RACE RELATIONSHIPS IN THE SOUTH
I
Generally speaking, the sharpest race prejudice in the South is exhibited by the poorer class of white people, whether farmers, artisans, or unskilled workers, who come into active competition with the Negroes, or from politicians who are seeking the votes of this class of people. It is this element which has driven the Negroes out of more than one community in the South and it commonly forms the lynching mobs. A similar antagonism of the working classes exists in the North wherever the Negro has appeared in large numbers—as I shall show when I come to write of the treatment of the Northern Negro.
On the other hand, the larger landowners and employers of the South, and all professional and business men who hire servants, while they dislike and fear the Negro as a race (though often loving and protecting individual Negroes), want the black man to work for them. More than that, they must have him: for he has a practical monopoly on labour in the South. White men of the employing class will do almost anything to keep the Negro on the land and his wife in the kitchen—so long as they are obedient and unambitious workers.
“Good” and “Bad” Landlords
But I had not been very long in the black belt before I began to see that the large planters—the big employers of labour—often pursued very different methods in dealing with the Negro. In the feudal middle ages there were good and bad barons; so in the South to-day there are “good” and “bad” landlords (for lack of a better designation) and every gradation between them.
The good landlord, generally speaking, is the one who knows by inheritance how a feudal system should be operated. In other words, he is the old slave-owner or his descendant, who not only feels the ancient responsibility of slavery times, but believes that the good treatment of tenants, as a policy, will produce better results than harshness and force.
The bad landlord represents the degeneration of the feudal system: he is in farming to make all he can out of it this year and next, without reference to human life.
I have already told something of J. Pope Brown’s plantation near Hawkinsville. On the November day, when we drove out through it, I was impressed with the fact that nearly all the houses used by the Negro tenants were new, and much superior to the old log cabins built either before or after the war, some of which I saw still standing, vacant and dilapidated, in various parts of the plantation. I asked the reason why he had built new houses:
“Well,” he answered, “I find I can keep a better class of tenants, if the accommodations are good.”
Liquor and “the Resulting Trouble”
Mr. Brown has other methods for keeping the tenantry on his plantation satisfied. Every year he gives a barbecue and “frolic” for his Negroes, with music and speaking and plenty to eat. A big watermelon patch is also a feature of the plantation, and during all the year the tenants are looked after, not only to see that the work is properly done, but in more intimate and sympathetic ways. On one trip through the plantation we stopped in front of a Negro cabin. Inside lay a Negro boy close to death from a bullet wound in the head. He had been at a Negro party a few nights before where there was liquor. Someone had overturned the lamp: shooting began, and the young fellow was taken out for dead. Such accidents or crimes are all too familiar in the plantation country. Although Pulaski County, Georgia, prohibits the sale or purchase of liquor (most of the South, indeed, is prohibition in its sentiment), the Negroes are able from time to time to get jugs of liquor—and, as one Southerner put it to me, “enjoy the resulting trouble.”
The boy’s father came out of the field and told us with real eloquence of sorrow of the patient’s condition.
“Las’ night,” he said, “we done thought he was a-crossin’ de ribbah.”
Mr. Brown had already sent the doctor out from the city; he now made arrangements to transport the boy to a hospital in Macon where he could be properly treated.
Use of Cocaine Among Negroes
As I have said before, the white landlord who really tries to treat his Negroes well, often has a hard time of it. Many of those (not all) he deals with are densely ignorant, irresponsible, indolent—and often rendered more careless from knowing that the white man must have labour. Many of them will not keep up the fences, or take care of their tools, or pick the cotton even after it is ready, without steady attention. A prominent Mississippi planter gave me an illustration of one of the troubles he just then had to meet. An eighteen-year-old Negro left his plantation to work in a railroad camp. There he learned to use cocaine, and when he came back to the plantation he taught the habit to a dozen of the best Negroes there, to their complete ruin. The planter had the entire crowd arrested, searched for cocaine and kept in jail until the habit was broken. Then he prosecuted the white druggist who sold the cocaine.
Some Southern planters, to prevent the Negroes from leaving, have built churches for them, and in one instance I heard of a school-house as well.
Another point of the utmost importance—for it strikes at the selfish interest of the landlord—lies in the treatment of the Negro, who, by industry or ability, can “get ahead.” A good landlord not only places no obstacles in the way of such tenants, but takes a real pride in their successes. Mr. Brown said:
“If a tenant sees that other Negroes on the same plantation have been able to save money and get land of their own, it tends to make them more industrious. It pays the planter to treat his tenants well.”
Negro with $1,000 in the Bank
The result is that a number of Mr. Brown’s tenants have bought and own good farms near the greater plantation. The plantation, indeed, becomes a sort of central sun around which revolves like planets the lesser life of the Negro landowner. Mr. Brown told me with no little pride of the successes of several Negroes. We met one farmer driving to town in a top buggy with a Negro school-teacher. His name was Robert Polhill—a good type of the self-respecting, vigorous, industrious Negro. Afterward we visited his farm. He had an excellent house with four rooms. In front there were vines and decorative “chicken-corn”; a fence surrounded the place and it was really in good repair. Inside the house everything was scrupulously neat, from the clean rag rugs to the huge post beds with their gay coverlets. The wife evidently had some Indian blood in her veins; she could read and write, but Polhill himself was a full black Negro, intelligent, but illiterate. The children, and there were a lot of them, are growing up practically without opportunity for education because the school held in the Negro church is not only very poor, but it is in session only a short time every year. Near the house was a one-horse syrup-mill then in operation, grinding cane brought in by neighbouring farmers—white as well as black—the whites thus patronising the enterprise of their energetic Negro neighbour.
“I first noticed Polhill when he began work on the plantation,” said Mr. Brown, “because he was the only Negro on the place whom I could depend upon to stop hog-cracks in the fences.”
His history is the common history of the Negro farmer who “gets ahead.” Starting as a wages’ hand, he worked hard and steadily, saving enough finally to buy a mule—the Negro’s first purchase; then he rented land, and by hard work and close calculating made money steadily. With his first $75 he started out to see the world, travelling by railroad to Florida, and finally back home again. The “moving about” instinct is strong in all Negroes—sometimes to their destruction. Then he bought 100 acres of land on credit and having good crops, paid for it in six or seven years. Now he has a comfortable home, he is out of debt, and has money in the bank, a painted house, a top buggy and a cabinet organ! These are the values of his property:
| His farm is worth | $2,000 | |
| Two mules | 300 | |
| Horse | 150 | |
| Other equipment | 550 | |
| Money in the bank | 1,000 | |
| $4,000 |
Negro Who Owns 1,000 Acres of Land
All of this shows what a Negro who is industrious, and who comes up on a plantation where the landlord is not oppressive, can do. And despite the fact that much is heard on the one hand of the lazy and worthless Negro, and on the other of the landlord who holds his Negroes in practical slavery—it is significant that many Negroes are able to get ahead. In Pulaski County there are Negroes who own as high as 1,000 acres of land. Ben Gordon is one of them, his brother Charles has 500 acres, John Nelson has 400 acres worth $20 an acre, the Miller family has 1,000 acres, January Lawson, another of Mr. Brown’s former tenants, has 500 acres; Jack Daniel 200 acres, Tom Whelan 600 acres. A mulatto merchant in Hawkinsville, whose creditable store I visited, also owns his plantation in the country and rents it to Negro tenants on the same system employed by the white landowners. Indeed, a few Negroes in the South are coming to be not inconsiderable landlords, and have many tenants.
Hawkinsville also has a Negro blacksmith, Negro barbers and Negro builders—and like the white man, the Negro also develops his own financial sharks. One educated coloured man in Hawkinsville is a “note shaver”; he “stands for” other Negroes and signs their notes—at a frightful commission.
Statistics will give some idea of how the industrious Negro in a black belt county like Pulaski has been succeeding.
| Acres of Land Owned | Total Assessed Value of Property | |||
| 1875 | 4,490 | $43,230 | ||
| 1880 | 5,988 | 60,760 | ||
| 1885 | 6,901 | 59,022 | ||
| 1890 | 12,294 | 122,926 | ||
| 1895 | 14,145 | 144,158 | ||
| 1900 | 13,205 | 138,800 |
It is surprising to an unfamiliar visitor to find out that the Negroes in the South have acquired so much land. In Georgia alone in 1906 coloured people owned 1,400,000 acres and were assessed for over $28,000,000 worth of property, practically all of which, of course, has been acquired in the forty years since slavery.
Negro farmers in some instances have made a genuine reputation for ability. John Roberts, a Richmond County Negro, won first prize over many white exhibitors in the fall of 1906 at the Georgia-Carolina fair at Augusta for the best bale of cotton raised.
Little Coloured Boy’s Famous Speech
I was at Macon while the first State fair ever held by Negroes in Georgia was in progress. In spite of the fact that racial relationships, owing to the recent riot at Atlanta, were acute, the fair was largely attended, and not only by Negroes, but by many white visitors. The brunt of the work of organisation fell upon R. R. Wright, president of the Georgia State Industrial College (coloured) of Savannah. President Wright is of full-blooded African descent, his grandmother, who reared him, being an African Negro of the Mandingo tribe. Just at the close of the war he was a boy in a freedman’s school at Atlanta. One Sunday General O. O. Howard came to address the pupils. When he had finished, he expressed a desire to take a message back to the people of the North.
“What shall I tell them for you?” he asked.
A little black boy in front stood up quickly, and said:
“Tell ’em, massa, we is rising.”
Upon this incident John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a famous poem: and at the Negro fair, crowning the charts which had been prepared to show the progress of the Negroes of Georgia, I saw this motto:
“WE ARE RISING”
The little black boy grew up, was graduated at Atlanta University, studied at Harvard, travelled in Europe, served in the Spanish-American War, and is now seeking to help his race to get an industrial training in the college which he organised in 1891. The attendance at the fair in Macon was between 25,000 and 30,000, the Negroes raised $11,000 and spent $7,000, and planned for a greater fair the next year. In this enterprise they had the sympathy and approval of the best white people. A vivid glimpse of what the fair meant is given by the Daily News of Macon—a white newspaper:
The fair shows what progress can be accomplished by the industrious and thrifty Negro, who casts aside the belief that he is a dependent, and sails right in to make a living and a home for himself. Some of the agricultural exhibits of black farmers have never been surpassed in Macon. On the whole, the exposition just simply astounded folks who did not know what the Negro is doing for himself.
Another significant feature about the fair was the excellent behaviour of the great throngs of coloured people who poured into the city during its progress. There was not an arrest on the fair grounds and very few in the city.
CANE SYRUP KETTLE. EXPERT NEGRO STIRRING AND SKIMMING
CHAIN-GANG WORKERS ON THE ROADS
The better class of Negro farmers, indeed, have shown not only a capacity for getting ahead individually, but for organising for self-advancement, and even for working with corresponding associations of white farmers. The great cotton and tobacco associations of the South, which aim to direct the marketing of the product of the farms, have found it not only wise, but necessary to enlist the cöoperation of Negro farmers. At the annual rally of the dark-tobacco growers at Guthrie, Kentucky, last September, many Negro planters were in the line of parade with the whites. The farmers’ conferences held at Hampton, Tuskegee, Calhoun, and at similar schools, illustrate in other ways the possibilities of advancement which grow out of landownership by the Negroes.
The Penalties of Being Free
So much for the sunny side of the picture: the broad-gauge landlord and the prosperous tenantry. Conditions in the black belt are in one respect much as they were in slavery times, or as they would be under any feudal system: if the master or lord is “good,” the Negro prospers; if he is harsh, grasping, unkind, the Negro suffers bitterly. It gets back finally to the white man. In assuming supreme rights in the South—political, social, and industrial, the white man also assumes heavy duties and responsibilities; he cannot have the one without the other: and he takes to himself the pain and suffering which goes with power and responsibility.
Of course, scarcity of labour and high wages have given the really ambitious and industrious Negro his opportunity, and many thousands of them are becoming more and more independent of the favour or the ill-will of the whites. And therein lies a profound danger, not only to the Negro, but to the South. Gradually losing the support and advice of the best type of white man, the independent Negro finds himself in competition with the poorer type of white man, whose jealousy he must meet. He takes the penalties of being really free. Escaping the exactions of a feudal life, he finds he must meet the sharper difficulties of a free industrial system. And being without the political rights of his poor white competitor and wholly without social recognition, discredited by the bestial crimes of the lower class of his own race, he has, indeed, a hard struggle before him. In many neighbourhoods he is peculiarly at the mercy of this lower class white electorate, and the self-seeking politicians whose stock in trade consists in playing upon the passions of race-hatred.
II
I come now to the reverse of the picture. When the Negro tenant takes up land or hires out to the landlord, he ordinarily signs a contract, or if he cannot sign (about half the Negro tenants of the black belt are wholly illiterate) he makes his mark. He often has no way of knowing certainly what is in the contract, though the arrangement is usually clearly understood, and he must depend on the landlord to keep both the rent and the supply-store accounts. In other words, he is wholly at the planter’s mercy—a temptation as dangerous for the landlord as the possibilities which it presents are for the tenant. It is so easy to make large profits by charging immense interest percentages or outrageous prices for supplies to tenants who are too ignorant or too weak to protect themselves, that the stories of the oppressive landlord in the South are scarcely surprising. It is easy, when the tenant brings in his cotton in the fall not only to underweigh it, but to credit it at the lowest prices of the week; and this dealing of the strong with the weak is not Southern, it is human. Such a system has encouraged dishonesty, and wastefulness; it has made many landlords cruel and greedy, it has increased the helplessness, hopelessness and shiftlessness of the Negro. In many cases it has meant downright degeneration, not only to the Negro, but to the white man. These are strong words, but no one can travel in the black belt without seeing enough to convince him of the terrible consequences growing out of these relationships.
The Story of a Negro Tenant
A case which came to my attention at Montgomery, Alabama, throws a vivid light on one method of dealing with the Negro tenant. Some nine miles from Montgomery lives a planter named T. L. McCullough. In December, 1903, he made a contract with a Negro named Jim Thomas to work for him. According to this contract, a copy of which I have, the landlord agreed to furnish Jim the Negro with a ration of 14 lbs. of meat and one bushel of meal a month, and to pay him besides $96 for an entire year’s labour.
On his part Jim agreed to “do good and faithful labour for the said T. L. McCullough.” “Good and faithful labour” means from sunrise to sunset every day but Sunday, and excepting Saturday afternoon.
A payment of five dollars was made to bind the bargain—just before Christmas. Jim probably spent it the next day. It is customary to furnish a cabin for the worker to live in; no such place was furnished, and Jim had to walk three or four miles morning and evening to a house on another plantation. He worked faithfully until May 15th. Then he ran away, but when he heard that the landlord was after him, threatening punishment, he came back and agreed to work twenty days for the ten he had been away. Jim stayed some time, but he was not only given no cabin and paid no money, but his food ration was cut off! So he ran away again, claiming that he could not work unless he had a place to live. The landlord went after him and had him arrested, and although the Negro had worked nearly half a year, McCullough prosecuted him for fraud because he had got $5 in cash at the signing of the contract. In such a case the Alabama law gives the landlord every advantage; it says that when a person receives money under a contract and stops work, the presumption is that he intended to defraud the landowner and that therefore he is criminally punishable. The practical effect of the law is to permit imprisonment for debt, for it places a burden of proof on the Negro that he can hardly overturn. The law is defended on the ground that Negroes will get money any way they can, sign any sort of paper for it, and then run off—if there is not a stringent law to punish them. But it may be imagined how this law could be used, and is used, in the hands of unscrupulous men to keep the Negro in a sort of debt-slavery. When the case came up before Judge William H. Thomas of Montgomery, the constitutionality of the law was brought into question, and the Negro was finally discharged.
Often an unscrupulous landlord will deliberately give a Negro a little money before Christmas, knowing that he will promptly waste it in a “celebration” thus getting him into debt so that he dare not leave the plantation for fear of arrest and criminal prosecution. If he attempts to leave he is arrested and taken before a friendly justice of the peace, and fined or threatened with imprisonment. If he is not in debt, it sometimes happens that the landlord will have him arrested on the charge of stealing a bridle or a few potatoes (for it is easy to find something against almost any Negro), and he is brought into court. In several cases I know of the escaping Negro has even been chased down with bloodhounds. On appearing in court the Negro is naturally badly frightened. The white man is there and offers as a special favour to take him back and let him work out the fine—which sometimes requires six months, often a whole year. In this way Negroes are kept in debt—so-called debt-slavery or peonage—year after year, they and their whole family. One of the things that I couldn’t at first understand in some of the courts I visited was the presence of so many white men to stand sponsor for Negroes who had committed various offences. Often this grows out of the feudal protective instinct which the landlord feels for the tenant or servant of whom he is fond; but often it is merely the desire of the white man to get another Negro worker. In one case in particular, I saw a Negro brought into court charged with stealing cotton.
“Does anybody know this Negro?” asked the judge.
Two white men stepped up and both said they did.
The judge fined the Negro $20 and costs, and there was a real contest between the two white men as to who should pay it—and get the Negro. They argued for some minutes, but finally the judge said to the prisoner:
“Who do you want to work for, George?”
The Negro chose his employer, and agreed to work four months to pay off his $20 fine and costs.
Sometimes a man who has a debt against a Negro will sell the claim—which is practically selling the Negro—to some farmer who wants more labour.
A case of this sort came up in the winter of 1907 in Rankin County, Mississippi—the facts of which are all in testimony. A Negro named Dan January was in debt to a white farmer named Levi Carter. Carter agreed to sell the Negro and his entire family to another white farmer named Patrick. January refused to be sold. According to the testimony Carter and some of his companions seized January, bound him hand and foot and beat him most brutally, taking turns in doing the whipping until they were exhausted and the victim unconscious.
January’s children removed him to his home, but the white men returned the next day, produced a rope and threatened to hang him unless he consented to go to the purchaser of the debt. The case came into court but the white men were never punished. January was in Jackson, Miss., when I was there; he still showed the awful effects of his beating.
Keeping Negroes Poor
This system has many bad results. It encourages the Negro in crime. He knows that unless he does something pretty bad, he will not be prosecuted because the landlord doesn’t want to lose the work of a single hand; he knows that if he is prosecuted, the white man will, if possible, “pay him out.” It disorganises justice and confuses the ignorant Negro mind as to what is a crime and what is not. A Negro will often do things that he would not do if he thought he were really to be punished. He comes to the belief that if the white man wants him arrested, he will be arrested, and if he protects him, he won’t suffer, no matter what he does. Thousands of Negroes, ignorant, weak, indolent, to-day work under this system. There are even landlords and employers who will trade upon the Negro’s worst instincts—his love for liquor, for example—in order to keep him at work. An instance of this sort came to my attention at Hawkinsville while I was there. The white people of the town were making a strong fight for prohibition; the women held meetings, and on the day of the election marched in the streets singing and speaking. But the largest employer of Negro labor in the county had registered several hundred of his Negroes and declared his intention of voting them against prohibition. He said bluntly: “If my niggers can’t get whisky they won’t stay with me; you’ve got to keep a nigger poor or he won’t work.”
This employer actually voted sixty of his Negroes against prohibition, but the excitement was so great that he dared vote no more—and prohibition carried.
A step further brings the Negro to the chain-gang. If there is no white man to pay him out, or if his crime is too serious to be paid out, he goes to the chain-gang—and in several states he is then hired out to private contractors. The private employer thus gets him sooner or later. Some of the largest farms in the South are operated by chain-gang labour. The demand for more convicts by white employers is exceedingly strong. In the Montgomery Advertiser for April 10, 1907, I find an account of the sentencing of fifty-four prisoners in the city court, fifty-two of whom were Negroes. The Advertiser says:
The demand for their labour is probably greater now than it ever has been before. Numerous labour agents of companies employing convict labour reached Montgomery yesterday, and were busily engaged in manœuvring to secure part or even all of the convicts for their respective companies. The competition for labour of all kinds, it seems, is keener than ever before known.
The natural tendency of this demand, and from the further fact that the convict system makes yearly a huge profit for the State, is to convict as many Negroes as possible, and to punish the offences charged as severely as possible. From the Atlanta Constitution of October 13, 1906, I have this clipping:
SIX MONTHS FOR POTATO THEFT
Columbus, Ga., October 12 (Special)
In the city court yesterday Charley Carter, a Negro, was sentenced to six months on the chain-gang or to pay a fine of $25 for stealing a potato valued at 5 cents.
Serious crimes are sometimes compromised. In a newspaper dispatch, October 6, 1906, from Eaton Ga., I find a report of the trial of six Negroes charged with assault with the intent to kill. All were found guilty, but upon a recommendation of mercy they were sentenced as having committed misdemeanours rather than felonies. They could therefore have their fines paid, and five were immediately released by farmers who wanted their labour. The report says that of thirty-one misdemeanours during the month it is expected that “none will reach the chain-gang,” since there are “three farmers to every convict ready to pay the fine.”
A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY CHAIN-GANG NEGRO
Still other methods are pursued by certain landlords to keep their tenants on the land. In one extreme case a Negro tenant, after years of work, decided to leave the planter. He had had a place offered him where he could make more money. There was nothing against him; he simply wanted to move. But the landlord informed him that no waggon would be permitted to cross his (the planter’s) land to get his household belongings. The Negro, being ignorant, supposed he could thus be prevented from moving, and although the friend who was trying to help him assured him that the landlord could not prevent his moving, he dared not go. In another instance—also extreme—a planter refused to let his tenants raise hogs, because he wanted them to buy salt pork at his store. It is, indeed, through the plantation store (which corresponds to the company or “truck” store of Northern mining regions) that the unscrupulous planter reaps his most exorbitant profits. Negroes on some plantations, whether they work hard or not, come out at the end of the year with nothing. Part of this is due, of course, to their own improvidence; but part, in too many cases, is due to exploitation by the landlord.
One Biscuit to Eat and no Place to Sleep
Booker T. Washington, in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser on the Negro labour problem, tells this story:
I recall that some years ago a certain white farmer asked me to secure for him a young coloured man to work about the house and to work in the field. The young man was secured, a bargain was entered into to the effect that he was to be paid a certain sum monthly and his board and lodging furnished as well. At the end of the coloured boy’s first day on the farm he returned. I asked the reason, and he said that after working all the afternoon he was handed a buttered biscuit for his supper, and no place was provided for him to sleep.
At night he was told he could find a place to sleep in the fodder loft. This white farmer, whom I know well, is not a cruel man and seeks generally to do the right thing; but in this case he simply overlooked the fact that it would have paid him in dollars and cents to give some thought and attention to the comfort of his helper.
This case is more or less typical. Had this boy been well cared for, he would have advertised the place that others would have sought work there.
Such methods mean, of course, the lowest possible efficiency of labour—ignorant, hopeless, shiftless. The harsh planter naturally opposes Negro education in the bitterest terms and prevents it wherever possible; for education means the doom of the system by which he thrives.
Negro with Nineteen Children
Life for the tenants is often not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I spent much time driving about on the great plantations and went into many of the cabins. Usually they were very poor, of logs or shacks, sometimes only one room, sometimes a room and a sort of lean-to. At one side there was a fireplace, often two beds opposite, with a few broken chairs or boxes, and a table. Sometimes the cabin was set up on posts and had a floor, sometimes it was on the ground and had no floor at all. The people are usually densely ignorant and superstitious; the preachers they follow are often the worst sort of characters, dishonest and immoral; the schools, if there are any, are practically worthless. The whole family works from sunrise to sunset in the fields. Even children of six and seven years old will drop seed or carry water. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, himself a Negro, who has made many valuable and scholarly studies of Negro life, gives this vivid glimpse into a home where the Negro and his wife had nineteen children. He says:
This family of twenty-one is a poverty stricken, reckless, dirty set. The children are stupid and repulsive, and fight for their food at the table. They are poorly dressed, sickly and cross. The table dishes stand from one meal to another unwashed, and the house is in perpetual disorder. Now and then the father and mother engage in a hand-to-hand fight.
Never Heard the Name of Roosevelt
It would be impossible to over-emphasise the ignorance of many Negro farmers. It seems almost unbelievable, but after some good-humoured talk with a group of old Negroes I tried to find out how much they knew of the outside world. I finally asked them if they knew Theodore Roosevelt. They looked puzzled, and finally one old fellow scratched his head and said:
“Whah you say dis yere man libes?”
“In Washington,” I said; “you’ve heard of the President of the United States?”
“I reckon I dunno,” he said.
And yet this old man gave me a first-class religious exhortation; and one in the group had heard of Booker T. Washington, whom he described as a “pow’ful big nigger.”
Why Negroes Go to Cities
I made inquiries among the Negroes as to why they wanted to leave the farms and go to cities. The answer I got from all sorts of sources was first, the lack of schooling in the country, and second, the lack of protection.
And I heard also many stories of ill-treatment of various sorts, the distrust of the tenant of the landlord in keeping his accounts—all of which, dimly recognised, tends to make many Negroes escape the country, if they can. Indeed, it is growing harder and harder on the great plantations, especially where the management is by overseers, to keep a sufficient labour supply. In some places the white landlords have begun to break up their plantations, selling small farms to ambitious Negroes—a significant sign, indeed, of the passing of the feudal system. An instance of this is found near Thomaston, Ga., where Dr. C. B. Thomas has long been selling land to Negroes, and encouraging them to buy by offering easy terms. Near Dayton, Messrs. Price and Allen have broken up their “Lockhart Plantation” and are selling it out to Negroes. I found similar instances in many places I visited. Commenting on this tendency, the Thomaston Post says:
This is, in part, a solution of the so-called Negro problem, for those of the race who have property interests at stake cannot afford to antagonise their white neighbours or transgress the laws. The ownership of land tends to make them better citizens in every way, more thoughtful of the right of others, and more ambitious for their own advancement.
At this place a number of neat and comfortable homes, a commodious high school, and a large lodge building, besides a number of churches, testify to the enterprise and thrift the best class of our coloured population.... The tendency towards cutting up the large plantations is beginning to show itself, and when all of them are so divided, there will be no agricultural labour problem, except, perhaps, in the gathering of an especially large crop.
III
I have endeavoured thus to give a picture of both sides of conditions in the black belt exactly as I saw them. I can now do no better in further illumination of the conditions I have described than by looking at them through the eyes and experiences of two exceptionally able white men of the South, both leaders in their respective walks of life, neither of them politicians and both, incidentally, planters.
At Jackson, Miss., I met Major R. W. Millsaps, a leading citizen of the state. He comes of a family with the best Southern traditions behind it; he was born in Mississippi, graduated before the war at Harvard College, and although his father, a slave owner, had opposed secession, the son fought four years in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of Major. He came out of the war, as he says, “with no earthly possessions but a jacket and a pair of pants, with a hole in them.” But he was young and energetic; he began hauling cotton from Jackson to Natchez when cotton was worth almost its weight in gold. He received $10 a bale for doing it and made $4,000 in three months. He is now the president of one of the leading banks in Mississippi, interested in many important Southern enterprises, and the founder of Millsaps College at Jackson: a modest, useful, Christian gentleman.
An Experiment in Trusting Negroes
Near Greenville, Miss., Major Millsaps owns a plantation of 500 acres, occupied by 20 tenants, some 75 people in all. It is in one of the richest agricultural sections—the Mississippi bottoms—in the United States. Up to 1890 he had a white overseer and he was constantly in trouble of one kind or another with his tenants. When the price of cotton dropped, he decided to dispense with the overseer entirely and try a rather daring experiment. In short, he planned to trust the Negroes. He got them together and said:
“I am going to try you. I’m going to give you every possible opportunity; if you don’t make out, I will go back to the overseer system.”
In the sixteen years since then no white man has been on that plantation except as a visitor. The land was rented direct to the Negroes on terms that would give both landlord and tenant a reasonable profit.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“I have never lost one cent,” said Major Millsaps, “no Negro has ever failed to pay up and you couldn’t drive them off the place. When other farmers complain of shortage of labour and tenants, I never have had any trouble.”
Every Negro on the place owns his own mules and waggons and is out of debt. Nearly every family has bought or is buying a home in the little town of Leland, nearby, some of which are comfortably furnished. They are all prosperous and contented.
“How do you do it?” I asked.
“The secret,” he said, “is to treat the Negro well and give him a chance. I have found that a Negro, like a white man, is most responsive to good treatment. Even a dog responds to kindness! The trouble is that most planters want to make too much money out of the Negro; they charge him too much rent; they make too large profits on the supplies they furnish. I know merchants who expect a return of 50 per cent. on supplies alone. The best Negroes I have known are those who are educated; Negroes need more education of the right kind—not less—and it will repay us well if we give it to them. It makes better, not worse, workers.”
I asked him about the servant problem.
“We never have any trouble,” he said. “I apply the same rule to servants as to the farmers. Treat them well, don’t talk insultingly of their people before them, don’t expect them to do too much work. I believe in treating a Negro with respect. That doesn’t mean to make equals of them. You people in the North don’t make social equals of your white servants.”
Jefferson Davis’s Way with Negroes
Then he told a striking story of Jefferson Davis.
“I got a lesson in the treatment of Negroes when I was a young man returning South from Harvard. I stopped in Washington and called on Jefferson Davis, then United States Senator from Mississippi. We walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. Many Negroes bowed to Mr. Davis and he returned the bow. He was a very polite man. I finally said to him that I thought he must have a good many friends among the Negroes. He replied:
“‘I can’t allow any Negro to outdo me in courtesy.’”
Plain Words from a White Man
A few days later on my way North I met at Clarksdale, Miss., Walter Clark, one of the well-known citizens of the state and President of the Mississippi Cotton Association. In the interests of his organisation he has been speaking in different parts of the state on court-days and at fairs. And the burden of his talks has been, not only organisation by the farmers, but a more intelligent and progressive treatment of Negro labour. Recognising the instability of the ordinary Negro, the crime he commits, the great difficulties which the best-intentioned Southern planters have to meet, Mr. Clark yet tells his Southern audiences some vigorous truths. He said in a recent speech:
“Every dollar I own those Negroes made for me. Our ancestors chased them down and brought them here. They are just what we make them. By our own greed and extravagance we have spoiled a good many of them. It has been popular here—now happily growing less so—to exploit the Negro by high store-prices and by encouraging him to get into debt. It has often made him hopeless. We have a low element of white people who are largely responsible for the Negro’s condition. They sell him whiskey and cocaine; they corrupt Negro women. A white man who shoots craps with Negroes or who consorts with Negro women is worse than the meanest Negro that ever lived.”
At Coffeeville, where Mr. Clark talked somewhat to this effect, an old man who sat in front suddenly jumped up and said: “That’s the truth! Bully for you; bully for you!”
In his talk with me, Mr. Clark said other significant things:
“Our people have treated the Negroes as helpless children all their days. The Negro has not been encouraged to develop even the capacities he has. He must be made to use his own brains, not ours; put him on his responsibility and he will become more efficient. A Negro came to me not long ago complaining that the farmer for whom he worked would not give him an itemised account of his charges at the store. I met the planter and asked him about it. He said to me:
“‘The black nigger! What does he know about it? He can’t read it.’
“‘But he is entitled to it, isn’t he?’ I asked him—and the Negro got it.
“The credit system has been the ruin of many Negroes. It keeps them in hopeless debt and it encourages the planter to exploit them. That’s the truth. My plan is to put the Negro on a strict cash basis; give him an idea of what money is by letting him use it. Three years ago I started it on my plantation. A Negro would come to me and say: ‘Boss, I want a pair of shoes.’ ‘All right,’ I’d say. ‘I’ll pay you spot cash every night and you can buy your own shoes.’ In the same way I made up my mind that we must stop paying Negroes’ fines when they got into trouble. I know planters who expect regularly every Monday to come into court and pay out about so many Negroes. It encourages the Negroes to do things they would not think of doing if they knew they would be regularly punished. I’ve quit paying fines; my Negroes, if they get into trouble, have got to recognise their own responsibility for it and take what follows. That’s the only way to make men of them.
“What we need in the South is intelligent labour, more efficient labour. I believe in the education of the Negro. Industrial training is needed, not only for the Negro, but for the whites as well. The white people down here have simply got to take the Negro and make a man of him; in the long run it will make him more valuable to us.”