Should the Color Line Go?
By Robert Watson Winston
The tendency to hide the facts about the negro problem—No real freedom for colored people in the South—Migration of the negroes to a country of their own is the solution suggested
“Reprinted by special permission from Current History Magazine, a monthly periodical published by The New York Times Co.” Born at Windsor, North Carolina, Mr. Winston is a leading lawyer of his native State. He was graduated from the University of North Carolina and received the degree of LL. D. from Wake Forest College. He was a Judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina from 1889 to 1895, when he resigned. He is a well-known orator and also an authority on Southern problems.
By what authority do I speak on this vexed subject of race relationship in the South? For more than two centuries my people have lived in the South, and I myself am a Southern man. My father was a Whig, a thorough-going Union man, and opposed to secession. He followed Mr. Webster and not Mr. Calhoun. In 1861, when one year of age, I became the owner by will of a three-fourths interest in five negro slaves. I sucked the breast of a negro woman, listened to the wonderful tales of my father’s slaves, rode “horse” on their backs, swam and fished with them, and ate their ash cake in the cabin. The negro, I think, is my friend; I know I am his. Thus I ought to be impartial.
Why do we of the South refuse to admit the facts, and when some blunt fellow, like the late Senator Tillman, blurts out the truth, why do we straightway fall to denying and disclaiming? On the other hand, why do few people outside the South seem to understand or care what consequences will follow the destruction of the caste system upheld by a color line so rigidly drawn?
A certain inexorable race law should be kept in mind if one would understand the magnitude of the issue involved: No two homogeneous races will long continue to exist side by side in the same country on terms of perfect equality without race-blending. One is prone to think of miscegenation as a thing foreign to the United States, and yet ethnologists generally declare that such blending between whites and blacks will take place, and that the Southern States will eventually become mulatto. Shortly after the close of the Civil War miscegenation societies were organized and leading abolitionists, Theodore Tilton and Wendell Phillip among others, advocated mixed marriages. About this time also the North British Review, in a calm statement, concluded that not only England and Europe, but Africa, would be represented in the new race which was growing up in the New World.
A few years ago Colonel Roosevelt, in letters to The Outlook, told of the rising tide of color in Central America—the fusing of whites and blacks into a mulatto civilization; how a prosperous negro would marry an impecunious white woman, how the male offspring would repeat the process, so that, after two or three generations, they would become a white family. And similar conditions exist today in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Portugal and the French colonies, where marriages between whites and blacks are well nigh universal.
Schults in “Race or Mongrel” declares that “if conditions that now exist continue nothing need be done with the negro; the problem will solve itself. The immigration of Southern mongrels is ingrafting more and more negro blood in our veins.” To the same effect is Hoffman’s “Racial Traits and Tendencies”: “The process is now rapidly going on and the black race will be absorbed; a condition which, though unpopular, is not unwelcome to many thinkers.” Document 188 of the Carnegie Foundation has valuable data showing universal race-blending in Jamaica and Bermuda. Sir Sidney Olivier, Governor of Jamaica, advocates the blending of whites and blacks “as a buffer to prevent race conflict.” In Volume 79 of the Popular Science Monthly he takes the ground that “we must make our account for a legitimate and honorable interblending between whites and blacks, and must look upon it not as an evil but as an advantage,” adding that “the black race is everywhere eager to mix with the white race.”
Viscount Bryce asserts that “the Brazilian lower classes intermarry freely with the black people, the Brazilian middle classes intermarry with mulattoes and quadroons”; and intimates that three-fourths white is white enough for Brazilians and Portuguese. The Journal of Heredity, October, 1916, contains a statement by Maynard W. Metcalf that the union of the races is inevitable; and to the same effect speak the Literary Digest of October, 1917, and the Century Magazine of March, 1903. In the “Future of Evolution” race-blending in the South is taken for granted; the Mercure de France for August, 1922, finds much hope for France from an infusion of African blood, declaring that the French people betray no antipathy to the color of the men from Algeria, Morocco or Tunis; and that all are “welded into lasting French cement,” a condition vouched for by our soldiers returning from France.
Robert Watson Winston (White)
Formerly Judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina
Reuter in “The Mulatto in the United States” implies that race-blending will take place if the color line and race segregation are not maintained: “Where no color line has been formally drawn against them they have tended to ally themselves with the superior race—during the process of reduction to a mongrel unity; it is biracial adjustment that keeps them apart.” One writer has asserted that all religions come from the black race; that extreme white and extreme black are departures, and that Adam, as his name signifies, was made of red earth.
We must conclude, therefore, that eventually the two races in America will blend if they be placed on social and political equality, and if they are in fact homogeneous.
Are Southern whites and blacks socially and politically equal? Are they homogeneous? And now we touch the first sore spot. We of the South generally maintain that the negro is a free man, and that the law bears on white and black alike, when we must know that this is not the fact. Is a man free who cannot vote, hold office or serve on the jury; is he free when he must ride in second-class coaches, sit in the gallery at public places, occupy rear seats of electric cars and flee for his life when suspected of being a dangerous character? Is a race free which has been battered into submission by whippings and lynchings, and which has no part in governmental affairs? Can man or race be free with a spirit in chains? And does it lie in the mouth of the white man to charge that the negro is but a race of bootblacks, when we have confined him to the task of blacking our boots?