The Crux of the Problem.
The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise were possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to be prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is unwholesome and demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of what Mr. Ray Stannard Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It seems hard, no doubt, that marriage should be impossible between a white man and a girl in whose complexion, perhaps, an eighth or sixteenth part of negro blood is entirely imperceptible; but such cases are romantic exceptions, and do not constitute a serious factor in the problem. Negroes, at any rate, will tell you proudly that the young men and women of their race, however light-skinned, hold it no hardship that their choice of mates should be restricted to their own people. Whatever be the truth as to these marginal relations, they are not the essence of the matter. The essence is simply this: the youth and manhood of the white South is subjected to an altogether unfair and unwholesome ordeal by the constant presence of a multitude of physically well-developed women, among whom, in the lower levels, there is no strong tradition of chastity, and to whom the penalties of incontinence are very slight. To say, as many Southerners will, that there is no such thing as virtue among negro women is stupidly libellous; but it is impossible to doubt that the average standard of sexual conduct among the lower orders of the black and brown population is anything but high. And this is not a state of things that can be radically amended in one generation or in two. The completest realization of the Atlanta Compromise that is conceivable within, say, a century, would still leave the white male exposed, from boyhood upward, to a stimulation of his animal instincts which, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, cannot be otherwise than unwholesome.
We are here at the very heart of the problem. All other relations are adjustable, at a certain sacrifice; but not this one. If the two races are to live together without open and lawful intermingling, it must be at the cost of incessant demoralization to both. “Miscegenation,” in the sense of permanent concubinage and the rearing of hybrid families, may be held in check by the strong social sentiment against it,[[56]] but nothing can hold in check the still more degrading casual commerce between the white man (and youth) and the coloured woman. It is probably this fact, quite as much as the hideous proclivities of the criminal negro male, that hardens the heart of the white woman against the black race. Nor is the unwholesomeness of the condition measured by the actual amount of laxity to which it leads. Temptation may in myriads of cases be resisted; but this order of temptation ought not to be in the air.[[57]] It cannot be good for any race of men to be surrounded by strongly-accentuated Sex, which, for ulterior reasons, whereof the mere animal nature takes little account, is placed under a tabu.
I venture to say that no one—not even Mr. Washington himself—really believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the problem. The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to speak), never doubt that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of racial intermixture. They see that so long as constant physical propinquity endures, the colour barrier between the sexes is factitious, and in great measure unreal, and they believe that at last the race-pride of the white man will be worn down, and he will accept the inevitable amalgamation.[[58]] The ultimate forces at war in the South are the instinctive, half-conscious desire of the black race to engraft itself on the white stock,[[59]] and the no less instinctive horror of the white stock at such a surrender of its racial integrity. This horror is all the more acute—all the more morbid, if you will—because the white race is conscious of its own frailty, and knows that it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against perfidious nature. It is a hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it is true, that much of the injustice and cruelty to which the negro is subjected in the South is a revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the negro’s part, as for an uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part of the whites.[[60]] It is because the black race inevitably appeals to one order of low instincts in the white, that it suffers from the sympathetic stimulation of another order of low instincts.