To all this I was no unwilling listener; yet my time was limited, and

now and then I sought to return to the prime object of my visit. In

vain! He literally button-holed me, held me by the lapel of my coat,

while he informed me that there was not an honest woman, in any sense of

the word, among the whole negro race, and that the coloured population

was ravaged by every sort of vice and disease. Had it been possible to

take his assurances literally, one must have concluded that the race

problem must quickly solve itself by the extinction of the negro. And he

frankly looked forward to that consummation. “Our vagrancy laws are

going to be a bitter pill for them. You see”—here he sketched a diagram

to assist my understanding—“a nigger can’t come here to the front-door

of my house and ring the bell; but he can go round to the back door”—a

line represented his tortuous course—“and I tell you he does. Every

household supports at least four or five niggers. Now the vagrancy laws

are going to drive that class of niggers to the North, and the Yankee

ain’t goin’ to stand his ways. We’re a long-sufferin’ people here in the

South.”

As for Mr. Du Bois’s book, it was evident that, even if he had it, he

was not going to sell it to me. I left the shop with two books: one was

“The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, jun., a melodramatic romance of the

Ku-Klux-Klan; the other a pseudo-scientific onslaught on the negro

race—a brutal and disgusting volume.

An hour or two later I was sitting in the consulting-room or “office” of

a coloured physician—Dr. Oberman, let me call him. [Sidenote: A Doctor’s

Story.]His real name was that of a we ll-known Southern family, and I

remarked upon the fact, expecting to hear that he had been born a slave

in that family. In a sense this was the case; but his story was a

strange one, and he told it with frank simplicity.

“My father,” he said, “was in fact a member of that family”—and he told

of sundry political offices which his white kindred had filled. “But my

father attached himself openly and honourably to my mother, who was a

slave in the family, and for that reason had to leave his home in North

Carolina. For some reason or other they chose to go to the State of

Mississippi. In 1850 that was a long and toilsome journey; and I was

born on the way, not far from this place. For some years they lived in

Mississippi, but they were again driven from there and passed into Ohio.

My father was one of the noblest of men, and as soon as he was in a

State where he could legally do so, he married my mother. I was present

at the wedding.”

“Your mother, Dr. Oberman,” I said, “must surely have been a quadroon,

or even an octoroon?”

“My dear mother,” he said, “was very nearly of the same colour as

myself. You see, sir, we don’t breed straight,”—and he proceeded to give

several instances in which the children either of two people of mixed

blood, or of a white father and a mother of mixed blood, had varied very

widely in complexion and facial type, some seeming almost pure white,

others emphatically negroid. I did not say it, but I could not help

thinking: This is scarcely a point in favour of that mixing of bloods

which is here called miscegenation. Or is it merely another form of

race-prejudice to hold that marriage undesirable in which the colour of

the offspring cannot be foretold, and is apt to be variegated?

[Sidenote: “Miscegenation.”]

In a country where such terrible disabilities and humiliations await

those in whom there is the slightest strain of black blood, it is surely

manifest that the people who impose these humiliations, and scout the

idea of legal marriage between the races, ought to visit with the

severest penalties any relation (necessarily illicit) between a white

man and a coloured woman—any augmentation by the white man of that

half-bred caste on which colour-disabilities press with such peculiar

cruelty. I asked Dr. Oberman whether there was any adequate feeling of

this sort in the white community—whether the white man who was known to

have relations with coloured women was denounced and ostracised?

“My dear sir,” he replied, “I can assure you that many of those who

preach most loudly against miscegenation are far from practising what

they preach.”

I am glad to say, however, that white men everywhere assured me that

there was a strong and increasingly efficient public sentiment against

this most anti-social form of transgression.[19] I cannot but think that

the lynching of a few white men notoriously guilty of it would

beneficially equalize matters.

-----

Footnote 19:

That excellent investigator, Mr. Stannard Baker, in his chapter on

“The Tragedy of the Mulatto,” presents a good deal of conflicting

evidence on this point. In the city of Montgomery, with its 35,000

inhabitants, it has been publicly stated without contradiction that

400 negro women live in more or less permanent concubinage with white

men, while “there are thirty-two negro dives operated for white

patronage”; nor does it seem that this state of things is at all

exceptional. On the other hand, the feeling against such connections

is certainly growing, and finds expression on every hand. The New

Orleans _Times Democrat_, for instance, declares it to be a public

scandal that no law against miscegenation should be on the

statute-book of Louisiana, “and that it should be left to mobs to

break up the miscegenatious couples.” Mr. Baker is, however, able to

say that “the class of white men who consort with negro women is of a

much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago.”

-----

[Sidenote: “Our Moses.”]

As I had come to Dr. Oberman with an introduction from Mr. Booker

Washington, it was natural that the talk should fall upon the

comparative merits of academic and of industrial education for the

negro. Said the doctor: “We acquire property, and we want bankers; we

fall ill, and we want physicians; we have business difficulties, and we

want lawyers; we have souls, and we want preachers who can give us

something better than the old ranting theology. But for every one of our

race who can profit by a literary education, there are ninety-nine for

whom manual training is the first essential.”

Then, looking up at a portrait of Mr. Washington on the wall of his

office, he said, “Ah! he is our Moses!”

But a stronger proof of the reverence with which this leader is regarded

awaited me as I left Dr. Oberman’s house. I had gone some twenty yards

down the street, when I fancied I heard my name called. It must be an

illusion, I thought, but nevertheless I looked round. There was the

doctor, with his head thrust out of his office-window on the first

floor, calling to me and beckoning me back.

“Did you take away that letter of Mr. Washington’s?” he asked.

I searched my pockets, but had it not. Meanwhile the doctor apparently

rummaged on his bureau, and found it.

“Here it is! All right!” he cried; and I passed on.

A formal type-written note of introduction, signed by the great man’s

hand, was a thing to be treasured like a pearl of great price. The first

thought in the doctor’s mind on parting from me had been to assure

himself of its safety!

VIII

IN THE BLACK BELT

For a whole long hot summer’s day I journeyed down the Mississippi

Valley from Memphis to Vicksburg, stopping at every wayside station.

Here I first felt—what was afterwards to grow upon me every day—an

impression of the extraordinary potential wealth of the South. These fat

champains, many of them scarcely reclaimed from the wilderness, and few

of them subjected to more than a rough surface culture, seemed to me to

reek of fertility and to cry aloud for development. As scenery they were

monotonous enough, but as the seed-plot of an illimitable future they

were vastly impressive.

There was no dining-car on the train, and at Clarksville, at 12.30, we

were allowed twenty minutes for “dinner.” We rushed for the dingy

refreshment-room, and found at each place a plate of soup, surrounded by

little saucers containing a cube of butter, a sort of dough-nut in

syrup, and some lettuce with a slice of hard-boiled egg. There was also

at each place a coffee-cup, a small milk-pot, and some sugar. The

soup-plates were removed by being piled in the middle of the table; a

negro waiter came round with fresh plates, and then served the following

menu, all dumped successively upon a single plate: (1) chunks of boiled

bacon with sauerkraut; (2) stewed veal; (3) mashed potatoes; (4) baked

beans; (5) roast chicken; (6) boiled beef. The meal ended with pumpkin

pie and ice-cream; and for beverage you had your choice of either coffee

or iced-tea. For this refection the charge was seventy-five cents, or

three shillings—the regular tariff, it would seem, at roadside stations.

Moral: Never, if you can help it, take a train without a dining-car.

Approaching Vicksburg, we ran for miles and leagues through a lovely

region of luxuriantly green, vine-tangled forest, mirrored in perfectly

clear water. Here, indeed, might the poet have sung of

“Annihilating all that’s made,

To a green thought in a green shade.”

How the water got there I cannot say. If it was simply the result of a

flood, how came it so exquisitely clear? It seemed as though the forest

grew naturally out of this pellucid mirror; the rather as we passed many

open glades of blue water, where a race of lake-dwellers had built their

cabins on piles. These glades I conceive to be “bayous,” but found no

native who could inform me. In any case, I shall never forget that run

up to Vicksburg. Until then, I scarcely knew the meaning of the word

“green.” The South was afterwards to teach me many other shades of its

significance.

This whole day’s journey lay through the “black belt” of the State of

Mississippi. [Sidenote: Africa in the Ascendant.] It was manifest to the

naked eye that the black population enormously outnumbered the white.

Few and far between were the cottages occupied by white folks,

numberless the cabins of the blacks. At the stations the blacks—who love

hanging around railway stations—were to the whites as ten to one. They

were a lively, good-humoured, talkative crowd, and on the whole, one

would have said, a fine race physically. Neither the men nor the women

showed any obvious sign of that dwindling vitality wherein my friend the

Memphis bookseller rejoiced—which is not to say that he was entirely

mistaken as regards the urban negro. These were rural negroes—a wholly

different matter.

The newsman on the train was selling the Memphis _Commercial Appeal_,

and I noticed that he found quite as many customers among the blacks as

among the whites—two or three at each station. This would have gratified

Mr. Booker Washington, for it was not only a proof of education but of

easy circumstances—the paper costing just about as much as the _Times_.

Mr. Washington, too, would have rejoiced to see the rather

exquisitely-dressed negro cavalier, mounted on a pretty little well-bred

mare, with spick-and-span new saddle and appurtenances, who, at Mound

Bayou, rode up to the Jim Crow car, and chatted with a friend. Here was

the Gospel of the Toothbrush supplemented by that of the curry-comb.

At this point I must face an avowal which I have long seen looming

ahead. [Sidenote: The Jim Crow Car.] Without sincerity these impressions

would be worse than useless. What I _think_ about the colour question

must be superficial, and may be foolish; but there is a certain

evidential value in what I _feel_. The whole question, ultimately, is

one of feeling; and the instinctive sensations of an observer, with the

prejudices of his race, no doubt, but with no local Southern prejudices,

are, so far as they go, worth taking into account.

Well, that day in the “black belt” of Mississippi brought home to me the

necessity of the Jim Crow car. The name—the contemptuous, insulting

name—is an outrage. The thing, on the other hand, I regard as

inevitable. There are some negroes (so called) with whom I should esteem

it a privilege to travel, and many others whose companionship would be

in no way unwelcome to me; but, frankly, I do not want to spend a whole

summer day in the Mississippi Valley cheek by jowl with a miscellaneous

multitude of the negro race.

The Jim Crow car is defended by many Southerners as a means of keeping

the peace, and on the ground of the special aversion which, owing to

deplorable and (in time) corrigible circumstances, the negro male

excites in the white woman. But I think the matter goes deeper than

this. The tension between the races might be indefinitely relaxed,

outrages might become a well-nigh incredible legend, the Gospel of the

Toothbrush might be disseminated among the negroes ten times more widely

than it is; and still it would not be desirable that the two races

should be intermingled at close quarters in the enforced intimacy of a

long railway journey. The permanent difficulty, underlying all

impermanent ones, that time, education, Christian charity, and soap and

water may remove, is that of sheer _unlikeness_.

Oh! they are terribly unlike, these two races! I am postulating no

superiority or inferiority. I say, with Bishop Bratton, that “the negro

is capable of development up to a point which neither he nor any one

else can as yet fix;” and I will even assume that, from an astral point

of view, the negro norm of physical beauty may be quite as well

justified as that of the white. But they are essentially, irreconcilably

different; and instincts rooted through untold centuries lead the white

man to associate ugliness and a certain tinge of animalism with the

negro physiognomy and physique. Call it illusion, prejudice, what you

will, this is an unalterable fact of white psychology; or, if alterable,

not in one generation, nor yet in one century. No doubt there is

something good-humoured and not unsympathetic in the very ugliness (from

the white point of view) of the negro. For that reason, among others,

the two races can get on well enough, if you give them elbow-room. But

elbow-room is just what the conditions of railway travelling preclude;

wherefore I hold the system of separate cars a legitimate measure of

defence against constant discomfort. Had it not been adopted, the South

would have been a nation of saints, not of men. It is in the methods of

its enforcement that they sometimes show themselves not only human but

inhuman.

Remember that the question is complicated by the American’s resolute

adherence to the constitutional fiction of equality. [Sidenote: The

Fiction of Equality.] As there are no “classes” in the great American

people, so there must be no first, second, or third class on the

American railways.[20] Of course, the theory remains a fiction on the

railroad no less than in life. Everyone travels first class; but those

who can pay for it may travel in classes higher than first, called

parlour-cars, drawing-room cars, and so forth. The only real validity of

the fiction, it seems to me, lies in the unfortunate situation it

creates with regard to the negro. If our three classes (or even two)

were provided on every train, the mass of the negro population would,

from sheer economic necessity, travel third. It might or might not be

necessary to provide separate cars on that level; but if it were, the

discrimination would not be greatly felt by the grade of black folks it

would affect. In the higher-class cars there would be no reasonable need

for discrimination, for the number of negroes using them would be few in

comparison, and personally unobjectionable. The essential elbow-room

would seldom be lacking; conditions in the first and second class would

be very much the same as they are at present in the North. It is the

crowding, the swamping, the submerging of the white race by the black,

that the South cannot reasonably be expected to endure; and what I

realized on that day in Mississippi was that such swamping would be an

inevitable and everyday incident unless measures were taken to obviate

it.

-----

Footnote 20:

Is this one of what Mr. E. G. Murphy calls “the divine inconveniences

of a Republic”?

-----

[Sidenote: A Dual Paradox.]

Of all historic ironies this is surely the bitterest—that the Republic

founded to demonstrate eighteenth-century ideals of human equality

should have been fated to provide their most glaring _reductio ad

absurdum_. This is far from an original observation: but there is

another paradox in the case which is not so generally recognized. It is

that the most religious of modern peoples should all the time be flying

in the face of the plainest dictates of Christianity. The South is by a

long way the most simply and sincerely religious country that I ever was

in.[21] It is not, like Ireland, a priest-ridden country; it is not,

like England, a country in which the strength of religion lies in its

social prestige; it is not, like Scotland, a country steeped in

theology. But it is a country in which religion is a very large factor

in life, and God is very real and personal. In other countries men are

apt to make a private matter of their religion, in so far as it is not

merely formal; but the Southerner wears his upon his sleeve. There is a

simple sincerity in his appeal to religious principle which I have often

found really touching. I have often, too, been reminded of that saying

of my Pennsylvanian friend: “The South may be living in the twentieth

century, but it has skipped the nineteenth.” The Southerner goes to the

Gospels for his rule of life, and has never heard of Nietzsche; yet I am

wholly unable to discover how the system of race-discriminations is

reconcilable with the fundamental precepts of Christianity. It is far

easier to find in the Old Testament the justification of slavery than in

the New Testament the justification of the Jim Crow car, the white and

black school, and the white and black church.[22] This is not

necessarily a condemnation of the Southerner’s attitude; I do not think

that the colour problem was foreseen in the New Testament. Christianity

is one thing, sociology another, and the Southerner’s logical error,

perhaps, lies in not keeping the distinction clear.[23] But I am sure

there are many sincere and earnest Christians in the South who will

scarce be at ease in heaven unless they enter it, like a Southern

railway station, through a gateway marked “For Whites.”

-----

Footnote 21:

“The fancied home of the cavalier is the home of the nearest approach

to puritanism and to the most vital protestant evangelicalism in the

world to-day.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 20.

Footnote 22:

“The result of the war was the complete expulsion of negroes from

white churches.... The Methodist Church South simply set its negro

members bodily out of doors. They did it with some consideration for

their feelings ... but they virtually said to all their black members,

‘You cannot worship God with us.’ There grew up, therefore, the

Coloured Methodist Episcopal Church.... From the North now came those

negro church bodies born of colour discrimination in Philadelphia and

New York in the eighteenth century; and thus a Christianity absolutely

divided along the colour-line arose. There may be in the South a black

man belonging to a white church to-day; but if so, he must be very old

and very feeble. This anomaly—this utter denial of the very first

principle of the ethics of Jesus Christ—is to-day so deep-seated and

unquestionable a principle of Southern Christianity that its essential

heathenism is scarcely thought of.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in

the South,” p. 174. I have been told, but make the statement “with all

reserve,” that no colour-line is drawn in Roman Catholic churches in

the South.

Footnote 23:

The perils of biblical argument may be illustrated by this passage

from “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” a book of which I shall have more to say

later (p. 235): “The same inspired authority who tells us that ‘God

made the world ... and hath made of one blood all nations of men, for

to dwell on the face of the earth,’ reminds us in the same breath that

He Himself ‘hath determined the bounds of their habitations.’” But if,

on this principle, the presence of the negro in America is a breach of

divine ordinance, what are we to say of the presence of the white man

in America?

-----

IX

EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM

Enormous undeveloped or half-developed fertility is the impression one

receives on every hand in the South; but the lack of development belongs

to a state of things soon to pass away. There can be little doubt that

the South stands on the threshold of an agricultural Golden Age.[24] It

is being brought about mainly by three agencies: (1) The United States

Department of Agriculture; (2) The General Education Board of New York;

(3) the boll-weevil, which, entering Texas from Mexico in 1899, has

extended its ravages over the States of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana,

and part of Mississippi, and at one time threatened the ruin of the

whole cotton industry. It may seem odd that this unwelcome invader

should be reckoned among the factors that are promoting agricultural

development; but, in a very real sense, he has served as a pioneer to

the movement.

-----

Footnote 24:

“Mr. Richard H. Edmonds, in an illuminating article in the _Review of

Reviews_ for February, 1906, has declared that no country ever

dominated, as does the South, an industry of such value and importance

as the cotton crop.... Three-fourths of this great crop, which must be

relied on to clothe civilization, and in the exploitation of which two

billions of capital are used, is raised in the South. It is a

stupendous God-made monopoly. To-day, the South has invested, in 777

mills, with their 9,200,000 spindles, $225,000,000, as against

$21,000,000 twenty-five years ago. The fields of the South furnish the

raw material for three-fourths of the mills of all the world with

their 110,000,000 spindles. The South now consumes 2,300,000 bales,

which is about the amount consumed by the rest of the country, and is

a fourfold increase over its consumption in 1890.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman:

“The Growing South,” p. 18. A threefold increase in the cotton-crops

seems easily possible; but whether prices could be kept up under such

conditions is another question. Be this as it may, an immense

agricultural development seems practically certain.

-----

Dr. Wallace Buttrick, of the General Education Board, was so kind as to

give me an outline of the course of events.

[Sidenote: Rockefeller to the Rescue.]

“Our Board,” he said, “was established and endowed, and has been at

various intervals re-endowed, by Mr. Rockefeller.”

“To promote education in the South?”

“Not in the South alone, nor even primarily; but we had, of course, to

study the special conditions prevailing in the South. We soon convinced

ourselves that the deficiencies of Southern education—and they were

enormous—were due to the sheer poverty of the country.[25] In the

Southern towns there are good schools, and the accommodation is fairly

adequate. But only 15 per cent. of the population of the South is a city

population. The remaining 85 per cent. is rural and agricultural—not

even, for the most part, gathered in villages of any size—so that the

problem of bringing education to the doors of the people is an immensely

difficult one.”

-----

Footnote 25:

“The figures of our national census show that from 1860 to 1870 there

was a fall of $2,100,000,000 in the assessed value of Southern

property, and that the period of Reconstruction added, in the years

from 1870 to 1880, another $67,000,000 to the loss.”—E. G. Murphy,

“The Present South,” p. 40. “No other region, except Poland, ever knew

such losses; and Poland ceased to exist. The year 1900 had come and

gone before the whole South had regained its _per capita_ wealth of

1860.”—E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 7.

-----

“I suppose compulsory education is not to be thought of?”

“It is thought of; it is mooted; it is coming; but not yet awhile. That

is just what, as I say, we realized—that the South is too poor to pay

for an adequate system of education, and that the problem is too huge a

one for even the most lavish outside philanthropy to tackle. What was to

be done, then? Manifestly to enrich the Southern agriculturalist, so as

to enable him to pay for the schooling of his children. As it is, his

average income is something like a third of the average income of a man

of his class in (say) the State of Iowa, where the public-school system

is adequate and satisfactory. Multiply his income by three, or even by

two, and he also will be able to afford an adequate public-school

system.”

“So your problem was nothing less than to double or treble the wealth of

the fifteen or sixteen Southern States?”

[Sidenote: The Boll-Weevil.]

“Something like that; and it was right here that the boll-weevil came

in. With ruin staring them in the face, the farmers of the affected

districts took up eagerly the system of what are called Demonstration

Farms, organized by Dr. S. A. Knapp, of the U.S. Department of

Agriculture. That department, at its experimental stations and with the

aid of its entomologists, had devised a method of combating the pest.

Roughly speaking, it consisted of getting in ahead of the

weevil—carefully preparing the ground and selecting the right varieties

of seed, so that the main part of the crop could be harvested before the

insect was ready to attack it. But it is one thing to devise a

scientific method and another thing to persuade and teach farmers to

carry it out. This difficulty Dr. Knapp got over by the following means:

he organized a body of skilled agents, who went to the leading

citizens—merchants, bankers, or what not—of a given district, and said,

‘Introduce us to the most intelligent and progressive farmer of your

neighbourhood.’ Then to this farmer the agent would say, ‘If you will

set apart a certain amount of land to be treated, under my supervision,

exactly as I shall prescribe, I (that is to say, the Government) will

provide you with the right seed for the purpose, and you will see what

the result will be.’ Then meetings would be called of the neighbouring

farmers, principles explained, and their attention directed to the

experiment. Their life-and-death interest in the matter would make them

watch the result closely; and as, in each case, the result would be a

far larger crop per acre than they had been used to before the

appearance of the weevil, you may imagine whether the methods of culture

were eagerly adopted and the right sorts of seed eagerly applied for.

[Sidenote: An Educational Campaign.]

“Well, we of the General Education Board saw in the method of Dr.

Knapp’s campaign against the boll-weevil the very thing we were wanting.

The Government was operating only in the boll-weevil districts—there

were constitutional objections to its extending its activity to regions

unaffected by the pest. There we stepped in, and offered to finance the

extension of the Demonstration Farms to other districts, in accordance

with their needs and capabilities. So long as only a nominal money

appropriation was required of it, the Government had no objection to our

acting under its authority, our agents thus having the prestige of

Government emissaries. For the current year, we have appropriated

£15,000 to the work, while Congress has voted a somewhat larger sum for

work in the boll-weevil States. Altogether, about 12,000 Demonstration

Farms have already been established, and about 20,000 farmers have

agreed to ‘co-operate’—that is, to work the whole or part of their land

according to our instructions. The system is quite new. It has nowhere

been at work more than two years, and there are many regions which are

not yet even touched by it; but already the results are surprising.”

“It does not, I presume, apply solely to cotton-growing?”

“Certainly not; on the contrary, one of our great objects is to break

down the exclusive reliance on cotton so common in many districts, and

to show how the exhaustion of land may be avoided by the judicious

rotation of crops. In short, we aim at providing object-lessons in

scientific agriculture all over the Southern States, and of course

always with strict reference to the particular advantages and

disadvantages of a district. I assure you the South is at the opening of

a new agricultural era; and it will not be many years before our work

will produce a marked effect on education. Come back ten years hence,

and you will no longer find it true that the Southern school is open, on

an average, only about three months in the year; that the Southerner

gets, on an average, something less than three years’ schooling in his

whole life; and that about 10 per cent. of the native-born white

population of the Southern States is wholly illiterate, and about 40 per

cent. of the negro population. We are going to change all that.”

[Sidenote: The Way to Wealth.]

Shortly afterwards I met, not Dr. Knapp himself, but his son, Mr. Arthur

Knapp, who gave me some further information as to the new era in

Southern agriculture.

“Not only,” he said, “is much Southern land unimproved, but much of it

is exhausted by careless and ignorant cultivation. It has been the

method of many Southern farmers to work their land until it would no

longer raise a paying crop of cotton; then to sell their farms for what

they could get and move on to fresher soil. The system of Demonstration

Farms will put an end to this, along with many other abuses and

stupidities. It is the only sound method of educating the farmer. You

may deluge him with Government bulletins of printed advice without

producing the slightest effect. Even if he reads and understands the

advice, he can’t or won’t apply it in practice. You must show him the

process and show him the results. Much more is done by talking than by

reading in the South; things circulate from mouth to mouth much more

effectually than even through the newspapers. Each of the 12,000

Demonstration Farms is visited by from thirty to one hundred

neighbouring farmers. That means that the object-lessons reach something

like 400,000 every year. And then the spirit of emulation is awakened.

Intelligent and energetic men are fired with the idea that they will

beat the Government; and they go off and have a very good try.”

“I think I roughly understand the method of fighting the boll-weevil;

but can you tell me something of what is being done for the benefit of

other products than cotton?”

“Well, we insist on the necessity of better drainage, of deeper and more

thorough ploughing, of carefully selecting and storing the best

varieties of seed. We demonstrate the judicious rotation of crops, and

show the advantages of devoting portions of the farm to legumes, which

have a high food value for stock, and at the same time enrich the soil.

Above all, perhaps, we insist on the necessity of economizing labour by

the use of more horse-power and better implements, and urge the

increasing of stock to such an extent that all the waste products and

idle lands of the farm may be utilized.”

“But most, if not all, of these prescriptions surely demand fresh

capital. Where is that to come from?”

“Why, no one pretends that the average farmer can introduce all these

improvements at once. The fundamental ones do not require more capital,

but only more thought and labour; and, these once applied, the more

expensive improvements will gradually become possible. The more

intelligent preparation of the soil and selection of the seed produce

wonderful results at once in the case of corn—what you call maize—no

less than in the case of cotton. If a farmer, under our guidance, plants

half his land with corn and cowpeas, and only the other half with

cotton, he gets as much cotton as he used to before, and has his corn

and cowpeas in addition, while the land will be gradually restored to

its original fertility. It is one of our great objects to teach farmers,

while keeping cotton their ‘cash crop,’ as they call it, to divert from

cotton as much land as is necessary to raise their own essential

food-stuffs and the fodder for their stock—things which, under the

present wasteful system, they mostly buy from outside.”

“Then the result of all this will not be an immense and immediate

increase in the whole output of cotton?”

“Not immediate, no; but who can tell what the ultimate result may be? It

is quite possible, for instance, that a cheaper and more effective

method of combating the boll-weevil may one day be discovered. As it is,

with all our care in breaking up the hibernating places of the pest, and

planting so that the greater part of the crop can be secured before he

is ready to attack it, we merely keep him effectively in check, we do

not exterminate him. He still puts us to much additional labour and

expense, and he still gets the end of the crop.”

“He seems to have been a valuable stimulus to effort, however; you ought

not to speak ungratefully of him.”

“His work in that respect is done—we have no further use for him.

By-the-by, have you seen his portrait?”

And I left Mr. Knapp with my note-book enriched with a counterfeit

presentment, many times enlarged, of the insect which has co-operated

with Mr. John D. Rockefeller in the agricultural regeneration of the

South.

X

NEW ORLEANS

Vicksburg is situated on a solitary, abrupt bluff, at a bend of the

Mississippi; whence, I suppose, its strategic importance and its place

in history. I climbed to its highest point, and looked out, at sunset,

over the burnished river and the Louisiana shore beyond. It seemed one

unbroken stretch of dark forest, which might never have been threaded by

human foot, or only by that of the Red Man. When the first explorer of

the great river climbed the bluff (as he doubtless did), he must have

surveyed no very different scene.

The town, too, had a touch of the primitive South about it which I had

not hitherto encountered. Memphis was as civilized and modern as any

Northern city; but Vicksburg, with its steep-climbing streets, its

cavernous, dimly-lighted shops, and its lounging outdoor life, had

something of the air of an Italian hill-town. The principal hotel was a

gaunt, dingy caravanserai, with no pretence to modernity about it. Here,

and here only, I may say, I found the Northern allegation justified,

that the South had lagged behind the age in things material.

An odd little incident brought home to me vividly the width of the

empire of English literature. [Sidenote: Madrigals by the Mississippi.]

At a street corner a sharp-featured Yankee youth, mounted on a large

cart, was carrying on a book-auction, with a great deal of lively

patter. As I passed, a familiar phrase fell upon my ear:

“And shallow rivers, by whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.”

I stopped and heard him read, not without understanding, the whole of

Marlowe’s canzonet. It carried me back from the Mississippi to the

Cherwell and the Chess; but what did it mean, I wonder, to the little

crowd of loafers, half white, half black, that surrounded his stall?

Then, with a little more patter, he modulated into

“As it fell upon a day

In the merry month of May,”

and I left him stumbling over the accentuation of

“King Pandion he is dead,

All thy friends are lapt in lead.”

Passing the same way half an hour later, I heard him thus deliver

himself: “Here y’are—Dr. Johnson’s great work ‘Rasselas’! Seventy-five

cents for ‘Rasselas’! He was Prince of Abyssinia—that’s a country in

West Africa where they’s a powerful lot o’ coloured folks.” But there

was, in the phrase of the country, nothing doing in “Rasselas.” I saw

only one actual transaction concluded—a negro could not resist the

allurement of “Doré’s Bible Gallery,” on which he lavished three

shillings.

Next morning I awoke to look out upon a moist mist rising over the vast

green chequer-board of rice-fields, as we approached New Orleans.

[Sidenote: Disillusionment.] Again a country of wonderful richness, to

which clumps of splendid trees gave a park-like aspect. The population

seemed sparse. Little wooden churches were dotted every here and there,

each with its pigmy spire—a feature not elsewhere common. The whole

region, of course, was as flat as a windless sea.

But, oh! the disappointment of New Orleans! To come from the dainty

pages of Cable to this roaring, clanging, ragged-edged, commonplace

American city! It seemed particularly frayed and grimy, because the

streets had everywhere been torn up for much-needed sewerage operations;

but under the best of circumstances it must be, I should say, a city

devoid of charm. In respect of mere width, Canal Street is doubtless a

splendid thoroughfare; but even it, with its two or three scattered

sky-scrapers and its otherwise paltry buildings, produces a raw,

unfinished effect; while it is so often cluttered up with electric cars,

on its six or eight tracks, as to have the air of a crowded

railway-yard.

The usually truthful Baedeker tells us that “New Orleans is in many ways

one of the most picturesque and interesting cities in America, owing to

the survival of the buildings, manners, and customs of its original

French and Spanish inhabitants.” He further states that “Canal Street

divides the French quarter, or ‘Vieux Carré’ from the new city, or

American quarter.” I therefore plucked up fresh hope, dodged the

swarming street-cars of Canal Street, and made for a street of the

“Vieux Carré,” which had at least a French name—Bourbon Street. But here

my disappointment became abysmal. It is difficult to believe that the

French city, with its narrow, rectangular streets and its commonplace

houses, can ever have been picturesque; now, at all events, it has sunk

into a rookery of grimy and dismal slums. There is still a certain

pleasantness about the old _Place d’ Armes_ (now Jackson Square), with

its cathedral and its old-world red-brick Pontalba Mansions; but, for

the rest, the glory of the old city has absolutely departed. Baedeker

duly informs us where “Sieur George” lived, and “Tite Poulette,” and

“Madame Délicieuse,” but I did not take the trouble to identify the

houses. If I am ever again to read Mr. Cable with pleasure, I must

forget all I saw of old New Orleans. Of only one spot in it have I a

grateful recollection—namely, Fabacher’s Restaurant, in Royal Street

(Rue Royale). There I partook of a “Creole Gumbo”—a soup compounded of

ham, crab, shrimps, chicken, and oysters—the bouillabaisse, I take it,

of Louisiana.

In the new residential quarters of the city, in St. Charles Avenue and

about Audubon Park, there are, no doubt, many beautiful houses,

pleasantly embowered in semi-tropical vegetation. One or two of the

newest and showiest mansions, in the Spanish style of architecture, I

suspected of being built after a fashion I had observed on the outskirts

of Memphis—with only a “veneer” of stone. The essential structure is of

wood; but an outside casing is added, consisting of rusticated blocks of

stone some three or four inches thick, an air-chamber being left between

the stone and the wood. Whether this method of building is found

successful I cannot say. The effect is often pleasing enough, even

though the Lamp of Truth may not shine conspicuous in the architecture.

A run in a river-steamer for several miles up and down the Mississippi

enabled me to realize in a measure the commercial magnitude and

importance of New Orleans. But what impressed me most of all in the city

was its cemeteries, of which it is justly proud. They are certainly

magnificent and “pretentious” cities of the dead. (The word

“pretentious” is currently used in America as a term of laudation.) Yes;

if you want to get buried with everything handsome about you, by all

means go to New Orleans. But as a place to live in, I cannot, on short

acquaintance, commend it.

[Sidenote: A Champion of the Children.]

My pleasantest memory of New Orleans is of a house on Prytania

Street—cool and airy, on an evening of extreme sultriness—where a lady

of Scottish name and descent was good enough to talk to me of her

manifold public activities. She is an ardent Suffragist—a rarity in

these climes—but, above all things, she devotes herself to the work of

holding in check, so far as may be, the terrible evils of child-labour,

which its rapidly growing industrialism has brought upon the South.

“It is quite true,” said Miss Graham, in answer to a question of mine,

“that you may often see the black child going to school while the white

child goes into the factory. The negro child is not wanted in the

factories; it could not be relied on; it would fall asleep over its

work. You know, I dare say, that we are now overrun in New Orleans with

Southern and Eastern Europeans—Italians, Roumanians, Lithuanians,

Greeks. It is their children that are the chief sufferers.”

“In what forms of employment?”

“Why, in cotton mills, stocking mills, candy factories, department

stores. We got an Act some time ago forbidding the employment in

factories of boys under twelve and girls under fourteen. But the proof

of age required was simply a certificate from the parents! And the

result was to make it appear that most boys had been born at the age of

twelve, and most girls at fourteen. We are now agitating for an Act

greatly increasing the penalties for employing children under age and

for issuing false certificates.”

“Just before coming here,” I said, “I went into a boot-blacking

‘parlour.’ It was a long, close gallery; and there I had seen a dozen

little boys working all this sweltering Sunday under a ‘boss.’ Unless he

had relays of boys (which seems unlikely) they must have been at it, to

my certain knowledge, for eight hours, and I don’t suppose they will

shut down for another two hours at least.”

“If you had inquired,” said Miss Graham, “you would probably have found

that they were all Greeks. The negro boot-blacks of New Orleans used to

be quite a class by themselves—Eugene Field has written a poem about

them. But now they have been quite ousted by the Greeks; while the

negroes, in turn, have ousted the Italian organ-grinders. Yes, the

boot-black boys are a bad case; but still worse is the case of the

telegraph-messengers. Just think of their working young boys from six in

the evening to six in the morning—sending them at all hours of the night

into the lowest streets of the lowest quarters of this wicked city—and

paying them two cents a message.”

“At what age do they take them?”

“Why, at any age when they can trot and have intelligence enough to find

an address that is given them. And, mark you, it isn’t always—perhaps

not generally—extreme poverty that makes the parents thus sacrifice

their children. Often the children’s earnings will go to pay the two or

two-and-a-half dollars a month demanded for a piano on the instalment

system. That instalment system is a great curse to the ignorant poor. I

have known a little child sent out to labour that its mother might

acquire—of course at four or five times its value—what do you think?—a

huge green plush album!

[Sidenote: An Island Inferno.]

“Just in these days,” Miss Graham continued, “we have had some terrible

revelations of child-labour, at a certain place on the Gulf Coast, where

more than 200 children, from nine years old upwards, are kept ‘shucking’

oysters for twelve hours a day, under the most horrible conditions,

physical and moral. And the Law Committee of our S.P.C.C. reports that

there is no remedy, because the factory law at present in force in

Louisiana applies only to ‘cities or towns having a population of 10,000

or more;’ whereas this place is a little private inferno, owned by a

single company and occupied solely by its serfs. But we are fighting a

good fight for better laws and better conditions.”

My greatly condensed report of her conversation may lead the reader to

mistake Miss Graham for a one-idea’d humanitarian. There could not be a

greater error. She is an eminently practical, energetic, broad-minded

young lady, with a keen sense of humour and an interest in many things

outside the work to which she has devoted herself. I am sure the little

children of New Orleans have in her not only a sincere but a very shrewd

and efficient friend.

Miss Graham reported the relations between the white and coloured

populations in New Orleans rather exceptionally good. The reason, I

think, is not far to seek—namely, that the whites outnumber the blacks

by about three to one. The acuteness of the problem in any given

locality is apt to depend largely on the numerical proportions of the

races.[26]

-----

Footnote 26:

“I lay it down as a fact which cannot successfully be challenged, that

the relations between the white and negro races in every State in the

Union have been, and are now, controlled by considerations ultimately

governed by the factor of the relative numbers of the two.’—A. H.

Stone: “The American Race Problem,” p. 57.

-----

On the New Orleans street-cars the two races are kept apart, but the

discrimination is certainly made with the utmost urbanity. The

rear-seats of each car are marked “For Coloured Patrons Only.”

-----

XI

CRIME-SLAVERY AND DEBT-SERFDOM[27]

Montgomery, the legislative capital of Alabama, has the air of a

pleasant and prosperous country town, with spacious streets, for the

most part well shaded with trees. Its dignified, unpretending State

House—where the Confederate Government was organized in 1861, and where

Jefferson Davis took the oath as President—is admirably situated at the

top of a gradually sloping hill, and commands a fine view over the rich,

pleasant country. The soil in this district (and, indeed, in many parts

of Alabama and Georgia) is as red as that of South Devon, and has

naturally imparted its tint to the swirling Alabama river, which, when I

saw it, reminded me of the rivers through which Thomas the Rhymer rode

in the old ballad:

“For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth

Rins through the springs o’ that countrie.”

-----

Footnote 27:

“Two systems of controlling human labour which still flourish in the

South are the direct children of slavery. These are the crop-lien

system and the convict-lease system. The crop-lien system is an

arrangement of chattel mortgages, so fixed that the housing, labour,

kind of agriculture and, to some extent, the personal liberty of the

free black labourer is put into the hands of the landowner and

merchant. It is absentee landlordism and the ‘company-store’ systems

united. The convict-lease system is the slavery in private hands of

persons convicted of crimes and misdemeanors in the courts.”—_Atlanta

University Publications_, No. IX. p. 2.

-----

I was much disappointed not to find at his Alabama home Mr. Edgar G.

Murphy, whose book on “The Present South” proves him not only a humane

and judicious thinker, but one of the most accomplished living writers

of America. I take this opportunity of expressing my great indebtedness

to his admirable work.

My most interesting experience in Montgomery was a long talk with an

intelligent and prosperous negro tradesman, whom I shall call Mr. Albert

Millard. [Sidenote: A Contented Negro.] Mr. Millard did not, on the

whole, express serious dissatisfaction with the condition of his race in

the neighbourhood, and was inclined to take a hopeful view of the

situation in general. “It’s the low classes of both races,” said he,

“that keep us down and keep friction up.”

“In labour matters,” he went on, “no galling colour-line is drawn. In

the building trade, for example, there is a white union and a coloured

union, with a superior council representing both races. On Labour Day

they parade together until they come to a certain point. Then one body

turns to the right and the other to the left, and they finish the

celebration each in its own park.”

“I wonder,” I said, “whether that may not be a type and model in

miniature for the general solution of the question.”

But Mr. Millard’s note changed when I got him on the administration of

justice.

[Sidenote: Inter-Racial Justice.]

“No,” he said, “we do not get justice in the courts. A negro’s case gets

no fair hearing; and he is far more severely punished than a white man

for the same offence. I’ll give you a little instance of the sort of

thing that happens. A coloured man whom I know—a decent, quiet

fellow—used to work in a livery stable. The boss one day fell a-cursing

him so furiously that the man couldn’t stand it, and said he’d just as

soon quit. He went into a room to take off his overalls; the boss

followed him, and, without more ado, hit him over the head with an iron

crowbar and knocked him senseless. When the man recovered he got out a

warrant against the boss; but, instead of listening to his case, the

Recorder said he might be thankful his master hadn’t killed him, and the

next time he appeared in that court he would be sent to the farm.”

“Sent to the farm?”

“That means fined a sum he couldn’t pay, and sent to work it out either

on the State farm or under some private employer. Oh, the State makes a

big profit in this way! Suppose a man is fined 20 dollars and costs—say

25 dollars altogether—his labour being credited to him at 50 cents a

day, it takes him fifty days to work out his fine. But his labour is

worth far more than 50 cents a day. Private employers pay the State 60

or 70 cents a day for each convict labourer, and provide his food as

well; but he is credited only with 50 cents all the same.”

“And what are they employed in for the most part?”

“Oh, farming in general—cotton, corn, potatoes, some sugar-cane. The

State has lots of stock. And then there are the truck gardens

(market-gardens) and the coal-mines.”

“And do you mean to say that all magistrates behave like the Recorder

you spoke of?”

“When the regular Recorder is away, they select the hardest of the

aldermen to take his place. There is only one court in which we think we

get justice, and that is the Federal Court.”

This is one of the few points on which there is little conflict of

evidence—the negro, in the main, does not get justice in the courts of

the South.[28] [Sidenote: An Elective Magistracy.] The tone of the

courts is exemplified in the pious peroration of the lawyer who

exclaimed: “God forbid that a jury should ever convict a white man for

killing a nigger who knocked his teeth down his throat!” Exceptions

there are, no doubt; there are districts in which the negroes themselves

report that they are equitably treated. But the rule is that in criminal

cases a negro’s guilt is lightly assumed, and he is much more heavily

punished than a white man would be for the same offence;[29] while in

civil cases justice may be done between black and black, but seldom

between white and black.

-----

Footnote 28:

On the other hand, Mr. A. H. Stone (“The American Race Problem,” p.

73) cites several cases of even-handed justice as between the two

races, and adds: “There is not a community in the South where such

things as these do not constantly occur, but their record is buried in

the musty documents of courts, instead of being trumpeted abroad.” Mr.

Stone also quotes a remark by Mr. Booker Washington to the same

effect.

Footnote 29:

It appears, however, that in many cases the great demand for negro

labour operates in favour of the negro who has been guilty of serious

crime—he escapes with a fine which is paid by his white employer, and

has to be worked off. Here, for instance, is a report from the

township of Prendergrass, Georgia: “The Negroes in general are in a

bad shape here. There are about eighty criminals here out on bond,

some for murder, some for selling whisky, some for gambling, some for

carrying concealed weapons, some for shooting, and most of them are

guilty, too; but their captain (_i.e._ employer) takes their part in

court. They generally pay about $25 and work the Negro from one and a

half to two years, and the Negro never knows what it cost.”—_Atlanta

University Publications_, No. IX. p. 47.

-----

It would seem, too, that as a rule the negro lawyer receives scant

attention in the courts. Flagrant instances of this have been related to

me—too flagrant, I hope, to be typical. It is pointed out, indeed, that

while negro doctors are numbered by the thousand, negro lawyers (despite

the argumentative and rhetorical nature of the race) are comparatively

few. The reason alleged is that, though colour is no disqualification in

the courts of nature, it practically disbars in the courts of men.

In the last analysis, this condition of affairs is no doubt a sort of

automatic index of the state of public sentiment in the South. The

average man does not greatly desire, or does not desire at all, that

scrupulous justice should be done to the negro; and an elective

magistracy—elected, as a rule, for short terms—simply mirrors this

attitude of mind. A Recorder who held the scales even, as between the

races, would quickly become unpopular with his electorate. He must

record _their_ judgments, or he will record no longer.

But there are special causes which tend to deflect the scale against the

negro, and the chief of these is the system touched upon by Mr. Millard,

which makes convict labour a source of profit to the State. [Sidenote:

Profitable Crime.] No doubt white men as well as blacks are sentenced to

the “chain-gang”; but it is much more natural and simple to send a negro

than a white man into judicial slavery.[30] Why let any pedantic rule of

evidence or sentimental scruple of humanity deprive the commonwealth of

a profitable serf? I find it alleged that in the year 1904 the State of

Georgia made a clear profit of £45,000 out of “chain-gang” labour leased

to private contractors. There is perhaps some mistake about this, since

the average profit of the previous three years had been only £16,000 per

annum. But even that sum is surely £16,000 too much.[31]

-----

Footnote 30:

“Besides the penitentiary convicts there were in Georgia in 1902, 2221

misdemeanour convicts undergoing punishment in county chain-gangs, of

whom 103 were white males, 5 white females, 2010 coloured males, and

103 coloured females.”—_Atlanta University Publications_, No. IX. p.

35.

“I have seen twelve-year-old boys working in chains on the public

streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the schools, in company with

old and hardened criminals; and this indiscriminate mingling of men,

women and children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and

debauchery.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 180.

Footnote 31:

Since writing this I have seen an apparently authentic statement that

in 1907 the profits from the Georgia chain-gangs had gone up to

$354,853, or nearly £71,000.

-----

One can understand the attractions of such a system, however unreal may

be the gains that accrue to the Commonwealth. It is much less easy to

understand another system, expounded to me by a leading white citizen of

the State of Alabama, which makes it to the interest of magistrates and

other officers of the law to promote litigation, and to keep the prisons

full, because of the fees it brings them—so much for issuing a warrant,

so much for filing it, so much for making an arrest, so much for

maintenance in prison, etc. I do not understand this system well enough

to attempt to explain it; but my informant declared that on one

occasion, in his own town, a temporary magistrate, who was appointed

during the serious illness of the regular occupant of the bench, found

the prison “stacked up” with 500 negroes. Half of them were “held” on

frivolous charges, which he simply dismissed; on the other half he

imposed light fines which they could pay. “These iniquities,” my friend

continued, “react upon us; they cost us money, and our gaols are

breeders of crime and filth and disease. But our best people see it, and

they’re going to correct it.”

While such systems prevail, it is manifest that statistics of negro

crime must be carefully scrutinized and largely discounted before any

value can be attached to them.[32] [Sidenote: An Outlawed Race.] At the

same time there is no doubt a considerable class of criminal negroes. It

is natural, and indeed inevitable, that there should be. They are

largely illiterate; they are for the most part poor; their white

environment does all it can to lower rather than to stimulate their

self-respect; the temptations of drink and drugs (mainly cocaine) beset

them in many places; and when once a negro comes in conflict with the

law, everything is done, not to reclaim him, but to harden him in crime.

When we consider in how many respects the race is outlawed, it seems

wonderful that more of them should not fall into habits of outlawry. No

one can reasonably pretend, I think, that there is in the negro any

innate and peculiar bent towards crime. Give him an equal chance, and he

will show himself quite as ready as the white man to respect the

criminal law at all events, if not, perhaps, the precepts of current

morality. I cannot believe that any deep-rooted “original sin” in the

African race is a serious element in the colour problem.

-----

Footnote 32:

“According to the census of 1890,” says Mr. Kelly Miller (“Race

Adjustment,” p. 97), “the negro constituted only 12 per cent. of the

population, and contributed 30 per cent. of the criminals.” But he

goes on to say, “No person of knowledge or candour will deny that the

negro in the South is more readily apprehended and convicted on any

charge than the white offender. The negro constitutes the lower

stratum of society, where the bulk of actionable crime is committed

all the world over.” On the other hand, Mr. E. G. Murphy (“The Present

South,” p. 176) says: “Petty crimes are often forgiven him, and in

countless instances the small offences for which white men are quickly

apprehended are, in the negro, habitually ignored.” A negro study of

negro crime (_Atlanta University Publications_, No. IX.) says, “It

seems fair to conclude that the negroes of the United States, forming

about one-eighth of the population, were responsible in 1890 for about

one-fifth of the crime.” This purports to be a correction of the

estimate above quoted by Mr. Kelly Miller. Complete statistics of a

later date do not seem to be available; but according to the same

publication, negro crime reached its maximum about 1895, when negro

convicts numbered 2·33 per thousand of the whole negro population.

Since then the percentage has notably decreased. In 1904 it stood at

1·78 per thousand.

-----

Meanwhile, by treating him with consistent and systematic injustice, the

South is weakening and confusing her own case against the negro. In

spite of many better impulses among the more enlightened of her people,

her dominant instinct is to substitute for slavery a condition of

serfdom. The black race is to have no indefeasible rights, but rather

revocable licences to pretend to be freemen, so long as the pretence

does not seriously interfere with the convenience or profit of the white

race. And specially must the strictest limits be placed to the freeman’s

right to work when and where he will, and even, if it suits him, to

refrain from working. The South needs the negro’s labour, and is

determined to have it, not on his terms, but on hers. Far more important

and wide-reaching than the crime-slavery of the “chain-gang” is the

system of debt-slavery or peonage, whereby a negro, becoming hopelessly

indebted to a white landlord (and store-keeper), is compelled to spend

the remainder of his life in working off a claim which can never be

wiped out, because, for his very subsistence, he is forced to be ever

renewing it. There is all the less chance of escape as accounts are kept

by the landlord or his agent, and the negro is seldom in a position to

check them. Until the law comes to the relief of the “peon,” and ceases

to traffic in the sweat of the convict, the South, it seems to me,

cannot look the negro squarely in the face.

Many Southerners, even the not unthoughtful or inhuman, make it the

first and last word of their philosophy that “the nigger must be taught

to know his place.” This means, on analysis, simply that he must accept

his position as a serf. But no more than slavery, I take it, is serfdom

permanently possible in a modern democratic State; and in so far as she

fails to recognize this, the South is once more trying to put back the

hands of Time.

-----

XII

AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY

It is very difficult to get at the true truth as to public education for

the negro in the South. The probability is, in fact, that there are as

many truths as there are points of view. One high authority (a negro)

told me that for every single dollar expended on a black child about

five dollars are expended on a white child. That is very likely true;

but it is probably no less true that the sums expended on negro

education are large out of all proportion to the sums paid by negroes in

taxes. “Let us reduce their education to the scale of their taxation,” I

have heard it said, “and where would they be?”[33] The true question is:

Where would the South be? Probably half-way back to barbarism.

-----

Footnote 33:

It is said that in the State of Georgia the negroes pay only

one-fifteenth of the taxes, but receive about one-third of the State

appropriation for public schools. E. G. Murphy: “The Present South,”

p. 39.

-----

But if we ask: Has the South neglected its plain duty towards the

children of the freedmen? or has it heroically, in its poverty, devoted

to the education of the black child money that could be ill spared from

the beggarly education fund of the white child?[34] we cannot rest

content with the answer, “It depends on the point of view.” On the

whole, I am inclined to believe that the favourable judgment is the true

one; but I should hold it with greater confidence if there had not

existed in the past, and did not survive to some degree in the present,

a violent feeling against the very idea of negro education. In many

places white teachers of black children are to this day ostracised.[35]

One may even say, I think, that, as a general rule, it takes some

strength of mind for a white man or woman to follow the vocation of

teaching negroes.

-----

Footnote 34:

Among the native (as opposed to foreign-born) white population of the

Southern States, there were in 1900 about 11 per cent. of illiterates

of ten years old and upwards, as against a percentage of 4·6 for the

whole United States. But this 11 per cent. showed a great improvement

during twenty years; for in 1880 there were over 20 per cent. of

illiterates. Among the coloured population of the same States, the

illiterates in 1900 numbered about 48 per cent., as against 75 per

cent. in 1880. It must be remembered that nearly 85 per cent. of the

people of the South live in sparsely populated rural districts, where

it is difficult for the schoolmaster to reach the children or the

children the schoolmaster. In the whole United States, the annual

expenditure per head of the pupils in average attendance at public

schools is over $21, whereas in Alabama and the Carolinas it is only

$4·50; yet in these States 50 per cent. of the whole State revenues

for general purposes is appropriated to public education. See an

admirable paper in “The Present South,” by Edgar Gardner Murphy. At

the close of the war, says Mr. Murphy, “the South—defeated,

impoverished, desolate—was forced to assume the task of providing for

the education of two populations out of the poverty of one.”

Footnote 35:

This is so in Atlanta, according to Mr. Stannard Baker. I cannot

resist quoting from Mr. Baker’s book a letter written by “a well-to-do

white citizen” to a South Carolina newspaper, apologizing for an act

of courtesy to a negro school—

“I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles

below; on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince

Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to

make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not

thinking that publicity would be given to it, or that I was doing

anything that would offend any one. I wish to say here and now that I

am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble

confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended will

forgive me.”

Was there ever a more abject document?

-----

The hostility to negro education has, however, lost much of its former

strength. [Sidenote: A Teacher of Negroes.] This is apparent from the

case of Professor Patterson, head of an excellent State school for

negroes in Montgomery. The Professor (a title as lightly accorded in the

South as Major or Colonel) is a sturdy Scot. When he first came to the

South in Reconstruction days chance led him to a county in the State of

Alabama where there was, indeed, already a school, but it was kept by a

negro who could neither read nor write. An educator by instinct, if not

by training, Mr. Patterson determined to set up a school of his own. For

this misdemeanour he was twice shot at, and was finally arrested, and

put under a bond of 15,000 dollars to desist from teaching in that

county. He went into another county, and started a school in the frame

building that served as a negro church; but here the negroes themselves

had to turn him out, as they were warned that if they did not the church

would be burnt. These experiences only stiffened the professor’s

backbone. He said: “I _will_ teach—teach in Alabama—and teach negroes!”

And here he is to-day, head of a fine large school in the State capital,

and partially maintained by the State—a school well planned, well built,

and with an excellent system of industrial training going on in various

annexes in its spacious grounds.

As I passed through one of the senior school-rooms, a boy had just

written on the blackboard, in a fine round hand, a quotation from a

recent speech by Senator Foraker on the Brownsville affair—the affair of

the negro regiment which President Roosevelt is alleged to have treated

with high-handed injustice. The sentence ran: “We ask no favour for them

because they are negroes, but justice for them because they are men.”

Evidently there is no affectation of excluding from the schoolroom the

all-absorbing problem.

[Sidenote: Mr. Washington’s Staff.]

Tuskegee (pronounced like Righi, but with the first “e” sound

lengthened) is about forty miles from Montgomery, situated on an open

rolling upland, with many small knolls and sudden gullies. In the course

of a short drive from the station to the Institute, one passes a

dignified old ante-bellum plantation-house, not without wondering what

its owners of fifty years ago would have thought of the Tuskegee of

to-day.

I am not going to attempt a minute description of “Booker Washington’s

City,” as it has been called. It is, beyond all doubt, a wonderful

place. Everywhere one sees the evidence of a great organizing capacity,

a great inspiring force, a tireless, indomitable singleness of

purpose—in short, a true magnanimity. I did not see Mr. Washington in

his principality—I had met him some weeks earlier in the North—but the

dominance of his spirit could perhaps be more clearly felt in his

absence than in his presence.

Mrs. Washington I did see—a lady with the mien and manner of a somewhat

dusky duchess. The observation may (or, rather, it does) seem an

impertinence; but such impertinences are forced upon one by the very

nature of the inquiry. Not only Mrs. Washington, but other members of

the General Staff with whom I was brought in contact—for instance, Mr.

Emmett J. Scott (Mr. Washington’s secretary) and Mr. Warren Logan (the

treasurer of the Institute)—were far more Caucasian than African in

feature, and very light in colour. Indeed, I saw no one in high position

at Tuskegee who would not, with a very small lightening of hue, have

been taken without question for a white man. I make the remark, however,

without suggesting any deduction from it. I believe there is little

evidence of any intellectual superiority of the mulatto (in all his

various degrees) over the pure negro. It is often assumed as a matter of

course; but those who have had the best opportunities for close

comparison are quite unconvinced of it. One well-known white educator of

the negro told me that for character, if not for intellect, he gave the

pure black the preference over the mulatto.

Mr. J. Stevenson, who conducted me over the Institute, showed precisely

the bright intelligence, the frank, unembarrassed courtesy, the quiet

enthusiasm for his _alma mater_, which I should have expected in a

senior “college boy” showing me the lions of Princeton or Cornell.

Tuskegee Institute is just twenty-seven years old. [Sidenote: Tuskegee.]

It was opened in 1881 with one teacher (Mr. Washington) and thirty

pupils. It had a grant of £400 a year from the Alabama Legislature; but

it had no land and no buildings. Operations began in a dilapidated

shanty and an old church, lent by the coloured people of the village.

It has now, or had two years ago, 2000 acres of land and 83 buildings,

large and small. Its property, exclusive of endowment fund, is valued at

about £170,000, and it has an endowment fund of a quarter of a million.

It now accommodates about 1500 students, two-thirds of them male. More

than 6000 students have passed through it, counting only those who have

remained long enough to benefit appreciably by their course. Of these

6000 Mr. Washington declares that, after diligent inquiry (and every

effort is made to keep in touch with former students), he cannot find a

dozen who are not usefully employed; nor has one Tuskegee graduate been

convicted of crime.

Instruction is given in thirty-seven industries, from agriculture and

stock-breeding to printing and electrical engineering. Mr. Stevenson

took me through the machine-room, the blacksmithing and carpentering,

carriage-building, harness-making, tailoring, and shoemaking

departments, the departments of agricultural chemistry, and of

mechanical and architectural drawing. Mrs. Washington herself was good

enough to be my guide through the women’s building (known as Dorothy

Hall), with its departments of plain sewing, dressmaking and millinery,

mattress-making, broom-making, basket-weaving, laundry-work, and

cookery, and its model dining-rooms and parlours, furnished, arranged,

and decorated by the students themselves. Everywhere I saw earnest work

in progress, everywhere order, discipline, and thorough scientific

method. All this had been made possible, no doubt, by white money; but

the whole organization and conduct of the Institute is the work of black

brains alone.

Externally, Tuskegee has none of the orderly design which one finds in

the “campus” of a Northern University. It is evidently a place that has

“growed.” Buildings are dotted here and there over the somewhat rugged

site, with small eye to picturesqueness or dignity of general effect.

Except the Carnegie Library, with its well-proportioned portico, there

is no building of much architectural ambition; but the chapel or general

assembly hall of the Institute struck me as showing real originality of

design. I was extremely sorry not to hear one of Mr. Washington’s Sunday

evening “talks” to the students in this fine hall. I had not time even

to see an assembly of the whole school, in its neat blue uniform, nor to

hear its singing of old negro melodies, which is said to be remarkable.

In speaking of Tuskegee architecture, one must not omit to mention that

nearly all the buildings of the Institute are built by the students

themselves, of bricks burnt in their own brickyard. All furniture and

fittings, too, are made and repaired within the Institute. I went

through one or two of the students’ dormitories; the little cubicles

were simple, neat, clean, fairly comfortable, but entirely devoid of

luxury or upholstery. As I have before explained, tuition is provided by

endowment, while the students are supposed to pay for their board and

lodging at the rate of about thirty-five shillings a month, which they

are enabled to earn, wholly or in part, for themselves.

After a far too brief visit, I left Tuskegee with the liveliest

admiration for its methods and results. [Sidenote: A Reflection and a

Query.] It is beyond all question a radiating centre of materially

helpful and morally elevating influences. Mr. Washington is assuredly

doing a great and an indispensable work for his race; nor is he doing it

in any such spirit of contempt for academic and literary culture as his

critics attribute to him.

But two reflections occurred to me as I returned through the red

twilight to Montgomery. The first was obvious enough—namely, that the

men and women turned out by such an institution as Tuskegee cannot

possibly be taken as representing the average of negro capacity. They

are a select company before they go there—or, rather, in the very fact

of their going there. They are impelled by individual and exceptional

intelligence, thirst for knowledge, desire for betterment. Some, it is

true, are sent by their parents, very much as white boys are sent to

school or college; but whereas the white boy’s parents are merely

following a social tradition, the black boy’s parents are taking a clear

step in advance, and showing not only ambition but (in all probability)

a good deal of self-denial. Almost every one, in short, who enrols

himself at Tuskegee is animated from the outset by some measure of Mr.

Washington’s own spirit; and not a few show, in the pursuit of

knowledge, something of the heroism which marked his early career.

My second reflection took the form of a query. I did not doubt for a

moment that Mr. Washington’s work was wise and salutary; but I wondered

whether the material and moral uplifting of the negro was going to bring

peace—or a sword. In other words, do the essential and fundamental

difficulties of the situation really lie in the defects of the negro

race? May not the development of its qualities merely create a new form

of friction? And far beneath the qualities and defects of either race,

may there not lie deep-rooted instincts which no “Atlanta Compromise”

will bring into harmony?

Tuskegee marks an inevitable stage of the conflict; but is it the

beginning of the end? I wonder.

-----

XIII

HAMPTON: AN AFTERMATH

After the daughter, the mother. Being again in America this year (1909),

I stole a few days for a run into Virginia and a visit to Hampton, the

fount and origin of the whole movement for the industrial training of

the coloured race. It is perhaps well to take Tuskegee before Hampton,

just as, in visiting English Universities, it would be well to take

Liverpool or Birmingham before Oxford or Cambridge.

Hampton is on historic ground, and looks over still more historic

waters. It stands at the tip of the peninsula formed (roughly speaking)

by Chesapeake Bay to the east and north and the James River to the west

and south. Yet not quite at the tip; for the spit of land which Captain

John Smith in 1608 named Point Comfort runs some two miles further to

the southward, and forms a sort of breakwater for Hampton Roads. The

spit of land, now known as Old Point Comfort, is entirely given over to

two great establishments—Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was

imprisoned after the war, and the Hotel Chamberlin, one of those huge

American caravanserais which are devoted to the cultivation partly of

health, partly of sport, and wholly of fashion. The Chamberlin, despite

its Pompeian swimming-bath and its circular dancing-pavilion built out

over the waters of the sound, is not quite so extensive or so sumptuous

as the Virginia Hot Springs Hotel, to say nothing of the Ponce de Leon

and other palaces of Florida; but its life has a colour of its own, due

to the large infusion of artillery officers from the Fort, which is but

a stone’s throw away. The coming and going of the great white

river-steamers, too, lends animation to the scene. Old Point is a

meeting-place for these floating hotels, hailing from New York,

Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond. Moreover, there is plenty of

shipping in the Roads, consisting for the most part of the great four-

and five-masted schooners which still abound in these waters. Some six

miles up the estuary to the westward rise the immense coal elevators of

Newport News, with its navy-yard; while to the southward, on the further

shore, towards Norfolk, one can dimly descry a city of towers and domes,

the buildings of the Jamestown Exhibition of 1907. Altogether, despite

the flatness of the coasts, this confluence of great estuaries with the

Atlantic has a nobility and beauty of its own. The sky-effects are

marvellous.

[Sidenote: In Pastures Green.]

Twenty minutes in the electric car carry you from the Chamberlin to

Hampton Institute, from valetudinarianism and luxury, time-killing and

life-killing,[36] to industry, frugality, character-building and—in far

more than a theologic sense—soul-saving. The Institute is divided from

the little town of Hampton (with its church built in 1660, of English

bricks) by a wide creek, known as the Hampton River, which was populous,

when we passed it, with negro oyster-dredgers. On a spacious campus,

bordering on this creek, stand the buildings of the Institute—looking

out upon the very reach of the Roads where the fight between the

Merrimac and the Monitor opened a new chapter in naval history. Both

banks of the creek are well-wooded, and the white houses, with their

wide verandahs deep-set in the tender green of early spring, gave the

scene a semi-tropical air. It needed only a few palm-trees to transport

one to Florida. The campus, too, is rich in flowering shrubs. A

marvellous rose-tree in full bloom almost covered the office-building;

hard by, a great bush of wisteria (standard, not climbing) made the air

heavy with scent; and tulip-trees and climbing wisteria were to be seen

at every turn. In the exquisite amenity of its site lies one great

contrast between Hampton and Tuskegee. The red and gully-gashed Alabama

upland, where Booker Washington has established his city, is unkempt,

almost untimbered, and as nearly bleak as any place can be in that

southern climate; whereas the Hampton student may sing with literal

truth:—

“The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want;

He makes me down to lie

In pastures green; He leadeth me

The quiet waters by.”

But as I watched the negroes plunging their dredgers into the mud of

Hampton Creek, I could not but wonder whether the downs of Tuskegee

might not be the healthier habitation.

-----

Footnote 36:

“The Hotel Chamberlin has a shooting preserve of 10,000 acres on the

Chickahominy River (quail, duck, wild turkey, woodcock,

snipe).”—Baedeker.

-----

[Sidenote: The Pious Founder.]

The fundamental contrast, however, between the two institutions lies in

the fact that at Tuskegee the organizing and teaching staff is all black

(or brown), at Hampton all white.[37] The founder of Hampton, General S.

C. Armstrong, was born in the Sandwich Islands in 1839, the son of a

missionary. He was a man of extraordinary strength and vitality, a

muscular Christian in the fullest sense of the term. In the war, he

commanded a negro regiment,[38] and after the war he put aside all

opportunities of personal gain and advancement to devote himself to the

work of the Freedmen’s Bureau. This brought him to Hampton; and here, in

April, 1868, he opened his school, with one assistant teacher and

fifteen pupils. Next year the attendance increased to sixty-six, and in

1870 the Institute received a charter (but no endowment) from the

Virginia Legislature. In 1878 it was decided to admit Indians as well as

negroes, and now about ten per cent. of the students belong to the

aboriginal tribes. Armstrong had immense difficulties to contend with.

The whole of the money for his enterprise had to be raised by his

personal exertions; and the value of his idea—the value of negro

education in general and industrial training in particular—was not then

a tested fact, but remained to be proven in the face of much scepticism.

A minor difficulty lay in the prejudice of the negroes themselves

against manual training. This was still, in their eyes, the badge of

servitude; and they were apt to rebel when, asking for Greek, they were

given a hoe. With indomitable energy and geniality, however, Armstrong

stuck to his task; and when, early in the nineties, he was stricken with

paralysis, Hampton was already a great institution, and Tuskegee was

firmly founded.

-----

Footnote 37:

The ratio of instructors to pupils is as high as one to six.

Footnote 38:

It is related of him that, while sedulously instructing his men to

take cover, he would deliberately “pitch his own tent under fire,”

excusing himself on the ground that “the _morale_ of the coloured

troops required it—they would do anything for a man who showed himself

superior to fear.”

-----

At Hampton there are now 113 buildings (65 of them of considerable size)

and a home farm of 120 acres; while at Shellbank, six miles away, the

school owns a farm of over 600 acres, with 150 head of cattle, 30 horses

and mules, 100 hogs, and fowls by the thousand. The students enrolled in

the Institute number 863, while the Whittier Preparatory School has

nearly 500 pupils. In addition to all branches of agriculture and

horticulture, fifteen trades are taught to boys, while girls are

thoroughly trained in every form of domestic industry, laundry-work,

dressmaking, etc. The teaching and organizing staff numbers about 200,

or one to every six pupils. It is the deliberate policy of the Institute

to seek for increase of efficiency rather than of numbers, and the

entrance tests are correspondingly severe.

The Principal, Dr. H. B. Frissell, was unfortunately absent when I

visited Hampton. [Sidenote: A Tour of the Institute.] I had met him a

year before at Memphis, and learnt to appreciate his quietly commanding

personality. Mrs. Frissell received us most courteously in the very

beautiful old plantation-house which is now the Principal’s residence. A

patriarchal hospitality is the tradition at Hampton, and we were

cordially invited to remain, if not a week, at least a night. But a few

hours were all we could spare; and the chaplain, Dr. Herbert Turner,

very kindly constituted himself our guide.

He took us first to “the soul of the institution,” the Memorial Church,

externally a fine building, internally, to my mind, memorably beautiful.

It is a cruciform structure of romanesque style; but the arms of the

cross are so short that they may be called apses rather than nave and

transepts, and the great body of the space is covered by the dome. The

four great arches are magnificent in their airy dignity, and the

material, red and cream brick, is at once simple and beautiful. The

doctrine here preached is entirely undenominational. The students are

encouraged to adhere to their own denominations, “as they will thus be

best able to serve the communities to which they return.” The official

designation of the building is simple—“The Church of Christ in Hampton

Institute”—and after several hours’ talk with Dr. Turner, I feel sure

that his flock will imbibe from him no harsh or illiberal theology.