Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the

situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general

trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.

NUMBERS AND VITALITY OF THE NEGRO

In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers,

distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to

ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was

taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty,

and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.

It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of

the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3

per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about

33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United

States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling

in the South and something over one million in the North and West.[48]

-----

Footnote 48:

I jot down almost at random, as they occur in my notes, a few

statements on the population question.

Mr. W. B. Smith, author of “The Colour-Line” (a strongly anti-negro

book), makes out that the negro population has since 1860 increased by

about 1,100,000 per decade. Thus, in 1860, it stood at 4,400,000, and

in 1900 at 8,800,000. Meanwhile the number of negroes per thousand of

the whole population has been steadily declining. In 1860 it was 141

per thousand; in 1900 only 116.

In the census of 1900, which gave the total population of the United

States as 75,994,575, the coloured population was set down at

9,185,379, or 12·1 per cent.; but as the term “coloured” included

351,394 Indians and Mongolians, the actual number of negroes is

reduced to 8,833,985. The coloured population of the South Atlantic

and South Central States is given at 8,001,557; and as Indians and

Mongolians are few in these regions, we may take it that the number of

negroes was nearly eight millions. The white population of these

States numbered 16,521,960, of whom only a little more than 2 per

cent. were foreign-born, as against 22·5 per cent. in the North

Atlantic division, and 15·8 per cent. in the North Central division.

But, no doubt, the next census will show a much higher percentage of

foreign-born whites in the South. See tables in “The Present South,”

by E. G. Murphy.

From a carefully argued statistical paper by W. F. Willcox in Stone’s

“Studies in the American Race Problem,” it appears that, taking

periods of twenty years together, the percentage of increase in the

negro population of the United States has steadily declined. In

1800-1820 it was 76 per cent., in 1880-1900 it was only 34 per cent.

Mr. Willcox places the “maximum limit of probable negro population a

century hence” at 25,000,000, and thinks that by that time the negroes

will constitute only 17·8 per cent. of the population of the Southern

States, instead of 32·4 per cent. as at present.

-----

Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they were

multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied that by

1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from Maryland to

Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself, and appears

to have been based on defective enumeration in the census of 1870, which

made the rate of negro increase between 1870 and 1880 seem quite

inordinate. Now speculation has gone to the other extreme, and

prophesies the not very distant extinction of the negro. This view is

set forth with uncompromising emphasis by Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise

of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):

The only cloud of any portentousness hanging over the prospects of the

Southern States is the continued expansion of the black population....

The fact, however, that the white inhabitants, as a body, are steadily

outstripping the black in numbers, is an indication that the evils

which are now created by the presence of so many negroes in the South

will not relatively and proportionately grow more dangerous.... When

the development of the Southern States along its present lines has

reached its last stage, there is reason to think that an even greater

relative decline in the numerical strength of the black population

will set in. We have already pointed out the probable effect of the

subdivision of Southern lands, and the growth of Southern towns, on

the numerical expansion of the negro race. As injurious to that race

in the end as being shut out of the general field of agriculture, or

being subjected to an abnormally high rate of mortality, will be the

relentless competition which is one of the conditions of modern life

in all civilized communities. The vaster the growth of the Southern

States in wealth and white population, the sharper and more urgent

will be the struggle of the black man for existence. In order to hold

even his present position as a common labourer he will have to exert

himself to the utmost, and in doing so to submit to a manner of life

that will be even more unwholesome and squalid than the one he now

follows, and sure to lead to a great increase in the already very high

rate of mortality for his race. The day will come in the South, just

as it came long ago in the North, when for lack of skill, lack of

sobriety, and lack of persistency, the negro will find it more

difficult to stand up as a rival to the white working-man. Already it

is the ultimate fate of the negro that is in the balance, not the

ultimate fate of the Southern States in consequence of the presence of

the negro. The darkest day for the Southern whites has passed.... The

darkest day for the Southern blacks has only just begun.

When I find this forecast cited with approval by Dr. E. A. Alderman of

the University of Virginia, it acquires some authority in my eyes; but

still it seems far from convincing. It leaves out of account one

probability and one certainty. The probability is that what may be

called the Hampton-Tuskegee movement—industrial education and moral

discipline—will in time so leaven the mass of the negro race as to make

it fitter to compete with white labour, and abler to resist the

destructive influences on which Mr. Bruce dwells with such gusto. I call

this a probability, not a certainty, for it is hard to tell as yet

whether the Hampton-Tuskegee spirit is really leavening the mass, or

only playing upon the surface. The industrial college at Hampton is

barely forty years old; Mr. Booker Washington’s great institute at

Tuskegee came into being less than thirty years ago; and the minor

offshoots of the movement are, of course, still younger. They have not

had time to give any just measure of their influence in promoting the

self-respect and the efficiency of the negro race. But there is no doubt

whatever that they are doing a remarkable and (from the negro point of

view) a beneficent work; the only doubt being as to whether the work is

or is not proceeding fast enough to overtake and counteract the forces

that make for degradation.[49]

-----

Footnote 49:

Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the third chapter of “The Negro: The

Southerner’s Problem,” takes a pessimistic view, arguing that the

apparent progress of the coloured population is “confined to the upper

fraction of the race,” while “the other nine-tenths, far from

advancing in any way, have either stood stagnant, or have

retrograded.” His argument leaves me unconvinced; and I think he gives

too much weight to the evidence of Mr. William Hannibal Thomas, author

of “The American Negro,” whose invectives against his own race are too

virulent to be accepted without the utmost caution.

-----

This, I say, is doubtful; but what is scarcely doubtful is that the

South, for its own sake, cannot suffer Mr. Bruce’s prophecy to fulfil

itself. The gist of the forecast is, briefly, this: the rural negro, who

is admittedly prolific, and whose children survive in fair proportions,

will gradually be driven into the towns, where all possible influences

are leagued against his moral and physical well-being, and where the

rate of negro mortality, both infant and adult, is always very high and

often appalling. Thus, according to Mr. Bruce, the “Afro-American” is

being inexorably hounded into the jaws of death, and must in due time

perish from off the face of the earth. But what is to be the state of

the South while this amiable prophecy is working itself out? If the

towns are the jaws of death to the negro, what are they to the white man

and his children? Putting all question of humanity aside, can any sane

civic policy permit negroes to crowd in their thousands into city slums,

and there to die like flies in conditions “even more unwholesome and

squalid” than those which at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro

mortality so high? Simply because the black folk are less able than the

whites to resist the poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as

well as physical. But bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one

race than to the other, inevitably takes its toll of both. Hear what a

Southern health officer has to say on this point:

We face the following issues: First: one set of people, the Caucasian,

with a normal death-rate of less than 16 per thousand per annum, and

right alongside of them is the negro race, with a death-rate of 25 to

30 per thousand. Second: the first-named race furnishing a normal, and

the second race an abnormal, percentage of criminals.... The negro is

with you for all time. He is what you will make him, and it is “up to”

the white people to prevent him from becoming a criminal, and to guard

him against tuberculosis, syphilis, etc. _If he is tainted with

disease, you will suffer: if he develops criminal tendencies, you will

be affected._

What can be more certain than this? And is it to be conceived that the

South will deliberately refrain from looking to its physical and moral

sewerage until the negro shall have been killed off?[50]

-----

Footnote 50:

There seems to be no doubt that the economic and social future of the

South must be radically influenced by the campaign against the

hookworm—uncinaria—which, financed by Mr. Rockefeller, is being

actively set on foot. This intestinal parasite, which works its way in

through the skin, has only of late years been recognized and studied;

and as yet scarcely a beginning has been made in that cleansing of the

polluted soil which is the obvious and only method of mastering the

pest. Both races suffer from it, but the negro far less than the

white; and it is said that the laziness and shiftlessness of the “po’

white trash” of the South is almost entirely due to the terrible

anæmia produced by its ravages. If this “poor white” population could

be converted from two million degraded paupers into as many healthy

and industrious citizens, the effect on the labour-market would

certainly be far-reaching. The disease ought to be a comparatively

easy one to stamp out; and, even when infection has occurred, it

commonly yields, in early stages, to a simple treatment.

-----

It is not to be conceived, and it is not what is happening. Better

sanitary conditions are everywhere being secured, though the movement is

slow in the cities of the South. In the North a great improvement has

already been effected. In a report on “The Health and Physique of the

Negro American” (_Atlanta University Publications_, No. XI., 1906) we

read—

Ten years ago the [negro] death-rate was twice the birth-rate in New

York; to-day they are about the same, with the death-rate steadily

decreasing and the birth-rate increasing. Ten years ago the birth-rate

of Philadelphia was less than the death-rate; to-day it is six per

thousand higher.... With the improved sanitary condition, improved

education, and better economic opportunities, the mortality of the

race may, and probably will, steadily decrease until it becomes

normal.

If there is any permanence and any efficacy in the “wave of prohibition”

that is passing over the South, it must certainly cause a great

reduction in negro mortality; and it surely cannot be long before means

are found to check the vending of noxious drugs. Unless, in short, the

civilization of the South is to stand still while the negro dies off,

there seems to be little likelihood of his fulfilling Mr. Bruce’s

prognostic. This great and beautiful region cannot possibly find its

salvation in making itself a hell for the negro.

When I quoted to Mr. Booker Washington Mr. Bruce’s death-sentence on his

people, he was moved to one of his rare laughs. In Mr. Washington’s

opinion, which may very well prove to be correct, the natural increase

of the negro in the South about keeps pace with that of the white man.

The white race, however, is being largely recruited by immigration, so

that its numerical preponderance is doubtless increasing. It would

appear, then, that, unless conditions very greatly alter, there is

little chance of the black race out-breeding and submerging the white,

but equally little chance of the black race being obliging enough to die

out. “Conservative” statisticians estimate that at the close of this

century there will be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five million

negroes in America.[51]

-----

Footnote 51:

See foot-note, p. 190. The American use of the word “conservative,” as

employed above, is curiously illustrated in this sentence from “The

American Race Problem,” p. 247: “The position of the more

conservative, or liberal, section of opinion was that of attempting to

show the folly and injustice of attacking Roosevelt by an argument

based upon a comparison of the number of negro appointments during his

and McKinley’s administrations.”

-----

Taking the Southern States at large, then, we find that one person out

of every three is wholly or partly of African blood. It is sometimes

maintained that really pure-bred negroes are very rare; but this seems

to be a mistake. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a man of mixed

origin and not likely to underestimate the number of his own class,

thinks that in two-thirds of the negroes of the United States there are

no “recognizable traces” of white blood. He adds that white blood

doubtless exists in many who show no trace of it; but for practical

purposes this speculation may be disregarded. I think we may take it as

pretty certain that if, in the South, one person out of every three is

of African descent, one person out of every four is either actually or

virtually a full-blooded negro. But it must not be supposed that the

distribution of the races is by any means even. Some districts, such as

the mountainous regions of Tennessee and West Virginia, contain hardly

any negroes; while in other districts, not a few, the blacks largely

outnumber the whites. These are, no doubt, the districts in which the

pure-bred black most abounds.

IS THERE A “NEGRO PROBLEM”?

Having ascertained, approximately, the numerical relations of the two

races, we are now in a position to consider the problem or problems

involved. And first we are confronted with the question, “Is there any

real problem at all?”

Some people deny it, or at all events maintain that the problem is

created solely by the almost insane arrogance and inhumanity of the

Southern white man. This view lingers in the North, among the inheritors

of the old abolitionist sentiment. In England, it has been roundly

expressed by Mr. H. G. Wells, and somewhat more considerately by even so

high an authority as Sir Sydney Olivier. I need scarcely say that it is

a very popular view among the negroes in the South itself.

For a typical (though moderate) American utterance of this opinion the

following may suffice. It is a passage from “Race Questions and

Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of Harvard

(_International Journal of Ethics_, April, 1906):

Scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so

much problems caused by anything which is essential to the existence

or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race

problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies.... Such

antipathies will always play their part in human history. But what we

can do about them is to try not to be fooled by them, not to take them

too seriously, because of their mere name. We can remember that they

are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with a dread

of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with

the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature.

The attitude of the South, then, in the conception of Professor Royce,

is no more rational than that of a woman who shrieks, jumps on a chair,

and gathers her skirts about her ankles, because a mouse happens to run

across the floor. I should have thought that the wiser tendency of

modern science was to divine something more than a “caprice” in so

deep-rooted an instinct as the dread even of mice. As for the dread of

snakes, it was surely by a slip of the pen that Professor Royce adduced

it.

Not at all dissimilar is the judgment of Mr. H. G. Wells. Hearing a

great deal of loose, illogical, inconclusive talk on the colour

question, and having himself taken a “mighty liking” to these “gentle,

human, dark-skinned people” as he saw them in a Chicago music-hall and

elsewhere, Mr. Wells formed the opinion that there was no reason at all

in the Southern frame of mind. His conclusion is that “these emotions

are a cult;” and by a cult he evidently means a contagious, fanatical

folly.

Now, Mr. Wells is a man for whose essential wisdom I have a very high

respect. If I were bound to acknowledge myself the disciple of any

living thinker, I should have small hesitation in selecting him as my

guide and philosopher. But his chapter on “The Tragedy of Colour” in

“The Future in America” is tinged with what I cannot but take to be a

dogmatic impatience of all distinctions and difficulties of race. Before

writing it, he might, I think, have asked himself whether the theory of

sheer race-monomania was not, perhaps, a rather too simple way of

accounting for “emotions” felt with absolute unanimity (in a greater or

less degree) by some twenty million Southern white people. The arguments

he heard might be weak, ill-informed, inconclusive; the conduct in which

the emotions expressed themselves might often be indefensible and

abhorrent; and yet there might lie at the root of the emotions something

very different from sheer unreason. I think Mr. Wells should have been

chary of “indicting a nation” without more careful reflection and a

closer scrutiny of evidence.

Sir Sydney Olivier, on the other hand, speaks with the authority of one

who has spent many years in close contact with negroes, having been a

successful administrator of large communities in which they greatly

preponderate. It is impossible to suspect him of hastiness or of _à

priori_ doctrinairism. What, then, is his view? In his “White Capital

and Coloured Labour” (1907), he tells us that both in visiting the

United States and in discussing race questions with American visitors to

Jamaica, “he found himself, as a British West Indian, unable to entirely

account for an attitude of mind which impressed him as superstitious, if

not hysterical, and as indicating misapprehensions of premises very

ominous for the United States of the future.” He proceeds:

The theory held in the Southern States of America and in some British

Colonies, comes, in substance, to this—that the negro is an inferior

order in nature to the white man, in the same sense that the ape may

be said to be so. It is really upon this theory that American

negrophobia rests, and not only upon the viciousness or criminality of

the negro. This viciousness and criminality are, in fact, largely

invented, imputed, and exaggerated, in order to support and justify

the propaganda of race exclusiveness (p. 43).

And again, in another part of his book:

My argument has been that race prejudice is the fetish of the man of

short views; and that it is a short-sighted and suicidal creed, with

no healthy future for the community that entertains it (p. 173).

I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of a

man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply studied;

but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one of Southern

unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however unwise in much of her

talk and her action, the South is in the main animated by a just and

far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That there has been an

infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in the South alone, no

one nowadays denies. But I believe that the problem, far from being

unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly difficult that nothing but an

almost superhuman wisdom, energy, and courage will ever effectually deal

with it.

Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.

WHITE MAN’S LAND OR BROWN MAN’S LAND?

No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the importation of

the African into America was an egregious blunder as well as a monstrous

crime. Without him the South would perhaps have developed more slowly

during the eighteenth century; but she would have escaped the arrest of

development which sums up her history during the nineteenth century. She

would have escaped the war by which she strove, with misguided heroism,

to perpetuate that arrest of development. She would have escaped the

“horrors” of that Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory

like a nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and

impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very

rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in the

past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her wealth,

is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much more truly

may he be said to have created her poverty.[52]

-----

Footnote 52:

In this connection it is perhaps worth noting that the hookworm—that

“vampire of the South”—is now pretty clearly proved to be an

importation from Africa. On the other hand, it is a far greater

scourge to the white than to the black race, the negro possessing a

power of resistance to its ravages which amounts almost to immunity.

-----

This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust

himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic

recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts of

Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the

shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history

merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in America is

not the result of a natural movement, an inevitable expansion, a

migration springing from economic necessity or from deep impulses of

folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of what may almost

be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman cupidity in the slave-dealers

and economic short-sightedness in the slave-owners.

The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well

outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white

race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every

four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be

the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively

desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a

normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance, would certainly

not be a more desirable place of residence if one-fourth of her

population were transmuted into the semblance of Dahomeyans, even

supposing that the metamorphosis involved no moral or intellectual

change for the worse. A monochrome civilization is on the face of it

preferable to such a piebald civilization as at present exists in the

Southern States.

Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and the West

Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to overlook. The West

Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white man’s land”; or, if it

was ever possible that they should become one, the chance was lost at

the very outset of their history. They are once for all black men’s

lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and exploiting them. It

would be much more reasonable for the black to chafe under the dominance

of the white, than for the white to resent the presence of the black.

But the case in the Southern States is absolutely different. They were

explored, settled, organized by white men; by white men their liberties

were vindicated. They are fitted by their climate and resources to be

not only a white man’s land, but one of the greatest white men’s lands

in the world. The black man came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen)

tool for their development. When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims

a third part of the heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and

exceedingly moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which,

after all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one

enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern white

man would be more than human if he accepted the part with perfect

equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no right to

assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his case are

even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is the essence and

foundation of life: in the United States he is a regrettable accident.

FOUR POSSIBILITIES: I. EXTINCTION.

It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions of

this piebald community which a violent interference with the normal

course of race-distribution has established in the Southern States.

The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather,

conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.

(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly unsatisfactory

condition, until the negro gradually dies out.

(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic elevation of

the black race, may gradually enable them to live side by side in mutual

tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but without clashing.

(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean might

conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by

“miscegenation.”

(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by deportation or

otherwise, and established in a community or communities of its own.

The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have already

examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only add here that

there is one way in which it might conceivably be brought about—a way

too horrible to be contemplated, yet not wholly beyond the bounds of

possibility. The recurrence of such an outbreak as the Atlanta riot of

1906 might lead to very terrible consequences. On that occasion the

white mob found the negroes unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically

unopposed. But the lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar

onslaught would, in many places, find them armed and capable of a

certain amount of resistance. In that case one dares not think what

might happen. Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense

of intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary,

infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their

proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the

result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or any

other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in

any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land

which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity

could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial

war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the

negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken

defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more

terrible would be the calamity to their race. Not even in the wildest

frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part of the race, be

violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to

lose that natural buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them,

and enabled them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction

already read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of

mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race,

as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their

spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic

_Negerhetze_? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr.

P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he

anticipated.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the brink of

such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are present

which might one day bring it to pass.[53] Sir Sydney Olivier is quite

right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners towards the

negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the class that is

handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises have been written

to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a “beast,” and, on

scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape than a man. These

works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their insanity is by no means

peculiar to their individual authors. The word “extermination” is

gravely spoken by men who are not therefore held to be maniacs or even

monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, is “simply an armed

camp for intimidating black folk”; and where such a condition prevails,

the possibility of sudden disaster is never far off. To recognize the

possibility is not to bring it nearer, but rather to indicate the urgent

need of measures that shall place it infinitely remote.

-----

Footnote 53:

“It has become the fashion of late for certain negro leaders to talk,

in conventions held outside the South, of fighting for their rights.

For their own sake and that of their race, let them take it out in

talking. A single outbreak would settle the question.”—T. N. Page:

“The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” p. 281.

-----

FOUR POSSIBILITIES: II. THE ATLANTA COMPROMISE.

We pass now to the second eventuality—the gradual smoothing away of

friction, so that the two races may live side by side, never blending

and yet never jarring. This is the conception set forth in Mr. Booker

Washington’s celebrated “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, wherein he

said, “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five

fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual

progress.” Is this a possible—I will not say ideal, for that it

manifestly is not—but a possible working arrangement?

One thing is evident at the outset—namely, that the fourteen years that

have elapsed since Mr. Washington uttered this aspiration have brought

its fulfilment no nearer. Both negro education and white education have

advanced in the interim; the “respectable” and well-to-do class of

negroes has considerably increased; but the feeling between the races is

worse rather than better. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page used to say,

“Northerners espouse the cause of the negro as a race, but dislike

negroes individually; while Southerners do not dislike negroes

individually, but oppose them as a race.”[54] Ten years ago there was a

large element of truth in this saying; but it becomes less and less true

with every year that passes. The old-time kindliness of feeling between

the ex-owner and the ex-slave is rapidly becoming a mere tradition. No

common memories or sentiments hold together the new generations of the

two races; they are growing up in unmitigated mutual antipathy. At best,

indeed, the Southern kindliness of feeling towards the individual negro

subsisted only so long as he “knew his place” and kept it; and the very

process of education and elevation on which Mr. Washington relies

renders the negro ever less willing to keep the place the Southern white

man assigns him. In the North, too, while the dislike of the individual

has greatly increased, the theoretic fondness for the race has very

perceptibly cooled. Altogether, the tendency of events since 1895 has

not been at all in the direction of the Atlanta Compromise. The Atlanta

riot of eleven years later was a grimly ironic comment on Mr.

Washington’s speech.

-----

Footnote 54:

This distinction is illustrated by the anecdote of a negro in a

Northern city going from door to door of a long street, asking for

work and food, and being everywhere met by a polite and regretful

refusal. At last he came to a door which was flung open by a man, who

thus addressed him: “You d——d black hound, how have you the impudence

to come to the front door! Go to the back door, ask for a broom, and

sweep out the yard.” “Bless de Lord!” said the negro, “He’s led me to

my own Southern people at last!”

-----

This merely means, it may be said, that education has as yet produced no

sensible effect upon the inveterate and inhuman prejudice of the South.

Nevertheless, time and patience may justify Mr. Washington’s optimism.

There is no saying, indeed, what a great deal of time and a great deal

of patience may not effect. Meanwhile, let us see what is really

involved in the idea of the Atlanta Compromise.

We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the negro

race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general efficiency.

Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly civilizable, if not

indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level he has yet

attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within normal limits; for

the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered so by ignorance,

poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal system. The next

fifty years, if present influences continue to work unimpeded, may see a

very large increase in the class of law-abiding, property-holding

negroes, and possibly a considerable improvement even in the condition

of the black proletariat. But supposing that, by the exercise of

infinite patience for fifty or a hundred years, a condition something

like that indicated in the Atlanta formula were ultimately attained,

would it be desirable? and could it be permanent?

The assumed improvement of conditions would, of course, imply a steady

increase in the numbers of the black race; so that, even with the aid of

immigration, the white race would probably not greatly add to its

numerical superiority. Let us suppose that at the end of fifty years the

coloured people were not as one in three, but as one in four, and that

this ratio remained pretty constant. Here, then, we should have a nation

within a nation, unassimilated and (by hypothesis) unassimilable,

occupying one-fourth of the whole field of existence, and performing no

function that could not, in their absence, be at least as well performed

by assimilable people, whose presence would be a strength to the

community.[55] The black nation would be a hampering, extraneous element

in the body politic, like a bullet encysted in the human frame. It may

lie there for years without setting up inflammation or gangrene, and

causing no more than occasional twinges of pain; but it certainly cannot

contribute to the health, efficiency, or comfort of the organism. Is it

wonderful that the Atlanta Compromise, supposing it realized in all

conceivable perfection, should excite little enthusiasm in the white

South?

-----

Footnote 55:

Negro labour is indispensable to the South only inasmuch as the negro

has kept and keeps out the white labourer. “Should the negro be

deported, there would be no trouble in filling his place with white

men, who would bring the South up to its proper agricultural

standard.” William P. Calhoun, “The Caucasian and the Negro,” p. 15.

Mr. A. H. Stone, a large employer of negro labour, writes: “It has

been the curse of the South for a hundred years that her people have

clung, and stubbornly, to a conviction, never reasonable or

well-founded, that negro labour was essential to the cultivation of

her soil.”—“The American Race Problem,” p. 174.

-----

But to imagine it realized in perfection is to imagine an

impossibility—almost a contradiction in terms. We are, on the one hand,

to suppose the negro ambitious, progressive, prosperous, and, on the

other hand, to imagine him humbly acquiescent in his status as a social

pariah. The thing is out of the question; such saintlike humility has

long ceased to form any part of the moral equipment of the American

negro. The bullet could never be thoroughly encysted; it would always

irritate, rankle, fester. Mr. Washington’s formula in renouncing social

equality is judiciously vague as to political rights. But one thing is

certain—neither Mr. Washington nor any other negro leader really

contemplates their surrender. It is quite inconceivable that the nation

within a nation should acquiesce in disfranchisement; and the question

of the negro vote will always be a disturbing factor in Southern

political life. Either he must be jockeyed out of it by devices

abhorrent to democratic principle and more or less subversive of

political morality; or, if he be honestly suffered to cast his ballot,

he will block the healthy divergence of political opinion in the South,

since, in any party conflict, he would hold the balance between the two

sides, and thus become the dominant power in the State. This will always

be a danger so long as the unassimilated negro is forced, by his

separateness, to think and act first as a negro and only in the second

place as an American. Even if the Atlanta Compromise were otherwise

realizable, the friction at this point would always continue acute.

THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM.

The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise were

possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side of sex.

For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to be

prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is unwholesome and

demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of what Mr. Ray Stannard

Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It seems hard, no doubt, that

marriage should be impossible between a white man and a girl in whose

complexion, perhaps, an eighth or sixteenth part of negro blood is

entirely imperceptible; but such cases are romantic exceptions, and do

not constitute a serious factor in the problem. Negroes, at any rate,

will tell you proudly that the young men and women of their race,

however light-skinned, hold it no hardship that their choice of mates

should be restricted to their own people. Whatever be the truth as to

these marginal relations, they are not the essence of the matter. The

essence is simply this: the youth and manhood of the white South is

subjected to an altogether unfair and unwholesome ordeal by the constant

presence of a multitude of physically well-developed women, among whom,

in the lower levels, there is no strong tradition of chastity, and to

whom the penalties of incontinence are very slight. To say, as many

Southerners will, that there is no such thing as virtue among negro

women is stupidly libellous; but it is impossible to doubt that the

average standard of sexual conduct among the lower orders of the black

and brown population is anything but high. And this is not a state of

things that can be radically amended in one generation or in two. The

completest realization of the Atlanta Compromise that is conceivable

within, say, a century, would still leave the white male exposed, from

boyhood upward, to a stimulation of his animal instincts which, in the

peculiar circumstances of the case, cannot be otherwise than

unwholesome.

We are here at the very heart of the problem. All other relations are

adjustable, at a certain sacrifice; but not this one. If the two races

are to live together without open and lawful intermingling, it must be

at the cost of incessant demoralization to both. “Miscegenation,” in the

sense of permanent concubinage and the rearing of hybrid families, may

be held in check by the strong social sentiment against it,[56] but

nothing can hold in check the still more degrading casual commerce

between the white man (and youth) and the coloured woman. It is probably

this fact, quite as much as the hideous proclivities of the criminal

negro male, that hardens the heart of the white woman against the black

race. Nor is the unwholesomeness of the condition measured by the actual

amount of laxity to which it leads. Temptation may in myriads of cases

be resisted; but this order of temptation ought not to be in the

air.[57] It cannot be good for any race of men to be surrounded by

strongly-accentuated Sex, which, for ulterior reasons, whereof the mere

animal nature takes little account, is placed under a tabu.

-----

Footnote 56:

See foot-note, p. 64.

Footnote 57:

Mr. Booker Washington said to Mr. Wells: “May we not become a peculiar

people—like the Jews? Isn’t that possible?” What so long kept the Jews

a peculiar people was the constancy with which Jewish women declined

to intermingle with the Gentiles around them. If negro women showed

such a spirit of racial chastity, the problem would be very different.

-----

I venture to say that no one—not even Mr. Washington himself—really

believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the problem.

The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to speak), never doubt

that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of racial intermixture. They

see that so long as constant physical propinquity endures, the colour

barrier between the sexes is factitious, and in great measure unreal,

and they believe that at last the race-pride of the white man will be

worn down, and he will accept the inevitable amalgamation.[58] The

ultimate forces at war in the South are the instinctive, half-conscious

desire of the black race to engraft itself on the white stock,[59] and

the no less instinctive horror of the white stock at such a surrender of

its racial integrity. This horror is all the more acute—all the more

morbid, if you will—because the white race is conscious of its own

frailty, and knows that it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against

perfidious nature. It is a hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it

is true, that much of the injustice and cruelty to which the negro is

subjected in the South is a revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the

negro’s part, as for an uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part

of the whites.[60] It is because the black race inevitably appeals to

one order of low instincts in the white, that it suffers from the

sympathetic stimulation of another order of low instincts.

-----

Footnote 58:

On p. 47 of “Race Adjustment,” by Mr. Kelly Miller, a coloured

professor at Howard University, the author says, addressing Mr. Thomas

Dixon, Junr., “You are mistaken. The negro does not ‘hope and dream of

amalgamation.’... A more careful reading of the article referred to

would have convinced you that I was arguing against amalgamation as a

probable solution of the race problem. _I merely stated the

intellectual conviction that two races cannot live indefinitely side

by side, under the same general régime, without ultimately fusing._”

For practical purposes, the difference is not great between “hoping

and dreaming” of amalgamation, and merely looking forward to it as

inevitable.

-----

Footnote 59:

Of course this does not imply that many individual negroes would not

be as unwilling as any white man or woman to marry outside their

colour limits.

It is on the whole very difficult to state my point in the above

paragraph, without seeming to imply a great deal more of conscious and

formulated will than I am, as a matter of fact, assuming. There are

doubtless thousands of negroes who oppose a race-pride of their own to

the race-pride of the whites, and hundreds of thousands who have no

conscious desire whatever regarding the future of their race. I am

trying to state what I believe, rightly or wrongly, to be deep

instinctive tendencies, which seldom, perhaps, emerge into

consciousness.

Footnote 60:

This I wrote from deep conviction, yet with a certain sense of daring;

for I thought the idea entirely my own, and feared it might give dire

offence. More than a year later, I was reassured on reading the

following passage in “The Basis of Ascendancy,” by Mr. E. G. Murphy

(p. 52): “Much of the South’s talk against the negro has therefore

been the South talking to itself; it has been its rebuke, by

implication, of those corrupting elements within the limits of its own

life which answer to no high policy of social self-respect, to no fine

purpose of racial conservation, but which, under the lowest impulses,

would degrade the present and betray the future.”

-----

FOUR POSSIBILITIES: III. AMALGAMATION.

This brings us, of course, to the third of the conceivabilities above

enumerated—the legalization of marriage between the two races. To the

white South, nothing is more inconceivable: to the critics of the white

South, nothing is more simple. Which of them is in the right?

It is significant that none of these outside critics puts the slightest

faith in the Atlanta Compromise. They see quite clearly that the two

races cannot live together and yet apart. Their solution is the obvious

one of free intermixture, and they cannot understand why the South

should be so inveterately opposed to it. Why make such a fuss, they say,

over such a simple matter?

And then comes a long array of arguments to minimize, in general, the

significance of race, and, in particular, the gap between the white race

and the black. Racial purity is a vain imagination; there is no such

thing, at any rate among European peoples; and if it existed it would

only be a limitation and a misfortune to the people afflicted with it.

Most of all is the Anglo-Saxon race ridiculed as a historic fallacy. The

South, which boasts itself almost the last stronghold of pure

Anglo-Saxondom,[61] is told that the pure Anglo-Saxon is a myth and a

superstition. As to the negro, we are assured that we were all negroes

once, or something very much to that effect. At any rate, it is asserted

that the Mediterranean races, with whom Western civilization originated,

were in great part of negro origin. Skull-measurement and brain-weight

are called in to prove—whatever the particular disputant wants to prove.

Special qualities are claimed for the negro—such as a rich imagination,

an innate courtesy, and a strong musical faculty; and it is argued that

these are the very things of which the (so-called) Anglo-Saxon race

stands most in need. Great play is made with the quasi-scientific modern

Rousseauism which avers that our barbarian ancestors were better men

than we, and thence argues that there is little or no real gap between

the savage of to-day and the civilized man. Weismannism is pressed into

the service to show that, as the aptitudes and tendencies that we sum up

in the word civilization are acquired and therefore (it is argued)

untransmissible, the white child can have profited nothing by its

ancestors’ centuries of upward struggle from barbarism, while the black

child cannot be in any way handicapped by his descent through untold

ages of savagery. We are even assured that civilization has sprung from

and must be maintained by “the commingling of all with all, the general

‘panmixture,’ the universal ‘half-breed.’”[62]

-----

Footnote 61:

“The only truly Anglo-Saxon communities in the world to-day are in

rural England and the Southern States.” Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The

Growing South,” p. 5. It may perhaps not be quite irrelevant to note

that I was struck by the immense preponderance of fair hair and

complexion among the women of the South. I would almost go so far as

to say that, with the exception of women who had obviously a negro

strain in their blood, I did not see a single brunette in the course

of my wanderings. As regards Louisiana, this no doubt only means that

I had not time or opportunity for adequate observation. But in the

case of the other States, I am inclined to think there must be good

grounds for the strong impression left on my mind.

Footnote 62:

Jean Finot: “Race Prejudice,” London, 1806, p. xv.

-----

Fortunately it is quite unnecessary that I should plunge into the mazes

of ethnological controversy. It is sufficient for my present purpose to

note that controversy, and very lively controversy, exists. The

practical equality of the two races is so far from being a point on

which all authorities are agreed, that it may rather be called a paradox

which charms a certain order of mind by reason of its very audacity. So,

too, with the opinion that, whether the African race be or be not

inferior, it possesses qualities that the European stock needs, and

ought to accept with gratitude. Whether true or false, this is, at

present at any rate, a quite undemonstrated speculation. Even Sir Sydney

Olivier, who maintains in general that a man of mixed race is

“potentially a more competent vehicle of humanity,” advances no proof of

the benefits of the particular mixture in question which can for a

moment be expected to carry conviction to the Southern white man. The

South, then, is urged by the amalgamation theorists to embark upon, or

submit to, what is at best a great experiment. It is to quell its higher

instincts (for so it regards them, rightly or wrongly) and commit what

it feels in the marrow of its bones to be a degrading race-abnegation,

in deference to a half-scientific, half-humanitarian opinion, held by

certain theorists outside its own boundaries, to the effect that, after

all, there is no great difference between black and white, and that the

complexion of the future will certainly be a uniform yellow. Can any one

blame the South for answering: “No, thank you! If you in England or in

New England are tired of being white men, and sigh for the blessings of

an African blend, we can send you several million negroes, of both

sexes, who will no doubt be happy, on suitable terms, to intermarry with

your sons and daughters. For our part, we are content with our

complexion as it is. We see no reason to believe that the African slave

trade was the means adopted by a beneficent Providence for the ultimate

improvement of our Anglo-Saxon stock; nor, on the other hand, can we

accept it as a just punishment for the sins of our fathers that our

race, as a race, should be merged and obliterated in indiscriminate

hybridism.”

I do not pretend, of course, that the fixed antipathy of the South to

the very idea of amalgamation is a purely rational one. Who is so

foolish as to look for pure reason in aught that concerns the obscure

fundamentals of life? What I am trying to show is that, whatever

irrational elements may mingle with it, the Southern sentiment has a

solid and sufficient nucleus of reason. The advantages of fusion, as

between such antipodal races as the white European and the black

African, are, to say the least of it, unproved; and a race may be

forgiven, surely, which declines to try on its own body, so to speak, so

problematic and so irremediable an experiment. For, once made, this

experiment cannot be unmade. The South must choose between definitely

renouncing its position as a “white man’s land” or struggling to

maintain it. What wonder if it feels that it has no choice in the

matter?

THE RACES NOT EQUAL.

I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the advantages

of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my position, I

must confess that my personal belief goes much further, and that the

disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved beyond all

reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the essential and

innate inferiority of the negro race, because my argument did not demand

it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to me as evident as it is

inevitable. However fallacious may be the boundaries between this and

that European race, the boundary between the European and the African is

real, and not to be argued away. The European is the fruit of untold

generations of upward struggle, the African of untold generations of

immobility. At the very dawn of history, the ancestors of the white

American had advanced to a point beyond that which the ancestors of the

Afro-American had attained when they were shipped across the Atlantic

from fifty to two hundred years ago. That the negro race has some very

amiable qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has

brought with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the

white savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the black

savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong

imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of

taking on a certain measure of civilization. But all this does not

practically lessen the huge historic gap between the two races. Even if

we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man in

intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him a

few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever it may

become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro race here

and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of its “previous

condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and fundamentally, because of

its recent condition of savagery. Therefore, the white race, in

accepting amalgamation, would be derogating from its birthright and

climbing down the scale of humanity.

Our theorists are, on the whole, too much inclined to confound instinct

with prejudice. It is absurd to class as pure prejudice the white man’s

preference for the colour and facial contour of his race. This is no

place for an analysis of our sense of beauty; but to maintain offhand

that it is an unmeaning product of sheer habit, with no biological

justification, is simply to shirk the problem and postpone analysis to

dogma. Does any one really believe that the genius of Cæsar and

Napoleon, of Milton and Goethe, had nothing to do with their facial

angle, and could have found an equally convenient habitation behind

thick lips and under woolly skulls? The negro himself (as distinct from

the mulatto rhetorician) takes his stand on no such paradox. Whoever may

doubt the superiority of the white race, it is not he; and it is a

racial, not merely a social or economic superiority to which he does

instinctive homage. It does not enter his head to champion his own

racial ideal, to set up an African Venus in rivalry to the Hellenic, and

claim a new Judgment of Paris between them. If wishing could change the

Ethiopian’s skin there would be never a negro in America.[63] The black

race, out of its poverty, spends thousands of dollars annually on

“anti-kink” lotions, vainly supposed to straighten the African wool.[64]

The brown belle tones her complexion with pearl powder; and many a black

mother takes pride in the brown skin of her offspring, though it

proclaims their illegitimacy. There can be no reasonable doubt that

amalgamation, in the negro’s eyes, means an enormous gain to his race.

It means ennoblement, transfiguration. It is quite natural that he

should not too curiously inquire whether the gain to him would involve a

corresponding loss to the white man. That is the white man’s business,

not his. The one thing his instinct tells him is that, if he can break

down the white man’s resistance and make the Southern States a brown or

yellow man’s land, he will have achieved a splendid racial triumph.

-----

Footnote 63:

There is some conflict of evidence as to whether many persons of negro

blood “cross the line” or “go over to white”—that is to say conceal

and renounce the negro strain in their ancestry. Mr. Kelly Miller

states that, as a result of white persecution, “hundreds of the

composite progeny are daily crossing the colour-line and carrying as

much of the despised blood as an albicant skin can conceal without

betrayal.” (“Race Adjustment,” p. 49.) “Hundreds daily” is probably an

exaggeration; but it would appear that such cases are not infrequent;

and it is significant that negroes generally, instead of resenting

this disloyalty to their blood, enter into “a sort of conspiracy of

silence to protect the negro who crosses the line.” “Such cases,” says

Mr. Stannard Baker, “even awaken glee among them, as though the negro

thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.”

Footnote 64:

“One day, while walking in one of the most fashionable residence

districts of Atlanta, I saw a magnificent gray stone residence

standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion, who

was a resident of the city:

“‘That’s a fine home.’

“‘Yes; stop a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you about that. The

anti-kink man lives there.’

“‘Anti-kink?’ I asked in surprise.

“‘Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men

here. He made his money by selling to negroes a preparation to smooth

the kinks out of their wool. They’re simply crazy on that subject.’

“‘Does it work?’

“‘You haven’t seen any straight-haired negroes, have you?’ he

asked.”—Ray Stannard Baker.

-----

THE CASE FOR THE MULATTO.

It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain would

not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would bring to the

white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need, the result of

the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the qualities and

powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience justified this

speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in South America, in

the West Indies, in the Southern States themselves. The mulatto exists

and has existed for generations, not in hundreds or thousands, but in

millions; in what respect has he proved himself superior to the pure

Spaniard, or Portuguese, or Anglo-Saxon? Does South American history

bear testimony to his political competence? Have his achievements in

science, in art, in literature, in music, been superior to those of the

un-Africanized peoples? Or, waiving the question of superiority, has he

even, in these domains, produced meritorious work in any fair proportion

to his numbers? I do not say that it is impossible to make a sort of

case for him, by the ransacking of records and the employment of a very

indefinite standard of values. But I do most emphatically say that no

conspicuous and undeniable advantage has resulted from the blending of

bloods, such as can or ought to counteract the instinctive repugnance of

the South.

In a work entitled “Twentieth Century Negro Literature,”[65] published

in 1901, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, a mulatto journalist, quotes Byron’s

lines:—

“You have the letters Cadmus gave;

Think ye he meant them for a slave?”

and then comments as follows:—

Now Cadmus was a black African slave, captured in war; so was Æsop,

the world’s greatest fabulist; so was Terence, among the grandest of

Rome’s lyric poets; so was Pushkin, the national poet to-day of

Russia; so was Alexandre Dumas, the first, the greatest, not only of

French novelists, but of novelists of all times, and the infinite

storehouse from which all novelists draw, Honoré de Balzac and Charles

Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.

-----

Footnote 65:

This volume contains portraits of ninety-seven contributors to it,

whom I have roughly classified according to their features and

apparent complexion. There are only three whom one can put down as

probably pure negroes. Of the remainder, twenty-three seem to be

predominantly negroes, but clearly not pure-bred; thirty-four are

typical mulattoes (that is to say, appear to be half black, half

white); in thirty-three the features are almost entirely Caucasian,

but the complexion is unmistakably swarthy, while in five there is

scarcely any recognizable trace of negro blood. The decoration round

the portraits in this book is curious and instructive. It consists of

a scroll-work encircling two pairs of contrasted medallions. On the

one side we have a black slave being flogged, on the other a very

light mulatto writing in a study, surrounded with books; on the one

side a negro kneeling with broken fetters on his wrists, on the other

a frock-coated mulatto on a platform, with an ice-water pitcher on his

table, lecturing with gesticulation to a crowded audience.

-----

This writer can scarcely mean what he says—namely, that Alexandre Dumas

and the rest were all black African slaves captured in war. We must

interpret him liberally, and take him to be simply asserting the

literary genius of the African race, whether pure or blended. A better

case than this might doubtless be made for it; but a ten times better

case would still be very far from a good case. And Mr. Edward E. Cooper

is a fair average specimen of the negro champion of negro genius.

Another spokesman of the race, by the way, in the same collection of

essays, argues that if the Southern clergy had done their duty in

denouncing lynching, there would have been no assassination of President

McKinley, “nor would there be anywhere such an illiberal public

sentiment as would openly criticize our Chief Executive for dining a

representative member of the race whose feasts even Jupiter did not

disdain to grace.”[66]

-----

Footnote 66:

“What evil spirit has come upon the present-day Afro-American that a

people who, from the days of Homer until this generation, have borne

the epithet of ‘blameless Ethiopians’ should now be accused as the

scourge of mankind?” Kelly Miller (coloured), “Race Adjustment,” p.

77.

-----

A BIOLOGICAL ARGUMENT.

To wind up this attempt to place on a basis of reason the Southern

horror of amalgamation, I return for a moment to Sir Sydney Olivier’s

argument on the point.[67] He says:—

There may naturally be aversion on the part of and a strong social

objection on behalf of the white woman against her marriage with a

black or coloured man. There is no correspondingly strong instinctive

aversion, nor is there so strong an ostensible social objection to a

white man’s marrying a woman of mixed descent. The latter kind of

union is much more likely to occur than the former. There is good

biological reason for this distinction. Whatever the potentialities of

the African stocks as a vehicle for human manifestation, and I myself

believe them to be exceedingly important and valuable, ... the white

races are now, in fact, by far the farther advanced in effectual human

development, and it would be expedient on this account alone that

their maternity should be economized to the utmost. A woman may be the

mother of a limited number of children, and our notion of the number

advisable is contracting: it is bad natural economy, and instinct very

potently opposes it, to breed backwards from her. There is no such

reason against the begetting of children by white men in countries

where, if they are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured

or mixed races. The offspring of such breeding, whether legitimate or

illegitimate, is, from the point of view of efficiency, an acquisition

to the community, and under favourable conditions, an advance on the

pure-bred African.

-----

Footnote 67:

I do not dwell on his surely unadvised initial statement that the

“barriers” between white and black “are not different in kind or in

strength from those which once separated neighbouring European

tribes.” I presume that “once” must be taken as referring to

pre-historic ages, reconstructed on scanty ethnological evidence.

-----

To this I have nothing to object, save that it manifestly and in its

very terms does not apply to the Southern States of America. Sir Sydney

does not intend it so to apply; but when he proceeds to speak of the

Southern States, he somehow neglects to draw the necessary distinctions.

The conditions he has in mind in the above paragraph are those of a

black man’s land, not of a white man’s land. It may readily be granted

that a fundamentally black community gains by the infusion of white

blood, though the circumstances of the “first cross” are scarcely

agreeable to civilized sentiment. There can be little beyond sheer

animalism in the relations between a white man and a black woman; and

such parentage cannot be reckoned the most desirable. This feeling,

however, is perhaps a mere superstition; the science of eugenics is not

yet far enough advanced, I take it, to afford us any authoritative

guidance. Sir Sydney Olivier, at all events, rejects without hesitation

the view that the mulatto is inferior, not only to the white, but to the

pure black. The mulatto element in a black community, he maintains, is a

distinct gain; and the larger it is the better. So far, I am quite

willing to follow him; but surely the same process of reasoning, applied

to a white community, must lead to exactly the opposite conclusion. It

is this fundamental distinction between a black and white community that

Sir Sidney either ignores, or declines to take into account. The South

is obviously not a country where, “if white men are to breed at all, it

must be with women of coloured races.” It is a country where a pure

white race increases rapidly in spite of the disturbance (economic and

sexual) undoubtedly set up by the constant propinquity of a black race.

In bygone days, when the black race was a herd of human chattels, with

no political or social rights, a great deal of intermixture took place.

It was, as Sir Sydney would doubtless admit, morally bestial and

degrading; but on the principles he lays down, and on the assumption

that slavery was part of the eternal scheme of things, it was probably

good policy, inasmuch as it improved the breed of the black

community—the community of slaves.[68] But when the black community

ceased to be, in its very nature, a thing apart—when its members became

freemen and citizens, indistinguishable, in constitutional theory, from

members of the white community—then the conditions entirely altered. It

was one thing to produce a superior breed of slaves; it is quite another

to go on producing an inferior breed of citizens, and to legalize the

production of such a breed. “But I deny the inferiority!” Sir Sydney may

say. “I contend that the good qualities of the white race are preserved,

and are reinforced by the addition of certain very valuable qualities

which are the special endowment of the black race.” It is not very easy

to see why, if this argument hold good, Sir Sydney should discountenance

the mating of the black man with the white woman. Either the African

strain is valuable or it is not; if it is, why should there be any “bad

natural economy” in such unions? Waiving this point, however, I think we

have already seen pretty clearly why Sir Sydney’s argument meets with

scant acceptance in the South. The plain reason is that it opposes to a

deep-rooted instinct a wholly unproved speculation. The South has not

discovered, in its own pretty considerable experience, the advantages of

hybridism as compared with purity of white blood; nor does Sir Sydney

himself advance anything that can possibly be called proof of his

opinion. A white nation can scarcely be expected to renounce its racial

integrity on the chance of breeding an occasional Alexandre Dumas.

-----

Footnote 68:

Yet I cannot but call attention once more to the doubt even on this

point. See p. 108. The general manager (a Canadian) of the company

which laid down the street-car lines in Kingston, Jamaica, reported

that “the best and most reliable of the workmen were the pure blacks.

This was found to be invariably the case.”—W. P. Livingstone, “Black

Jamaica,” p. 182.

-----

Sir Sydney Olivier’s biological principle, strictly and consistently

applied, would issue in a law making marriage legal between any male and

a female lower in the colour scale than himself, but illegal between any

female and a male with a larger proportion of African blood. Such a law

would, of course, be absolutely impossible of enforcement; and equally

inconceivable in practice would be any other partial and restricted

legalization of inter-racial unions. There is no middle course between a

resolute maintenance of the legal barrier between the races and a

complete acceptance of the principle of amalgamation. If the legal

barrier were ever removed, it would mean such a relaxation of public

sentiment as would insure the very rapid increase of the hybrid

race.[69] Three or four generations would see the South a brown man’s

land, with, no doubt, a rapidly narrowing white aristocracy. In another

three or four generations the prevailing complexion of the North would

be sensibly affected; and, finally, the whole American nation would be

typically negroid, the pure white man being the more or less rare

exception. For my part, I cannot but sympathize with the sentiment that

violently repudiates such a contingency. I do not understand how any

white man who has ever visited the South can fail to be dismayed at the

thought of absorbing into the veins of his race the blood of the African

myriads who swarm on every hand.

For the South itself, at any rate, the discussion is purely academic.

Amalgamation is a thousand leagues remote from the sphere of practical

politics. I have been endeavouring to state for outsiders the case of

the South as I understand it. I may have stated it wrongly, or

understated it; but no one can possibly overstate the resolve of the

South that the colour line shall not be obliterated by “miscegenation.”

-----

Footnote 69:

Several of my critics, when this essay first appeared, misunderstood

this phrase. I do not mean that if the legal barriers were removed

white men would rush to marry black women. What I mean is that, in a

democratic community, the legal barrier could not possibly be removed

unless there had previously occurred a relaxation, or rather reversal,

of public sentiment with regard to mixed unions.

-----

FOUR POSSIBILITIES: IV. SEGREGATION.

Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the

geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or without

the limits of the United States.

This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at the

outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But the

more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more urgently did

segregation recur to me as the one possible way of escape from an

otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the instant, and

wholesale, and violent deportation of ten million people—that is a rank

impossibility. Between that and inert acquiescence in the ubiquity of

the negro throughout the Southern States, there are many middle courses;

and I cannot but believe that the first really great statesman who

arises in America will prove his greatness by grappling with this vast

but not insoluble problem. And, assuredly, the sooner he comes the

better.

We have seen that the negro race is not dying out, or that, if it does

die out, it can only be, so to speak, at the cost of Southern

civilization—through the indefinite continuance of insanitary and

barbarous conditions. We have seen that the Atlanta Compromise is

illusory and impracticable, that there is no reasonable hope that the

two races will ever live together, yet apart—in economic solidarity, yet

without social or sexual contact. We have seen that the essence of the

whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even though it

be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn upward, through

physical coalescence, into the white race, and the white man’s intense

resolve that, on a large and determining scale, no such coalescence

shall take place. Now this state of war—for such it undoubtedly is—will

not correct itself by lapse of time. It will continue to degrade and

demoralize both races until active measures are taken to put an end to

it. Though I sympathize with the white man’s horror of amalgamation, I

neither approve nor extenuate the systematic injustice and frequent

barbarity in which that horror expresses itself. The present state of

society in the South is as inhuman as it is inconsistent with the

democratic and Christian principles which the Southern white man so

loudly, and in the main sincerely, professes. The Jim Crow car, and all

such discriminations in the system of public conveyance, are, I believe,

necessities, but deplorable necessities none the less. The constant

struggle to exclude the negro from political power is at best a negative

and unproductive expenditure of energy, at worst a source of political

dishonesty and corruption. The wresting of the law, whether criminal or

civil, into an instrument for keeping the negro in a state of abject

serfdom, is a scandal and a disgrace to any civilized community. The

constant resort to lawless violence and cruelty in revenge for negro

crime (real or imaginary) is a hideous blot upon the fair fame of the

South, if not rather an impeachment of her sanity. The truth is, in

fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely

sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are

merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which

puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human

nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot

be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects

are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an

active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship.

BACK TO AFRICA?

The deportation of the negro has been urged by many American writers,

generally in a somewhat illogical fashion. They start by asserting his

total incapacity for self-government, as demonstrated in Haiti, Liberia,

and elsewhere, and then recommend the foundation of a new negro republic

in some undefined portion of Africa. A curious scheme was put forward in

1889, in an anonymous book entitled, “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” written, I

believe, by Mr. Carl McKinley, of Charleston, South Carolina. Mr.

McKinley’s proposal was to promote “the voluntary and steady emigration

of the active maternal element of the negro race.” He calculated that if

12,500 child-bearing females, between the ages of twenty and thirty,

could every year be induced to emigrate (taking their husbands with

them), the whole “maternal element” of the coloured population would be

removed within fifty years. The plan was, apparently, that as soon as a

child was born to a young negro couple, they were to be persuaded to

emigrate, and that thus the prolific negro would gradually be

transferred to the new negro commonwealth, only the sterile element of

the race being left to die off at their leisure. It is unnecessary to

criticize this scheme, which is now twenty years old, and does not seem

to have found any serious champions. I mention it as perhaps the most

carefully considered of the suggestions for an exodus to Africa.

In no form does the African project seem to me at all a hopeful one. The

habitable portions of Africa are, I take it, pretty well staked out

among the European Powers, so that an elaborate and costly international

arrangement would be necessary before the requisite territory would be

available. But supposing this difficulty overcome, would the United

States be justified in simply dumping its coloured population in Africa,

and then washing its hands of them? It might just as well drive them

into the sea and have done with it. The negro character has shown no

fitness for the very difficult task of combined pioneering and

nation-building that it would have to encounter. To the lower elements

in the race, the return to Africa might mean repatriation in the sense

of a not unwelcome home-coming to savagery; but the better elements

would suffer greatly in such a relapse, while of their own strength they

probably could not resist it. Toward these better elements, and indeed

toward the whole race, the United States has a responsibility that it

could not, and certainly would not, shirk; so that it would in effect

have to undertake the policing of a distant, troublesome, and

unsatisfactory dependency, which might, in addition, not improbably

involve it in international difficulties. This would be preferable to

the present state of things, but still far from a desirable solution of

the problem.

The same objections apply to a settlement in South America, the

Philippines, or anywhere else outside the United States. Deportation, in

a word, is beset with disadvantages. It would be ruinously costly and

indefensibly cruel. If there ever was a time for it, that time is past.

A NEGRO STATE.

What, then, is the alternative? Manifestly, concentration within the

United States—the formation of a new State which should be, not a white

man’s land, but a black man’s land.

Is this physically possible? Is there enough unoccupied territory to

permit of such a concentration? Of absolutely unoccupied territory there

probably is not enough; but those who have studied the matter tell us

that there is plenty of territory so thinly occupied that the white

settlers could be removed and compensated at no extravagant cost.

According to the Honourable John Temple Graves:—

Lower California might be secured. The lands west of Texas may be had.

But the Government does not need to purchase. Four hundred million

acres of Government land is yet untaken and undeveloped in the West.

Of these vast acres the expert hydrographer of the Interior Department

has reported that it is easily possible to redeem by irrigation enough

to support in plenty a population of sixty million people.

We may liberally discount this estimate, and yet leave it unquestionable

that the resources of the United States are amply sufficient to admit of

the establishment of a new State without any exorbitant disturbance of

the existing distribution of territory.

It would be absurd for me to forecast in any detail the methods by which

the concentration should be brought about. They must be devised and

elaborated by the great American statesman who is to come. If he can

successfully grapple with this colossal task, he will deserve to rank

with Washington and Lincoln in the affections of his countrymen. It may

be pretty safely predicted that he will attempt no sudden and forcible

displacement of the mass of the negro race. Rather he will establish

local conditions that shall tempt the younger and more enterprising

negroes to migrate of their own free will; while he will probably fix by

legislation a pretty distant date—say five-and-twenty years ahead—after

which it shall be competent for the various State governments[70]

forcibly to evict (with compensation) and transplant to the new State

any negroes under, say, forty-five years of age still lingering within

their boundaries. There will be no need at any time to disturb old or

middle-aged negroes who are disinclined to start life afresh under new

conditions.

-----

Footnote 70:

I assume that, the principle once accepted, there will be small

difficulty in arranging the respective rights and duties in this

matter of the central and the State governments. The colour problem is

a national concern, if ever there was one.

-----

The probability is, however, that if once the new State were judiciously

set on foot, the difficulty would be so to moderate the westward rush as

to prevent an unnecessary dislocation of the labour-market in the South.

Negro labour could and would be gradually replaced by white labour; but

a sudden negro exodus on a large scale would embarrass agriculture and

other industries in most of the Southern States. It would be one of the

main problems of the case so to regulate the flow of migration as to

make it continuous, yet not excessive.

There seems to be little doubt that the negro race, as a whole, would

welcome any reasonable means of escape from the galling conditions of

their life in the South. On the other hand, there is no doubt whatever

that all the more intelligent members of the race are staunchly and even

pathetically loyal to American ideals, and would be very unwilling to

live under any other than the American form of government. In the new

State, they would be members of a negro community without ceasing to be

American citizens. It might be necessary at first to establish some

provisional government like that of an American territory or English

crown colony; but as soon as the country was sufficiently settled, and

the mechanism of life in full swing, there could be no difficulty or

danger in admitting the new community into the Union, with full State

rights. Negro education has enormously progressed since the bad old days

of Reconstruction; and there is no reason to doubt that the population

could furnish a competent legislature, executive and judiciary.

Legislative aberrations would be checked by the Supreme Court of the

United States; and if things went thoroughly wrong, and a new Haiti

threatened to develop in the heart of the Republic, why, United States

troops would always be at hand to hold a black mob or a black adventurer

in awe. But it would doubtless be a fundamental principle that no white

man could vote or hold office in the negro State, while, reciprocally,

no coloured man could vote or hold office in the white States.[71] The

abrogation of the Fifteenth Amendment would remove from the Constitution

of the United States a constant source of trouble.

-----

Footnote 71:

The negro State would, of course, send to Congress its two Senators

and its due proportion of members of the Lower House.

-----

I am far from denying that this racial readjustment would demand a huge

effort and a very large expense. In many individual cases it might cause

a good deal of hardship to people of both colours. But that both colours

would enormously and permanently benefit by the effort seems to me

indubitable. It would be, before everything, an act of justice to the

negro. It would enable him to build up a polity of his own, on lines to

which his mind is already habituated. It would offer him full

opportunity for the development of his talents and ambitions, unhampered

by any social discriminations or disabilities. The Hampton-Tuskegee

movement has been fitting great numbers of the race to carry out the

necessary tasks of construction and organization involved in the

material and moral upbuilding of the new community. Every aid should, of

course, be afforded for the transference to the new domain of all negro

universities, colleges, and similar institutions. I see little reason to

doubt that the sense of new and unhampered opportunity would stimulate

the mental and moral energies of the race, and beget a higher

competency, a new self-respect. They would feel that they were on trial

before the eyes of the world, that their future was in their own hands,

and that they must vindicate their claim to the rights and liberties of

civilized humanity. They would have a very fair chance of success; and

in case of failure they would at worst relapse upon some sort of crown

colony government. A regularly established and benevolent despotism

would, at any rate, be better than the capricious and malevolent

despotism to which they are now subjected in the South.

“But,” it may be said, “the rights and liberties of civilized humanity

include the right to move freely hither and thither over the face of the

earth. This right, at any rate, would be denied to the Afro-American,

inclosed within the ring-fence of his own State.” There is, I think, a

sufficient answer to this objection. The right to travel would not be

denied to the negro. Nor would he be debarred from emigrating and

settling abroad among any community that was willing to receive him. It

is, I think, becoming more and more clear that the right of every man,

white, black, or yellow, to effect a permanent settlement outside his

own country, is subject to this qualification. The idea that all the

world ought to belong equally to all men, and that rational development

tends toward an unrestricted intermingling of races, seems to be

signally contradicted by the trend of events. Is it not the great

essential for the ultimate world-peace that races should learn to keep

themselves to themselves?

If the negro State is established with any success, I do not believe

that its inhabitants will feel it an undue restriction on their

liberties that they are forbidden to settle in other parts of the Union.

The population question will gradually regulate itself. A fairly

civilized people, with limited opportunities of expansion, will soon

realize the penalties of breeding beyond its means of subsistence.

And what of the South, when this act of justice to the negro shall have

been performed? It will awaken, as from a nightmare, to the realization

of its splendid destiny. No longer will one of the richest and most

beautiful regions of the world be hampered in its material and spiritual

development by a legacy of ancestral crime. All that is best in the

South—and the Southern nature is rich in elements of magnanimity and

humanity—abhors the inhuman necessities imposed upon it by the presence

of the negro. The Southern white man writhes under the criticisms of the

North and of Europe, which he feels to be ignorant and in great measure

unjust, yet which he can only answer by an impotent, “You do not know!

You cannot understand!”[72] He has to confess, too, that there is much

in Southern policy and practice that even the necessities of the

situation cannot excuse—much that can only be palliated as the result of

a constant overstrain to which human nature ought never to be subjected.

Remove the causes of this overstrain, and a region perhaps the most

favoured by Nature of all in the Western Hemisphere will stand where it

ought to stand—in the van, not only of civilization, but of humanity.

-----

Footnote 72:

“I know of no other community of white people of equal numbers in the

world to-day carrying the burden borne by those of the Southern

States.... I mean the burden of ... administering the same law for the

two most diverse races on earth; of so carrying themselves in the

various relations of daily life with these childish people that their

conduct may have the approval of their consciences; of living with a

due regard for the opinions of their fellow-men, the while oppressed

by the consciousness that their fellow-men do not, will not, or cannot

understand.”—A. H. Stone, “The American Race Problem,” p. 74.

-----