THE MULATTO: THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE
I had not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question:
“What is a Negro?”
I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose assertion that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft straight red hair. I have seen Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he was a Negro. And I have met several people, passing everywhere for white, who, I knew, had Negro blood.
Nothing, indeed, is more difficult to define than this curious physical colour line in the individual human being. Legislatures have repeatedly attempted to define where black leaves off and white begins, especially in connection with laws prohibiting marriage between the races. Some of the statutes define a Negro as a “person with one-eighth or more of Negro blood.” Southern people, who take pride in their ability to distinguish the drop of dark blood in the white face, are themselves frequently deceived. Several times I have heard police judges in the South ask concerning a man brought before them:
“Is this man coloured or white?”
Just recently a case has arisen at Norfolk, Va., in which a Mrs. Rosa Stone sued the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company for being compelled by the white conductor, who thought her a Negro, to ride in a “Jim Crow” car. Having been forced into the Negro compartment, it remained for a real coloured woman, who knew her personally, to draw the line against her. This coloured woman is reported as saying:
“Lor, Miss Rosa, this ain’t no place for you; you b’long in the cars back yonder.”
It appears that Mrs. Stone was tanned.
Curious Story of a White Man Who Was Expelled as a Negro
Here is a story well illustrating the difficulties sometimes encountered by Southerners in deciding who is white and who is coloured. On March 6, 1907, the Atlanta Georgian published this account of how a man who, it was said, was a Negro passing for a white man, was expelled by a crowd of white men from the town of Albany, Ga.:
Peter Zeigler, a Negro, was last night escorted out of town by a crowd of white men. Zeigler had been here for a month and palmed himself off as a white man. He has been boarding with one of the best white families in the city and has been associating with some of Albany’s best people. A visiting lady recognised him as being a Negro who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated and found to be correct. Last night he was carried to Forester’s Station, a few miles north of here, and ordered to board an outgoing train.
Zeigler has a fair education and polished manners, and his colour was such that he could easily pass for a white man where he was not known.
Immediately after suffering the indignity of being expelled from Albany, Mr. Zeigler communicated with his friends and relatives, a delegation of whom came from Charleston, Orangeburg, and Summerville, S. C. and proved to the satisfaction of everyone that Mr. Zeigler was, in reality, a white man connected with several old families of South Carolina. Of this return of Mr. Zeigler the Albany Herald says:
The Herald yesterday contained the account of the return to Albany of Peter B. Zeigler, the young man who was forced to leave Albany between suns on the night of March 4th. The young man upon his return was accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential friends from his native state of South Carolina.
Nothing surely could throw a more vivid light on colour line confusions in the South than this story.
Another extraordinary case is that of Mrs. Elsie Massey, decided in Tipton County, Tenn., after years of litigation, in which one side tried to prove that Mrs. Massey was a Negro, the daughter of a cotton planter named “Ed” Barrow, and a quadroon slave, and the other side tried to prove that she was of pure Caucasian blood. On June 13, 1907, a jury of white men finally declared that Mrs. Massey was white and that she and her children might inherit $250,000 worth of property. Such instances as these, a few among almost innumerable cases, will indicate how difficult it often is to decide who is and who is not a Negro—the definition of Negro here being that used in the South, a person having any Negro blood, no matter how little.
How Many Mulattoes There Are
Few people realise how large a proportion of the so-called Negro race in this country is not really Negro at all, but mulatto or mixed blood, either half white, or quadroon, or octoroon, or some other combination. In the last census (1900) the government gave up the attempt in discouragement of trying to enumerate the mulattoes at all, and counted all persons as Negroes who were so classed in the communities where they resided. The census of 1870 showed that one-eighth (roughly) of the Negro population was mulatto, that of 1890 showed that the proportion had increased to more than one-seventh. But these statistics are confessedly inaccurate: the census report itself says:
“These figures are of little value. Indeed, as an indication of the extent to which the races have mingled, they are misleading.”
From my own observation, and from talking and corresponding with many men who have had superior opportunities for investigation, I think it safe to say that between one-fourth and one-third of the Negroes in this country at the present time have a visible admixture of white blood. At least the proportion is greater than the census figures of 1870 and 1890 would indicate. It is probable that 3,000,000 persons out of the 10,000,000 population are visibly mulattoes. It will be seen, then, how very important a matter it is, in any careful survey of the race problem, to consider the influence of the mixed blood. In the North, indeed, the race problem may almost be called a mulatto problem rather than a Negro problem, for in not a few places the mixed bloods are in excess of the darker types.
Many mulattoes have a mixed ancestry reaching back to the beginning of civilisation in North America; for the Negro slave appeared practically as soon as the white colonist. Many Negroes mixed (and are still mixing in Oklahoma) with the Indians, and one is to-day often astonished to see distinct Indian types among them. I shall never forget a woman I saw in Georgia—as perfect of line as any Greek statue—erect, lithe, strong, with sleek straight hair, the high cheekbones of the Indian, but the lips of the Negro. She was plainly an Indian type—but had no memory of anything but Negro ancestry. A strain of Arab blood from Africa runs in the veins of many Negroes, in others flows the blood of the Portuguese slave-traders or of the early Spanish adventurers or of the French who settled in New Orleans, to say nothing of every sort of American white blood. In my classification I have estimated 3,000,000 persons who are “visibly” mulattoes: the actual number who have some strain of blood—Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indian—other than Negro, must be considerably larger.
It is a curious problem, this of colour. Several times, in different parts of the country, I have been told by both white and coloured observers that Negroes, even without the admixture of white blood, were gradually growing lighter—the effect of a cold climate, clothing and other causes. A tendency toward such a change, an adaptation to new environment, is certainly in accord with the best scientific beliefs, but whether a mere century or two in America has really operated to whiten the blackness of thousands of years of jungle life, must be left for the careful scientist to decide. It is certain that the darkest American Negro is far superior to the native African Negro.
Story of a Real African Woman
At Montgomery, Ala., Mr. Craik took me to see a real African woman, one of the very few left who were captured in Africa and brought to this country as slaves. She came in the Wanderer, long after the slave trade was forbidden by law, and was secretly landed at Mobile about 1858. She is a stocky, vigorous old woman. She speaks very little English, and I could not understand even that little. She asserts, I am told, that she is the daughter of a king in Africa, and she tells yet of the hardships and alarms of the ocean voyage. Her daughter is married to a respectable-looking Negro farmer. Mr. Craik succeeded, in spite of her superstitious terrors, in getting her to submit to having a picture taken.
And yet all these strange-blooded people are classed roughly together as Negroes. I remember sitting once on the platform at a great meeting at the People’s Tabernacle in Atlanta. An audience of some 1,200 coloured people was present. A prominent white man gave a brief address in which he urged the Negroes present to accept with humility the limitations imposed upon them by their heredity, that they were Negroes and that therefore they should accept with grace the place of inferiority. Now as I looked out over that audience, which included the best class of coloured people in Atlanta, I could not help asking myself:
“What is this blood he is appealing to, anyway?”
For I saw comparatively few men and women who could really be called Negroes at all. Some were so light as to be indistinguishable from Caucasians. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who sat near me on the platform was a nephew of Robert Toombs, one of the great men of the South, a leader of the Confederacy. Another man present was a grandson of a famous senator of South Carolina. Several others that I knew of were half-brothers or sisters or cousins of more or less well-known white men. And I could not hear this appeal to heredity without thinking of the not at all humble Southern blood which flowed in the veins of some of these men and women. How futile such advice really was, and how little it got into the hearts of the audience, was forcibly impressed on me afterward by the remark of a mulatto I met.
“They’ve given us their blood, whether we wanted it or not,” he said, “and now they ask us not to respond to the same ambitions and hopes that they have. They have given us fighting blood and expect us not to struggle.”
Attitude of the Mixed Blood Toward the Black Negroes
In the cities of the South no inconsiderable communities of mulattoes have long existed, many of them highly prosperous. Even before the war thousands of “free persons of colour” resided in Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans. In places like Charleston they had (and still have to some extent) an exclusive society of their own which looked down on the black Negro with a prejudice equal to that of the white man. The census of 1860 shows a population of 3,441 “free persons of colour” in Charleston alone, of whom 2,554 were mulattoes. In New Orleans in the same year lived 9,084 free Negroes, of whom 7,357 were mulattoes; and they were so far distant in sympathy from the slave population that they even tendered their support to the Confederacy at the beginning of the war.
But with the Emancipation Proclamation the aristocratic “free person of colour” who had formed a sort of third class as between the white above and the black below, lost his unique position: the line was drawn against him. When I went South I expected to find a good deal of aloofness between the mulatto and the black man. It does exist, but really less to-day in the South than in Boston! The very first mulatto, a preacher in Atlanta, with whom I raised the question, surprised me by denying that the mulatto was in any degree potentially superior to the real Negro: that if the black man were given the same advantages and environment as the mulatto, he would do as well, that the prominence of the mulatto is the result of the superior advantages he has long enjoyed, being the house servant in slavery times, with opportunities for education and discipline that the black man never possessed. This was his argument, and to support it he gave me a long list of black Negroes who had achieved success or leadership. I found Booker T. Washington and Professor Du Bois (themselves both mulattoes) arguing along the same lines. In other words, the prejudice of white people has forced all coloured people, light or dark, together, and has awakened in many ostracised men and women who are nearly white a spirit which expresses itself in the passionate defence of everything that is Negro.
And yet, with what pathos! What is this race? The spirit and the ideals are not Negro: for the people are not Negro, even the darkest of them, in the sense that the inhabitants of the jungles of Africa are Negroes. The blackest of black American Negroes is far ahead of his naked cousin in Africa. But neither are they white!
One evening last summer I attended a performance at Philadelphia of a Negro play called the “Shoo-Fly Regiment.” It was written, both words and music, by two clever mulattoes, Cole and Johnson; and it was wholly presented by Negroes. The audience was large, mostly composed of coloured people, and the laughter was unstinted. The point that impressed me was this, that the writers had chosen a distinct Negro subject. The play dealt with two questions of much interest among coloured people: the matter of industrial education, and the Negro soldier. That, it seemed to me, was significant: it was an effort to appeal to the class consciousness of the Negro.
And yet as I sat and watched the play I could not help being impressed with the essential tragedy of the so-called Negro people. The players of the company were of every colour, from the black African type to the mulatto with fair hair and blue eyes. In spite of this valiant effort to emphasise certain racial interests, one who saw the play could not help asking:
“What, after all, is this Negro race? What is the Negro spirit? Is it in this black African or in this white American with the drop of dark blood?”
In a recent address a coloured minister of San Francisco, J. Hugh Kelley, said:
“My father’s father was a Black Hawk Indian, seven feet tall. My father’s mother was an Irishwoman. My mother’s father was an American white man. Her mother was a full-blooded African woman. What am I?”
Pathetic Desire of Negroes to Be Like White Men
Even among those Negroes who are most emphatic in defence of the race there is, deep down, the pathetic desire to be like the dominant white man. It is not unreasonable, nor unnatural, for all outward opportunity of development lies open to the white man. To be coloured is to be handicapped in the race for those things in life which men call desirable. I remember discussing the race question one evening with a group of intelligent coloured men. They had made a strong case for the Negro spirit, and the need of the race to stand for itself, but one of them said in a passing remark (what the investigator overhears is often of greater significance than what he hears), speaking of a mulatto friend of his:
“His hair is better than mine.”
He meant straighter, more like that of the white man.
The same evening, another Negro, referring to a light-complexioned coloured man, said:
“Thank God, he is passing now for white.”
At Philadelphia a dark Negro made this comment on one of the coloured churches where mulattoes are in the ascendancy:
“You can’t have a good time when you go there unless you have straight hair.”
This remark indicated not only the ideal held by the speaker, but showed the line drawn by the light-coloured man against his darker brother.
In the same way it is almost a universal desire of Negroes to “marry whiter;” that is, a dark man will, if possible, marry a mulatto woman, the lighter the better. The ideal is whiteness: for whiteness stands for opportunity, power, progress.
Give a coloured man or woman white blood, educate him until he has glimpses of the greater possibilities of life and then lock him forever within the bars of colour, and you have all the elements of tragedy. Dr. DuBois in his remarkable book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” has expressed more vividly than any other writer the essential significance of this tragedy. I read the book before I went South and I thought it certainly overdrawn, the expression of a highly cultivated and exceptional Mulatto, but after meeting many Negroes I have been surprised to find how truly it voices a wide experience.
Experience of a Highly Educated Mulatto
DuBois tells in this book how he first came to realise that he was really a Negro. He was a boy in school near his home in Massachusetts.
“Something,” he writes, “put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs not mine.... With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny; their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half-hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.”
If space permitted I could tell many stories illustrative of the daily tragedy which many mulattoes are meeting in this country, struggles that are none the less tragic for being inarticulate. Here is a letter which I received not long ago from a mulatto professor in a Western Negro college:
“I wonder how you will treat that point to which you have thus far only referred in your studies, ‘Where does the colour line really begin?’ What is to become of that large class of which I am a part, that class which is neither white nor black and yet both? There are millions of us who have the blood of both races, and, if heredity means anything, who have the traditions, feelings, and passions of both. Yet we are black in name, in law, in station, in everything save face and figure, despite the overwhelming white blood. And why? Certainly not because we have to be. America is a big country: it is easy to get lost, even in a neighbouring state. Some of us do, and the process has been going on so long in certain large cities of the North until we cease to think about it. But the majority of us stay and live and work out our destiny among the people into whom we were born, living ofttimes side by side with our white brothers and sisters. When I go back to Atlanta after an absence of two years, I can, if I wish, go back in a Pullman, go out of the main entrance of the station, get my dinner at the Piedmont Hotel, and when I am tired of being Mr. Hyde, I can stroll down Auburn Avenue with my friends in the full glory of Dr. Jekyll. As a matter of fact I shall doubtless avail myself of the privilege of a sleeper, sneak out the side entrance, get on the last seat of the car, despite the conductor’s remonstrance, go on to my friends at once and be myself all the time I am there. I wouldn’t be a white man if I had to. I want to be black. I want to love those who love me. I want to help those who need my help. And I know hundreds just like me: I know others who are not.
“I wonder if you can decide: ‘Where does the colour line really—end?’”
A Negro Who Lived First as a White Man, Then as a Negro
When I was in Philadelphia I met an intelligent Negro named A. L. Manley, who is at present the janitor of a large apartment house. He has been connected with the good-government movement in Philadelphia, being the leader of a club of coloured men who have supported the reform party. When I first met him I should not have known him for a Negro, he is so white. His white grandfather was a famous governor of North Carolina—Charles Manley. He was educated at Wilmington, N. C., and at Hampton Institute. For a time he published a Negro newspaper at Wilmington, but during the race riot in that city a number of years ago he was driven out and his property was destroyed, his office being burned to the ground. After a year or two in Washington he came to Philadelphia, where he endeavoured to get work at his trade as a painter and decorator, but the moment he informed employers that he was a coloured man they refused to hire him—usually excusing themselves on the ground that union labour would refuse to work with him.
“So I tried being white,” he said: “that is, I did not reveal the fact that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work in some of the best shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all.”
But during all this time he had to live, as he says, “the life of a sneak.” He had to sneak out of his home in the morning and return to it only after nightfall, lest someone discover that his family (he has a wife and two children) was coloured.
“The thing finally became unbearable,” he said; “no decent man could stand it. I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a sneak.”
So he dropped his trade and became a janitor. In other words, he stepped back, as so many Negroes in the North are forced to do, into a form of domestic service, although in his case the position is one of responsibility and good pay.
Such stories of the problem of the mulatto are innumerable; and yet I do not wish to imply that the life is all shadow, for it isn’t. The Negro blood, wherever it is, supplies an element of light-heartedness which will not be wholly crushed. It is this element, indeed, that accounts in no small degree for the survival of the Negro in this country. Where the Indian perished for want of adaptability, the Negro has survived by sheer elasticity of temperament: it is perhaps the highest natural gift of the Negro race. One hears much of the unfavourable traits of the Negro, but certainly, judging from any point of view, the power of adaptability displayed by the Negro in a wholly foreign environment, under the harshest conditions, and his ability to thrive and increase in numbers, even meeting the competition of the dominant race, and to keep on laughing at his work, is a power which in any race would be regarded as notable.
Why Some Light Mulattoes do not “Cross over to White”
I once asked a very light mulatto why he did not “cross the line,” as they call it (or “go over to white”) and quit his people. His answer surprised me; it was so distinctly an unexpected point of view.
“Why,” he said, “white people don’t begin to have the good times that Negroes do. They’re stiff and cold. They aren’t sociable. They don’t laugh.”
Here certainly was a criticism of the white man! And it was corroborated by a curious story I heard at Memphis, of a mulatto well known among the coloured people of Tennessee. A number of years ago it came to him suddenly one day that he was white enough to pass anywhere for white, and he acted instantly on the inspiration. He went to Memphis and bought a first-class ticket on a Mississippi River boat to Cincinnati. No one suspected that he was coloured; he sat at the table with white people and even occupied a state-room with a white man. At first he said he could hardly restrain his exultation, but after a time, although he said he talked and smoked with the white men, he began to be lonesome.
“It grew colder and colder,” he said.
In the evening he sat on the upper deck and as he looked over the railing he could see, down below, the Negro passengers and deck hands talking and laughing. After a time, when it grew darker, they began to sing—the inimitable Negro songs.
“That finished me,” he said, “I got up and went downstairs and took my place among them. I’ve been a Negro ever since.”
An ordinary community of middle or working class white people is often singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often sombre, sodden, uninteresting. Not so the Negro community. In several cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques, especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported.
Forced upon themselves, every point of contact with the white race becomes to the Negro a story of peculiar human interest. The view they get from the outside or underneath of white civilisation is not, to say the least, altogether our view. Once, in a gathering of mulattoes I heard the discussion turn to the stories of those who had “gone over to white”—friends or acquaintances of those who were present. Few such cases are known to white people, but the Negroes know many of them. It developed from this conversation (and afterward I got the same impression many times) that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the Negro who “crosses the line” and takes his place as a white man. Such cases even awaken glee among them, as though the Negro, thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.
Stories of Negroes Who Have Crossed the Colour Line
I don’t know how many times I have heard mulattoes speak of the French novelist Dumas as having Negro blood, and they also claim Robert Browning and Alexander Hamilton (how truly I do not know). But the cases which interest them most are those in this country; and there must be far more of them than white people imagine. I know of scores of them. A well-known white actress, whose name, of course, I cannot give, when she goes to Boston, secretly visits her coloured relatives. A New York man who holds a prominent political appointment under the state government and who has become an authority in his line, is a Negro. Not long ago he entered a hotel in Baltimore and the Negro porter who ran to take his bag said discreetly:
“Hello, Bob.”
As boys they had gone to the same Negro school.
“Let me carry your bag,” said the porter, “I won’t give you away.”
In Philadelphia there lives a coloured woman who married a rich white man. Of course, no white people know she is coloured, but the Negroes do, and do not tell. Occasionally she drives down to a certain store, dismisses her carriage and walks on foot to the home of her mother and sisters.
Only a few years ago the newspapers were filled for a day or two with the story of a girl who had been at Vassar College, and upon graduation by merest accident it was discovered that she was a Negro. A similar case arose last year at Chicago University, that of Miss Cecelia Johnson, who had been a leader in her class, a member of the Pi Delta Phi Sorority and president of Englewood House, an exclusive girls’ club. She was the sister of a well-known Negro politician of Chicago.
The Chicago Tribune, after publishing a story to the effect that Miss Johnson had kept her parentage secret apologised for the publicity in these words:
The Tribune makes this reparation spontaneously and as a simple act of justice.
There is not the slightest mystery about Miss Johnson. Her life has been an open book. She has won distinction at high school, and university, and her career appears to have been free from any blemish that should lessen the love of her intimate friends or the respect in which she is held by her acquaintances.
Some mulattoes I know of, one a prominent Wall Street broker, have “crossed the line” by declaring that they are Mexicans, Brazilians, Spanish or French; one says he is an Armenian. Under a foreign name they are readily accepted among white people where, as Negroes, they would be instantly rejected. No one, of course, can estimate the number of men and women with Negro blood who have thus “gone over to white”; but it must be large.
Does Race Amalgamation Still Continue?
One of the first questions that always arises concerning the mulatto is whether or not the mixture of blood still continues and whether it is increasing or decreasing. In other words, is the amalgamation of the races still going on and to what extent?
Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern states and also in the following Northern and Western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western states marriage between the races is lawful.
And yet, the marriage laws, so far as they affect the actual problem of amalgamation, mean next to nothing at all. No legal marriage existed between the races in slavery times and yet there was a widespread mixture of blood. Concubinage was a common practice: a mulatto was worth more in cash than a black man. The great body of mulattoes now in the country trace their origin to such relationships.
And such practice of slavery days no more ceased instantly with a paper Emancipation Proclamation than many other customs and habits which had grown up out of centuries of slave relationships. It is a slow process, working out of slavery, both for white men and black.
I made inquiries widely in every part of the South among both white and coloured people and I found a strong and rapidly growing sentiment against what the South calls “miscegenation.” For years white men in many communities, often prominent judges, governors, wealthy planters, made little or no secret of the fact that they had a Negro family as well as a white family.
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| A TYPE OF NEGRO GIRL | MULATTO GIRL STUDENT | MISS CECELIA JOHNSON |
| Typesetter in Atlanta. Many Negro girls are entering stenography, bookkeeping, dressmaking, millinery and other occupations. | At Clark University, Atlanta. At the completion of her studies this young woman will take up missionary work in Africa. | A mulatto who could be easily taken for a white person. She was a leader in her class in Chicago University. |
And the practice is far from dead yet. Every Southern town knows of such cases, often many of them: and a large number of mulatto children to-day are the sons and daughters of Southern white men, often men of decided importance in their communities. In one town I visited I heard a white man expressing with great bitterness his feeling against the Negro race, arguing that the Negro must be kept down, else it would lead to the mongrelisation of the white race. The next morning as chance would have it, another white man with whom I was walking pointed out to me a neat cottage, the home of the Negro family of the white man who had talked with me on the previous evening. And I saw this man’s coloured children in the yard!
The better class of Southern people know perfectly well of these conditions and are beginning to attack them boldly. At a meeting in the Court Street Methodist Church in Montgomery, Ala., in 1907, Dr. J. A. Rice, the pastor, made this statement, significant in its very fearlessness, of changing sentiment:
“I hesitate before I make another statement which is all too true. I hesitate, because I fear that in saying it I shall be charged with sensationalism. But even at the risk of such a charge I will say, for it must be said, that there are in the city of Montgomery, four hundred Negro women supported by white men.”
The next morning this statement was reported in the Montgomery Advertiser.
It may be said also, that these 400 cases in a city of 35,000 people do not represent a condition of mere vice. Many of the women are comfortably provided for and have families of children. Vice is wholly distinct from this system of concubinage; for there are in Montgomery thirty-two Negro dives operated for white patronage—also the statement of Dr. Rice, quoted in the Montgomery Advertiser.
The proportion of such cases in some of the less progressive Southern towns even to-day, is almost appalling: and at the same time that speakers and writers are railing at the mulatto for his disturbing race leadership and his restless desire for political and other rights, and while they are declaiming against amalgamation and mongrelisation, the mulatto population is increasing. Striving to keep the Negro in his place as a Negro, the South is making him more and more a white man.
Attempt to Stop Miscegenation
Among Southern women, not unnaturally, the feeling aroused by these practices has been especially bitter. Here is a remarkable plea, published in the Times-Democrat on June 21, 1907, signed “A woman.”
Will you kindly publish the following without attaching my signature or divulging it in any way? I have several brothers who are old-maidish enough to have nervous prostration if they should see my name signed to such an unmaidenly, immodest letter, but I do my thinking without any assistance from them, and hope for the sake of peace in my family that they will not recognise me in print.
I am a resident of a large town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where miscegenation is common—where, if a man isolates himself from feminine society, the first and only conclusion reached is, “he has a woman of his own” in saddle, of duskier shade. This conclusion is almost without exception true. If some daring woman, not afraid of being dubbed a Carrie Nation, were to canvass the delta counties of Mississippi taking the census, she would find so many cases of miscegenation, and their resultant mongrel families, that she would bow her head in shame for the “flower of Southern chivalry”—gone to seed.
Awakened by a sense of the fearfulness of these conditions, such a strong paper as the New Orleans Times-Democrat has been conducting a campaign for laws which shall punish the white man who maintains illicit relations with Negroes. For years attempts have been made in the legislatures of several states (in part successfully) to enact such legislation, but the practice has been so firmly entrenched that many of the efforts have failed.
On February 15, 1906, the Times-Democrat put the case in stronger language than I would dare to do:
It is a public scandal that there should be no law of this kind (against miscegenation) on the statute book of Louisiana, and that it should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples. The failure to pass a law of this kind is attributed to white degenerates, men who denounce social equality yet practice it, men who are more dangerous to their own race than the most inflammatory Negro orator and social equality preacher, and who have succeeded by some sort of legislative trickery in pigeon-holing or killing the bills intended to protect Louisiana from a possible danger. Such men should be exposed before the people of the state in their true colours.
It will thus be seen how deep-seated the difficulty is. And yet, as I have followed the editorial expression of many Southern newspapers, I have been astonished to see how people are beginning to talk out. Here is an editorial from the Star of Monroe, La.:
DESTRUCTIVE CRIME OF MISCEGENATION
There can be no greater wrong done the people of any community than for public sentiment to permit and tolerate this growing and destructive crime of miscegenation, yet in many towns and cities of Louisiana, especially, there are to-day white men cohabiting with Negro women, who have sweet and lovable families. This is a crime that becomes almost unbearable, and should bring the blush of shame to every man’s cheek who dares to flaunt his debased and degrading conceptions of morality in the eyes of self-respecting men and women.
In January, 1907, District Attorney J. H. Currie, in Judge Cochran’s court at Meridian, Miss., addressed a jury on what he called “the curse of miscegenation.” In the course of his speech he said:
“The accursed shadow of miscegenation hangs over the South to-day like a pall of hell. We talk much of the Negro question and all of its possible ramifications and consequences, but, gentlemen, the trouble is not far afield. Our own people, our white men with their black concubines, are destroying the integrity of the Negro race, raising up a menace to the white race, lowering the standard of both races and preparing the way for riot, mob, criminal assaults, and, finally, a death struggle for racial supremacy. The trouble is at our own door. We have tolerated this crime long enough, and if our country is not run by policy rather than by law, then it is time to rise up and denounce this sin of the earth.”
Anti-Miscegenation League is Formed
Strong men and women, indeed, in several states have begun to organise against the evil. At Francisville, La., in May (1907), a meeting was called to organise against what one of the speakers, Mr. Wickliffe, called the “yellow peril” of the South. He said that “every man familiar with conditions in our midst knows that the enormous increase in persons of mixed blood is due to men of the white race openly keeping Negro women as concubines.” Out of this meeting grew an organisation to help stamp out the evil. About the same time, a mass meeting was held in Vicksburg, Miss., and an Anti-Miscegenation League was formed.
The hatred and fear of such relationships have grown most rapidly, of course, among the better classes of white people. The class of white men who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago, or than it was in slavery times.
And the Negroes on their part are also awakening to the seriousness of this problem. I found in several Negro communities women’s clubs and other organisations which are trying, feebly enough, but significantly trying, to stem the evil from their side. It is a terrible slough to get out of. Negro women, and especially the more comely and intelligent of them, are surrounded by temptations difficult indeed to meet. It has been and is a struggle in Negro communities, especially village communities, to get a moral standard established which will make such relationships with white men unpopular. In some places to-day, the Negro concubines of white men are received in the Negro churches and among the Negroes generally, and honoured rather than ostracised. They are often among the most intelligent of the Negro women, they often have the best homes and the most money to contribute to their churches. They are proud of their light-coloured children. And yet, as the Negroes begin to be educated, they develop an intense hatred of these conditions: and the utter withdrawal of the best sort of Negro families from any white associations is due in part to the dread of such temptations. I shall never forget the bitterness in the reply of a coloured blacksmith who had a number of good-looking girls. I said to him jokingly:
“I suppose you are going to send them to college.”
“Why should I?” he asked. “What good will it do? Educate them to live with some white man!”
The Tragedy of the Negro Girl
A friend of mine, Southern by birth, told me a story of an experience he had at Nashville, where he went to deliver an address at Fisk University, a Negro college. On his way home in the dark, he chanced to walk close behind two mulatto girls who had been at the lecture. They were discussing it. One of them said:
“Well, it’s no use. There is no chance down here for a yellow girl. It’s either get away from the South—or the usual thing.”
In that remark lay a world of bitter knowledge of conditions.
It is remarkable, indeed, that the Negroes should have begun to develop moral standards as rapidly as they have. For in the South few people expect the coloured girl to be moral: everything is against her morality. In the first place, the home life of the great mass of Negroes is still primitive. They are crowded together in one or two rooms, they get no ideas of privacy, or of decency. The girls are the prey not only of white men but of men of their own race. The highest ideal before their eyes in many cases is the finely dressed, prosperous concubine of a white man. Moreover, in nearly all Southern towns, houses of prostitution are relegated to the Negro quarter. At Montgomery, Ala., I saw such places in respectable Negro neighbourhoods, against which the Negro people had repeatedly and bitterly objected to the city authorities, to no purpose. The example of such places of vice on Negro children is exactly what it would be on white children. In the same way, although it seems unbelievable, Negro schools in several cities have been built in vice districts. I saw a fine new brick school for coloured children at Louisville placed in one of the very nastiest streets of the city. The same conditions surround at least one coloured school which I saw at New Orleans.
And yet the South, permitting such training in vice, wonders at Negro immorality and is convulsed over the crime of rape. Demanding that the Negro be self-restrained, white men set the example in every way from concubinage down, of immorality and lack of restraint. They sow the whirlwind and look for no crop!
When the coloured girl grows up, she goes to service in a white family, where she either sleeps in an outbuilding (the survival of the old system of Negro “quarters”) or goes home at night. In either event the mistress rarely pays the slightest attention to her conduct in this particular. I talked with a woman, a fine type of the old gentlefolk, who expressed with frankness a common conviction in the South.
“We don’t consider,” she said, “that the Negroes have any morals. Up North where I was visiting this summer I was amazed to find women with coloured servants looking after them, trying to keep them in at night and prevent mischief. We never do that; we know it isn’t any use.”
It may be imagined how difficult it is in such an atmosphere for Negroes to build up moral standards, or to live decently. If there ever was a human tragedy in this world it is the tragedy of the Negro girl.
Relations Between White Men and Negro Women
Illicit relationships between the races have not gone on without causing many a troubled conscience. Nor has a difference in colour always deadened the deeper feelings of the human heart. In spite of laws and colour lines, human nature, wherever found, is profoundly alike. In making my inquiries among coloured colleges I found to my astonishment that in nearly all of them mulatto boys and girls are being educated, and well educated, by their white fathers. A number of them are at Atlanta University, Tuskegee, Hampton, Fisk—indeed, at all of the colleges. And Wilberforce College, next after Lincoln University of Chester County, Pa., the oldest Negro institution of learning in the country, founded in 1856, was largely supported in slavery times by Southern white men who felt a moral obligation to educate their coloured sons and daughters. Large farms around Wilberforce (near Xenia) which I have visited were originally bought by Southern slave-owners for their mulatto children, where they could get away from the South and grow up in a free state. Some of these mulatto children, educated in Latin and Greek, with too much money and little to do, went straight to the devil, while others conserved their property, and it is to-day in the hands of their descendants.
Thus the relations between white men and Negro women even to-day, though marriage is forbidden by law, are sometimes remarkable in their expression of the deepest emotions of the human heart. I shall never forget the story of one such case among many that I heard in the South. I withhold the names in this case although the story is widely known among the people in that part of Alabama. At —— lives a planter of prominence who was formerly on the staff of the governor of the state. He had no white family, but everyone knew that he lived with a mulatto woman and was raising a coloured family. When the boys and girls were old enough, he sent them to Atlanta University, to Tuskegee, and to Spellman Seminary, providing them plentifully with money. He also paid for his wife’s sister’s schooling.
A year or so ago his mulatto “wife” died; and he was heart-broken. He sent for his boys to come from college and let it be known that he would have something to say at the funeral. Many white and coloured people, therefore, attended and followed the body of the Negro woman to the cemetery. At the grave, General —— stepped forward and raised his hand.
“I have just one word to say here to-day. These children who are here have always gone by their mother’s name. I want to acknowledge them now in front of all these people as my children; and henceforth they will bear my name. I wish also to say that this woman who lies here was my wife, not by law, but in the sight of God. I here acknowledge her. This is a duty I have to do not only to this woman but to God. When I leave my property I shall leave it to those children, and shall see that they get it.”
Intermarriage of the Races in the North
So much for Southern conditions. How is it in the North where intermarriage is not forbidden by law?
In 1903, during a heated political campaign in Mississippi, United States Senator Money repeatedly made the assertion that in Massachusetts in the previous year, because there were no laws to separate the Negro and prevent intermarriage, 2,000 white women had married Negro men. I heard echoes of Senator Money’s statistics in several places in the South.
I have made a careful investigation of the facts in several northern cities, and I have been surprised to discover how little intermarriage there really is.
If intermarriage in the North were increasing largely, Boston, being the city where the least race prejudice exists and where the proportion of mulattoes is largest, would show it most plainly. As a matter of fact, in the year 1902, when according to Senator Money, 2,000 white women married coloured men, there were in Boston, which contains the great bulk of the Negro population of Massachusetts, just twenty-nine inter-racial marriages.
Although the Negro population of Boston has been steadily increasing, the number of marriages between the races, which remained about stationary from 1875 to 1890, has since 1900 been rapidly decreasing. Here are the exact figures as given by the registry department:
RACIAL INTERMARRIAGES IN BOSTON
| Groom Coloured Bride White | Groom White Bride Coloured | Total Mixed Marriages | ||||
| 1900 | 32 | 3 | 35 | |||
| 1901 | 30 | 1 | 31 | |||
| 1902 | 25 | 4 | 29 | |||
| 1903 | 27 | 2 | 29 | |||
| 1904 | 27 | 1 | 28 | |||
| 1905 | 17 | 2 | 19 |
At Boston and in other Northern towns I made inquiries in regard to the actual specific instances of intermarriage.
There are two classes of cases, first, what may be called the intellectuals; highly educated mulattoes who marry educated white women. I have the history of a number of such intermarriages, but there is not space here to relate the really interesting life stories which have grown out of them. One of the best-known Negro professors in the country has a white wife. I saw the home where they live under almost ideal surroundings. A mulatto doctor of a Southern town married a white girl who was a graduate of Wellesley College; they had trouble in the South and have “gone over to white” and are now living in the North. They have two children. A Negro business man of Boston has a white wife; they celebrated recently the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage.
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| Photograph by Clinedinst | |
| MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON | MRS. ROBERT H. TERRELL |
TWO OF THE LEADING WOMEN OF THE NEGRO RACE
But such cases as these are rare. In the great majority of intermarriages the white women belong to the lower walks of life. They are German, Irish, or other foreign women, respectable, but ignorant. As far as I can see from investigating a number of such cases, the home life is as happy as that of other people in the same stratum of life. But the white woman who thus marries a Negro is speedily declassed: she is ostracised by the white people, and while she finds a certain place among the Negroes, she is not even readily accepted as a Negro. In short, she is cut off from both races. When I was at Xenia, O., I was told of a case of a white man who was arrested for living with a Negro woman. The magistrate compelled him to marry the Negro woman as the worst punishment he could invent!
For this reason, although there are no laws in most Northern states against mixed marriages, and although the Negro population has been increasing, the number of intermarriages is not only not increasing, but in many cities, as in Boston, it is decreasing. It is an unpopular institution!
No one phase of the race question has aroused more acrimonious discussion than that of the Mulatto, especially as to the comparative physical strength and intelligence of the black Negro and the mulatto, a subject which cannot be here entered into.
Most Leaders of the Negro Race are Mulattoes
This much I know from my own observation: most of the leading men of the race to-day in every line of activity are mulattoes. Both Booker T. Washington and Dr. DuBois are mulattoes. Frederick Douglass was a mulatto. The foremost literary men, Charles W. Chesnutt and William Stanley Braithwaite, are mulattoes; the foremost painter of the race, H. O. Tanner, whose pictures have been in the Luxembourg, and who has been an honour to American art, is a mulatto. Both Judge Terrell and his wife, Mary Church Terrell, who is a member of the School Board of Washington, are mulattoes. On the other hand, there are notable exceptions to the rule. W. T. Vernon, Register of the United States Treasury, and Professor Kelly Miller of Washington, D. C., one of the ablest men of his race, both have the appearance of being full-blooded Negroes. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the poet, was an undoubted Negro; so was J. C. Price, a brilliant orator; so is M. C. B. Mason, secretary of the Southern Aid Society of the Methodist Church.
Full-blooded Negroes often make brilliant school and college records, even in comparison with white boys. It is the judgment of Hampton Institute, after years of careful observation, that there is no difference in ability between light and dark Negroes. I quote from the Southern Workman, published at Hampton:
The question as to the comparative intelligence of light and dark Negroes is one that is not easily settled. After long years of observation Hampton’s records show that about an equal number of mulattoes and pure blacks have made advancement in their studies and at their work. While it is probable that the lighter students are possessed of a certain quickness which does not belong to the darker, there is a power of endurance among the blacks that does not belong to their lighter brethren.
As to the comparative accomplishment of light and dark Negroes after leaving school, the evidence is so confusing that I would not dare to enter upon a generalisation: that question must be left to the great scientific sociologist who will devote a lifetime to this most interesting problem in human life.