VII
SOME CRITICS AND THEIR FALLACIES[ToC]
It is the purpose of the present chapter to reply to some of the more common of the arguments brought forward against the Negro. We shall by no means attempt to cover the whole ground, or even pretend that in every case we have summoned the most representative critics. At the same time we feel that those that are adduced are fairly typical of those of harsher view.
One of the noteworthy characteristics of discussion in recent years has been a tendency to deny the ideals on which America was founded, especially where the Negro was concerned. One of the frankest statements along this line was a Fourth of July address in 1911 by no less a person than Ex-President Eliot of Harvard University. This distinguished citizen gave voice to an opinion which is just now gaining more and more converts in this country, in effect this: The Declaration of Independence is a wornout document; it never was meant to be taken seriously; and, in the words of Rufus Choate, it is made up simply of "glittering and sounding generalities of natural right." The passage to which exception seems especially to be taken is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It will be observed that in a way each successive one of the three clauses here explains the one preceding; that is to say, all men are equal in the rights given to them by God, and these rights consist in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The fathers were not thinking about such things as that one child was born in a palace and another in a hut, or that one was born with brilliant intellect and the other with little power of mind. Certainly the "facts submitted to a candid world" are based on no such principles as these. The founders were talking about things moral. Each man deserved at least that no other man should have power to declare that he must live in a hut. In other words, each man deserved a man's chance in the world.
So far as the Negro is concerned then we hold that the Declaration of Independence is a very live document. More and more, however, within recent years has it been the fashion to fix attention upon his shortcomings, and this attitude has led some people to strange conclusions. One of the most accessible statements of the adverse point of view is "The Color Line," by Prof. William Benjamin Smith, for years a teacher at Tulane University. This book is in no sense better than many others. At the same time it was written by a man who had broadened his scholarship in Europe, being the holder of a doctor's degree from a German university, and who in his own studies had emphasized such subjects as mathematics and philosophy. From such a source one would at least expect some degree of consideration for logic; and yet "The Color Line" but shows the lengths to which some persons will go when they discuss the Negro. The central thesis seems to be the following (p. 174): "Drawing the color line, firm and fast, between the races, first of all in social relations, and then by degrees in occupations also, is a natural process and a rational procedure, which makes equally for the welfare of both." Professor Smith remarks several Negroes of distinction, shows that in fact most of them were not pure Negroes at all, but persons with an infusion of white blood, and concludes (p. 44): "It seems vain to deny that the mixed blood is notably more intelligent than the pure black; the necessary inference is that the white blood with which it was mixed is far more intelligent still." The same line of argument is used by Mr. Alfred Holt Stone in his Atlantic paper on "The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem," included in "Studies in the American Race Problem," as well as by Mr. E.B. Reuter in his recent study in the American Journal of Sociology, "The Superiority of the Mulatto." "Have equal opportunities," we are asked, "raised the Negroes in Pennsylvania to the white level?" Education has been a complete failure. Professor Smith visited a Negro school (p. 166): "An olive-colored young man was at the board trying to explain to a mulatto woman, the only member of the class, the mysterious nature of the perpendicular. He appeared very earnest in his exposition, but unable to awaken any answering intelligence." "The higher culture at 'colored universities' merely spoils a plough-hand or house-maid." Finally (p. 259), "nearly forty years of devoted and enthusiastic effort to elevate and educate the Southern Negro lie stretched out behind us in a dead level of failure."
This whole argument is guilty of the vicious fallacy of begging the question by arguing in a circle. First we degrade human beings by the curse of slavery for two hundred and fifty years, and then because they are not advanced we argue that they have not the capacity to rise. Far from being an advantage to both races the color line is the curse of both. Obsessed by the Negro problem, the white South has always been held back and still finds it impossible to think in the large; while the Negro is daily met with such insults as shake the very foundations of his citizenship. The argument on the mulatto goes back to the circle already remarked. Everybody knows that in a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a field-hand; but no thorough test in Negro schools has ever demonstrated that the black boy is intellectually inferior to the fair one. This is all a part of the general American snobbishness that places on the Negro the burden of any blame or deficiency, but that claims for the white race any merit that an individual may show, even while many advantages of citizenship are withheld from both mulatto and Negro alike. Furthermore, and this is a point not previously remarked in discussions of the Negro problem, the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist of mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather than Anglo-Saxon; note the romantic and elemental sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller and the mystical religious paintings of Henry O. Tanner. As to labor, how can any one assert that the Negro in the North has had an equal chance with the white man, in view of the attitude of the labor unions? The whole matter of education represents the circle worse than anything else. Would anybody who knows the South contend for a moment that public school appropriations are evenly divided between the white and black? And shall we allow one stupid pupil in a poorly organized school to offset the brilliant attainments in the foremost colleges in the country, from which institutions Negro graduates are each year coming by the scores? Not a year passes now but that some of these students win noteworthy honors, receive valuable prizes, or take doctors' degrees. Let one observe in full proof of this the educational number of the Crisis, published in July of each year. The point about "colored universities" simply represents a state of ignorance common throughout the South. The day never was when Fisk and Knoxville and Morehouse simply crammed Greek into unreceptive minds. No schools in the country have had a clearer idea of their mission, or have done more to answer it with limited facilities. The pity is that not one of a dozen representative colleges has the beginning of an adequate endowment, and all have had to do their work with the cheapest tools. And certainly such leadership as the race has had, and such advance as the race has made, have been due primarily to the large idea of Christian service behind the missionary institutions.
Within recent years, however, there has developed a fear of the part that the Negro is to play in American civilization. This was fairly well stated in an article in the Forum a few years ago by Mr. W.W. Kenilworth, "Negro Influences in American Life." Mr. Kenilworth is much disturbed. "Can it be," he asks, "that America is falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro?" "It is unthinkable that the increase of Negro population, the increased and unhampered (sic) circumstances of Negro expression should not have an important reaction on the white population." The pity is that the whole article is based on unwarranted assumptions, and, in spite of some elements of truth, the reasoning, condensed, is somewhat as follows:—
The Negro element is daily becoming more potent in American society.
American society is daily becoming more immoral.
Therefore at the door of the Negro may be laid the general increase of divorce and all other evils of society.
Somewhat more subtle than all this is the criticism in Volume VII of "The South in the Building of the Nation," in the article on "The Intellectual and Literary Progress of the Negro" written by Mr. H.I. Brock. The central thesis here is the following: "The Negro is mentally quite sufficiently developed to use his brain with effect upon the immediate and the concrete. He is not sufficiently developed to start with the white man's generalizations, or more exactly, the formulas in which these generalizations are expressed, and work down to the concrete. He is in the class in arithmetic. He is not fit yet awhile for that in algebra and analytics." In proof of this position it is asserted that Booker T. Washington was in type and in fact "exactly like Peter the successful barber and Walker who runs a profitable carrier's business in a certain Southern town, though neither Peter nor Walker can read or write." As for Frederick Douglass, what happened to him "cannot be set down as his achievement. He was a sign and a symbol held up for men to see. He was floated on the top of the abolition wave into public office. He did not climb there." Phillis Wheatley was "taught the trick of verse. Her verses were printed as a curiosity at the time and her 'Poems' have no other interest." "Even Paul Laurence Dunbar has a fame quite disproportionate to his actual place in the catalogue of contemporary minor poets. He, too, is, in part, a curiosity." The whole question at issue, so far as the country at large is concerned, is "not so much how to advance the Negro as how to prevent the Negro from retarding the upward tendency of the rest of the population." All of his books and compositions so far "are like the schoolboy's essay which gets into the school magazine; they are to be considered as 'exercises,' not as achievements."
There is a very real criticism here, one deliberately frank and even harsh, but deserving of attention. If we understand it, it says in substance that the Negro in America has not yet developed the great creative or organizing mind that points the way of civilization. He has so far produced no Plato, no Jonathan Edwards, no Pierpont Morgan, no Edison. The larger thought here will be considered in our next chapter. Just now let us observe that the argument makes the familiar assumption that because a thing never has been it never will be. All America is crude, however. While she has made great advance in applied science, she certainly has not as yet produced a Shakespeare or a Beethoven. If America has not reached her heights after three hundred years, she ought not to be impatient with the Negro after only fifty years of opportunity. Furthermore, all signs go to prove the assumption fundamentally false. We know of some of the younger men of to-day who have not only mastered language and science, but who have outshone brilliant groups of white students in pure philosophy. It would be a miracle if this were the everyday occurrence. It is not; but the fact that it is an occurrence at all means that the Negro is at least capable of the highest things. Furthermore, it is not true that everything that the Negro has written may be dismissed with a wave of the hand as school boy exercises, though we grant that only a beginning has been made. Give us time. Give us time! Within the next fifty years we shall astound you!