Changes in Sexual Relations
After about 1876 sexual intercourse between the races gradually decreased, and today has practically stopped. The law sustained by public sentiment condemns the practice, which has become a badge of shame. One would naturally expect the census table to reflect this change in race relationship, and it does. In 1910, in a group of 100 negroes, as we have seen, 20, or one in five, were mulattoes, whereas in 1920 the proportion was one in six, or 16 mulattoes in a group of 100 negroes. But bloody revolutions, much legislation forbidding race intercourse of any kind, innumerable race riots, lynchings and burnings in the “Black Belt,” together with the white womanhood of the South—all these were required to separate the two homogeneous races.
The Roosevelt letters made a lasting impression on the South. These letters describing the process of race-blending showed how the crossing of white and mulatto produced a quadroon; the crossing of quadroon with white person produced an octoroon; the crossing of octoroon with white person produced a person called “passing for white”; and the crossing of “passing for white” with pure white produced “fixed white,” and after “fixed white” there was no further reversion to black color.
The total population of the United States is about 106,000,000, of which 10,500,000 are negroes. It is interesting to note that of these 10,500,000 negroes about 8,333,000 reside in Southern territory. That is to say, in the fourteen South Atlantic, East South Central and West South Central States (omitting West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky), there are 8,333,000 blacks and 19,000,000 whites. On the other hand, in Northern territory there are 71,000,000 whites and 1,500,000 blacks. In other words, in the thirty-two Northeastern, Middle Atlantic, East North Central, West North Central, Mountain and Pacific States the white population is 71,000,000, while the negro population is 1,500,000.
If it were possible at the present time to blend the races, Southern people would have more than one-third colored blood in their veins and less than two-thirds white blood, and Northern people would have about 3 per cent colored blood and 97 per cent white. Moreover, if amalgamation were to take place now, the whole of South Carolina and Mississippi and half of Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana would grade about 50 per cent negro blood and 50 per cent white. The North, on the other hand, would grade about 3 per cent colored blood and 97 per cent white, a mixture well within the rule of “fixed white”; whereas the Southern mixture would not reach the grade of “passing for white,” the offspring of such persons being subject to the law of reversion to color.
It is not possible to place Southern whites and blacks on terms of social and political equality as soon as the blacks are fitted for citizenship, as many philanthropic organizations are now insisting, because the Southern white man is tenacious of his rights and on this subject is regardless of consequences. With him a white man’s government means a white man’s government. If Congress should pass a Force Bill and undertake to put it into operation, the Irish upheaval would be a mild affair in comparison with conditions in the Southern States. Either the white man would exterminate the negro, or the negro would exterminate the white man. The white man will brook no peer. It is not a question of whether the negro is a good citizen or a bad citizen; it is deeper than this; it has to do with race integrity, race autonomy.
So long as the negro “behaves himself” in the South he is safe. But once let him cross the dead line of race separation and endeavor to assert his manhood rights and he becomes a menace to the existing order of things, after the manner of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. With hat in hand, the Southern negro is more than safe, he is happy—if he is that kind of negro. For his sake and in memory of the old-time “darkey” schools, hospitals and orphanages have been set on foot. Nothing, indeed, is too good for him. A tender, patient relationship exists between this unambitious, likable creature and the white people of the South. This white man’s negro gets all that he is entitled to and often more in the courts, as a domestic on the farm, with trowel or hammer. The white man who undertakes to impose on a white man’s negro has his hands full. Many years’ experience as a Circuit Judge enables me to declare that in the Court House I never witnessed an act of injustice to such a negro—who does not desire rights, social or political, and could not be induced to leave “his ol’ white folks.”
But what of that increasing number of negroes who are not the white man’s negroes, and what of the widening gulf between races? Has the situation improved since the return of negro soldiers in khaki from France, where the black man from Algeria was a favorite of the Parisian drawing rooms, a recipient of the voluptuous white woman’s favors? Did Siki’s victory over Carpentier give a new turn to the race question, as The Boston Herald asserts? Is it true, as literature of “new negro” type declares, that race war and revolution must presently follow if conditions continue and race segregation be insisted upon? Perhaps not. But so The Crisis is teaching and so one reads in “The Souls of the Black Folks,” “The Voice of the Negro,” “Dark Water,” “The Black Dispatch,” and like publications. The negro Leckey thinks that “race separation and distinctions are a spiritual lynching and that the negro must feel that he is a cursed, knee-bending slave, bound and shackled by laws and customs made for slaves.” And the “new negro’s” call to battle, how clear it is. Let us hear it:
Oh! kinsman we must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave;
And for their thousand blows, deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave,
Like men we’ll face the cowardly, murderous pack,
Pressed to the wall—dying—but fighting back.
Why is the negro not right? Self determination is of God, not of man. But the black race must not underrate the task. They are lined up against descendants of men who fought a four years’ war against the world without salt, shoes or powder, and whose courage and endurance no man questions. Men of the South place race integrity above politics, property, religion, or life itself. The South alone among nations is today making a fight against a universal ethnological law of race-blending. The mistake is in not boldly admitting the facts, flinging defiance to the future, spurning representation based on negro population in the electoral college.