Four Possibilities: IV. Segregation.
Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or without the limits of the United States.
This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at the outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But the more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more urgently did segregation recur to me as the one possible way of escape from an otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the instant, and wholesale, and violent deportation of ten million people—that is a rank impossibility. Between that and inert acquiescence in the ubiquity of the negro throughout the Southern States, there are many middle courses; and I cannot but believe that the first really great statesman who arises in America will prove his greatness by grappling with this vast but not insoluble problem. And, assuredly, the sooner he comes the better.
We have seen that the negro race is not dying out, or that, if it does die out, it can only be, so to speak, at the cost of Southern civilization—through the indefinite continuance of insanitary and barbarous conditions. We have seen that the Atlanta Compromise is illusory and impracticable, that there is no reasonable hope that the two races will ever live together, yet apart—in economic solidarity, yet without social or sexual contact. We have seen that the essence of the whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even though it be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn upward, through physical coalescence, into the white race, and the white man’s intense resolve that, on a large and determining scale, no such coalescence shall take place. Now this state of war—for such it undoubtedly is—will not correct itself by lapse of time. It will continue to degrade and demoralize both races until active measures are taken to put an end to it. Though I sympathize with the white man’s horror of amalgamation, I neither approve nor extenuate the systematic injustice and frequent barbarity in which that horror expresses itself. The present state of society in the South is as inhuman as it is inconsistent with the democratic and Christian principles which the Southern white man so loudly, and in the main sincerely, professes. The Jim Crow car, and all such discriminations in the system of public conveyance, are, I believe, necessities, but deplorable necessities none the less. The constant struggle to exclude the negro from political power is at best a negative and unproductive expenditure of energy, at worst a source of political dishonesty and corruption. The wresting of the law, whether criminal or civil, into an instrument for keeping the negro in a state of abject serfdom, is a scandal and a disgrace to any civilized community. The constant resort to lawless violence and cruelty in revenge for negro crime (real or imaginary) is a hideous blot upon the fair fame of the South, if not rather an impeachment of her sanity. The truth is, in fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship.