American

nigger has since confessed that he was the real culprit. It’s very

different,” he went on, “in my native State, Louisiana. I have two

sisters married there. The husband of one of them never dares to leave

his home unless he takes his wife with him. The husband of the other is

compelled to leave home for days at a time; but he keeps a loaded

shot-gun in every room in the house, and he has made his wife practice

till she is a very fair shot, both with gun and revolver. There isn’t a

white man in the country districts that doesn’t take similar

precautions.”

Think what it means to have this nightmare constantly present to the

mind of every woman and girl of a community—at any rate in the country

districts, and on the outskirts of the towns. [Sidenote: A Malign

Enchantment.] No doubt the state of “nerves” it sets up is responsible

for many errors and cruelties. Many attempted outrages may be purely

imaginary. Negroes may have been lynched or shot down, not only for

crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were never

committed at all.[5] But there are quite enough authentic cases of

crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.[6] It is all

very well to say that it is the precautions taken, and most of all the

lynchings, that suggests the crime to vagrant, dissolute,

drink-and-drug-ruined negroes. That is probably in great measure

true—the evil moves in a vicious circle. But who or what is to break the

circle of malign enchantment? Education? Yes, perhaps; but education is

at best a slow process. I cannot to-day throw my revolver into the

Mississippi because I hope that fifty years hence my grandson may have

no use for it.

-----

Footnote 5:

Among the “Causes Assigned” for lynchings in the statistical statement

prepared by the Chicago _Tribune_, “Race Prejudice” stands fourth on

the list; and in the four years, 1900-1903, twenty-four cases are

assigned to it. Among the other causes are “Unknown offences” (10),

“Mistaken Identity” (5), and “No offence” (1).

Footnote 6:

“Making allowance for all exaggerations in attributing this crime to

negroes, there still remain enough well-authenticated cases of brutal

assault on women by black men in America to make every negro bow his

head in shame.”—_Atlanta University Publications_, No. IX. (A negro

monograph).

-----

“During the war,” a very intelligent coloured man said to me, “the

planters’ wives and children were left to the protection of the negroes.

[Sidenote: Who is to Blame?] Not a single case of outrage occurred, and

scarcely a case of theft or breach of trust. Had we been the lecherous

brutes we are now supposed to be, we should have written the darkest

page in history, and brought the Southern armies home to the defence of

their own hearthstones.”

That is true. It is admitted on every hand that the conduct of the

slaves during the war was, on the whole, excellent, and in many cases

touchingly beautiful.[7] And therein lies, by the way, not, certainly,

an apology for slavery, but a proof that its most melodramatic horrors

were exceptional. But what matters the admission that the malignant and

bestial negro did not exist forty years ago, if it has to be admitted in

the same breath that he exists to-day?

-----

Footnote 7:

“No race ever behaved better than the negro behaved during the war.

Not only were there no massacres and no outbreaks, but even the amount

of defection was not large.... Many a master going off to the war

entrusted his wife and children to the care of his servants with as

much confidence as if they had been of his own blood. They acted

rather like clansmen than like bondmen.... As Henry Grady once said,

‘A thousand torches would have disbanded the Southern army; but there

was not one.’”—Thomas Nelson Page: “The Negro: The Southerner’s

Problem,” p. 21.

-----

What has bred him? Who is responsible for his existence? History may one

day apportion the burden between the doctrinaire self-righteousness of

the respectable North, the rascality of the “carpet-bag” politician, the

stiff-necked pride of the South, and the vanity, the resentfulness, and

the savagery of the negro himself. But what avails recrimination or

apportionment of blame, while the monstrous evil—none the less monstrous

because it necessarily awakens a morbid imagination on both sides—exists

and calls aloud to be dealt with? While the relations of the two races

remain as they are, there can be no doubt that an act of brutal lust

often justifies itself to a semi-savage imagination as an act of war—a

racial reprisal. And who shall say that a state of war does not exist?

Few sensible men in the South have now a word to say for lynching.[8] It

has proved itself as ineffectual in practice as it is unjustifiable in

theory. [Sidenote: Lynch Law.] It cannot even be palliated as an

ungovernable reaction of horror at the particular atrocity here in

question; seeing that, as a matter of fact, more negroes are lynched for

mere murder than for outrages on women.[9] There seems to be little

hope, however, of a cessation of lynchings in the near future. The

Southern Press abounds with evidences that the lynching impulse is

strong, and is with difficulty held in check[10] even when the

provocation is comparatively trifling.

-----

Footnote 8:

One of the most sensible men in the South is certainly Mr. E. G.

Murphy, who writes (“The Present South,” p. 177): “The mob, so far as

it has a conscious philosophy, has attempted the justification of its

course upon these grounds: It has insisted that its methods were

necessary in order to prevent the crime; in order to avoid the

procrastination of the courts; and in order to protect the victim of

assault from the ordeal of presenting testimony at the trial of the

offender. It has become increasingly obvious, however, that the

practice of lynching ... is not a remedy. It does not prevent crime.

Through the morbid interest which it arouses, and through the

publicity which it creates, it inflames to the utmost the power of

criminal suggestion and aggravates all the conditions of racial

suspicion and antagonism. The so-called ‘remedy’ has always been

followed by new outbreaks of the disease, the most atrocious crimes

coming at short intervals after the previous exercise of the mob’s

philosophy of ‘prevention.’” “Lynching as a remedy,” says Mr. Thomas

Nelson Page, “is a ghastly failure.” The opposite opinion, however,

has still its champions. “The lynch lightning,” says Mr. W. B. Smith

(an anti-negro extremist), “seldom strikes twice in the same district

or community.” “The Colour-Line,” p. 259.

Footnote 9:

The commonly accepted statistics of lynchings are those supplied by

the Chicago _Tribune_. I have before me the figures for the years

1885-1904, somewhat vitiated by the fact that the enumeration for 1888

is incomplete. It would appear that in these years 2942 lynchings in

all occurred, 2042 of the victims being negroes, and the remaining 900

belonging to other races. But the proportion of negro lynchings

steadily increased. In 1886, 71 negroes were lynched, as against 62

men of other races; whereas in 1901 the respective figures were 107

and 28. Out of the whole number of lynchings 25 per cent. were for

rape, 42 per cent. for murder, and 33 per cent. for other offences.

More than 80 per cent. of the whole number of lynchings occurred in

the Southern States.

Footnote 10:

Washington, November 15, 1909. “Ninety days’ imprisonment was imposed

to-day upon ex-Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp, of Chattanooga, Tenn., by the

supreme court of the United States for contempt of court in failing to

prevent the lynching of a negro, Edward Johnson, whose execution had

been stayed by the court.

“Luther Williams and Nick Nolan were sentenced to imprisonment for

ninety days for connection with the lynching, and Jeremiah Gibson, the

jailer, Henry Padgett and William Mayers, all of Chattanooga, for

sixty days.”

-----

One thing seems to me certain—namely, that crimes against women, and all

sorts of negro crime, will be far more effectually checked when

respectable and well-disposed negroes can feel reasonably confident that

people of their race will be treated with common fairness in white

courts of law. At present it is certain that they can feel no such

confidence. But, in making this statement, I am anticipating matters.

The point is one to which I must return later.

IV

RHETORIC IN LOUISVILLE

Louisville, Kentucky, is not an attractive city. It is as flat as my

hand; its atmosphere is grimy; its buildings vary from the commonplace

to the mean. It has one or two of the dumpy sky-scrapers—only some ten

or twelve storeys high—which are indispensable to the self-respect of

every American city of a certain size; but one feels that they are

products of mere imitative ostentation, not of economic necessity. In

Louisville the names, or numbers, of the streets are scarcely ever stuck

up. It is characteristic of a half-grown American town that you can

generally read the names of streets which have no houses in them; but

when the houses are built, the name-boards seem to be thrown away.

I am apt to estimate the civilization of a city by inspecting its

book-stores; but during a long day in Louisville I could not find a

single one. No doubt I failed to look in the right place; but I

certainly perambulated the leading business streets. I was reminded of a

couplet from I know not what poet—

“Alas for the South! Her books have grown fewer;

She was never much given to literature.”

Let me hasten to add that in all the other cities I visited I found one

or more fairly well-supplied book-stores.

For reasons I have elsewhere stated at length, an American barber’s shop

is an abomination to me. [Sidenote: Tonsorial Sarcasm.] Among the least

of its terrors is the interminable time occupied by the disgusting

processes to which you are submitted. However, I had time on my hands in

Louisville, and, being a vagrant with no fixed abode, had no

conveniences for shaving myself. So I ventured into a “tonsorial

parlour.”

I was “attended” by a white “artist”; for this is one of the trades from

which the negro is being rapidly ousted all over the South.[11]

-----

Footnote 11:

“There are more coloured barbers in the United States to-day than ever

before, but a larger number than ever cater to only the coloured

trade.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Negro in the South,” p. 99. On this

point, however, a wise word of Mr. E. G. Murphy’s deserves to be

noted: “If the man who ‘disappears’ as a barber reappears as a

carpenter, or as a small farmer on his own land, he may figure in the

census-tables to prove all sorts of dismal theories; but, as a matter

of fact, he has been forced into a sounder and stronger economic

position. Many negroes are suffering displacement without gaining by

the process; but it is a mistake to assume that displacement in itself

is always an evidence of industrial defeat.” “The Basis of

Ascendancy,” p. 64.

-----

“Have you special seats for coloured people in the street-cars here”? I

asked my torturer.

“No,” he replied, “we haven’t. They can sit wherever they please. And,

what’s more, they won’t sit beside each other, but insist on plumping

themselves down alongside of white folks. If _I_ had my way, they’d ride

on the roof.” I need scarcely remark that, as American street-cars have

no outside seats, this was an ironical recommendation.

It was with some hesitancy that I offered a tip to this champion of the

dignity of the white man. But he showed no resentment.

I had been recommended to call on Mr. A. B. Shipton (I alter the name),

a coloured lawyer of some prominence. [Sidenote: A Negro Lawyer.]

Entering his office, I found a man of aquiline features and tawny rather

than brown complexion, carrying on a conversation through the telephone.

From its matter I gathered that he was talking to his wife; and this

conjecture was confirmed when he, so to speak, rang off with two

sounding kisses into the instrument. The trait was characteristic; for

the domestic negro is very domestic indeed.

He now put on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses and read my letter of

introduction, all the time smoking a long pipe, which he had kept alight

even while at the telephone. I presently found that some of his habits

in relation to the use of tobacco savoured of the period of “Martin

Chuzzlewit”; but he was a man whom one instinctively, and with no

effort, met on the equal terms on which one would meet a member of his

profession in England.

As I was well accredited, he received me with cordiality and talked

freely. Not only freely, indeed, but copiously; not only copiously, but

with rhetorical finish and emphasis. I soon realized that I was

listening to extracts from speeches which he was in the habit of

delivering.

Looking back upon the whole tenor of our interview, I find it curiously

like the talk which a sixteenth-century Englishman might have held with

a Spanish or Venetian Jew. Mr. Shipton related, indeed, a series of

wrongs, injustices, and humiliations; but the ever-recurring burden of

his tale was a celebration of the material progress of his race, the

wealth they were amassing, the homes they were founding, the heroism

they were developing in the teeth of adverse circumstance.

[Sidenote: The Plaint of the Uncomplaining.]

“As you go southward, sir,” he said, “people will tell you over and over

again that they, the Southern whites, alone know the negro and know how

to deal with him. That is precisely the reverse of the truth. They do

not know the negro, because they won’t know him. They won’t enter into

any sympathetic relation with him.

“It was different in the days of slavery, no doubt. Then, in most cases,

there was a certain amount of human intercourse between the slave and

the master. But the growing white generation has no approach to the

knowledge of the black man (to say nothing of sympathy with him) that

its grandfathers had in ante-bellum days.

“Is race-prejudice weakening at all? It is not weakening, but altering,

and that in an ominous way. Thirty years ago the prejudice was against

the ignorant, shiftless and thriftless black; now it is against the

thrifty and industrious, the refined and the cultured—against those, in

a word, who come into competition with the middle-class white.[12]

“Just think, sir, what we have done! Forty years ago, when slavery came

to an end, we were four million ignorant, homeless, schoolless,

friendless creatures. Now there are ten millions of us, and we have a

hundred colleges, thousands of schools, tens of thousands of homes. We

pay taxes on a billion dollars’ worth of property.[13]

-----

Footnote 12:

“If my own city of Atlanta had offered it to-day the choice between

five hundred negro college graduates—forceful, busy, ambitious men of

property and self-respect—and five hundred black, cringing vagrants

and criminals, the popular vote in favour of the criminals would be

simply overwhelming. Why? Because they want negro crime? No, not that

they fear negro crime less, but that they fear negro ambition and

success more. They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or

at least they think they can. But the South can conceive neither

machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive

black man.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Negro in the South,” p. 180.

Footnote 13:

According to Mr. W.H. Thomas, a negro writer violently hostile to his

race, negroes in the year 1901 owned about $700,000,000, and paid

state and municipal taxes of over $3,000,000. This, he reckons, would

mean property to the amount of about $90 per head, or a saving of

about $2·60 (ten and sixpence) per head per year since emancipation.

Mr. Thomas also states that before the war there was in the South a

free negro population of a quarter of a million, owning between

thirty-five and forty million dollars’ worth of property. “The

American Negro,” pp. 39 and 74. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page also points out

that some negroes accumulated wealth during the Reconstruction period

“by other means than those of honest thrift.” But it is probable that

in most cases the money thus gained was not so employed as to

constitute a permanent addition to the wealth of the race.

-----

“Forty years ago we had no business men, no professional men. Now we

have painters, poets, architects, inventors, merchants, lawyers,

doctors, divines. And yet we are shut off from the body-politic. We have

to submit to taxation without representation. Even those of us who

cannot be defrauded of our votes are excluded from the councils of the

party which would not exist without us. That” (with peculiar bitterness)

“is what they call the lilywhite policy![14]

-----

Footnote 14:

See foot-note, p. 171.

-----

“But, sir, we are uncomplaining. If there is a colour-problem, it is not

we who raise it. No! it is the unprincipled white politician who finds

anti-negro agitation a popular plank in his platform.

“Even under this government of the two races by and for the one race,

the negro is loyal to the country which he has enriched by his labour,

hallowed by his graves, watered with his blood.

“We are a docile and an instinctively religious race. You will find few

negro atheists or infidels. We are susceptible to any and all of the

forms of the Christian religion. We are Methodists or Baptists among the

Methodists and Baptists, Presbyterians among the Presbyterians,

Episcopalians among the Episcopalians, Roman Catholics among the Roman

Catholics.”

I could not but think this remark significant of much—of far more,

indeed, than the speaker realized.

“Are you excluded from municipal as well as from political life?” I

asked.

“Even more strictly, if possible,” was the reply. “All municipal offices

are in the hands of ‘sho’ ’nuff white folks,’ though they may be Dagos,

or Germans, or Slavs. Of course the city government and the police

department are run by the Irish. No negro holds a job higher than that

of washing spittoons in the Court House. Yet in this city we pay taxes

on three millions of property.

[Sidenote: Arithmetical Progression.]

“But this is the saving trait of the negro’s character: shut off from

all other activities, he goes on quietly and uncomplainingly working,

educating himself, and accumulating property.[15] For the righting of

our wrongs we must look to the negroes in those States where they hold

the balance of power—in Ohio, Indiana, Connecticut, New Jersey, and

others. And think what an element we are destined to form in the body

politic! In fifty years we shall be twenty-five millions; next century

we shall be fifty millions. Not a drop of our blood is lost to us—the

whites take care of _that_. If you haven’t got but a sixteenth part of

black blood, you’re a negro all right.”

-----

Footnote 15:

Mr Booker Washington declares (“The Negro in the South,” p. 73) that

“the race has acquired ownership in land that is equal in area to the

combined countries of Belgium and Holland.” He does not say how much

of it is under mortgage. Elsewhere, Mr. Washington has stated (on the

authority of the census of 1900) “that from a penniless population

just out of slavery, 372,414 owners of homes have emerged, and of

these 255,156 are known to own their homes absolutely free of

encumbrance.” See E. G. Murphy: “The Present South,” p. 184. But the

negroes were not absolutely “penniless” at the outbreak of the war.

See p. 33.

-----

Twenty-five millions in fifty years! Next century fifty millions! I did

think of it; and it was a thought to give one pause. Perhaps a more

careful estimate would somewhat reduce the figures. Cautious

statisticians, proceeding on the best available data, place the probable

number of negroes at the beginning of the next century somewhere about

35,000,000—that is to say, some 10,000,000 more than the whole

population of the eighteen Southern States at last census.[16]

-----

Footnote 16:

But see foot-note, p. 189.

-----

As I left Mr. Shipton I asked whether his practice was mainly among his

own people. “Yes,” he said; “ninety nine per cent. of it; though,

by-the-by, I got divorces for a couple of white men the other day.”

And now a word of amends to Louisville. An hour before sunset I took a

car down all the long length of Broad Street, till it landed me at the

entrance to Shawnee Park. [Sidenote: An Idyll.] This expanse of lush and

yet delicate verdure is embraced by a bend of the majestic Ohio. The

steep banks of the river are nobly wooded, and you look across the

splendid sheet of water to what might be primeval forest beyond. In that

soft sunset hour, the air was full of the scent of flowering shrubs. A

mocking-bird was singing in a thicket; far off I heard voices of

children playing, and, on the river, the clunk of a pair of oars in

rowlocks; but within sight there were only two lovers on a grassy mound,

and a student bent over his book. As the sun touched the trees of the

opposite bank and threw a glow over the yellow eddies of the great

river, I thought it would be hard to picture a more peaceful, a more

beautiful, a more idyllic scene. So even Louisville is not without its

charms.

V

“DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS

A night’s railway journey on the Illinois Central carries you from

Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee, and from the Ohio to the Mississippi.

You strike the Father of Waters some time before you reach Memphis. Here

two sets of literary associations were awakened in my mind. We passed

through miles of swampy, malarial-looking forests, with snake-like vines

binding the trees together; and every here and there would come a

clearing on the river-bank, still bristling with huge gaunt stumps of

dead timber, and showing a melancholy cabin or two, which forcibly

recalled the Eden of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” And then, again, in some quiet

backwater, we would see a great raft of lumber, with a hut or tent on

it—the very raft of Huckleberry Finn and Jim. So strongly have the great

rivers always appealed to my imagination that the first thing I did in

Memphis was to go down to the wharf and ascertain whether I could not

travel at least part of the way to New Orleans by steamer. There are

plenty of huge sternwheel boats, still on the river; but alas! their

movements are not arranged in view of passenger traffic. Only in short

stages, and at great expenditure of time, could I have carried out my

ambition. Baffled at Memphis, I still hoped to take boat from Vicksburg

to Natchez; but I found that I should have to wait two days for a boat,

and should then spend two more days in covering a distance which I could

do by rail in a single night. So, except for a short excursion at New

Orleans, I did not go a-sailing on the waters of the Mississippi.

Memphis is a much brighter, cleaner, more alert and prosperous-looking

place than Louisville. [Sidenote: Charity and Colour.] There are shops

on Main Street that would make a good figure in Paris; and at night it

is as gay with electricity as the “Great White Way” of New York. When I

arrived, Memphis was evidently in the thick of some excitement. The

side-walks of Main Street were crowded with ladies, young and—less

young, who were making dashes at every male passer-by, and seeking to

pin a square purple badge to the lapel of his coat. It was soon evident

that life was not worth living unless you wore one of these badges; so I

secured one, at the expense of half-a-dollar, and on examining it found

that it was inscribed—“Tag-Day for the Tennessee Home for Incurables.”

This was, in fact, a sort of Hospital Saturday, and the tag pinned to

your coat was a certificate that you had paid up.

The system struck me as ingenious; but it is because of a significant

sequel that I mention it. In the afternoon, I called on a negro

professional man who had invited me to go for a drive in his buggy. As

we left the house I noticed that he wore no tag. I touched my own tag,

and said, smiling, “Dare you venture into the streets without one of

these?” “Why,” he replied, “they wouldn’t for anything ‘tag’ a coloured

man!”

This was “discrimination” with a vengeance! Even charity fenced round by

the colour-line! I felt that here at last I had touched the limit.

[Sidenote: “Free” Libraries.]

We drove past the small but attractive-looking Public Library, situated

on a bluff, with a glorious view over the lake-like Mississippi.

“Is there discrimination here?” I asked.

“Why, certainly,” was the reply. “My son is in an office where several

of the white young men have cards enabling them to draw books from the

library. My son applied for a card; and as he is very light in colour,

it at first seemed that there was going to be no difficulty. But when

they heard his name, they identified him as my son and refused him a

card. The librarian wrote to me privately, and said that the boy could

have as many books as he liked without any card. But I would not have

that; I threatened to take the case into court by refusing to pay any

tax for the support of the library. But then they offered to establish a

branch library for coloured people, and that compromise I accepted.”

Some time later, in another city, I was reminded of this conversation on

seeing a very handsome Carnegie Free Library occupying a prominent site.

“Is it free to coloured people?” I asked.

“Oh dear no,” was the reply. “Carnegie offered to give an extra $10,000

for a black branch library, if the town would contribute $1000 a year to

its support. This the town agreed to do, on condition that the negro

community provided the site. We, on our part, consented to this, merely

stipulating that we should have a voice in the management. The town

replied emphatically ‘No,’ and the whole thing fell through. It would

simply have meant, you see, that they would have dumped upon us any

rubbish for which they hadn’t room in the main library. Can you wonder

that we declined?” I could not.

To return to Memphis. I had gone there, not exactly to attend the annual

“Conference for Education in the South,” but to see several people who

were attending it. [Sidenote: Educators in Council.] However, I did go

to one or two meetings, and notably to one which was to be addressed by

the British Ambassador, Mr. James Bryce. It was in the Lyceum Theatre,

and I sat on the platform (the stage) and looked out over the crowded

house, where a dozen electric fans were keeping the sultry air in

motion. It seemed to me odd that, while the floor of the house and the

first and second circle were overcrowded, there were only one or two

people in the gallery. Presently I looked up again; there were now about

twenty people in the upper regions, and I had a curious difficulty in

distinguishing their features. A light burst upon me—they were negroes.

In a “Conference for Education in the South” the whites did all the

conferring and the blacks, if they were so minded, might listen from the

gallery.

Next day my black, or rather olive-coloured, friend said: “I could have

whipped myself this morning when I opened the paper and saw that I’d

missed hearing Bryce. I was bent upon hearing him, but somehow I forgot

that yesterday was the evening.” I wondered whether he realized that he

would have had to sit in the gallery. But I did not ask him. Every now

and then, in this country, one turns tail and flees from the haunting

colour question. It is the skeleton at the feast of Southern life.

In New York I had met President Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, one

of the most notable men in America, an accomplished speaker, and an

authority, if ever there was one, on the education of the negro. “No

doubt I shall see you at Memphis,” I said, in an off-hand way. He

answered, rather drily, “No;” and some time afterwards he said, “You

asked me if I would be at Memphis—I am not at all sure that I should be

welcome there. I received a printed circular notifying me of the

meeting, but no invitation to attend it. You will find friends of the

negro there, and of negro education—oh yes, plenty. But they will not be

of my colour.”

I did, as a matter of fact, hear one friend of negro education hold

forth—Bishop Bratton, of Mississippi. [Sidenote: A Bishop on Race

Equality.] The Bishop laid down a good many principles—among them that

“the negro is capable of development to a point whose limit he (the

speaker) had not discovered,” but that “the vast majority are still

children intellectually, and little short of savages morally.” The

purport of his address was the assertion that negro education should not

be left entirely or mainly to negro teachers. The ideal school would be

one under the supervision of a white clergyman, where carefully selected

portions of Scripture should be necessary parts of the curriculum, and

“where the race should be taught that race integrity is obedience to

God’s own creation and appointment, and that race intercourse, kindly

and cordial, is not race equality.” “Indeed,” the Bishop proceeded, “the

very expression ‘race equality’ is an anachronism belonging to the

mediæval period of reconstruction history [that is, roughly, the period

between 1866 and 1876], which has long gone to its account.” These

remarks were warmly received by the audience, and greatly applauded by

the leading Southern papers. But one understands why Mr. Booker T.

Washington—and, still more, why Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta

University—were not bidden to the conference. Of these two negro leaders

I shall try to give a sketch in my next paper.

VI

TWO LEADERS

“People are always laying stress on the white blood in me,” said Mr. W.

E. Burghardt Du Bois, “and attributing to that anything I do that is

worth doing. But they never speak of the white blood in Mr. Booker

Washington, who, as a matter of fact, has a larger share than I have.”

“How do you make that out?” I asked; and Mr. Du Bois gave me the story

of his ancestry. The story went back two hundred years, for he comes of

a New England stock, and has had no slave ancestors (I take it) for many

generations. I could not follow his proof that more of Africa flows in

his veins than in Mr. Booker Washington’s; nor does it greatly matter;

for if it be so in fact, Nature has taken great pains to conceal the

fact, and the popular error of which he complains is practically

inevitable.

[Sidenote: A Contrast of Personalities.]

Principal Booker T. Washington is a negro in every lineament, and not,

one would say, of the most refined type. His skin is neither black nor

copper-coloured, but rather of a sort of cloudy yellow, to which the

other shades are, perhaps, æsthetically preferable. His hair, his ears,

his nose, his jaw, all place his race beyond dispute; only his grave,

candid, forceful eyes announce a leader of men. He is above middle

height, and heavily built; seated, he is apt to sprawl. He has a curious

trick of drawing back the corners of his mouth, so as to reveal almost

the whole of his range of teeth. At first I took this for a slow smile,

heralding some humorous remark; but humour is not Mr. Washington’s

strong point. His grin is a nervous habit, and scarcely a pretty

one.[17] Altogether, in talking with him, you have no difficulty in

remembering the race of your interlocutor, and if you make an untactful

remark—if you let the irrepressible instinct of race-superiority slip

out—you have all the more reason to be ashamed.

-----

Footnote 17:

Since writing this, I have heard Mr. Washington make a speech, and now

conceive this grin to be partly, at any rate, a habit contracted in

the effort to secure perfectly clear enunciation.

-----

With Mr. Du Bois the case is totally different. His own demonstration

notwithstanding, I cannot believe that there is more of the negro in him

than in (say) Alexandre Dumas fils. Meeting this quiet, cultivated,

French-looking gentleman, with his pointed beard, olive complexion, and

dark melancholy eyes, it is hard to believe that he is born, as he

himself phrases it, “within the Veil.” In appearance he reminded me a

good deal of Gabriele d’Annunzio, only that D’Annunzio happens to be

fair, while Mr. Du Bois has something more like the average Italian

complexion. In speaking to this man of fine academic culture—this

typical college don, one would have said—the difficulty was to feel any

difference of race and traditions, and not to assume, tactlessly, an

identical standpoint.

These two men are unquestionably the leaders of their race to-day; but

their ideals and their policy are as different as their physique. Mr.

Washington leads from within; Mr. Du Bois from without. Should he read

this phrase he will probably resent it; but it may be none the less

true. Mr. Washington could never have been anything else than a negro;

he represents all that is best in the race, but nothing that is not in

the race. Mr. Du Bois is a negro only from outside pressure. I do not

mean, of course, that there are no negro traits in his character, but

that it is outside pressure—the tyranny of the white man—that has made

him fiercely, passionately, insistently African. Had there been no

colour question—had the negro had no oppression, no injustice to

complain of—Mr. Du Bois would have been a cosmopolitan, and led the life

of a scholar at some English, German, or perhaps even American

University. As it was, he felt that to desert his race would be the

basest of apostasies; but it was because he could have been disloyal

that he became so vehemently—one might almost say fanatically—loyal.

I have heard a well-known New York publicist, the editor of an

influential paper, express the opinion that Mr. Booker Washington is one

of the greatest men at present alive in America. [Sidenote: “Up from

Slavery.”] One of the others was President Eliot, of Harvard; the third

I will not name—thus leaving the gate of hope ajar for many eminent

persons. There was, perhaps, a spice of paradox in this appraisement of

Mr. Washington; but a remarkable man he certainly is. Not, I think, a

great intellect, but assuredly a strong and admirable character. His

life, as related by himself in “Up from Slavery,” is a story of quiet

heroism to rank with any in literature. Born a slave in a one-room

cabin, with no glazed window and an earthen floor, he remained there

until, when he was eight or nine, emancipation came. After that he

worked in a salt-furnace and in a coal-mine, devoured all the time by a

passion for knowledge which overcame what seemed almost incredible

difficulties. At last he set forth for Hampton Institute, where General

Armstrong was then just beginning his beneficent work. He had five

hundred miles to travel and scarcely any money. He worked and even

begged his way; for Mr. Washington has never been ashamed to beg when

there was a good object to be served. Arriving at Richmond, Virginia,

without a cent, he worked for several days unloading a ship, and slept

at night in a hollow under a wooden side-walk.

At Hampton he found the system in operation which he has since adopted

at Tuskegee—namely, that tuition is covered by endowment, while the

student is enabled to pay (in part, at any rate) by work, for his board

and clothing. He soon distinguished himself, not by great attainments,

but by the thoroughness of his work and the sincerity and elevation of

his character. Then, in 1881, it occurred to the State of Alabama to

start a normal school for coloured people at a little village named

Tuskegee, some forty miles from the capital, Montgomery. It did not,

however, occur to the State of Alabama to provide any buildings or

apparatus; it simply allotted £400 a year to be applied to the salaries

of the teachers. On General Armstrong’s recommendation, Mr. Washington,

then a youth of some five-and-twenty, was entrusted with the

organization and management of the school; and the account of how, with

practically no resources at all, he built up the great and beneficent

institution which has now made the name of Tuskegee world-famous, is

indeed a remarkable story of indomitable courage and perseverance. Mr.

Washington felt that his personal failure would be reckoned a failure

for his race. Out of the nettle, danger, he plucked the flower, safety;

and Tuskegee now represents perhaps the greatest individual triumph his

race has ever achieved.

Of course it has been achieved largely through philanthropic help from

the North—Mr. Washington, as I have said, is an unashamed, though very

tactful, beggar. [Sidenote: Statesman or Time-Server?] It is precisely

that tactfulness, in its largest sense, with which the fierier spirits

of his race reproach him. In their milder moods they call him an

opportunist and time-server; in moments of irritation they call him a

betrayer of his people, and a pitiful truckler to the white man. He is,

in fact, nothing of the sort; on the wrongs of his race he has spoken

with no uncertain voice, when he felt it to be in season; but he has not

harped upon them in and out of season. While he has plenty of

race-pride, he has no race-vanity, and realizes that the negro has yet

to conquer his place among the fully-developed and civilized races of

the world. To help in this conquest is the mission and glory of his

life; and he feels, rightly or wrongly, that material progress must

precede and serve as a basis for intellectual progress. Therefore what

is called the academic course—the course of language, literature, and

abstract science—plays only a secondary part at Tuskegee. The curriculum

is mainly industrial and agricultural, though the chemical and

mechanical theory which lies behind agriculture and the handicrafts is

by no means neglected. The fostering of aptitudes and the upbuilding of

character—these are the two great aims of Tuskegee. The negro, says Mr.

Washington, must render himself necessary to the American Commonwealth

before he can expect to take a highly esteemed place in it, and the best

way to claim a vote is to show that you are capable of using it wisely.

Such are the maxims which he inculcates on his students—thereby earning

the contumely of the fierier spirits aforesaid. They broke up one of his

meetings in Boston, not long ago, with red pepper, and with the racial

weapon—the razor.

But if any one imagines that Mr. Washington is a saint-like spirit in

whom the wrongs of his race awaken no bitterness, he is very much

mistaken. He has, when he cares to show it, a quiet contempt for the

pettinesses of Southern policy which is rendered all the more scathing

by his acceptance of them as matters of course.

It was at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 that Mr. Booker Washington made

his first great success—the success which brought him national renown as

a speaker and a leader of his race. [Sidenote: The Atlanta Compromise.]

In an address delivered at the opening ceremony, he formulated what has

since become famous as the Atlanta Compromise, in this oft-quoted

sentence: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as

the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual

progress.”

Mr. Washington has himself described with dignified simplicity the

enthusiasm which this speech aroused among an audience which, if not

hostile at the outset, was at least sceptical of the policy of allowing

a negro to speak on such an occasion. The chairman—the Governor of

Georgia—rushed across the platform and shook him by the hand, and the

country was soon ringing with the fame of his tactful eloquence. But

though it is the phrase above quoted that has become classic, there was

another, which, if I am not greatly mistaken, did more to conciliate his

audience. Speaking of the progress of his race, as manifested in their

department of the Exposition, he reminded his hearers that the negro had

“started thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts

and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources).” I

would wager a good deal that it was this parenthesis, this genial

allusion to the tender topic of chicken-stealing, that finally won the

hearts of his white hearers. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Du Bois

thus playing, not to the gallery, but rather to the stalls. And Mr.

Washington no doubt deliberately calculated his effect, for he is

certainly not by nature an irrepressibly facetious personage.

This famous speech, with its famous metaphor, was delivered, as I have

said, at Atlanta, in 1895. At Atlanta in 1906 an outbreak of popular

frenzy, excited by one or two real and several imaginary outrages, led

to the slaughter in the streets of an unknown number of negroes

(probably thirty or forty), not one of whom was even suspected of any

crime. It does not seem as though the Atlanta Compromise had as yet

borne much fruit, at any rate on its native soil.

Even more significant than Mr. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” is a book

called “Tuskegee and its People,” to which he contributes a general

introduction. [Sidenote: Tuskegee Ideals.] Two-thirds of the book

consist of “Autobiographies by Graduates of the School,” with such

titles as “A College President’s Story,” “A Lawyer’s Story,” “The Story

of a Blacksmith,” “The Story of a Farmer,” “A Druggist’s Story,“ “A

Negro Community Builder.” These stories are all interesting, many of

them heroic and touching, and all permeated with the Booker-Washington

spirit of indomitable self-help, unresentful acceptance of outward

conditions, and unquestioning measurement of success by material

standards. And yet not wholly material. The formation and maintenance of

the “home” are the aspiration and ideal everywhere proclaimed—the home

connoting, to the negro mind, not only pecuniary well-being, but

decency, morality, education, a certain standard of refinement. Here is

a characteristic passage from “The Story of a Farmer”:

Rev. Robert C. Bedford, Secretary of the board of trustees, Tuskegee

Institute, some time ago visited us.... He wrote the following

much-appreciated compliment regarding our homes and ourselves: “The

homes of the Reid brothers are very nicely furnished throughout.

Everything is well kept and very orderly. The bedspreads are

strikingly white, and the rooms—though I called when not expected—were

in the best of order.”

To this subject of the “home” I shall return later. I have seen few

things more touching than the negro’s pride in the whiteness of his

bedspreads.

Not less characteristic, however, is this further passage from the same

“Story of a Farmer,” which follows, indeed, on the same page:—

Under the guidance of the Tuskegee influences ... the importance of

land-buying was early brought to our attention, but because of the

crude and inexperienced labourers about us, we found that we could,

with advantage to all, rent large tracts of land, sub-rent to others,

and in this way pay no rent ourselves, as these sub-renters did that

for us. We could in this way also escape paying taxes, insurance, and

other expenses that naturally follow.

It does not appear that “the Tuskegee influence” involves any economic

idealism, or any doubt as to the legitimacy of capitalistic

exploitation.

Principal Washington’s message, by his own admission, or, rather,

insistence, might not unfairly be called “The Gospel of the Toothbrush.”

[Sidenote: Washingtonian Optimism.] Again and again he uses this

unpretending appliance as a symbol of the clean-living self-respect

which he has made an ideal for his race. His policy, as he puts it in a

remarkable passage, is to teach the negro to “want more wants.” It is

the man with scarcely any wants who can satisfy them by working one day

a week and loafing the other six. The man who wants many things “to make

a happy fireside clime for weans and wife,” is the man who can be

trusted to work steadily for six days out of the seven. This undeniable

and (from the employer’s point of view) most salutary truth ought to put

to silence the dwindling minority of Southerners who still object to the

very idea and principle of negro education.

But suppose the majority of the race converted either into men of

independent substance or satisfactory labourers for hire, will the

problem be thereby solved? Principal Washington has no doubt on the

subject. In the introduction to “Tuskegee and its People,” he proclaims

his optimism in no uncertain voice:

The immeasurable advancement of the negro, manifested in character,

courage, and cash ... is “confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ”

that the gospel of industry, as exemplified by Tuskegee and its

helpers, has exerted a leavening influence upon civilization wherever

it has been brought within the reach of those who are struggling

towards the heights. Under this new dispensation of mind, morals, and

muscle, with the best whites and best blacks in sympathetic

co-operation, and justice meaning the same to the weak as to the

strong, the South will no longer be vexed by a race problem.

Such is the teaching of Washingtonian optimism.

And what is the reply of Du Boisian idealism?

The reply is implicit in the very title of Mr. Du Bois’ book, “The Souls

of Black Folk.” [Sidenote: Du Boisian Idealism.] “Your method of

securing peace, decency, and comfort for our bodies,” say the idealists

to Mr. Washington, “implies, even if successful, the degradation and

atrophy of our souls.” Mr. Du Bois celebrates with fervour the saints,

the rebels, and the martyrs of his race, of whom Mr. Washington seems

never to have heard. Mr. Du Bois admits, of course, the misfortunes of

his people, but apparently regards them as a pure contrariety of Fate,

with nothing in the racial constitution or character to account for

them. Nothing less than the most perfect equality, not only economic and

political, but social and intellectual, will satisfy him. If the negro

is to hold a place apart, it must be by his own free choice, because he

does not desire or condescend to mingle with the white. “Those who

dislike amalgamation,” he says, “can best prevent it by helping to raise

the negro to such a plane of intelligence and economic independence that

he will never stoop to mingle his blood with those who despise him.” Mr.

Washington admits to the full the mistakes of the Reconstruction

Period—when the negro was made the dominant race in the South—and

promises that they shall never be repeated. For Mr. Du Bois the mistake

lay in not resolutely carrying through (of course, with greater wisdom

and purity of purpose) the Reconstruction policy. He sees no reason why

“the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’—the righteous and reasonable

ambition to become a landowner, which the nation had all but

categorically promised to the freedmen”—should not have been literally

realized. In short, while Mr. Washington is an opportunist and a man of

action, Mr. Du Bois is a cloistered intransigeant.

But especially does he resent the over-emphasis laid, as he thinks, on

manual as opposed to intellectual training. Manual training is good; but

without intellectual training it must leave the race on a low and

servile level; and Mr. Washington’s “deprecation of institutions of

higher learning,” is leading to a “steady withdrawal of aid” from negro

universities. The spectacle of a “lone black boy poring over a French

grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home,” which raised in

Mr. Washington only a pitying smile, seems to Mr. Du Bois heroic and

admirable. The “gospel of work and money,” he thinks, “threatens almost

completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” “To seek to make the

blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of

making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.”

I have paused in the story of my pilgrimage in order to give a little

sketch of two conflicting tendencies, embodied in two remarkable men.

Mr. Washington I have called an optimist; but it must not be understood

that Mr. Du Bois is wholly a pessimist. He even says in one place: “That

the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must

eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows

civilized, is clear.” But is it? I wish I could share the confidence of

either the optimist or the idealist.

VII

A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK

In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked

for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street;

and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of

Black Folk,” which I had not yet read.

Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of

that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted

information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right

shop. He exuded information at every pore. He had no prejudice against

the negro—no, not he! Why, he employed three or four of them on his own

place. (This protestation of impartiality I found to be the constant

exordium of such a tirade.) But he was simply stating a matter of

incontrovertible fact when he said that there was no nigger that would

not assault a white woman whenever he saw a chance of doing so with

impunity.

“But,” I objected, “outrages are not, after all, such daily occurrences.

Do you mean to suggest that there are many outrages and lynchings that

are never heard of—that don’t get into the newspapers?”

“Oh no; they get into the papers right enough. The reason there aren’t

more outrages is simply that we whites have learnt to protect ourselves

against the negro, just as we do against the yellow fever and the

malaria—the work of noxious insects. You’re at the Hotel Gayoso, are

you? Well, you see the wire-gauze screens over all the doors and

windows? That’s to keep out the muskeeters; and just in the same way we

must keep the nigger out of our lives.”

[Sidenote: An Impartial Philosopher.]

Then came a phrase which I was to hear repeated many times, not by

irresponsible fanatics, but by Southerners of a much higher type: “I

tell you, sir, no pen can describe the horrors of the Reconstruction

Period, when all that was best in the white South was outlawed, and the

nigger rode roughshod over us. The true story of that time will never be

written in history. It is known only to those who went through it.”[18]

-----

Footnote 18:

For the benefit of English readers, it may be well to state clearly

what Reconstruction meant. I do so in the words of Mr. Edgar Gardner

Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 9): “The policies of reconstruction

represented two cardinal movements of purpose. One was the withdrawal

of political and civic power from those, especially those in official

positions, who had borne arms against the United States. This effort

was an expedient of distrust. It was as natural as it was

unintelligent, and it was as successful as it was mischievous.... This

was not all. The suffrage which the masters were denied was by the

same act committed into the hands of their former slaves, vast dumb

multitudes, more helpless with power than without power.” It is almost

universally admitted that the Reconstruction policy was a mistake,

which would never have been made had Lincoln lived, and that its

results were grotesque and often tragic. I find only Professor Du Bois

putting in a word for it and for some of its results. “The granting of

the ballot to the black man,” he says (“The Souls of Black Folk,” p.

38), “was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a

wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept

the results of the war.” But he adds, “Thus negro suffrage ended a

civil war by beginning a race feud.” The Reconstruction policy was

overthrown by the “Revolution” of 1876, when the military support, on

which the Reconstruction governments had rested, was withdrawn.

-----

He then poured forth in terms of romantic extravagance the tale of the

Ku-Klux-Klan, and how it had saved American civilization. He referred

me, by way of proof, to the statue of General Forrest, right here in

Memphis, who had been Grand Titan, or Grand Dragon, or I know not what,

of the said organization, and whom British soldiers, General French and

General Wolseley, had declared to have been the greatest military genius

that ever lived.