NOW AND THEN
I had scarcely recovered my equilibrium and become able to give an account of myself before I was formally called on by the “Chief of the Bureau of Public Utility” of the country to make a statement about the Negro problem in my time, Dr. Newell having informed him that I was interested in that subject.
Here follows the substance of what I wrote as I read it over to Dr. Newell before sending it:
“Many changes considered well nigh impossible one hundred years ago have taken place in almost all phases of the so-called Negro problem. One of the most noticeable instances to me is the absence of slurs at individual Negroes and at the race as a whole in your newspapers. Such headlines as ‘Another Coon Caught,’ ‘The Burly Black Brute Foiled,’ ‘A Ham Colored Nigger in the Hen House’ and ‘This Coon Wants to be Called Mister,’ are, to me, conspicuous by their absence. In the old days, in referring to a Negro who had made a speech of some merit he was called ‘Professor,’ but in making a reference to him as being connected with politics the same person was dubbed ‘Jim’ or ‘Tom.’ Fights between three white men and two Negroes were published, under glaring headlines, as ‘Race Riots.’ The usual custom of dealing out the vices of the Negro race as a morning sensation in the daily papers evidently fell into ‘innocuous desuetude,’ and the daily papers having dropped the custom, the weeklies, which were merely echoes of the dailies, also left off the habit, so that now neither the city people nor farmers have their prejudices daily and weekly inflamed by exaggerated portrayals of the Negroes’ shortcomings.
“The character of no individual and in fact of no race can long endure in America when under the persistent fire of its newspapers. Newspapers mould public opinion. Your organization for the dissemination of news has it in its power to either kill or make alive in this respect. Our organization, called the News Distributing Bureau, was formerly in the hands of people whose policy designedly necessitated the portrayal of the Negro in his worst light before the people, in order that certain schemes against the race might be fostered, and seemed to take special delight in publishing every mean act of every bad Negro, and leaving unrecorded the thousands of credible acts of the good ones.
“Like Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, this wholesale assassination of Negro character in the newspapers was strictly a political ‘war measure,’ intended for political use only. Its design was to prejudice the race in the eyes of the world and thus enable the white supremacy advocates, North and South, to perfect the political annihilation of the Negro. The Negro farmer knew little about what was going on; he was making corn and cotton, and to tell him in public assemblies would be considered ‘incendiary,’ and ‘stirring up strife between the races,’ and the individual who might be thus charged would certainly have to leave ‘between two suns,’ as the phrase was. However, the general desire among leading Negroes was for peace at any sacrifice, and they studiously labored to that end. The South ought to have thanked the Negro preachers and the Negro school teachers for the reign of peace in that section, because it was due almost wholly to their efforts.
“Then, too, the public schools, which were at that period the boast of the South, in support of her contention of friendliness to the Negro, served the purpose of quieting many a Negro who might otherwise have been disposed to ‘talk too much.’[1] Be it remembered that at this time it was considered virtually a social crime to employ a Negro as a clerk in a store or elsewhere. This feeling extended from Delaware to Texas, and the thousands of Negroes who were coming out of the various public schools, and the institutions for higher training established by Northern philanthropists, had practically no calling open to them, as educated men and women, save that of teaching. The door of hope was shut in their face and they were censured for not doing better under such impossible handicaps. It was like closing the stable door and whipping the horse for not going in! A few entered the professions of law, pharmacy and medicine, some engaged in business, but no great number for the following reasons:
“First—In the professions the white professional man was by habit and custom very generally employed by the colored people, while the colored professional man, by the conventional laws of society, was rarely or never employed by white people.
“Second—The natural disposition of the colored people to patronize white merchants and professional men in preference to their own was a factor to be reckoned with in looking for the causas rerum—a kind of one-sided arrangement whereby the whites got the Negroes’ money but the Negroes could not get theirs—in the professions. In many of the small lines of business, however, the Negro was patronized by the whites.
“So that—with the News Bureau making capital every morning of the corruption in the race; with the efforts of Southern ministers who had taken charge of Northern pulpits, to strew seeds of poison by proclaiming, on the commission of every offense by a Negro, ‘We told you that the Negro was not worth the freedom you gave him,’ ‘We told you he wasn’t fit for citizenship and that the money you have spent for his education is worse than wasted;’ with the constant assertions that his only place is ‘behind a mule,’ that education made him a greater criminal, that ‘the Southern people are his best friends’ because ‘we overlook his follies’ and ‘treat him kindly if he will stay in his place;’ with the money interests clamoring for the South ‘to be let alone’ with the Negro question, for fear of unsettling business and causing a slump in Southern securities; with the claims that, to keep the railroads earning dividends, to keep the cotton market active, the Negro must be handled according to the serfdom or shotgun plan, and that the best task master so far found was the Southern white man, who had proven himself wonderfully adept in getting good crops from Negro labor—with these and many other excuses, the question of raising the Negro in the scale of civilization was left to posterity.
“‘What is he worth to us now?’ That is the only question with which we are concerned, was the ruling thought, if not the open confession.
“Let it be understood that statistics (which the Negro did not compile) showed that the race at that time was, as a mass, the most illiterate, the least thrifty, and the most shiftless and criminal of any class of American citizens—dividing the population into natives—Irish emigrants, German emigrants, Italians, Jews, and Poles. This was a fact that hurt, regardless of who was responsible for it.
“Then the question of color cut no small figure in this problem. The Negro’s color classified him; it rang the signal bell for drawing ‘the color line’ as soon as he was seen, and it designated and pointed him out as a marked man, belonging to that horrible criminal class whose revolting deeds were revealed every day in the newspapers. No wonder he was shunned, no wonder the children and women were afraid of him! The great mass of the people took the newspaper reports as true. They never read between the lines and seldom read the corrections of errors[2] that had been made. In some cases the first report had been that a Negro had committed a crime, and later it was discovered that a white man with his face blacked had been the perpetrator. Some one has said, ‘Let me write the songs of a people and I will control their religious sentiments.’ In a country like America where the newspapers are so plentiful and where people rely on them so implicitly, those who control the newspapers may be said to control the views of the people on almost any public question. With 30 per cent of the Negro population illiterate, with a criminal record double that of any of the emigrant classes above outlined, with the News Distributing Bureau against it, with no political or social standing—pariahs in the land—with Northern capital endorsing serfdom, with their inability to lose their race identity, on account of their color—we realize how heavy the odds were against the Negro race at that time.
“As a Negro orator once put it, ‘De Southern white man’s on top’er de nigger and de Yankee white man’s on top er de Southern white man and de bad nigger’s on top er dem bofe!’
“I now come to some of the proposed solutions of the problem. Various meetings were held all over the country to discuss the Negro problem, and many a mediocre white man who thirsted for a little newspaper notoriety, or political preferment, in both the North and the South, had his appetite in this direction satisfied by writing or saying something on the Negro question. One Thomas Dixon tried to out Herod Herod in taking up the exceptional cases of Negro criminality and using them in an attempt to convince his readers of the Negro’s unfitness for citizenship. A public speaker named John Temple Graves[3] made lecture tours advocating deportation as the only solution of the problem, rejecting as unsound the theories of Booker Washington, who was advocating industrial education as the main factor in solving the problem, because of the consequent clash that would arise between white and colored mechanics—rejecting also as unsound the theory of higher education; because that would develop in the Negro a longing for equality which the white man would not give and was never known to give an inferior race, a statement which all honest white people must regard as a base slander upon their Christianity.
“Bishop Turner, senior bishop of the African Methodist-Episcopal Church, one of the leading organizations of the Negro race, also advocated emigration to Africa as the only solution of the problem, on the grounds that the white people would never treat the Negro justly and that history furnished no instance where a slave race had ever become absolutely free in the land of its former owners, instancing that to be free the Jews had to leave Egypt; that William the Conqueror and his followers slaughtered the native Britons, rather than attempt to carry out what seemed to them an impossible task, that of teaching two races, a conquered race and a conquering one, to live side by side in peace.
“One Professor Bassett made enemies of the Southern newspapers and politicians by proposing justice and equality as a solution of the problem. The ‘most unkindest cut of all’ of Professor Bassett’s saying was that Booker Washington was ‘the greatest man, save Robert E. Lee, that the South had produced in a hundred years.’ The politicians and their sympathizers seized upon this statement as being a good opportunity to keep up the discussion of the Negro issue, which many better disposed people were hoping would be dropped, according to promise, as soon as the Negroes had been deprived of the ballot by the amendments then being added to the constitutions of the Southern States. They rolled it over as a sweet morsel under their tongues. ‘Othello’s occupation,’ they realized, would be gone without the ‘nigger in the wood pile.’ The politicians disfranchised the Negro to get rid of his vote, which was in their way, and they kept the Negro scarecrow bolstered up for fear that the whites might divide and that the Negro might then come back into possession of the ballot.
“The politicians proposed no measures of relief for the great mass of ignorance and poverty in their midst. The modicum of school appropriations was wrung from them, in some instances, by the threats of the better element of the people. They were obstructionists rather than constructionists. One Benjamin Tillman boasted on the floor of the United States Senate that in his state he kept the Negroes ‘in their place’ by the use of the shot-gun, in defiance of law and the constitution, and that he expected to keep it up. If left alone, the feeling against Negroes would have subsided to some extent and mutual helpfulness prevailed, but the politicians had to have an issue, even at the sacrifice of peace between the races and at the expense of a loss of labor in many sections where it was once plentiful—as many Negroes left for more liberal states, where they not only received better wages but also better treatment. The Southern farmer and business man was paying a dear price for office holders when he stood by the politicians and allowed them to run off Negro labor, by disfranchisement and political oppression. It was paying too much for a whistle of that quality.
“Many Negroes thought, with Bishop Turner and John Temple Graves, that emigration was the solution of the problem; not necessarily emigration from the United States, but emigration individually to states where public sentiment had not been wrought up against them. But the Negro, owing to his ignorance, and also to his affection for the land of his birth, and on account of a peculiar provincialism that narrowed his scope of vision of the world and its opportunities, could not bring himself to leave the South, so far as the great mass was concerned. Then, too, he had been told that the Yankees would not treat him like the Southerner, and Southern newspapers took especial pains to publish full details of all the lynchings that occurred in the North and make suggestive comments on them, in which they endeavored to show that the whole country was down on the Negro, and that while in the South the whites lynched only the one Negro against whom they had become enraged, in the North they mobbed and sought to drive out all the Negroes in the community where the crime had been committed. (The two clippings below occurred in the same issue of a Southern paper and showed how, while the North was mobbing a Negro, the South was honoring one.)[4]
“Instances of white mechanics North who were refusing to work with Negroes, and instances of Northern hotels refusing them shelter were also made the most of and served the purpose of deterring Negro emigration from the Southern States. Frequently some Negro was brought home dead, or one who had contracted disease in the North came home and died. These occurrences were also used as object lessons and had their effect.
“In fact, the Southern white people did not want the Negroes to leave. They wanted them as domestics, on the farm, and as mechanics. They knew their value as such. ‘Be as intelligent, as capable as you may but acknowledge my superiority,’ was the unspoken command.
“Many individual Negroes acted on this suggestion and by shrewd foresight managed to accumulate considerable property, and so long as they ‘minded their own business,’ and ‘stayed out of politics’ they did well, and had strong personal friends among the white people. Their property rights were recognized to a very large extent, in fact the right of Negroes to hold property was very generally conceded. This was true even to the extent, in several instances, of causing reimbursement for those who were run away from their homes by mobs. In some states laws were passed giving damages to the widows of those who were lynched by mobs, said damages to be paid by the county in which the lynching occurred. In fact the South had long since discovered the Negro’s usefulness and the feeling against him partook more of political persecution than race hatred. The paradoxical scheme of retaining six million Negroes in the population with all the rights and duties of citizenship, less social and political standing, was the onus of the problem in the South. Such a scheme as this was bound to breed more or less persecution and lawlessness, as did the slave system. It was a makeshift at best, and though in the main, honestly undertaken, it was impossible of performance.
“The Southern people seemed to have no objection to personal contact with Negroes in a servile capacity. Many Negro women made their living as ‘wet nurses,’ and the Southern ‘black mammy’ had become stereotyped. Then, too, the large number of mulatto children everywhere was some evidence of personal contact, on the part of the men. Negro servants swarmed around the well-to-do Southern home, cooked the food and often slept with the children; the Southerner shook hands with his servants on his return home from a visit and was glad to see them; but if any of these servants managed by industry and tact to rise to higher walks of life, it became necessary, according to the unwritten law, to break off close relations. Yet, in the great majority of cases, the interest and good feeling remained, if the Negro did not become too active politically—in which case he could expect ‘no quarter.’
“The subject of lynching became very serious. This evil custom, for a while, seemed to threaten the whole nation. While Negroes were the most common victims, yet the fever spread like a contagion to the lynching of white criminals as well.
“At first it was confined to criminals who committed assaults on women, and to brutal murderers, but it soon became customary to lynch for the slightest offense, so that no man’s life was safe if he was unfortunate enough to have had a difficulty with some individual, who had friends enough to raise a mob at night who would go with him to the house of his victim, call him out, and either shoot, or unmercifully beat him. The refusal of the officers of the law to crush out this spirit in its embryonic stage resulted in its growing to such enormous proportions that they found, too late, that they could neither manage nor control it. The officers themselves were afraid of the lynchers.
“The method of lynching Negroes was usually by hanging or by burning at the stake, sometimes in the presence of thousands of people, who came in on excursion trains to see the sight, and, possibly, carry off a trophy consisting of a finger joint, a tooth or a portion of the victim’s heart. If the lynching was for a crime committed against a woman, and she could be secured, she was consigned to the task of starting the flames with her own hands. This was supposed to add to the novelty of the occasion.[5]
“‘Why did not the Negro offer some resistance to these outrages?’ you may ask.
“That question, no doubt, is often propounded by those who read of the horrors of this particular period. Different theories are advanced. One is that the Negro was overawed by numbers and resources—that he saw the uselessness of any such attempt. Another theory is that during the whole history of Negro slavery in this country there occurred only one or two rebellions worthy of the name. One was the ‘Nat Turner Insurrection’ in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. This was soon put down and the ringleader hung, together with several of his misguided followers. So it must be concluded, since the Negro bore two hundred and fifty years of slavery so patiently, and made only a few feeble attempts to liberate himself, that he is not naturally of a rebellious nature—that he easily fits into any place you put him, and with the fatalistic tendency of all barbaric races, except the Indian, makes the best of circumstances. It is possibly true that the Negro would be a slave among us to-day if some one else had not freed him. The sentiment, ‘He who would be free must first himself strike the blow,’ did not appeal to him.
“Another reason cited for the Negro’s submission so long to oppression both before and since the American Civil War of 1860 to 1865 was his inability to organize. The white man learned this art by thousands of years of experience and of necessary resistance for the protection of those rights which he holds most dear. The Negroes were never able to make any concerted movement in their own behalf. They clashed too easily with one another and any individual would swamp the ship, as it were, to further his own scheme. The ‘rule or ruin’ policy prevailed and the necessity of the subordination of individuality for the good of the whole was lost in a storm of personal aggrandizement whenever an attempt was made at anything bordering on Negro national organization. This was one of the fruits of slavery, which encouraged jealousy and bickering. Several religious organizations had a successful existence for some time and quite a number of business and benevolent enterprises, but in politics all was chaos. The Negroes cast their ballots one way all of the time; it was known just as well ten years before an election how they would vote, as it was after the ballots were counted. No people of political calibre like that could measure arms with the white man politically; his rebelling in such a condition would have been preposterous. The Negro took his cue in matters of race policy from his white friends—he did not fight until the signal was given by them. No Negro gained any national reputation without first having been recognized by the white race, instead of his own. The Negroes recognized their leaders after the whites picked them out—not before.
“The Negro nature at this time was still a pliable one, after many years of drill training, but it was much more plastic in the days of slavery, and for the first forty years after reconstruction. The master labored to subordinate the will of the slave to his own, to make him like clay in the hands of the potter. In this he had an eye to business. The nearer the slave approached the horse, in following his master’s guidance, the nearer perfect he was, and this lesson of putting himself absolutely at the mercy of his master was thoroughly learned, and it was learned easily because there seemed to exist a natural instinctive awe on the part of the Negro for the white man. He had that peculiar fondness for him that the mule has for the horse. You can mount one horse and lead a thousand mules, without bit or bridle, to the ends of the earth.
“The Negro sought to please his master in all things. He had a smile for his frowns and a grin for his kicks. No task was too menial, if done for a white master—he would dance if he was called upon and make sport of the other Negroes, and even pray, if need be, so he could laugh at him. He was trustworthy to the letter, and while occasionally he might help himself to his master’s property on the theory of a common ownership, yet woe be unto the other Negro that he caught tampering with his master’s goods! He was a ‘tattler’ to perfection, a born dissembler—a diplomat and a philosopher combined. He was past grand master in the art of carrying his point when he wanted a ‘quarter’ or fifty cents. He knew the route to his master’s heart and pocketbook and traveled it often. He simply made himself so obliging that he could not be refused! It was this characteristic that won him favor in the country from college president down to the lowest scullion. Had he been resentful and vindictive, like the Indian, he would have been deported or exterminated long since.
“The Negro’s usefulness had also bound him to the South. The affection that the master and mistress had for the slave was transmitted in the blood of their children.
“As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman,
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows;
Useless each without the other,”
applied to the relations between the Negro and his white master. In the Civil War between the states, many a slave followed his master to the front. Here he was often the only messenger to return home. He bore the treasured watch, or ring, or sword, of the fallen soldier, and broke the sad news to the family; and there were black tears as well as white ones spilled on such occasions.
“The white males went to the war leaving the family and farm in charge of the blacks thereon. They managed everything, plowed, sowed, reaped, and sold, and turned over all returns to the mistress. They shared her sorrows and were her protection. When Union soldiers came near, the trusted blacks were diligent in hiding property from the thieves and bummers of the army. They carried the horses to the woods and hid them in the densest swamps, they buried the jewelry and silver and gold plate; they secreted their young mistresses and the members of the family where they could not be found, and not one instance was there ever heard of improper conduct, out of a population of nearly four million slaves; in spite of the fact that the war was being maintained by their masters for the perpetuation of the shackles of slavery on themselves! The Negro was too fond of his master’s family to mistreat them, he felt almost a kinship to them. The brutes of later days came from that class of Negroes who had been isolated from the whites, on the quarters of large plantations.
“Was there ever a more glorious record? Did ever a race deserve more fully the affection of another race than these southern Negroes, and did not we owe it to their descendants to save them from both deportation and serfdom?
“You ask, ‘Why was it that after the war there was so much race prejudice, in the face of all these facts?’
“The answer to that question is fraught with much weight and bears strongly on the final solution of the Negro problem. The friends of the Negro had this question to battle with from the beginning, for the enemies of the race used every weapon at hand in the long and terrible fight against Negro citizenship.
“To begin with, I will state that after the war the Negro became a free citizen and a voter—he was under no restraint. His new condition gave him privileges that he had never had before; it was not unnatural that he should desire to exercise them. His attempts to do so were resisted by the native whites, but his vote was needed by the white men who had recently come into the South to make it their home—and to get office—and also for his own protection. It was necessary that he should vote to save himself from many of the harsh laws that were being proposed at the time. Some of them were that a Negro should not own land, that a Negro’s testimony was incompetent in the courts, that a Negro should not keep firearms for his defense, that he should not engage in business without paying a high and almost prohibitive tax, that he must hire himself out on a farm in January or be sold to the highest bidder for a year, the former owner to have the preference in bidding.
“These laws were unwisely urged by those whites who did not desire to accept the consequences of the war. To make the laws effective, it was thought necessary by their advocates to suppress the Negro voters; for, if they were allowed to vote, there were so many of them, and so many of the whites had been disfranchised because of participation in the war, that defeat was certain. Here is where the bitterness, which for a long time seemed to curse our country, had its origin. The Negroes and their friends were lined up on one side and their opponents on the other.
“The ‘Ku Klux Klan’ was a secret organization whose purpose was to frighten and intimidate Negroes and thus prevent their voting. It had branch organizations in the different Southern states during the reconstruction period. When the members went out on raids, they wore disguises; some had false heads with horns and long beards, some represented his satanic majesty, some wore long gowns, others wrapped themselves in sheets of different colors, and all sorts of hideous shapes and forms, with masks representing the heads of different animals, such as goats, cows and mules. They proceeded on the principle of using mild means first, but when that failed, they did not hesitate to resort to harsher methods. The object seemed to be only to so frighten Negroes that they would not attempt to vote. But in carrying out this scheme they often met resistance, whereupon many outrages were perpetrated upon people who made a stand for their rights under the law of the land. In obstinate cases and toward the end of their careers “klans” would visit Negro cabins at night and terrify the inmates by whipping them, hanging them up by their thumbs, and sometimes killing them. Many Negroes who assumed to lead among their people were run from one county into another. Some were run out of their states, and even white men who led the Negroes in thickly settled Negro counties were driven out.
“The story was told of one case where a white man named Stephens, the recognized political leader of the Negroes as well as a few whites, in one of the states, was invited into one of the lower rooms of the courthouse of his county while a political meeting by his opponents was in progress above, and there told he must agree to leave the county and quit politics or be killed then and there. He refused to do either, whereupon two physicians, with others who were present, tied him, laid him on a table and opened his jugular veins and bled him to death in buckets provided for the occasion. Meanwhile the stamping of feet and the yelling above, where the speaking was going on, was tremendous, being prearranged to deaden any outcry that he might make. It is said that Stephens’s last words before he was put on the table were a request that he might go to the window and take a final look at his home, which was only a few rods away. This was granted, and as he looked his wife passed out of the house and his children were playing in the yard. Stephens’s dead body was found by a Negro man who suspected something wrong and climbed to the window of the room in search for him.
“Such acts as these spread terror among the Negro population, as well as bad feeling, and dug a wide political pit between the Negro and the Democratic party which organized these methods of intimidation.[6] The ‘Ku Klux Klan’ was finally annihilated by the strong hand of President Grant, who filled the South with sufficient militia to suppress it. A favorite means of evading the arrests made by the militia was to have the prisoners released on habeas corpus by the native judges. To stop this the writ of habeas corpus was suspended by some of the provisional governors. One governor who did this was impeached by the Democratic party when it returned to power and he died broken hearted, without the removal of his disabilities. You can easily see from these facts how the political differences between the Negro and the Democratic party arose.”
Here my paper ended. When I had read it over to Dr. Newell, he rose and went over to his desk, saying,
“While looking over some old papers belonging to my grandfather, I found the following article inside of an old book. On it is a statement that it was written in the year 1902 and republished in 1950. I have often desired to get at the true status of this question, and when I found this my interest was doubly aroused. The so-called Negro problem was truly a most crucial test of the foundation principles of our government a century ago, and I feel proud of my citizenship in so great a country when I reflect that we have come through it all with honor and that finally truth has won out and we are able at last to treat the Negro with justice and humanity, according to the principles of Christianity! This problem tested our faith as with fire.”
He handed me the article, and gave his attention to other matters until I had read it:—