THE NEGRO QUESTION
The number of books, pamphlets, and special articles upon this subject, written by Northerners, Southerners, negroes, and even foreigners, is enormous. These publications range from displays of hysterical emotionalism to statistical studies, but no one book can treat fully all phases of so complex a question. Bibliographies have been prepared by W. E. B. Du Bois, A. P. C. Griffin, and others. W. L. Fleming has appended a useful list of titles to Reconstruction of the Seceded States (1905).
F. L. Hoffman, a professional statistician of German birth, in Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), has collected much valuable material but all his conclusions cannot be accepted without question. Special Bulletins on the negro are published by the United States Census Bureau, of which the issues for 1904 and 1915 should especially be consulted. Some of the Publications of Atlanta University contain valuable studies of special localities or occupations.
Several negroes have written histories of their race. George W. Williams's History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, 2 vols. (1883), is old but contains material of value. William H. Thomas, in The American Negro (1901), is pessimistic as to the future because of the moral delinquencies of his people. Booker T. Washington's The Story of the Negro, the Rise of the Race from Slavery (1909), on the other hand, emphasizes achievements rather than deficiencies and is optimistic in tone. Of this writer's several other books, the Future of the American Negro (1899) is the most valuable. Kelly Miller has written Race Adjustment (1908) and An Appeal to Conscience (1918), besides many articles and monographs all marked by excellent temper. On the other hand, W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and in his other writings, voices the bitterness of one to whom the color line has proved an "intolerable indignity."
Ray Stannard Baker in Following the Color Line (1908) gives the observations of a trained metropolitan journalist and is eminently sane in treatment. William Archer, the English author and journalist expresses a European point of view in Through Afro-America (1910). Carl Kelsey's The Negro Farmer (1903) is a careful study of agricultural conditions in eastern Virginia. A collection of valuable though unequal papers is contained in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science under The Negro's Progress in Fifty Years, No. 138 (1913) and America's Race Problem (1901).
One of the first Southerners to attack the new problem was A. G. Haygood, later a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who published Our Brother in Black, His Freedom and His Future (1881). P. A. Bruce, in The Plantation Negro as a Freeman (1888), has done an excellent piece of work. Thomas Nelson Page, in The Negro, The Southerner's Problem (1904), holds that no good can come through outside interference. William B. Smith's The Color Line (1905) takes the position that the negro is fundamentally different from the white. Alfred Holt Stone, in Studies in the American Race Problem (1908), has given a record of his experiences and reflections as a cotton planter in the delta region of Mississippi, while Patience Pennington (pseud.) in A Woman Rice-Planter (1913) gives in the form of a diary a naïve but fascinating account of life in the lowlands of South Carolina. Edgar Gardner Murphy, whose Problems of the Present South has already been mentioned, discusses in The Basis of Ascendancy (1909) the proper relations of black and white. The title of Gilbert T. Stephenson's Race Distinctions in American Law (1910) is self-explanatory.