V
“DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS
A night’s railway journey on the Illinois Central carries you from Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee, and from the Ohio to the Mississippi. You strike the Father of Waters some time before you reach Memphis. Here two sets of literary associations were awakened in my mind. We passed through miles of swampy, malarial-looking forests, with snake-like vines binding the trees together; and every here and there would come a clearing on the river-bank, still bristling with huge gaunt stumps of dead timber, and showing a melancholy cabin or two, which forcibly recalled the Eden of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” And then, again, in some quiet backwater, we would see a great raft of lumber, with a hut or tent on it—the very raft of Huckleberry Finn and Jim. So strongly have the great rivers always appealed to my imagination that the first thing I did in Memphis was to go down to the wharf and ascertain whether I could not travel at least part of the way to New Orleans by steamer. There are plenty of huge sternwheel boats, still on the river; but alas! their movements are not arranged in view of passenger traffic. Only in short stages, and at great expenditure of time, could I have carried out my ambition. Baffled at Memphis, I still hoped to take boat from Vicksburg to Natchez; but I found that I should have to wait two days for a boat, and should then spend two more days in covering a distance which I could do by rail in a single night. So, except for a short excursion at New Orleans, I did not go a-sailing on the waters of the Mississippi.
Memphis is a much brighter, cleaner, more alert and prosperous-looking place than Louisville. |Charity and Colour.| There are shops on Main Street that would make a good figure in Paris; and at night it is as gay with electricity as the “Great White Way” of New York. When I arrived, Memphis was evidently in the thick of some excitement. The side-walks of Main Street were crowded with ladies, young and—less young, who were making dashes at every male passer-by, and seeking to pin a square purple badge to the lapel of his coat. It was soon evident that life was not worth living unless you wore one of these badges; so I secured one, at the expense of half-a-dollar, and on examining it found that it was inscribed—“Tag-Day for the Tennessee Home for Incurables.” This was, in fact, a sort of Hospital Saturday, and the tag pinned to your coat was a certificate that you had paid up.
The system struck me as ingenious; but it is because of a significant sequel that I mention it. In the afternoon, I called on a negro professional man who had invited me to go for a drive in his buggy. As we left the house I noticed that he wore no tag. I touched my own tag, and said, smiling, “Dare you venture into the streets without one of these?” “Why,” he replied, “they wouldn’t for anything ‘tag’ a coloured man!”
This was “discrimination” with a vengeance! Even charity fenced round by the colour-line! I felt that here at last I had touched the limit.
“Free” Libraries.
We drove past the small but attractive-looking Public Library, situated on a bluff, with a glorious view over the lake-like Mississippi.
“Is there discrimination here?” I asked.
“Why, certainly,” was the reply. “My son is in an office where several of the white young men have cards enabling them to draw books from the library. My son applied for a card; and as he is very light in colour, it at first seemed that there was going to be no difficulty. But when they heard his name, they identified him as my son and refused him a card. The librarian wrote to me privately, and said that the boy could have as many books as he liked without any card. But I would not have that; I threatened to take the case into court by refusing to pay any tax for the support of the library. But then they offered to establish a branch library for coloured people, and that compromise I accepted.”
Some time later, in another city, I was reminded of this conversation on seeing a very handsome Carnegie Free Library occupying a prominent site.
“Is it free to coloured people?” I asked.
“Oh dear no,” was the reply. “Carnegie offered to give an extra $10,000 for a black branch library, if the town would contribute $1000 a year to its support. This the town agreed to do, on condition that the negro community provided the site. We, on our part, consented to this, merely stipulating that we should have a voice in the management. The town replied emphatically ‘No,’ and the whole thing fell through. It would simply have meant, you see, that they would have dumped upon us any rubbish for which they hadn’t room in the main library. Can you wonder that we declined?” I could not.
To return to Memphis. I had gone there, not exactly to attend the annual “Conference for Education in the South,” but to see several people who were attending it. |Educators in Council.| However, I did go to one or two meetings, and notably to one which was to be addressed by the British Ambassador, Mr. James Bryce. It was in the Lyceum Theatre, and I sat on the platform (the stage) and looked out over the crowded house, where a dozen electric fans were keeping the sultry air in motion. It seemed to me odd that, while the floor of the house and the first and second circle were overcrowded, there were only one or two people in the gallery. Presently I looked up again; there were now about twenty people in the upper regions, and I had a curious difficulty in distinguishing their features. A light burst upon me—they were negroes. In a “Conference for Education in the South” the whites did all the conferring and the blacks, if they were so minded, might listen from the gallery.
Next day my black, or rather olive-coloured, friend said: “I could have whipped myself this morning when I opened the paper and saw that I’d missed hearing Bryce. I was bent upon hearing him, but somehow I forgot that yesterday was the evening.” I wondered whether he realized that he would have had to sit in the gallery. But I did not ask him. Every now and then, in this country, one turns tail and flees from the haunting colour question. It is the skeleton at the feast of Southern life.
In New York I had met President Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, one of the most notable men in America, an accomplished speaker, and an authority, if ever there was one, on the education of the negro. “No doubt I shall see you at Memphis,” I said, in an off-hand way. He answered, rather drily, “No;” and some time afterwards he said, “You asked me if I would be at Memphis—I am not at all sure that I should be welcome there. I received a printed circular notifying me of the meeting, but no invitation to attend it. You will find friends of the negro there, and of negro education—oh yes, plenty. But they will not be of my colour.”
I did, as a matter of fact, hear one friend of negro education hold forth—Bishop Bratton, of Mississippi. |A Bishop on Race Equality.| The Bishop laid down a good many principles—among them that “the negro is capable of development to a point whose limit he (the speaker) had not discovered,” but that “the vast majority are still children intellectually, and little short of savages morally.” The purport of his address was the assertion that negro education should not be left entirely or mainly to negro teachers. The ideal school would be one under the supervision of a white clergyman, where carefully selected portions of Scripture should be necessary parts of the curriculum, and “where the race should be taught that race integrity is obedience to God’s own creation and appointment, and that race intercourse, kindly and cordial, is not race equality.” “Indeed,” the Bishop proceeded, “the very expression ‘race equality’ is an anachronism belonging to the mediæval period of reconstruction history [that is, roughly, the period between 1866 and 1876], which has long gone to its account.” These remarks were warmly received by the audience, and greatly applauded by the leading Southern papers. But one understands why Mr. Booker T. Washington—and, still more, why Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta University—were not bidden to the conference. Of these two negro leaders I shall try to give a sketch in my next paper.
VI
TWO LEADERS
“People are always laying stress on the white blood in me,” said Mr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “and attributing to that anything I do that is worth doing. But they never speak of the white blood in Mr. Booker Washington, who, as a matter of fact, has a larger share than I have.”
“How do you make that out?” I asked; and Mr. Du Bois gave me the story of his ancestry. The story went back two hundred years, for he comes of a New England stock, and has had no slave ancestors (I take it) for many generations. I could not follow his proof that more of Africa flows in his veins than in Mr. Booker Washington’s; nor does it greatly matter; for if it be so in fact, Nature has taken great pains to conceal the fact, and the popular error of which he complains is practically inevitable.
A Contrast of Personalities.
Principal Booker T. Washington is a negro in every lineament, and not, one would say, of the most refined type. His skin is neither black nor copper-coloured, but rather of a sort of cloudy yellow, to which the other shades are, perhaps, æsthetically preferable. His hair, his ears, his nose, his jaw, all place his race beyond dispute; only his grave, candid, forceful eyes announce a leader of men. He is above middle height, and heavily built; seated, he is apt to sprawl. He has a curious trick of drawing back the corners of his mouth, so as to reveal almost the whole of his range of teeth. At first I took this for a slow smile, heralding some humorous remark; but humour is not Mr. Washington’s strong point. His grin is a nervous habit, and scarcely a pretty one.[[17]] Altogether, in talking with him, you have no difficulty in remembering the race of your interlocutor, and if you make an untactful remark—if you let the irrepressible instinct of race-superiority slip out—you have all the more reason to be ashamed.
With Mr. Du Bois the case is totally different. His own demonstration notwithstanding, I cannot believe that there is more of the negro in him than in (say) Alexandre Dumas fils. Meeting this quiet, cultivated, French-looking gentleman, with his pointed beard, olive complexion, and dark melancholy eyes, it is hard to believe that he is born, as he himself phrases it, “within the Veil.” In appearance he reminded me a good deal of Gabriele d’Annunzio, only that D’Annunzio happens to be fair, while Mr. Du Bois has something more like the average Italian complexion. In speaking to this man of fine academic culture—this typical college don, one would have said—the difficulty was to feel any difference of race and traditions, and not to assume, tactlessly, an identical standpoint.
These two men are unquestionably the leaders of their race to-day; but their ideals and their policy are as different as their physique. Mr. Washington leads from within; Mr. Du Bois from without. Should he read this phrase he will probably resent it; but it may be none the less true. Mr. Washington could never have been anything else than a negro; he represents all that is best in the race, but nothing that is not in the race. Mr. Du Bois is a negro only from outside pressure. I do not mean, of course, that there are no negro traits in his character, but that it is outside pressure—the tyranny of the white man—that has made him fiercely, passionately, insistently African. Had there been no colour question—had the negro had no oppression, no injustice to complain of—Mr. Du Bois would have been a cosmopolitan, and led the life of a scholar at some English, German, or perhaps even American University. As it was, he felt that to desert his race would be the basest of apostasies; but it was because he could have been disloyal that he became so vehemently—one might almost say fanatically—loyal.
I have heard a well-known New York publicist, the editor of an influential paper, express the opinion that Mr. Booker Washington is one of the greatest men at present alive in America. |“Up from Slavery.”| One of the others was President Eliot, of Harvard; the third I will not name—thus leaving the gate of hope ajar for many eminent persons. There was, perhaps, a spice of paradox in this appraisement of Mr. Washington; but a remarkable man he certainly is. Not, I think, a great intellect, but assuredly a strong and admirable character. His life, as related by himself in “Up from Slavery,” is a story of quiet heroism to rank with any in literature. Born a slave in a one-room cabin, with no glazed window and an earthen floor, he remained there until, when he was eight or nine, emancipation came. After that he worked in a salt-furnace and in a coal-mine, devoured all the time by a passion for knowledge which overcame what seemed almost incredible difficulties. At last he set forth for Hampton Institute, where General Armstrong was then just beginning his beneficent work. He had five hundred miles to travel and scarcely any money. He worked and even begged his way; for Mr. Washington has never been ashamed to beg when there was a good object to be served. Arriving at Richmond, Virginia, without a cent, he worked for several days unloading a ship, and slept at night in a hollow under a wooden side-walk.
At Hampton he found the system in operation which he has since adopted at Tuskegee—namely, that tuition is covered by endowment, while the student is enabled to pay (in part, at any rate) by work, for his board and clothing. He soon distinguished himself, not by great attainments, but by the thoroughness of his work and the sincerity and elevation of his character. Then, in 1881, it occurred to the State of Alabama to start a normal school for coloured people at a little village named Tuskegee, some forty miles from the capital, Montgomery. It did not, however, occur to the State of Alabama to provide any buildings or apparatus; it simply allotted £400 a year to be applied to the salaries of the teachers. On General Armstrong’s recommendation, Mr. Washington, then a youth of some five-and-twenty, was entrusted with the organization and management of the school; and the account of how, with practically no resources at all, he built up the great and beneficent institution which has now made the name of Tuskegee world-famous, is indeed a remarkable story of indomitable courage and perseverance. Mr. Washington felt that his personal failure would be reckoned a failure for his race. Out of the nettle, danger, he plucked the flower, safety; and Tuskegee now represents perhaps the greatest individual triumph his race has ever achieved.
Of course it has been achieved largely through philanthropic help from the North—Mr. Washington, as I have said, is an unashamed, though very tactful, beggar. |Statesman or Time-Server?| It is precisely that tactfulness, in its largest sense, with which the fierier spirits of his race reproach him. In their milder moods they call him an opportunist and time-server; in moments of irritation they call him a betrayer of his people, and a pitiful truckler to the white man. He is, in fact, nothing of the sort; on the wrongs of his race he has spoken with no uncertain voice, when he felt it to be in season; but he has not harped upon them in and out of season. While he has plenty of race-pride, he has no race-vanity, and realizes that the negro has yet to conquer his place among the fully-developed and civilized races of the world. To help in this conquest is the mission and glory of his life; and he feels, rightly or wrongly, that material progress must precede and serve as a basis for intellectual progress. Therefore what is called the academic course—the course of language, literature, and abstract science—plays only a secondary part at Tuskegee. The curriculum is mainly industrial and agricultural, though the chemical and mechanical theory which lies behind agriculture and the handicrafts is by no means neglected. The fostering of aptitudes and the upbuilding of character—these are the two great aims of Tuskegee. The negro, says Mr. Washington, must render himself necessary to the American Commonwealth before he can expect to take a highly esteemed place in it, and the best way to claim a vote is to show that you are capable of using it wisely. Such are the maxims which he inculcates on his students—thereby earning the contumely of the fierier spirits aforesaid. They broke up one of his meetings in Boston, not long ago, with red pepper, and with the racial weapon—the razor.
But if any one imagines that Mr. Washington is a saint-like spirit in whom the wrongs of his race awaken no bitterness, he is very much mistaken. He has, when he cares to show it, a quiet contempt for the pettinesses of Southern policy which is rendered all the more scathing by his acceptance of them as matters of course.
It was at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 that Mr. Booker Washington made his first great success—the success which brought him national renown as a speaker and a leader of his race. |The Atlanta Compromise.| In an address delivered at the opening ceremony, he formulated what has since become famous as the Atlanta Compromise, in this oft-quoted sentence: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Mr. Washington has himself described with dignified simplicity the enthusiasm which this speech aroused among an audience which, if not hostile at the outset, was at least sceptical of the policy of allowing a negro to speak on such an occasion. The chairman—the Governor of Georgia—rushed across the platform and shook him by the hand, and the country was soon ringing with the fame of his tactful eloquence. But though it is the phrase above quoted that has become classic, there was another, which, if I am not greatly mistaken, did more to conciliate his audience. Speaking of the progress of his race, as manifested in their department of the Exposition, he reminded his hearers that the negro had “started thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources).” I would wager a good deal that it was this parenthesis, this genial allusion to the tender topic of chicken-stealing, that finally won the hearts of his white hearers. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Du Bois thus playing, not to the gallery, but rather to the stalls. And Mr. Washington no doubt deliberately calculated his effect, for he is certainly not by nature an irrepressibly facetious personage.
This famous speech, with its famous metaphor, was delivered, as I have said, at Atlanta, in 1895. At Atlanta in 1906 an outbreak of popular frenzy, excited by one or two real and several imaginary outrages, led to the slaughter in the streets of an unknown number of negroes (probably thirty or forty), not one of whom was even suspected of any crime. It does not seem as though the Atlanta Compromise had as yet borne much fruit, at any rate on its native soil.
Even more significant than Mr. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” is a book called “Tuskegee and its People,” to which he contributes a general introduction. |Tuskegee Ideals.| Two-thirds of the book consist of “Autobiographies by Graduates of the School,” with such titles as “A College President’s Story,” “A Lawyer’s Story,” “The Story of a Blacksmith,” “The Story of a Farmer,” “A Druggist’s Story,“ “A Negro Community Builder.” These stories are all interesting, many of them heroic and touching, and all permeated with the Booker-Washington spirit of indomitable self-help, unresentful acceptance of outward conditions, and unquestioning measurement of success by material standards. And yet not wholly material. The formation and maintenance of the “home” are the aspiration and ideal everywhere proclaimed—the home connoting, to the negro mind, not only pecuniary well-being, but decency, morality, education, a certain standard of refinement. Here is a characteristic passage from “The Story of a Farmer”:
Rev. Robert C. Bedford, Secretary of the board of trustees, Tuskegee Institute, some time ago visited us.... He wrote the following much-appreciated compliment regarding our homes and ourselves: “The homes of the Reid brothers are very nicely furnished throughout. Everything is well kept and very orderly. The bedspreads are strikingly white, and the rooms—though I called when not expected—were in the best of order.”
To this subject of the “home” I shall return later. I have seen few things more touching than the negro’s pride in the whiteness of his bedspreads.
Not less characteristic, however, is this further passage from the same “Story of a Farmer,” which follows, indeed, on the same page:—
Under the guidance of the Tuskegee influences ... the importance of land-buying was early brought to our attention, but because of the crude and inexperienced labourers about us, we found that we could, with advantage to all, rent large tracts of land, sub-rent to others, and in this way pay no rent ourselves, as these sub-renters did that for us. We could in this way also escape paying taxes, insurance, and other expenses that naturally follow.
It does not appear that “the Tuskegee influence” involves any economic idealism, or any doubt as to the legitimacy of capitalistic exploitation.
Principal Washington’s message, by his own admission, or, rather, insistence, might not unfairly be called “The Gospel of the Toothbrush.” |Washingtonian Optimism.| Again and again he uses this unpretending appliance as a symbol of the clean-living self-respect which he has made an ideal for his race. His policy, as he puts it in a remarkable passage, is to teach the negro to “want more wants.” It is the man with scarcely any wants who can satisfy them by working one day a week and loafing the other six. The man who wants many things “to make a happy fireside clime for weans and wife,” is the man who can be trusted to work steadily for six days out of the seven. This undeniable and (from the employer’s point of view) most salutary truth ought to put to silence the dwindling minority of Southerners who still object to the very idea and principle of negro education.
But suppose the majority of the race converted either into men of independent substance or satisfactory labourers for hire, will the problem be thereby solved? Principal Washington has no doubt on the subject. In the introduction to “Tuskegee and its People,” he proclaims his optimism in no uncertain voice:
The immeasurable advancement of the negro, manifested in character, courage, and cash ... is “confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ” that the gospel of industry, as exemplified by Tuskegee and its helpers, has exerted a leavening influence upon civilization wherever it has been brought within the reach of those who are struggling towards the heights. Under this new dispensation of mind, morals, and muscle, with the best whites and best blacks in sympathetic co-operation, and justice meaning the same to the weak as to the strong, the South will no longer be vexed by a race problem.
Such is the teaching of Washingtonian optimism.
And what is the reply of Du Boisian idealism?
The reply is implicit in the very title of Mr. Du Bois’ book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” |Du Boisian Idealism.| “Your method of securing peace, decency, and comfort for our bodies,” say the idealists to Mr. Washington, “implies, even if successful, the degradation and atrophy of our souls.” Mr. Du Bois celebrates with fervour the saints, the rebels, and the martyrs of his race, of whom Mr. Washington seems never to have heard. Mr. Du Bois admits, of course, the misfortunes of his people, but apparently regards them as a pure contrariety of Fate, with nothing in the racial constitution or character to account for them. Nothing less than the most perfect equality, not only economic and political, but social and intellectual, will satisfy him. If the negro is to hold a place apart, it must be by his own free choice, because he does not desire or condescend to mingle with the white. “Those who dislike amalgamation,” he says, “can best prevent it by helping to raise the negro to such a plane of intelligence and economic independence that he will never stoop to mingle his blood with those who despise him.” Mr. Washington admits to the full the mistakes of the Reconstruction Period—when the negro was made the dominant race in the South—and promises that they shall never be repeated. For Mr. Du Bois the mistake lay in not resolutely carrying through (of course, with greater wisdom and purity of purpose) the Reconstruction policy. He sees no reason why “the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landowner, which the nation had all but categorically promised to the freedmen”—should not have been literally realized. In short, while Mr. Washington is an opportunist and a man of action, Mr. Du Bois is a cloistered intransigeant.
But especially does he resent the over-emphasis laid, as he thinks, on manual as opposed to intellectual training. Manual training is good; but without intellectual training it must leave the race on a low and servile level; and Mr. Washington’s “deprecation of institutions of higher learning,” is leading to a “steady withdrawal of aid” from negro universities. The spectacle of a “lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home,” which raised in Mr. Washington only a pitying smile, seems to Mr. Du Bois heroic and admirable. The “gospel of work and money,” he thinks, “threatens almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” “To seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.”
I have paused in the story of my pilgrimage in order to give a little sketch of two conflicting tendencies, embodied in two remarkable men. Mr. Washington I have called an optimist; but it must not be understood that Mr. Du Bois is wholly a pessimist. He even says in one place: “That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.” But is it? I wish I could share the confidence of either the optimist or the idealist.
[17]. Since writing this, I have heard Mr. Washington make a speech, and now conceive this grin to be partly, at any rate, a habit contracted in the effort to secure perfectly clear enunciation.
VII
A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK
In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street; and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” which I had not yet read.
Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right shop. He exuded information at every pore. He had no prejudice against the negro—no, not he! Why, he employed three or four of them on his own place. (This protestation of impartiality I found to be the constant exordium of such a tirade.) But he was simply stating a matter of incontrovertible fact when he said that there was no nigger that would not assault a white woman whenever he saw a chance of doing so with impunity.
“But,” I objected, “outrages are not, after all, such daily occurrences. Do you mean to suggest that there are many outrages and lynchings that are never heard of—that don’t get into the newspapers?”
“Oh no; they get into the papers right enough. The reason there aren’t more outrages is simply that we whites have learnt to protect ourselves against the negro, just as we do against the yellow fever and the malaria—the work of noxious insects. You’re at the Hotel Gayoso, are you? Well, you see the wire-gauze screens over all the doors and windows? That’s to keep out the muskeeters; and just in the same way we must keep the nigger out of our lives.”
An Impartial Philosopher.
Then came a phrase which I was to hear repeated many times, not by irresponsible fanatics, but by Southerners of a much higher type: “I tell you, sir, no pen can describe the horrors of the Reconstruction Period, when all that was best in the white South was outlawed, and the nigger rode roughshod over us. The true story of that time will never be written in history. It is known only to those who went through it.”[[18]]
He then poured forth in terms of romantic extravagance the tale of the Ku-Klux-Klan, and how it had saved American civilization. He referred me, by way of proof, to the statue of General Forrest, right here in Memphis, who had been Grand Titan, or Grand Dragon, or I know not what, of the said organization, and whom British soldiers, General French and General Wolseley, had declared to have been the greatest military genius that ever lived.
To all this I was no unwilling listener; yet my time was limited, and now and then I sought to return to the prime object of my visit. In vain! He literally button-holed me, held me by the lapel of my coat, while he informed me that there was not an honest woman, in any sense of the word, among the whole negro race, and that the coloured population was ravaged by every sort of vice and disease. Had it been possible to take his assurances literally, one must have concluded that the race problem must quickly solve itself by the extinction of the negro. And he frankly looked forward to that consummation. “Our vagrancy laws are going to be a bitter pill for them. You see”—here he sketched a diagram to assist my understanding—“a nigger can’t come here to the front-door of my house and ring the bell; but he can go round to the back door”—a line represented his tortuous course—“and I tell you he does. Every household supports at least four or five niggers. Now the vagrancy laws are going to drive that class of niggers to the North, and the Yankee ain’t goin’ to stand his ways. We’re a long-sufferin’ people here in the South.”
As for Mr. Du Bois’s book, it was evident that, even if he had it, he was not going to sell it to me. I left the shop with two books: one was “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, jun., a melodramatic romance of the Ku-Klux-Klan; the other a pseudo-scientific onslaught on the negro race—a brutal and disgusting volume.
An hour or two later I was sitting in the consulting-room or “office” of a coloured physician—Dr. Oberman, let me call him. |A Doctor’s Story.|His real name was that of a we ll-known Southern family, and I remarked upon the fact, expecting to hear that he had been born a slave in that family. In a sense this was the case; but his story was a strange one, and he told it with frank simplicity.
“My father,” he said, “was in fact a member of that family”—and he told of sundry political offices which his white kindred had filled. “But my father attached himself openly and honourably to my mother, who was a slave in the family, and for that reason had to leave his home in North Carolina. For some reason or other they chose to go to the State of Mississippi. In 1850 that was a long and toilsome journey; and I was born on the way, not far from this place. For some years they lived in Mississippi, but they were again driven from there and passed into Ohio. My father was one of the noblest of men, and as soon as he was in a State where he could legally do so, he married my mother. I was present at the wedding.”
“Your mother, Dr. Oberman,” I said, “must surely have been a quadroon, or even an octoroon?”
“My dear mother,” he said, “was very nearly of the same colour as myself. You see, sir, we don’t breed straight,”—and he proceeded to give several instances in which the children either of two people of mixed blood, or of a white father and a mother of mixed blood, had varied very widely in complexion and facial type, some seeming almost pure white, others emphatically negroid. I did not say it, but I could not help thinking: This is scarcely a point in favour of that mixing of bloods which is here called miscegenation. Or is it merely another form of race-prejudice to hold that marriage undesirable in which the colour of the offspring cannot be foretold, and is apt to be variegated?
“Miscegenation.”
In a country where such terrible disabilities and humiliations await those in whom there is the slightest strain of black blood, it is surely manifest that the people who impose these humiliations, and scout the idea of legal marriage between the races, ought to visit with the severest penalties any relation (necessarily illicit) between a white man and a coloured woman—any augmentation by the white man of that half-bred caste on which colour-disabilities press with such peculiar cruelty. I asked Dr. Oberman whether there was any adequate feeling of this sort in the white community—whether the white man who was known to have relations with coloured women was denounced and ostracised?
“My dear sir,” he replied, “I can assure you that many of those who preach most loudly against miscegenation are far from practising what they preach.”
I am glad to say, however, that white men everywhere assured me that there was a strong and increasingly efficient public sentiment against this most anti-social form of transgression.[[19]] I cannot but think that the lynching of a few white men notoriously guilty of it would beneficially equalize matters.
“Our Moses.”
As I had come to Dr. Oberman with an introduction from Mr. Booker Washington, it was natural that the talk should fall upon the comparative merits of academic and of industrial education for the negro. Said the doctor: “We acquire property, and we want bankers; we fall ill, and we want physicians; we have business difficulties, and we want lawyers; we have souls, and we want preachers who can give us something better than the old ranting theology. But for every one of our race who can profit by a literary education, there are ninety-nine for whom manual training is the first essential.”
Then, looking up at a portrait of Mr. Washington on the wall of his office, he said, “Ah! he is our Moses!”
But a stronger proof of the reverence with which this leader is regarded awaited me as I left Dr. Oberman’s house. I had gone some twenty yards down the street, when I fancied I heard my name called. It must be an illusion, I thought, but nevertheless I looked round. There was the doctor, with his head thrust out of his office-window on the first floor, calling to me and beckoning me back.
“Did you take away that letter of Mr. Washington’s?” he asked.
I searched my pockets, but had it not. Meanwhile the doctor apparently rummaged on his bureau, and found it.
“Here it is! All right!” he cried; and I passed on.
A formal type-written note of introduction, signed by the great man’s hand, was a thing to be treasured like a pearl of great price. The first thought in the doctor’s mind on parting from me had been to assure himself of its safety!
[18]. For the benefit of English readers, it may be well to state clearly what Reconstruction meant. I do so in the words of Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 9): “The policies of reconstruction represented two cardinal movements of purpose. One was the withdrawal of political and civic power from those, especially those in official positions, who had borne arms against the United States. This effort was an expedient of distrust. It was as natural as it was unintelligent, and it was as successful as it was mischievous.... This was not all. The suffrage which the masters were denied was by the same act committed into the hands of their former slaves, vast dumb multitudes, more helpless with power than without power.” It is almost universally admitted that the Reconstruction policy was a mistake, which would never have been made had Lincoln lived, and that its results were grotesque and often tragic. I find only Professor Du Bois putting in a word for it and for some of its results. “The granting of the ballot to the black man,” he says (“The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 38), “was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war.” But he adds, “Thus negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.” The Reconstruction policy was overthrown by the “Revolution” of 1876, when the military support, on which the Reconstruction governments had rested, was withdrawn.
[19]. That excellent investigator, Mr. Stannard Baker, in his chapter on “The Tragedy of the Mulatto,” presents a good deal of conflicting evidence on this point. In the city of Montgomery, with its 35,000 inhabitants, it has been publicly stated without contradiction that 400 negro women live in more or less permanent concubinage with white men, while “there are thirty-two negro dives operated for white patronage”; nor does it seem that this state of things is at all exceptional. On the other hand, the feeling against such connections is certainly growing, and finds expression on every hand. The New Orleans Times Democrat, for instance, declares it to be a public scandal that no law against miscegenation should be on the statute-book of Louisiana, “and that it should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples.” Mr. Baker is, however, able to say that “the class of white men who consort with negro women is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago.”
VIII
IN THE BLACK BELT
For a whole long hot summer’s day I journeyed down the Mississippi Valley from Memphis to Vicksburg, stopping at every wayside station. Here I first felt—what was afterwards to grow upon me every day—an impression of the extraordinary potential wealth of the South. These fat champains, many of them scarcely reclaimed from the wilderness, and few of them subjected to more than a rough surface culture, seemed to me to reek of fertility and to cry aloud for development. As scenery they were monotonous enough, but as the seed-plot of an illimitable future they were vastly impressive.
There was no dining-car on the train, and at Clarksville, at 12.30, we were allowed twenty minutes for “dinner.” We rushed for the dingy refreshment-room, and found at each place a plate of soup, surrounded by little saucers containing a cube of butter, a sort of dough-nut in syrup, and some lettuce with a slice of hard-boiled egg. There was also at each place a coffee-cup, a small milk-pot, and some sugar. The soup-plates were removed by being piled in the middle of the table; a negro waiter came round with fresh plates, and then served the following menu, all dumped successively upon a single plate: (1) chunks of boiled bacon with sauerkraut; (2) stewed veal; (3) mashed potatoes; (4) baked beans; (5) roast chicken; (6) boiled beef. The meal ended with pumpkin pie and ice-cream; and for beverage you had your choice of either coffee or iced-tea. For this refection the charge was seventy-five cents, or three shillings—the regular tariff, it would seem, at roadside stations. Moral: Never, if you can help it, take a train without a dining-car.
Approaching Vicksburg, we ran for miles and leagues through a lovely region of luxuriantly green, vine-tangled forest, mirrored in perfectly clear water. Here, indeed, might the poet have sung of
“Annihilating all that’s made,
To a green thought in a green shade.”
How the water got there I cannot say. If it was simply the result of a flood, how came it so exquisitely clear? It seemed as though the forest grew naturally out of this pellucid mirror; the rather as we passed many open glades of blue water, where a race of lake-dwellers had built their cabins on piles. These glades I conceive to be “bayous,” but found no native who could inform me. In any case, I shall never forget that run up to Vicksburg. Until then, I scarcely knew the meaning of the word “green.” The South was afterwards to teach me many other shades of its significance.
This whole day’s journey lay through the “black belt” of the State of Mississippi. |Africa in the Ascendant.| It was manifest to the naked eye that the black population enormously outnumbered the white. Few and far between were the cottages occupied by white folks, numberless the cabins of the blacks. At the stations the blacks—who love hanging around railway stations—were to the whites as ten to one. They were a lively, good-humoured, talkative crowd, and on the whole, one would have said, a fine race physically. Neither the men nor the women showed any obvious sign of that dwindling vitality wherein my friend the Memphis bookseller rejoiced—which is not to say that he was entirely mistaken as regards the urban negro. These were rural negroes—a wholly different matter.
The newsman on the train was selling the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and I noticed that he found quite as many customers among the blacks as among the whites—two or three at each station. This would have gratified Mr. Booker Washington, for it was not only a proof of education but of easy circumstances—the paper costing just about as much as the Times. Mr. Washington, too, would have rejoiced to see the rather exquisitely-dressed negro cavalier, mounted on a pretty little well-bred mare, with spick-and-span new saddle and appurtenances, who, at Mound Bayou, rode up to the Jim Crow car, and chatted with a friend. Here was the Gospel of the Toothbrush supplemented by that of the curry-comb.
At this point I must face an avowal which I have long seen looming ahead. |The Jim Crow Car.| Without sincerity these impressions would be worse than useless. What I think about the colour question must be superficial, and may be foolish; but there is a certain evidential value in what I feel. The whole question, ultimately, is one of feeling; and the instinctive sensations of an observer, with the prejudices of his race, no doubt, but with no local Southern prejudices, are, so far as they go, worth taking into account.
Well, that day in the “black belt” of Mississippi brought home to me the necessity of the Jim Crow car. The name—the contemptuous, insulting name—is an outrage. The thing, on the other hand, I regard as inevitable. There are some negroes (so called) with whom I should esteem it a privilege to travel, and many others whose companionship would be in no way unwelcome to me; but, frankly, I do not want to spend a whole summer day in the Mississippi Valley cheek by jowl with a miscellaneous multitude of the negro race.
The Jim Crow car is defended by many Southerners as a means of keeping the peace, and on the ground of the special aversion which, owing to deplorable and (in time) corrigible circumstances, the negro male excites in the white woman. But I think the matter goes deeper than this. The tension between the races might be indefinitely relaxed, outrages might become a well-nigh incredible legend, the Gospel of the Toothbrush might be disseminated among the negroes ten times more widely than it is; and still it would not be desirable that the two races should be intermingled at close quarters in the enforced intimacy of a long railway journey. The permanent difficulty, underlying all impermanent ones, that time, education, Christian charity, and soap and water may remove, is that of sheer unlikeness.
Oh! they are terribly unlike, these two races! I am postulating no superiority or inferiority. I say, with Bishop Bratton, that “the negro is capable of development up to a point which neither he nor any one else can as yet fix;” and I will even assume that, from an astral point of view, the negro norm of physical beauty may be quite as well justified as that of the white. But they are essentially, irreconcilably different; and instincts rooted through untold centuries lead the white man to associate ugliness and a certain tinge of animalism with the negro physiognomy and physique. Call it illusion, prejudice, what you will, this is an unalterable fact of white psychology; or, if alterable, not in one generation, nor yet in one century. No doubt there is something good-humoured and not unsympathetic in the very ugliness (from the white point of view) of the negro. For that reason, among others, the two races can get on well enough, if you give them elbow-room. But elbow-room is just what the conditions of railway travelling preclude; wherefore I hold the system of separate cars a legitimate measure of defence against constant discomfort. Had it not been adopted, the South would have been a nation of saints, not of men. It is in the methods of its enforcement that they sometimes show themselves not only human but inhuman.
Remember that the question is complicated by the American’s resolute adherence to the constitutional fiction of equality. |The Fiction of Equality.| As there are no “classes” in the great American people, so there must be no first, second, or third class on the American railways.[[20]] Of course, the theory remains a fiction on the railroad no less than in life. Everyone travels first class; but those who can pay for it may travel in classes higher than first, called parlour-cars, drawing-room cars, and so forth. The only real validity of the fiction, it seems to me, lies in the unfortunate situation it creates with regard to the negro. If our three classes (or even two) were provided on every train, the mass of the negro population would, from sheer economic necessity, travel third. It might or might not be necessary to provide separate cars on that level; but if it were, the discrimination would not be greatly felt by the grade of black folks it would affect. In the higher-class cars there would be no reasonable need for discrimination, for the number of negroes using them would be few in comparison, and personally unobjectionable. The essential elbow-room would seldom be lacking; conditions in the first and second class would be very much the same as they are at present in the North. It is the crowding, the swamping, the submerging of the white race by the black, that the South cannot reasonably be expected to endure; and what I realized on that day in Mississippi was that such swamping would be an inevitable and everyday incident unless measures were taken to obviate it.
A Dual Paradox.
Of all historic ironies this is surely the bitterest—that the Republic founded to demonstrate eighteenth-century ideals of human equality should have been fated to provide their most glaring reductio ad absurdum. This is far from an original observation: but there is another paradox in the case which is not so generally recognized. It is that the most religious of modern peoples should all the time be flying in the face of the plainest dictates of Christianity. The South is by a long way the most simply and sincerely religious country that I ever was in.[[21]] It is not, like Ireland, a priest-ridden country; it is not, like England, a country in which the strength of religion lies in its social prestige; it is not, like Scotland, a country steeped in theology. But it is a country in which religion is a very large factor in life, and God is very real and personal. In other countries men are apt to make a private matter of their religion, in so far as it is not merely formal; but the Southerner wears his upon his sleeve. There is a simple sincerity in his appeal to religious principle which I have often found really touching. I have often, too, been reminded of that saying of my Pennsylvanian friend: “The South may be living in the twentieth century, but it has skipped the nineteenth.” The Southerner goes to the Gospels for his rule of life, and has never heard of Nietzsche; yet I am wholly unable to discover how the system of race-discriminations is reconcilable with the fundamental precepts of Christianity. It is far easier to find in the Old Testament the justification of slavery than in the New Testament the justification of the Jim Crow car, the white and black school, and the white and black church.[[22]] This is not necessarily a condemnation of the Southerner’s attitude; I do not think that the colour problem was foreseen in the New Testament. Christianity is one thing, sociology another, and the Southerner’s logical error, perhaps, lies in not keeping the distinction clear.[[23]] But I am sure there are many sincere and earnest Christians in the South who will scarce be at ease in heaven unless they enter it, like a Southern railway station, through a gateway marked “For Whites.”
[20]. Is this one of what Mr. E. G. Murphy calls “the divine inconveniences of a Republic”?
[21]. “The fancied home of the cavalier is the home of the nearest approach to puritanism and to the most vital protestant evangelicalism in the world to-day.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 20.
[22]. “The result of the war was the complete expulsion of negroes from white churches.... The Methodist Church South simply set its negro members bodily out of doors. They did it with some consideration for their feelings ... but they virtually said to all their black members, ‘You cannot worship God with us.’ There grew up, therefore, the Coloured Methodist Episcopal Church.... From the North now came those negro church bodies born of colour discrimination in Philadelphia and New York in the eighteenth century; and thus a Christianity absolutely divided along the colour-line arose. There may be in the South a black man belonging to a white church to-day; but if so, he must be very old and very feeble. This anomaly—this utter denial of the very first principle of the ethics of Jesus Christ—is to-day so deep-seated and unquestionable a principle of Southern Christianity that its essential heathenism is scarcely thought of.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in the South,” p. 174. I have been told, but make the statement “with all reserve,” that no colour-line is drawn in Roman Catholic churches in the South.
[23]. The perils of biblical argument may be illustrated by this passage from “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” a book of which I shall have more to say later (p. 235): “The same inspired authority who tells us that ‘God made the world ... and hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on the face of the earth,’ reminds us in the same breath that He Himself ‘hath determined the bounds of their habitations.’” But if, on this principle, the presence of the negro in America is a breach of divine ordinance, what are we to say of the presence of the white man in America?
IX
EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM
Enormous undeveloped or half-developed fertility is the impression one receives on every hand in the South; but the lack of development belongs to a state of things soon to pass away. There can be little doubt that the South stands on the threshold of an agricultural Golden Age.[[24]] It is being brought about mainly by three agencies: (1) The United States Department of Agriculture; (2) The General Education Board of New York; (3) the boll-weevil, which, entering Texas from Mexico in 1899, has extended its ravages over the States of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and part of Mississippi, and at one time threatened the ruin of the whole cotton industry. It may seem odd that this unwelcome invader should be reckoned among the factors that are promoting agricultural development; but, in a very real sense, he has served as a pioneer to the movement.
Dr. Wallace Buttrick, of the General Education Board, was so kind as to give me an outline of the course of events.
Rockefeller to the Rescue.
“Our Board,” he said, “was established and endowed, and has been at various intervals re-endowed, by Mr. Rockefeller.”
“To promote education in the South?”
“Not in the South alone, nor even primarily; but we had, of course, to study the special conditions prevailing in the South. We soon convinced ourselves that the deficiencies of Southern education—and they were enormous—were due to the sheer poverty of the country.[[25]] In the Southern towns there are good schools, and the accommodation is fairly adequate. But only 15 per cent. of the population of the South is a city population. The remaining 85 per cent. is rural and agricultural—not even, for the most part, gathered in villages of any size—so that the problem of bringing education to the doors of the people is an immensely difficult one.”
“I suppose compulsory education is not to be thought of?”
“It is thought of; it is mooted; it is coming; but not yet awhile. That is just what, as I say, we realized—that the South is too poor to pay for an adequate system of education, and that the problem is too huge a one for even the most lavish outside philanthropy to tackle. What was to be done, then? Manifestly to enrich the Southern agriculturalist, so as to enable him to pay for the schooling of his children. As it is, his average income is something like a third of the average income of a man of his class in (say) the State of Iowa, where the public-school system is adequate and satisfactory. Multiply his income by three, or even by two, and he also will be able to afford an adequate public-school system.”
“So your problem was nothing less than to double or treble the wealth of the fifteen or sixteen Southern States?”
The Boll-Weevil.
“Something like that; and it was right here that the boll-weevil came in. With ruin staring them in the face, the farmers of the affected districts took up eagerly the system of what are called Demonstration Farms, organized by Dr. S. A. Knapp, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That department, at its experimental stations and with the aid of its entomologists, had devised a method of combating the pest. Roughly speaking, it consisted of getting in ahead of the weevil—carefully preparing the ground and selecting the right varieties of seed, so that the main part of the crop could be harvested before the insect was ready to attack it. But it is one thing to devise a scientific method and another thing to persuade and teach farmers to carry it out. This difficulty Dr. Knapp got over by the following means: he organized a body of skilled agents, who went to the leading citizens—merchants, bankers, or what not—of a given district, and said, ‘Introduce us to the most intelligent and progressive farmer of your neighbourhood.’ Then to this farmer the agent would say, ‘If you will set apart a certain amount of land to be treated, under my supervision, exactly as I shall prescribe, I (that is to say, the Government) will provide you with the right seed for the purpose, and you will see what the result will be.’ Then meetings would be called of the neighbouring farmers, principles explained, and their attention directed to the experiment. Their life-and-death interest in the matter would make them watch the result closely; and as, in each case, the result would be a far larger crop per acre than they had been used to before the appearance of the weevil, you may imagine whether the methods of culture were eagerly adopted and the right sorts of seed eagerly applied for.
An Educational Campaign.
“Well, we of the General Education Board saw in the method of Dr. Knapp’s campaign against the boll-weevil the very thing we were wanting. The Government was operating only in the boll-weevil districts—there were constitutional objections to its extending its activity to regions unaffected by the pest. There we stepped in, and offered to finance the extension of the Demonstration Farms to other districts, in accordance with their needs and capabilities. So long as only a nominal money appropriation was required of it, the Government had no objection to our acting under its authority, our agents thus having the prestige of Government emissaries. For the current year, we have appropriated £15,000 to the work, while Congress has voted a somewhat larger sum for work in the boll-weevil States. Altogether, about 12,000 Demonstration Farms have already been established, and about 20,000 farmers have agreed to ‘co-operate’—that is, to work the whole or part of their land according to our instructions. The system is quite new. It has nowhere been at work more than two years, and there are many regions which are not yet even touched by it; but already the results are surprising.”
“It does not, I presume, apply solely to cotton-growing?”
“Certainly not; on the contrary, one of our great objects is to break down the exclusive reliance on cotton so common in many districts, and to show how the exhaustion of land may be avoided by the judicious rotation of crops. In short, we aim at providing object-lessons in scientific agriculture all over the Southern States, and of course always with strict reference to the particular advantages and disadvantages of a district. I assure you the South is at the opening of a new agricultural era; and it will not be many years before our work will produce a marked effect on education. Come back ten years hence, and you will no longer find it true that the Southern school is open, on an average, only about three months in the year; that the Southerner gets, on an average, something less than three years’ schooling in his whole life; and that about 10 per cent. of the native-born white population of the Southern States is wholly illiterate, and about 40 per cent. of the negro population. We are going to change all that.”
The Way to Wealth.
Shortly afterwards I met, not Dr. Knapp himself, but his son, Mr. Arthur Knapp, who gave me some further information as to the new era in Southern agriculture.
“Not only,” he said, “is much Southern land unimproved, but much of it is exhausted by careless and ignorant cultivation. It has been the method of many Southern farmers to work their land until it would no longer raise a paying crop of cotton; then to sell their farms for what they could get and move on to fresher soil. The system of Demonstration Farms will put an end to this, along with many other abuses and stupidities. It is the only sound method of educating the farmer. You may deluge him with Government bulletins of printed advice without producing the slightest effect. Even if he reads and understands the advice, he can’t or won’t apply it in practice. You must show him the process and show him the results. Much more is done by talking than by reading in the South; things circulate from mouth to mouth much more effectually than even through the newspapers. Each of the 12,000 Demonstration Farms is visited by from thirty to one hundred neighbouring farmers. That means that the object-lessons reach something like 400,000 every year. And then the spirit of emulation is awakened. Intelligent and energetic men are fired with the idea that they will beat the Government; and they go off and have a very good try.”
“I think I roughly understand the method of fighting the boll-weevil; but can you tell me something of what is being done for the benefit of other products than cotton?”
“Well, we insist on the necessity of better drainage, of deeper and more thorough ploughing, of carefully selecting and storing the best varieties of seed. We demonstrate the judicious rotation of crops, and show the advantages of devoting portions of the farm to legumes, which have a high food value for stock, and at the same time enrich the soil. Above all, perhaps, we insist on the necessity of economizing labour by the use of more horse-power and better implements, and urge the increasing of stock to such an extent that all the waste products and idle lands of the farm may be utilized.”
“But most, if not all, of these prescriptions surely demand fresh capital. Where is that to come from?”
“Why, no one pretends that the average farmer can introduce all these improvements at once. The fundamental ones do not require more capital, but only more thought and labour; and, these once applied, the more expensive improvements will gradually become possible. The more intelligent preparation of the soil and selection of the seed produce wonderful results at once in the case of corn—what you call maize—no less than in the case of cotton. If a farmer, under our guidance, plants half his land with corn and cowpeas, and only the other half with cotton, he gets as much cotton as he used to before, and has his corn and cowpeas in addition, while the land will be gradually restored to its original fertility. It is one of our great objects to teach farmers, while keeping cotton their ‘cash crop,’ as they call it, to divert from cotton as much land as is necessary to raise their own essential food-stuffs and the fodder for their stock—things which, under the present wasteful system, they mostly buy from outside.”
“Then the result of all this will not be an immense and immediate increase in the whole output of cotton?”
“Not immediate, no; but who can tell what the ultimate result may be? It is quite possible, for instance, that a cheaper and more effective method of combating the boll-weevil may one day be discovered. As it is, with all our care in breaking up the hibernating places of the pest, and planting so that the greater part of the crop can be secured before he is ready to attack it, we merely keep him effectively in check, we do not exterminate him. He still puts us to much additional labour and expense, and he still gets the end of the crop.”
“He seems to have been a valuable stimulus to effort, however; you ought not to speak ungratefully of him.”
“His work in that respect is done—we have no further use for him. By-the-by, have you seen his portrait?”
And I left Mr. Knapp with my note-book enriched with a counterfeit presentment, many times enlarged, of the insect which has co-operated with Mr. John D. Rockefeller in the agricultural regeneration of the South.
[24]. “Mr. Richard H. Edmonds, in an illuminating article in the Review of Reviews for February, 1906, has declared that no country ever dominated, as does the South, an industry of such value and importance as the cotton crop.... Three-fourths of this great crop, which must be relied on to clothe civilization, and in the exploitation of which two billions of capital are used, is raised in the South. It is a stupendous God-made monopoly. To-day, the South has invested, in 777 mills, with their 9,200,000 spindles, $225,000,000, as against $21,000,000 twenty-five years ago. The fields of the South furnish the raw material for three-fourths of the mills of all the world with their 110,000,000 spindles. The South now consumes 2,300,000 bales, which is about the amount consumed by the rest of the country, and is a fourfold increase over its consumption in 1890.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 18. A threefold increase in the cotton-crops seems easily possible; but whether prices could be kept up under such conditions is another question. Be this as it may, an immense agricultural development seems practically certain.
[25]. “The figures of our national census show that from 1860 to 1870 there was a fall of $2,100,000,000 in the assessed value of Southern property, and that the period of Reconstruction added, in the years from 1870 to 1880, another $67,000,000 to the loss.”—E. G. Murphy, “The Present South,” p. 40. “No other region, except Poland, ever knew such losses; and Poland ceased to exist. The year 1900 had come and gone before the whole South had regained its per capita wealth of 1860.”—E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 7.
X
NEW ORLEANS
Vicksburg is situated on a solitary, abrupt bluff, at a bend of the Mississippi; whence, I suppose, its strategic importance and its place in history. I climbed to its highest point, and looked out, at sunset, over the burnished river and the Louisiana shore beyond. It seemed one unbroken stretch of dark forest, which might never have been threaded by human foot, or only by that of the Red Man. When the first explorer of the great river climbed the bluff (as he doubtless did), he must have surveyed no very different scene.
The town, too, had a touch of the primitive South about it which I had not hitherto encountered. Memphis was as civilized and modern as any Northern city; but Vicksburg, with its steep-climbing streets, its cavernous, dimly-lighted shops, and its lounging outdoor life, had something of the air of an Italian hill-town. The principal hotel was a gaunt, dingy caravanserai, with no pretence to modernity about it. Here, and here only, I may say, I found the Northern allegation justified, that the South had lagged behind the age in things material.
An odd little incident brought home to me vividly the width of the empire of English literature. |Madrigals by the Mississippi.| At a street corner a sharp-featured Yankee youth, mounted on a large cart, was carrying on a book-auction, with a great deal of lively patter. As I passed, a familiar phrase fell upon my ear:
“And shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.”
I stopped and heard him read, not without understanding, the whole of Marlowe’s canzonet. It carried me back from the Mississippi to the Cherwell and the Chess; but what did it mean, I wonder, to the little crowd of loafers, half white, half black, that surrounded his stall? Then, with a little more patter, he modulated into
“As it fell upon a day
In the merry month of May,”
and I left him stumbling over the accentuation of
“King Pandion he is dead,
All thy friends are lapt in lead.”
Passing the same way half an hour later, I heard him thus deliver himself: “Here y’are—Dr. Johnson’s great work ‘Rasselas’! Seventy-five cents for ‘Rasselas’! He was Prince of Abyssinia—that’s a country in West Africa where they’s a powerful lot o’ coloured folks.” But there was, in the phrase of the country, nothing doing in “Rasselas.” I saw only one actual transaction concluded—a negro could not resist the allurement of “Doré’s Bible Gallery,” on which he lavished three shillings.
Next morning I awoke to look out upon a moist mist rising over the vast green chequer-board of rice-fields, as we approached New Orleans. |Disillusionment.| Again a country of wonderful richness, to which clumps of splendid trees gave a park-like aspect. The population seemed sparse. Little wooden churches were dotted every here and there, each with its pigmy spire—a feature not elsewhere common. The whole region, of course, was as flat as a windless sea.
But, oh! the disappointment of New Orleans! To come from the dainty pages of Cable to this roaring, clanging, ragged-edged, commonplace American city! It seemed particularly frayed and grimy, because the streets had everywhere been torn up for much-needed sewerage operations; but under the best of circumstances it must be, I should say, a city devoid of charm. In respect of mere width, Canal Street is doubtless a splendid thoroughfare; but even it, with its two or three scattered sky-scrapers and its otherwise paltry buildings, produces a raw, unfinished effect; while it is so often cluttered up with electric cars, on its six or eight tracks, as to have the air of a crowded railway-yard.
The usually truthful Baedeker tells us that “New Orleans is in many ways one of the most picturesque and interesting cities in America, owing to the survival of the buildings, manners, and customs of its original French and Spanish inhabitants.” He further states that “Canal Street divides the French quarter, or ‘Vieux Carré’ from the new city, or American quarter.” I therefore plucked up fresh hope, dodged the swarming street-cars of Canal Street, and made for a street of the “Vieux Carré,” which had at least a French name—Bourbon Street. But here my disappointment became abysmal. It is difficult to believe that the French city, with its narrow, rectangular streets and its commonplace houses, can ever have been picturesque; now, at all events, it has sunk into a rookery of grimy and dismal slums. There is still a certain pleasantness about the old Place d’ Armes (now Jackson Square), with its cathedral and its old-world red-brick Pontalba Mansions; but, for the rest, the glory of the old city has absolutely departed. Baedeker duly informs us where “Sieur George” lived, and “Tite Poulette,” and “Madame Délicieuse,” but I did not take the trouble to identify the houses. If I am ever again to read Mr. Cable with pleasure, I must forget all I saw of old New Orleans. Of only one spot in it have I a grateful recollection—namely, Fabacher’s Restaurant, in Royal Street (Rue Royale). There I partook of a “Creole Gumbo”—a soup compounded of ham, crab, shrimps, chicken, and oysters—the bouillabaisse, I take it, of Louisiana.
In the new residential quarters of the city, in St. Charles Avenue and about Audubon Park, there are, no doubt, many beautiful houses, pleasantly embowered in semi-tropical vegetation. One or two of the newest and showiest mansions, in the Spanish style of architecture, I suspected of being built after a fashion I had observed on the outskirts of Memphis—with only a “veneer” of stone. The essential structure is of wood; but an outside casing is added, consisting of rusticated blocks of stone some three or four inches thick, an air-chamber being left between the stone and the wood. Whether this method of building is found successful I cannot say. The effect is often pleasing enough, even though the Lamp of Truth may not shine conspicuous in the architecture.
A run in a river-steamer for several miles up and down the Mississippi enabled me to realize in a measure the commercial magnitude and importance of New Orleans. But what impressed me most of all in the city was its cemeteries, of which it is justly proud. They are certainly magnificent and “pretentious” cities of the dead. (The word “pretentious” is currently used in America as a term of laudation.) Yes; if you want to get buried with everything handsome about you, by all means go to New Orleans. But as a place to live in, I cannot, on short acquaintance, commend it.
A Champion of the Children.
My pleasantest memory of New Orleans is of a house on Prytania Street—cool and airy, on an evening of extreme sultriness—where a lady of Scottish name and descent was good enough to talk to me of her manifold public activities. She is an ardent Suffragist—a rarity in these climes—but, above all things, she devotes herself to the work of holding in check, so far as may be, the terrible evils of child-labour, which its rapidly growing industrialism has brought upon the South.
“It is quite true,” said Miss Graham, in answer to a question of mine, “that you may often see the black child going to school while the white child goes into the factory. The negro child is not wanted in the factories; it could not be relied on; it would fall asleep over its work. You know, I dare say, that we are now overrun in New Orleans with Southern and Eastern Europeans—Italians, Roumanians, Lithuanians, Greeks. It is their children that are the chief sufferers.”
“In what forms of employment?”
“Why, in cotton mills, stocking mills, candy factories, department stores. We got an Act some time ago forbidding the employment in factories of boys under twelve and girls under fourteen. But the proof of age required was simply a certificate from the parents! And the result was to make it appear that most boys had been born at the age of twelve, and most girls at fourteen. We are now agitating for an Act greatly increasing the penalties for employing children under age and for issuing false certificates.”
“Just before coming here,” I said, “I went into a boot-blacking ‘parlour.’ It was a long, close gallery; and there I had seen a dozen little boys working all this sweltering Sunday under a ‘boss.’ Unless he had relays of boys (which seems unlikely) they must have been at it, to my certain knowledge, for eight hours, and I don’t suppose they will shut down for another two hours at least.”
“If you had inquired,” said Miss Graham, “you would probably have found that they were all Greeks. The negro boot-blacks of New Orleans used to be quite a class by themselves—Eugene Field has written a poem about them. But now they have been quite ousted by the Greeks; while the negroes, in turn, have ousted the Italian organ-grinders. Yes, the boot-black boys are a bad case; but still worse is the case of the telegraph-messengers. Just think of their working young boys from six in the evening to six in the morning—sending them at all hours of the night into the lowest streets of the lowest quarters of this wicked city—and paying them two cents a message.”
“At what age do they take them?”
“Why, at any age when they can trot and have intelligence enough to find an address that is given them. And, mark you, it isn’t always—perhaps not generally—extreme poverty that makes the parents thus sacrifice their children. Often the children’s earnings will go to pay the two or two-and-a-half dollars a month demanded for a piano on the instalment system. That instalment system is a great curse to the ignorant poor. I have known a little child sent out to labour that its mother might acquire—of course at four or five times its value—what do you think?—a huge green plush album!
An Island Inferno.
“Just in these days,” Miss Graham continued, “we have had some terrible revelations of child-labour, at a certain place on the Gulf Coast, where more than 200 children, from nine years old upwards, are kept ‘shucking’ oysters for twelve hours a day, under the most horrible conditions, physical and moral. And the Law Committee of our S.P.C.C. reports that there is no remedy, because the factory law at present in force in Louisiana applies only to ‘cities or towns having a population of 10,000 or more;’ whereas this place is a little private inferno, owned by a single company and occupied solely by its serfs. But we are fighting a good fight for better laws and better conditions.”
My greatly condensed report of her conversation may lead the reader to mistake Miss Graham for a one-idea’d humanitarian. There could not be a greater error. She is an eminently practical, energetic, broad-minded young lady, with a keen sense of humour and an interest in many things outside the work to which she has devoted herself. I am sure the little children of New Orleans have in her not only a sincere but a very shrewd and efficient friend.
Miss Graham reported the relations between the white and coloured populations in New Orleans rather exceptionally good. The reason, I think, is not far to seek—namely, that the whites outnumber the blacks by about three to one. The acuteness of the problem in any given locality is apt to depend largely on the numerical proportions of the races.[[26]]
On the New Orleans street-cars the two races are kept apart, but the discrimination is certainly made with the utmost urbanity. The rear-seats of each car are marked “For Coloured Patrons Only.”
[26]. “I lay it down as a fact which cannot successfully be challenged, that the relations between the white and negro races in every State in the Union have been, and are now, controlled by considerations ultimately governed by the factor of the relative numbers of the two.’—A. H. Stone: “The American Race Problem,” p. 57.
XI
CRIME-SLAVERY AND DEBT-SERFDOM[[27]]
Montgomery, the legislative capital of Alabama, has the air of a pleasant and prosperous country town, with spacious streets, for the most part well shaded with trees. Its dignified, unpretending State House—where the Confederate Government was organized in 1861, and where Jefferson Davis took the oath as President—is admirably situated at the top of a gradually sloping hill, and commands a fine view over the rich, pleasant country. The soil in this district (and, indeed, in many parts of Alabama and Georgia) is as red as that of South Devon, and has naturally imparted its tint to the swirling Alabama river, which, when I saw it, reminded me of the rivers through which Thomas the Rhymer rode in the old ballad:
“For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Rins through the springs o’ that countrie.”
I was much disappointed not to find at his Alabama home Mr. Edgar G. Murphy, whose book on “The Present South” proves him not only a humane and judicious thinker, but one of the most accomplished living writers of America. I take this opportunity of expressing my great indebtedness to his admirable work.
My most interesting experience in Montgomery was a long talk with an intelligent and prosperous negro tradesman, whom I shall call Mr. Albert Millard. |A Contented Negro.| Mr. Millard did not, on the whole, express serious dissatisfaction with the condition of his race in the neighbourhood, and was inclined to take a hopeful view of the situation in general. “It’s the low classes of both races,” said he, “that keep us down and keep friction up.”
“In labour matters,” he went on, “no galling colour-line is drawn. In the building trade, for example, there is a white union and a coloured union, with a superior council representing both races. On Labour Day they parade together until they come to a certain point. Then one body turns to the right and the other to the left, and they finish the celebration each in its own park.”
“I wonder,” I said, “whether that may not be a type and model in miniature for the general solution of the question.”
But Mr. Millard’s note changed when I got him on the administration of justice.
Inter-Racial Justice.
“No,” he said, “we do not get justice in the courts. A negro’s case gets no fair hearing; and he is far more severely punished than a white man for the same offence. I’ll give you a little instance of the sort of thing that happens. A coloured man whom I know—a decent, quiet fellow—used to work in a livery stable. The boss one day fell a-cursing him so furiously that the man couldn’t stand it, and said he’d just as soon quit. He went into a room to take off his overalls; the boss followed him, and, without more ado, hit him over the head with an iron crowbar and knocked him senseless. When the man recovered he got out a warrant against the boss; but, instead of listening to his case, the Recorder said he might be thankful his master hadn’t killed him, and the next time he appeared in that court he would be sent to the farm.”
“Sent to the farm?”
“That means fined a sum he couldn’t pay, and sent to work it out either on the State farm or under some private employer. Oh, the State makes a big profit in this way! Suppose a man is fined 20 dollars and costs—say 25 dollars altogether—his labour being credited to him at 50 cents a day, it takes him fifty days to work out his fine. But his labour is worth far more than 50 cents a day. Private employers pay the State 60 or 70 cents a day for each convict labourer, and provide his food as well; but he is credited only with 50 cents all the same.”
“And what are they employed in for the most part?”
“Oh, farming in general—cotton, corn, potatoes, some sugar-cane. The State has lots of stock. And then there are the truck gardens (market-gardens) and the coal-mines.”
“And do you mean to say that all magistrates behave like the Recorder you spoke of?”
“When the regular Recorder is away, they select the hardest of the aldermen to take his place. There is only one court in which we think we get justice, and that is the Federal Court.”
This is one of the few points on which there is little conflict of evidence—the negro, in the main, does not get justice in the courts of the South.[[28]] |An Elective Magistracy.| The tone of the courts is exemplified in the pious peroration of the lawyer who exclaimed: “God forbid that a jury should ever convict a white man for killing a nigger who knocked his teeth down his throat!” Exceptions there are, no doubt; there are districts in which the negroes themselves report that they are equitably treated. But the rule is that in criminal cases a negro’s guilt is lightly assumed, and he is much more heavily punished than a white man would be for the same offence;[[29]] while in civil cases justice may be done between black and black, but seldom between white and black.
It would seem, too, that as a rule the negro lawyer receives scant attention in the courts. Flagrant instances of this have been related to me—too flagrant, I hope, to be typical. It is pointed out, indeed, that while negro doctors are numbered by the thousand, negro lawyers (despite the argumentative and rhetorical nature of the race) are comparatively few. The reason alleged is that, though colour is no disqualification in the courts of nature, it practically disbars in the courts of men.
In the last analysis, this condition of affairs is no doubt a sort of automatic index of the state of public sentiment in the South. The average man does not greatly desire, or does not desire at all, that scrupulous justice should be done to the negro; and an elective magistracy—elected, as a rule, for short terms—simply mirrors this attitude of mind. A Recorder who held the scales even, as between the races, would quickly become unpopular with his electorate. He must record their judgments, or he will record no longer.
But there are special causes which tend to deflect the scale against the negro, and the chief of these is the system touched upon by Mr. Millard, which makes convict labour a source of profit to the State. |Profitable Crime.| No doubt white men as well as blacks are sentenced to the “chain-gang”; but it is much more natural and simple to send a negro than a white man into judicial slavery.[[30]] Why let any pedantic rule of evidence or sentimental scruple of humanity deprive the commonwealth of a profitable serf? I find it alleged that in the year 1904 the State of Georgia made a clear profit of £45,000 out of “chain-gang” labour leased to private contractors. There is perhaps some mistake about this, since the average profit of the previous three years had been only £16,000 per annum. But even that sum is surely £16,000 too much.[[31]]
One can understand the attractions of such a system, however unreal may be the gains that accrue to the Commonwealth. It is much less easy to understand another system, expounded to me by a leading white citizen of the State of Alabama, which makes it to the interest of magistrates and other officers of the law to promote litigation, and to keep the prisons full, because of the fees it brings them—so much for issuing a warrant, so much for filing it, so much for making an arrest, so much for maintenance in prison, etc. I do not understand this system well enough to attempt to explain it; but my informant declared that on one occasion, in his own town, a temporary magistrate, who was appointed during the serious illness of the regular occupant of the bench, found the prison “stacked up” with 500 negroes. Half of them were “held” on frivolous charges, which he simply dismissed; on the other half he imposed light fines which they could pay. “These iniquities,” my friend continued, “react upon us; they cost us money, and our gaols are breeders of crime and filth and disease. But our best people see it, and they’re going to correct it.”
While such systems prevail, it is manifest that statistics of negro crime must be carefully scrutinized and largely discounted before any value can be attached to them.[[32]] |An Outlawed Race.| At the same time there is no doubt a considerable class of criminal negroes. It is natural, and indeed inevitable, that there should be. They are largely illiterate; they are for the most part poor; their white environment does all it can to lower rather than to stimulate their self-respect; the temptations of drink and drugs (mainly cocaine) beset them in many places; and when once a negro comes in conflict with the law, everything is done, not to reclaim him, but to harden him in crime. When we consider in how many respects the race is outlawed, it seems wonderful that more of them should not fall into habits of outlawry. No one can reasonably pretend, I think, that there is in the negro any innate and peculiar bent towards crime. Give him an equal chance, and he will show himself quite as ready as the white man to respect the criminal law at all events, if not, perhaps, the precepts of current morality. I cannot believe that any deep-rooted “original sin” in the African race is a serious element in the colour problem.
Meanwhile, by treating him with consistent and systematic injustice, the South is weakening and confusing her own case against the negro. In spite of many better impulses among the more enlightened of her people, her dominant instinct is to substitute for slavery a condition of serfdom. The black race is to have no indefeasible rights, but rather revocable licences to pretend to be freemen, so long as the pretence does not seriously interfere with the convenience or profit of the white race. And specially must the strictest limits be placed to the freeman’s right to work when and where he will, and even, if it suits him, to refrain from working. The South needs the negro’s labour, and is determined to have it, not on his terms, but on hers. Far more important and wide-reaching than the crime-slavery of the “chain-gang” is the system of debt-slavery or peonage, whereby a negro, becoming hopelessly indebted to a white landlord (and store-keeper), is compelled to spend the remainder of his life in working off a claim which can never be wiped out, because, for his very subsistence, he is forced to be ever renewing it. There is all the less chance of escape as accounts are kept by the landlord or his agent, and the negro is seldom in a position to check them. Until the law comes to the relief of the “peon,” and ceases to traffic in the sweat of the convict, the South, it seems to me, cannot look the negro squarely in the face.
Many Southerners, even the not unthoughtful or inhuman, make it the first and last word of their philosophy that “the nigger must be taught to know his place.” This means, on analysis, simply that he must accept his position as a serf. But no more than slavery, I take it, is serfdom permanently possible in a modern democratic State; and in so far as she fails to recognize this, the South is once more trying to put back the hands of Time.
[27]. “Two systems of controlling human labour which still flourish in the South are the direct children of slavery. These are the crop-lien system and the convict-lease system. The crop-lien system is an arrangement of chattel mortgages, so fixed that the housing, labour, kind of agriculture and, to some extent, the personal liberty of the free black labourer is put into the hands of the landowner and merchant. It is absentee landlordism and the ‘company-store’ systems united. The convict-lease system is the slavery in private hands of persons convicted of crimes and misdemeanors in the courts.”—Atlanta University Publications, No. IX. p. 2.
[28]. On the other hand, Mr. A. H. Stone (“The American Race Problem,” p. 73) cites several cases of even-handed justice as between the two races, and adds: “There is not a community in the South where such things as these do not constantly occur, but their record is buried in the musty documents of courts, instead of being trumpeted abroad.” Mr. Stone also quotes a remark by Mr. Booker Washington to the same effect.
[29]. It appears, however, that in many cases the great demand for negro labour operates in favour of the negro who has been guilty of serious crime—he escapes with a fine which is paid by his white employer, and has to be worked off. Here, for instance, is a report from the township of Prendergrass, Georgia: “The Negroes in general are in a bad shape here. There are about eighty criminals here out on bond, some for murder, some for selling whisky, some for gambling, some for carrying concealed weapons, some for shooting, and most of them are guilty, too; but their captain (i.e. employer) takes their part in court. They generally pay about $25 and work the Negro from one and a half to two years, and the Negro never knows what it cost.”—Atlanta University Publications, No. IX. p. 47.
[30]. “Besides the penitentiary convicts there were in Georgia in 1902, 2221 misdemeanour convicts undergoing punishment in county chain-gangs, of whom 103 were white males, 5 white females, 2010 coloured males, and 103 coloured females.”—Atlanta University Publications, No. IX. p. 35.
“I have seen twelve-year-old boys working in chains on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and this indiscriminate mingling of men, women and children makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 180.
[31]. Since writing this I have seen an apparently authentic statement that in 1907 the profits from the Georgia chain-gangs had gone up to $354,853, or nearly £71,000.
[32]. “According to the census of 1890,” says Mr. Kelly Miller (“Race Adjustment,” p. 97), “the negro constituted only 12 per cent. of the population, and contributed 30 per cent. of the criminals.” But he goes on to say, “No person of knowledge or candour will deny that the negro in the South is more readily apprehended and convicted on any charge than the white offender. The negro constitutes the lower stratum of society, where the bulk of actionable crime is committed all the world over.” On the other hand, Mr. E. G. Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 176) says: “Petty crimes are often forgiven him, and in countless instances the small offences for which white men are quickly apprehended are, in the negro, habitually ignored.” A negro study of negro crime (Atlanta University Publications, No. IX.) says, “It seems fair to conclude that the negroes of the United States, forming about one-eighth of the population, were responsible in 1890 for about one-fifth of the crime.” This purports to be a correction of the estimate above quoted by Mr. Kelly Miller. Complete statistics of a later date do not seem to be available; but according to the same publication, negro crime reached its maximum about 1895, when negro convicts numbered 2·33 per thousand of the whole negro population. Since then the percentage has notably decreased. In 1904 it stood at 1·78 per thousand.
XII
AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY
It is very difficult to get at the true truth as to public education for the negro in the South. The probability is, in fact, that there are as many truths as there are points of view. One high authority (a negro) told me that for every single dollar expended on a black child about five dollars are expended on a white child. That is very likely true; but it is probably no less true that the sums expended on negro education are large out of all proportion to the sums paid by negroes in taxes. “Let us reduce their education to the scale of their taxation,” I have heard it said, “and where would they be?”[[33]] The true question is: Where would the South be? Probably half-way back to barbarism.
But if we ask: Has the South neglected its plain duty towards the children of the freedmen? or has it heroically, in its poverty, devoted to the education of the black child money that could be ill spared from the beggarly education fund of the white child?[[34]] we cannot rest content with the answer, “It depends on the point of view.” On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the favourable judgment is the true one; but I should hold it with greater confidence if there had not existed in the past, and did not survive to some degree in the present, a violent feeling against the very idea of negro education. In many places white teachers of black children are to this day ostracised.[[35]] One may even say, I think, that, as a general rule, it takes some strength of mind for a white man or woman to follow the vocation of teaching negroes.
The hostility to negro education has, however, lost much of its former strength. |A Teacher of Negroes.| This is apparent from the case of Professor Patterson, head of an excellent State school for negroes in Montgomery. The Professor (a title as lightly accorded in the South as Major or Colonel) is a sturdy Scot. When he first came to the South in Reconstruction days chance led him to a county in the State of Alabama where there was, indeed, already a school, but it was kept by a negro who could neither read nor write. An educator by instinct, if not by training, Mr. Patterson determined to set up a school of his own. For this misdemeanour he was twice shot at, and was finally arrested, and put under a bond of 15,000 dollars to desist from teaching in that county. He went into another county, and started a school in the frame building that served as a negro church; but here the negroes themselves had to turn him out, as they were warned that if they did not the church would be burnt. These experiences only stiffened the professor’s backbone. He said: “I will teach—teach in Alabama—and teach negroes!” And here he is to-day, head of a fine large school in the State capital, and partially maintained by the State—a school well planned, well built, and with an excellent system of industrial training going on in various annexes in its spacious grounds.
As I passed through one of the senior school-rooms, a boy had just written on the blackboard, in a fine round hand, a quotation from a recent speech by Senator Foraker on the Brownsville affair—the affair of the negro regiment which President Roosevelt is alleged to have treated with high-handed injustice. The sentence ran: “We ask no favour for them because they are negroes, but justice for them because they are men.” Evidently there is no affectation of excluding from the schoolroom the all-absorbing problem.
Mr. Washington’s Staff.
Tuskegee (pronounced like Righi, but with the first “e” sound lengthened) is about forty miles from Montgomery, situated on an open rolling upland, with many small knolls and sudden gullies. In the course of a short drive from the station to the Institute, one passes a dignified old ante-bellum plantation-house, not without wondering what its owners of fifty years ago would have thought of the Tuskegee of to-day.
I am not going to attempt a minute description of “Booker Washington’s City,” as it has been called. It is, beyond all doubt, a wonderful place. Everywhere one sees the evidence of a great organizing capacity, a great inspiring force, a tireless, indomitable singleness of purpose—in short, a true magnanimity. I did not see Mr. Washington in his principality—I had met him some weeks earlier in the North—but the dominance of his spirit could perhaps be more clearly felt in his absence than in his presence.
Mrs. Washington I did see—a lady with the mien and manner of a somewhat dusky duchess. The observation may (or, rather, it does) seem an impertinence; but such impertinences are forced upon one by the very nature of the inquiry. Not only Mrs. Washington, but other members of the General Staff with whom I was brought in contact—for instance, Mr. Emmett J. Scott (Mr. Washington’s secretary) and Mr. Warren Logan (the treasurer of the Institute)—were far more Caucasian than African in feature, and very light in colour. Indeed, I saw no one in high position at Tuskegee who would not, with a very small lightening of hue, have been taken without question for a white man. I make the remark, however, without suggesting any deduction from it. I believe there is little evidence of any intellectual superiority of the mulatto (in all his various degrees) over the pure negro. It is often assumed as a matter of course; but those who have had the best opportunities for close comparison are quite unconvinced of it. One well-known white educator of the negro told me that for character, if not for intellect, he gave the pure black the preference over the mulatto.
Mr. J. Stevenson, who conducted me over the Institute, showed precisely the bright intelligence, the frank, unembarrassed courtesy, the quiet enthusiasm for his alma mater, which I should have expected in a senior “college boy” showing me the lions of Princeton or Cornell.
Tuskegee Institute is just twenty-seven years old. |Tuskegee.| It was opened in 1881 with one teacher (Mr. Washington) and thirty pupils. It had a grant of £400 a year from the Alabama Legislature; but it had no land and no buildings. Operations began in a dilapidated shanty and an old church, lent by the coloured people of the village.
It has now, or had two years ago, 2000 acres of land and 83 buildings, large and small. Its property, exclusive of endowment fund, is valued at about £170,000, and it has an endowment fund of a quarter of a million. It now accommodates about 1500 students, two-thirds of them male. More than 6000 students have passed through it, counting only those who have remained long enough to benefit appreciably by their course. Of these 6000 Mr. Washington declares that, after diligent inquiry (and every effort is made to keep in touch with former students), he cannot find a dozen who are not usefully employed; nor has one Tuskegee graduate been convicted of crime.
Instruction is given in thirty-seven industries, from agriculture and stock-breeding to printing and electrical engineering. Mr. Stevenson took me through the machine-room, the blacksmithing and carpentering, carriage-building, harness-making, tailoring, and shoemaking departments, the departments of agricultural chemistry, and of mechanical and architectural drawing. Mrs. Washington herself was good enough to be my guide through the women’s building (known as Dorothy Hall), with its departments of plain sewing, dressmaking and millinery, mattress-making, broom-making, basket-weaving, laundry-work, and cookery, and its model dining-rooms and parlours, furnished, arranged, and decorated by the students themselves. Everywhere I saw earnest work in progress, everywhere order, discipline, and thorough scientific method. All this had been made possible, no doubt, by white money; but the whole organization and conduct of the Institute is the work of black brains alone.
Externally, Tuskegee has none of the orderly design which one finds in the “campus” of a Northern University. It is evidently a place that has “growed.” Buildings are dotted here and there over the somewhat rugged site, with small eye to picturesqueness or dignity of general effect. Except the Carnegie Library, with its well-proportioned portico, there is no building of much architectural ambition; but the chapel or general assembly hall of the Institute struck me as showing real originality of design. I was extremely sorry not to hear one of Mr. Washington’s Sunday evening “talks” to the students in this fine hall. I had not time even to see an assembly of the whole school, in its neat blue uniform, nor to hear its singing of old negro melodies, which is said to be remarkable.
In speaking of Tuskegee architecture, one must not omit to mention that nearly all the buildings of the Institute are built by the students themselves, of bricks burnt in their own brickyard. All furniture and fittings, too, are made and repaired within the Institute. I went through one or two of the students’ dormitories; the little cubicles were simple, neat, clean, fairly comfortable, but entirely devoid of luxury or upholstery. As I have before explained, tuition is provided by endowment, while the students are supposed to pay for their board and lodging at the rate of about thirty-five shillings a month, which they are enabled to earn, wholly or in part, for themselves.
After a far too brief visit, I left Tuskegee with the liveliest admiration for its methods and results. |A Reflection and a Query.| It is beyond all question a radiating centre of materially helpful and morally elevating influences. Mr. Washington is assuredly doing a great and an indispensable work for his race; nor is he doing it in any such spirit of contempt for academic and literary culture as his critics attribute to him.
But two reflections occurred to me as I returned through the red twilight to Montgomery. The first was obvious enough—namely, that the men and women turned out by such an institution as Tuskegee cannot possibly be taken as representing the average of negro capacity. They are a select company before they go there—or, rather, in the very fact of their going there. They are impelled by individual and exceptional intelligence, thirst for knowledge, desire for betterment. Some, it is true, are sent by their parents, very much as white boys are sent to school or college; but whereas the white boy’s parents are merely following a social tradition, the black boy’s parents are taking a clear step in advance, and showing not only ambition but (in all probability) a good deal of self-denial. Almost every one, in short, who enrols himself at Tuskegee is animated from the outset by some measure of Mr. Washington’s own spirit; and not a few show, in the pursuit of knowledge, something of the heroism which marked his early career.
My second reflection took the form of a query. I did not doubt for a moment that Mr. Washington’s work was wise and salutary; but I wondered whether the material and moral uplifting of the negro was going to bring peace—or a sword. In other words, do the essential and fundamental difficulties of the situation really lie in the defects of the negro race? May not the development of its qualities merely create a new form of friction? And far beneath the qualities and defects of either race, may there not lie deep-rooted instincts which no “Atlanta Compromise” will bring into harmony?
Tuskegee marks an inevitable stage of the conflict; but is it the beginning of the end? I wonder.
[33]. It is said that in the State of Georgia the negroes pay only one-fifteenth of the taxes, but receive about one-third of the State appropriation for public schools. E. G. Murphy: “The Present South,” p. 39.
[34]. Among the native (as opposed to foreign-born) white population of the Southern States, there were in 1900 about 11 per cent. of illiterates of ten years old and upwards, as against a percentage of 4·6 for the whole United States. But this 11 per cent. showed a great improvement during twenty years; for in 1880 there were over 20 per cent. of illiterates. Among the coloured population of the same States, the illiterates in 1900 numbered about 48 per cent., as against 75 per cent. in 1880. It must be remembered that nearly 85 per cent. of the people of the South live in sparsely populated rural districts, where it is difficult for the schoolmaster to reach the children or the children the schoolmaster. In the whole United States, the annual expenditure per head of the pupils in average attendance at public schools is over $21, whereas in Alabama and the Carolinas it is only $4·50; yet in these States 50 per cent. of the whole State revenues for general purposes is appropriated to public education. See an admirable paper in “The Present South,” by Edgar Gardner Murphy. At the close of the war, says Mr. Murphy, “the South—defeated, impoverished, desolate—was forced to assume the task of providing for the education of two populations out of the poverty of one.”
[35]. This is so in Atlanta, according to Mr. Stannard Baker. I cannot resist quoting from Mr. Baker’s book a letter written by “a well-to-do white citizen” to a South Carolina newspaper, apologizing for an act of courtesy to a negro school—
“I had left my place of business here on a business trip a few miles below; on returning I came by the above-mentioned school (the Prince Institute, coloured), and was held up by the teacher and begged to make a few remarks to the children. Very reluctantly I did so, not thinking that publicity would be given to it, or that I was doing anything that would offend any one. I wish to say here and now that I am heartily sorry for what I did, and I hope after this humble confession and expression of regret that all whom I have offended will forgive me.”
Was there ever a more abject document?
XIII
HAMPTON: AN AFTERMATH
After the daughter, the mother. Being again in America this year (1909), I stole a few days for a run into Virginia and a visit to Hampton, the fount and origin of the whole movement for the industrial training of the coloured race. It is perhaps well to take Tuskegee before Hampton, just as, in visiting English Universities, it would be well to take Liverpool or Birmingham before Oxford or Cambridge.
Hampton is on historic ground, and looks over still more historic waters. It stands at the tip of the peninsula formed (roughly speaking) by Chesapeake Bay to the east and north and the James River to the west and south. Yet not quite at the tip; for the spit of land which Captain John Smith in 1608 named Point Comfort runs some two miles further to the southward, and forms a sort of breakwater for Hampton Roads. The spit of land, now known as Old Point Comfort, is entirely given over to two great establishments—Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the war, and the Hotel Chamberlin, one of those huge American caravanserais which are devoted to the cultivation partly of health, partly of sport, and wholly of fashion. The Chamberlin, despite its Pompeian swimming-bath and its circular dancing-pavilion built out over the waters of the sound, is not quite so extensive or so sumptuous as the Virginia Hot Springs Hotel, to say nothing of the Ponce de Leon and other palaces of Florida; but its life has a colour of its own, due to the large infusion of artillery officers from the Fort, which is but a stone’s throw away. The coming and going of the great white river-steamers, too, lends animation to the scene. Old Point is a meeting-place for these floating hotels, hailing from New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond. Moreover, there is plenty of shipping in the Roads, consisting for the most part of the great four- and five-masted schooners which still abound in these waters. Some six miles up the estuary to the westward rise the immense coal elevators of Newport News, with its navy-yard; while to the southward, on the further shore, towards Norfolk, one can dimly descry a city of towers and domes, the buildings of the Jamestown Exhibition of 1907. Altogether, despite the flatness of the coasts, this confluence of great estuaries with the Atlantic has a nobility and beauty of its own. The sky-effects are marvellous.
In Pastures Green.
Twenty minutes in the electric car carry you from the Chamberlin to Hampton Institute, from valetudinarianism and luxury, time-killing and life-killing,[[36]] to industry, frugality, character-building and—in far more than a theologic sense—soul-saving. The Institute is divided from the little town of Hampton (with its church built in 1660, of English bricks) by a wide creek, known as the Hampton River, which was populous, when we passed it, with negro oyster-dredgers. On a spacious campus, bordering on this creek, stand the buildings of the Institute—looking out upon the very reach of the Roads where the fight between the Merrimac and the Monitor opened a new chapter in naval history. Both banks of the creek are well-wooded, and the white houses, with their wide verandahs deep-set in the tender green of early spring, gave the scene a semi-tropical air. It needed only a few palm-trees to transport one to Florida. The campus, too, is rich in flowering shrubs. A marvellous rose-tree in full bloom almost covered the office-building; hard by, a great bush of wisteria (standard, not climbing) made the air heavy with scent; and tulip-trees and climbing wisteria were to be seen at every turn. In the exquisite amenity of its site lies one great contrast between Hampton and Tuskegee. The red and gully-gashed Alabama upland, where Booker Washington has established his city, is unkempt, almost untimbered, and as nearly bleak as any place can be in that southern climate; whereas the Hampton student may sing with literal truth:—
“The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want;
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green; He leadeth me
The quiet waters by.”
But as I watched the negroes plunging their dredgers into the mud of Hampton Creek, I could not but wonder whether the downs of Tuskegee might not be the healthier habitation.
The Pious Founder.
The fundamental contrast, however, between the two institutions lies in the fact that at Tuskegee the organizing and teaching staff is all black (or brown), at Hampton all white.[[37]] The founder of Hampton, General S. C. Armstrong, was born in the Sandwich Islands in 1839, the son of a missionary. He was a man of extraordinary strength and vitality, a muscular Christian in the fullest sense of the term. In the war, he commanded a negro regiment,[[38]] and after the war he put aside all opportunities of personal gain and advancement to devote himself to the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau. This brought him to Hampton; and here, in April, 1868, he opened his school, with one assistant teacher and fifteen pupils. Next year the attendance increased to sixty-six, and in 1870 the Institute received a charter (but no endowment) from the Virginia Legislature. In 1878 it was decided to admit Indians as well as negroes, and now about ten per cent. of the students belong to the aboriginal tribes. Armstrong had immense difficulties to contend with. The whole of the money for his enterprise had to be raised by his personal exertions; and the value of his idea—the value of negro education in general and industrial training in particular—was not then a tested fact, but remained to be proven in the face of much scepticism. A minor difficulty lay in the prejudice of the negroes themselves against manual training. This was still, in their eyes, the badge of servitude; and they were apt to rebel when, asking for Greek, they were given a hoe. With indomitable energy and geniality, however, Armstrong stuck to his task; and when, early in the nineties, he was stricken with paralysis, Hampton was already a great institution, and Tuskegee was firmly founded.
At Hampton there are now 113 buildings (65 of them of considerable size) and a home farm of 120 acres; while at Shellbank, six miles away, the school owns a farm of over 600 acres, with 150 head of cattle, 30 horses and mules, 100 hogs, and fowls by the thousand. The students enrolled in the Institute number 863, while the Whittier Preparatory School has nearly 500 pupils. In addition to all branches of agriculture and horticulture, fifteen trades are taught to boys, while girls are thoroughly trained in every form of domestic industry, laundry-work, dressmaking, etc. The teaching and organizing staff numbers about 200, or one to every six pupils. It is the deliberate policy of the Institute to seek for increase of efficiency rather than of numbers, and the entrance tests are correspondingly severe.
The Principal, Dr. H. B. Frissell, was unfortunately absent when I visited Hampton. |A Tour of the Institute.| I had met him a year before at Memphis, and learnt to appreciate his quietly commanding personality. Mrs. Frissell received us most courteously in the very beautiful old plantation-house which is now the Principal’s residence. A patriarchal hospitality is the tradition at Hampton, and we were cordially invited to remain, if not a week, at least a night. But a few hours were all we could spare; and the chaplain, Dr. Herbert Turner, very kindly constituted himself our guide.
He took us first to “the soul of the institution,” the Memorial Church, externally a fine building, internally, to my mind, memorably beautiful. It is a cruciform structure of romanesque style; but the arms of the cross are so short that they may be called apses rather than nave and transepts, and the great body of the space is covered by the dome. The four great arches are magnificent in their airy dignity, and the material, red and cream brick, is at once simple and beautiful. The doctrine here preached is entirely undenominational. The students are encouraged to adhere to their own denominations, “as they will thus be best able to serve the communities to which they return.” The official designation of the building is simple—“The Church of Christ in Hampton Institute”—and after several hours’ talk with Dr. Turner, I feel sure that his flock will imbibe from him no harsh or illiberal theology.
“We lay the greatest stress first and last,” he said, “on character-building. It is not the clever self-seeker that we look for and encourage—not the youth whose aim is personal success and money-making. It is the service he is to do to his people that we keep constantly before the student’s mind; and with the great majority that is actually and effectively the dominant idea. Many of them, of course, are training to be teachers; but all of them feel that they can teach indirectly in their different communities, by uprightness in life and efficiency in work. We follow carefully the careers of our students, and I am able to say that 83 per cent. of those who are now out in the world are Christian men and women, not merely in the sense of church-membership, but of the practical Christianity which is known by its fruits. We are especially careful to cultivate mutual kindliness and good feeling among teachers and pupils alike. It was a saying of General Armstrong’s that ‘cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy,’ and we still take that view.”
“Have you many students,” I asked, “who are supported by comparatively well-to-do parents?”
“Very few,” Dr. Turner replied; “and we do not particularly care for that class of young man or woman. All new students have to bring with them a registration-fee of ten dollars, and eleven dollars for one month’s board; but the great majority of them need little more than that, for they are immediately put to various sorts of unskilled work by which they are enabled to earn from fifteen to twenty dollars a month, and so can not only pay their current board bills, but lay up a sum to meet the expenses of the next year, when they go into the day-school or into trades in which, during their apprenticeship, they are unable to earn anything. You remember how Booker Washington, when he first presented himself, was so ignorant that he was almost rejected; but when he was told, by way of trial, to clean a room, the superintendent noticed that the dark corners were as thoroughly cleaned as the most visible parts, and accepted him on the strength of that observation.”
We were now in the boot- and harness-making division of the Trade School building. Pursuing the theme of thoroughness suggested by the anecdote of Booker Washington, Dr. Turner continued—
Principles and Methods.
“We insist that every student shall become highly skilled in whatever trade or pursuit he takes up; but we allow him to acquire a partial and rough-and-ready knowledge of other crafts subsidiary to his own. For instance, it is found that the individual harness-maker cannot compete with factory work, so that few students now take a complete course in that craft; but a boy who becomes a thoroughly skilled shoemaker also learns so much of harness-making as to render him an efficient repairer. In the same way our thoroughly trained carpenters also acquire a certain amount of skill in bricklaying, plastering, painting, and tinsmithing; and the girls, in addition to complete instruction in house-work, laundry-work, dressmaking and cooking, also learn something of simple carpentry, paper-hanging, painting, and the repairing of tinware, shoes, etc. In small villages and country districts it is very important to know something of everything as well as everything of something.”
“And where, amid all this, does academic study come in?”
“Students in their first year who are working for wages attend the night-school only. After that, if they are training for teachers, they enter the day-school, and devote only a minor portion of their time to manual work. But we take care that those who are mainly engaged in handicrafts and agriculture do not neglect their mental development on the academic side; and we find, with scarcely an exception, that the boy who does the best work in the classroom does the best work at the bench. The annual cost of academic training (apart from board, etc.), is seventy dollars, or £14, of industrial training, thirty dollars, or £6. To many of our students, in accordance with their abilities and their necessities, we are able to allot scholarships which cover these fees; but we are greatly in need of more such scholarships. For the general needs of the institution an endowment fund of three million dollars is required; but as yet we have been able to raise only about half that sum. The United States Government pays a small sum for each of the Indians whom it sends to the Institute; but it does not cover their expenses.”
“And how do the negroes and the Indians get on together?”
“Without the slightest friction. They live in separate houses—there is the Wigwam, the home of the Indian boys, and nearer the river is Winona Lodge, the Indian girls’ dormitory. But you have seen them working side by side in the workshops, and you will see them presently dining side by side in Virginia Hall.”
“A Changed Ideal.”
Dr. Turner took us through the very interesting Indian Museum, used also as a lecture-hall, and through the beautiful and admirably equipped Huntington Memorial Library, containing, among other things, one of the largest existing collections of books on the negro race and its problems.
“Do you find,” I asked, “that many of your students come to you with the idea that book-learning is a more dignified and desirable thing than manual training?”
“No,” was the reply; “that particular form of ignorance is rapidly passing away. But now and then students come to us with ambitions which we can scarcely encourage. A good many years ago now, a boy presented himself with the announcement that he wanted to be trained for the career of a prize-fighter. We did not reject him, but we found means of modifying his aspirations. He proved to be an unusually intelligent youth, and at the end of his course was chosen the valedictorian of his class. The subject of his address was ‘A Changed Ideal.’ He is now the head of an agricultural college.”
A Happy Family.
Our perambulation of the Institute was interrupted by the bugle call summoning us to midday dinner in Virginia Hall, a building partly “sung up” by a travelling band of Hampton singers. The beautiful quality of the students’ voices was manifest in the short grace which they sang. We went through not only the dining-hall, but the kitchen, and were much struck by the brilliant cleanliness and neatness of all the arrangements, the rapidity of the service, and the appetizing appearance of the meal. The young men and girls sit together at the same tables, a lively, talkative, but well-mannered company—with enviable appetites, if one may judge by the rapidity with which dishes were sent back to the kitchen to be replenished. I noticed that for the most part, though not strictly, the Indians and the negroes kept to separate tables. None of the white instructors took part in the meal.
Hampton was the only negro college or school I ever visited in which I saw no student who could have passed as white. There was, indeed, one singularly beautiful girl with auburn hair, who might have been taken for a European of peculiarly rich colouring; but she was of Indian, not of negro, blood. There must, I think, have been some reason for the absence of “white negroes” at Hampton; but I had not time to inquire into it. We bade an unwilling farewell to our kind hosts, and departed deeply impressed by the spirit and achievement of this noble institution.
XIV
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
Birmingham, Alabama, is a city not yet forty years old; yet it numbers, with its suburbs, 150,000 inhabitants. It is the Pittsburg of the South, the centre of a great and rapidly growing iron and steel industry. But as yet it has not created anything of a “black country” around it. From the roof of its splendidly equipped and organized High School I saw nothing in its environment but pleasant wooded hills and flourishing “residential” suburbs. The city itself has spacious streets, handsome shops, at least two first-class hotels, a fine Court House, and an excellent streetcar service. There is far less rawness in Birmingham than in many American cities three times its age.
A very remarkable feature of the town is the splendid Union Station now in course of completion. Among the most conspicuous proofs of the prosperity of the South are the spacious and handsome railway stations, which are everywhere replacing the grimy old shanties of the past. In almost all, as though by special word of command, the Spanish Mission style of architecture is adopted, with its two towers crowning either end of the structure. This Union Station at Birmingham was perhaps the finest I saw; but the new station at Atlanta runs it hard; and Charleston, Jacksonville, even little Vicksburg, have all handsome and commodious stations. Each has its separate entrance, waiting-rooms, ticket-office, etc., “for White Passengers” and “for Coloured Passengers.” In some the colour-line is very palpably drawn in the shape of a thick brass rod running across the main hall, or “concourse,” and dividing it into two (unequal) portions. One end of this rod runs into the news-stand, the other into the ticket-office; so that in each of these departments both races can be served by one staff of clerks. Wherever I observed this rod, it was no provisional or movable device, but fixed as the foundations of the building.
Two little traits which I noted in the streets of Birmingham are perhaps worth reproducing. The first was a parcel-van with the legend—
IMPERIAL LAUNDRY
WE WASH FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY.
Tho second was a placard inspired by a more catholic spirit. It ran: “Largest glass of beer in the city, for White or Coloured, 5 cents.”
Dr. Phillips, Superintendent of the Birmingham Public Schools, was kind enough to take me over the really magnificent High School building above mentioned, in which, by the way, manual and industrial training is as largely provided for as literary training. |The Young Idea.| In Dr. Phillips’s opinion, compulsory education is now well within sight in Alabama. They have already, he said, in the Birmingham district, approximately the school accommodation required under a system of compulsion. From a statistical report it appears that the number of “seats” provided in the nine white schools of the city is 4903, while in the four negro schools only 1607 are provided; whereas it would seem that the negro population is little, if at all, less numerous than the white. Indeed, the same report points to the inadequate accommodation for coloured pupils as an evil calling for prompt remedy. I note with interest that in the school year ending June, 1907, the “Cases of Corporal Punishment” are set down as “White: 57. Negro: 432.” As the average daily attendance of negroes was less than half that of the whites, these figures mean a ratio of something like sixteen to one. On the other hand, when we come to “Cases of Suspension” we find, “White: 105. Negro: 9.” It is clear that totally different systems of discipline are applied to the two races.
On the question of the relative mental capacity of white and coloured children Dr. Phillips holds decided views.
“Whatever the anthropologists may report,” he says, “the black race is to all intents and purposes a young race; therefore it is imitative. The black child has a good word-memory and a good eye-memory. He will often learn by rote quicker than a white child—but it is a different thing when it comes to understanding what he learns. Such an imitative function as writing comes at least as easy to the negro as to the white; but in anything that requires reasoning—in mathematics, for instance—the negro soon falls behind.”
There is a general agreement, I may say, as to the remarkable brightness of the young negro child, and a scarcely less general agreement as to the fact that this brightness does not usually last far into the teens. Some theorists tell you that the sutures of the skull close earlier in the black than in the white, and thus do not leave room for brain expansion. In the West Indies it is said that precocious sexual development checks the mental growth of the negro. On the other hand, negro investigators seek to show that the difference, in so far as it is not purely imaginary, arises from such accidental causes as the inferior nutrition of the average black child.
Dr. Phillips differs from some other authorities in holding the mulatto distinctly superior in mental capacity to the pure black.[[39]] As to industrial training, he admits its value for the negro, but adds that an undue proportion of the race, even when brought up to a trade, manifests an invincible preference for “some sort of teaching or preaching”—in a word, for an easier life.
It seemed as though all my introductions in Birmingham, save that to Dr. Phillips, were to be of no avail. |A Character.| One gentleman had gone to Kansas, another had gone to a picnic, a third had gone where not even an inquisitive journalist could follow him—at least for the present. I had packed my “gripsack” in preparation for an early start on the morrow, when my telephone bell rang, and a visitor was announced. It was the gentleman who had gone to Kansas; and to his timely return, and kind promptitude in calling on me, I owe one of the most interesting hours of all my pilgrimage. He stated few facts, and some of these I have already mentioned in other contexts; he was very chary of pronouncing judgments; but he gave me a charming glimpse of Southern (though certainly not typical Southern) character.
A man of middle height, with a clear-cut, aquiline, rather careworn face, and iron-grey hair. His features would certainly not strike you at first sight as beautiful, or even as distinguished; you might class him, in a crowd, as a well-to-do farmer; but ten minutes’ talk brought out a curious distinction and charm in his face. It reminded me, vaguely, of portraits of Cardinal Newman. He looked far older than his years—at least, I found myself treating him with the deference due to marked seniority, and was amazed when it appeared that he was three years my junior. He had taken life earnestly, strenuously; he had been very successful in his business career, and he felt his success, not as an end achieved, but as an obligation imposed; so much I very soon made out from his slow, reflective, simple, and open-hearted talk.
“I’m ve’y much attached, sir,” he said, “to the negro race. My father was a large slaveholder, and he had a passion for them. He selected and bought ve’y fine types of negroes. Fo’ myself, I have now an entirely negro household, and they are all of them devoted to my wife and to my children. Fo’ instance, we have in our house a coloured woman of fo’ty-five or fifty—an old maid and a ve’y clever woman indeed—who is passionately attached to my youngest daughter.”
It was curious to find such an old-time, antebellum household subsisting in the go-ahead, intensely modern city of Birmingham. I felt, however, that this casual survival had very small bearing upon the problems of the present or future; so I tried to get at my visitor’s feeling on some of the burning topics of the actual situation.
Almost in vain. He would not express himself either for or against the “Jim Crow car,” though he was emphatic on the iniquity, which President Roosevelt also has recently denounced, of giving negroes inferior accommodation for the same rates as those charged to the whites. Not even on the question of “miscegenation” would he give a decided personal view.
The Mills of God.
“I feel,” he said, “that these people have been left on our hands through no fault of their own, and that it is our duty to do the best we can for them, each in his own way. It is the business of some people to think out theoretical questions; but that is not my business. I try to do what practical good I can from day to day—and that keeps my hands pretty full. As for such questions as that of social equality or inequality, they will settle themselves in time, through the thinkers and professional men of both races. Solutions will be found for many problems that now seem terribly difficult, if both races will only have patience. You know,
‘God worketh in mysterious ways,
His wonders to perform.’
—these lines often come back to me.
“Many whites in the South,” he went on, “have hitherto held aloof from the negro cause, because they felt that the negro regarded them with suspicion and preferred to look for help to the North. That feeling is now passing away on both sides.”
He had, naturally, no sympathy with the idea of supplanting negro labour with imported European labour. “Even if there were nothing else against it,” he said, “it is bad business policy. The Italians have carried four hundred million dollars out of the country in [I forget what space of time], whereas the earnings of the negro remain in the country. Sixty-five per cent. of the raw material produced in this district is mined by negroes.”
Judge Not, that Ye be not Judged.
I tried in vain even to get at what he regarded as the chief mistakes made by white people in dealing with negroes—at the reasons, for instance, why such households as his own were now such rare exceptions. He could not be got to pass any judgments, even on his own race. The nearest he came to it was in this speech, which I reproduce almost word for word:
“My wife is a ve’y beautiful woman. Other ladies say to her, ‘Oh yes, Mrs. ——, you get on with yo’ negroes because yo’ beautiful an’ yo’ rich—but it’s ve’y diffe’ent with us.’ But seems to me ’tisn’t he’ beauty no’ he’ wealth that makes the diffe’ence—’tis he’ ha’at.
“As to those questions you ask me,” he said, as we were parting, “I read a’ticles upon them with great interest—oh yes, su’, with great interest and profit. But what is happening now is to me of mo’ impo’tance than what may possibly happen fifty years hence.
“You are going to Atlanta? Then you will see Judge Mansfield. He can tell you far more than I can on all these matters.”
I did see Judge Mansfield, and he did tell me more.
[36]. “The Hotel Chamberlin has a shooting preserve of 10,000 acres on the Chickahominy River (quail, duck, wild turkey, woodcock, snipe).”—Baedeker.
[37]. The ratio of instructors to pupils is as high as one to six.
[38]. It is related of him that, while sedulously instructing his men to take cover, he would deliberately “pitch his own tent under fire,” excusing himself on the ground that “the morale of the coloured troops required it—they would do anything for a man who showed himself superior to fear.”
[39]. This is also the view of Mr. W. B. Smith (“The Colour-Line,” p. 127), who says: “Then comes a race of mongrels of average mental powers higher than the lower breed, with exceptions little lower than the higher.” See p. 108.
XV
THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS
The quaintly named “Seaboard Air Line” carries you from Birmingham to Atlanta, Georgia, for the most part through a region of fresh and woody highlands, with blue mountains on the southern horizon. The woods consist of pine and leaf trees about evenly mixed. Large tracts of them, unfortunately, have been ruthlessly hewn or burnt away—that crime against the future so prevalent in America.
Atlanta is finely situated at an elevation of about 1000 feet above the sea, on a billowy upland which has earned for it the name of “the city of a hundred hills.” The guide-book states that it is “laid out in the form of a circle”; but to the casual observer it seems to lack the usual regularity of plan. It has many spacious streets and handsome buildings, with the usual sprinkling of sky-scrapers. Its Park Lane or Fifth Avenue is named Peachtree Street, and is a really beautiful winding road, with handsome houses on either hand, shadowed by fine trees. It was hard to believe that this well-built, bright, busy, windy city had, only eighteen months before, been the scene of a sanguinary riot, almost a massacre, in which many innocent coloured people lost their lives.
The population of Atlanta is a little over 100,000, about 40 per cent. being coloured. |Gunpowder and Fire.| Most of the white people, I was told, come of a mountain stock, who never held slaves or came in contact with the negro before the war. Hence there is even less of mutual comprehension between the races here than elsewhere.
The riot was the outcome of a political campaign, in which negrophobia had been carefully worked up with a view to securing votes—yellow journalism aiding with inflammatory headlines. Then came a series of five or six outrages on women within twenty-four hours. Two of them, perhaps, were genuine; the rest were figments of hysterical imagination. The papers came out with edition after edition, piling horror on horror’s head; the saloons seethed with virtuous and highly alcoholized indignation; and some trifling incident sufficed to let loose the bloodthirsty frenzy of the mob. The police judiciously made themselves scarce, and for four days there was no law in Atlanta.
It is admitted on all hands that not one of those who were killed was even suspected of any crime. The mob went from unprotected house to house, ostensibly searching for firearms. But it kept carefully to parts of the city where it knew it would meet with no real resistance. It did not go down into the negro quarter; it avoided the criminal negro, whose criminality might have gone the length of “putting up a fight.” It preferred to harry the respectable and law-abiding coloured person, and “teach him his place.”
Atlanta is now very sorry for its sport. Its better people, of course, reprobated and deplored the riot from the first; but even the average man soon realized what it had cost the city. Its credit was shaken; there was an immediate fall in real estate and rise in wages. In no community does the sane element favour such outbreaks; but I had only to think of my Memphis bookseller to realize that nowhere in the South is the point very far distant at which the insane element may get out of hand.
There were fears of an outbreak last Christmas, and if it had come it would have been a very different matter, for the negroes were armed to the teeth.
Nor did my talk with Judge Mansfield (as I shall call him) altogether reassure me. |A Friend of the Negro.| The Judge is one of the leading citizens of the State, and took a prominent part in a sort of conciliation movement which immediately followed the riot. He is a man well advanced in years, was himself a slaveholder before the war, and is full of the warm Southern sentiment for the “old-time negro.” He is well known among white people as a friend of the coloured race and a defender of its rights. I do not know whether the negroes themselves rank him high among their champions.
He seemed to me more concerned with injustices done by the North to the South than with injustices done by the South to the negro. “Sherman said, ‘War is hell,’” so he led off; “but there is a worse state than hell, and we passed through that state. It was called Reconstruction.”[[40]]
As to that, however, he was content to let bygones be bygones. His real complaint was of the immediate past and present—of the ignorant intermeddling of Northern folk in Southern affairs, the ignorant and contemptuous criticisms of the Northern Press.
“The other day,” he said, “Mr. Smith, a Congregationalist minister—I’m a Baptist myself, but I have a great respect for the Congregationalists—Mr. Smith came to me and said, ‘I hear that the coloured people in your town are sending their children to school in flies and waggons rather than let them ride in the street-cars. What am I to say to my people in the North about that?’ ‘I suggest, sir,’ was my reply, ‘that you should tell them it is none of their business.’”
He was absolutely opposed in theory to lynching, but seemed hopeless of its being put down so long as outrages on women continued. Here, again, his last word was a tu quoque to the North: “I addressed a meeting in Ohio last year, and I said to them, ‘Here in Ohio you have 2 per cent. of negroes; in Georgia we have 47 per cent.; yet you have lynchings here, not so many fewer than ours. Until we have twenty-three times as many as you have, I don’t see that you have anything to say to us.’”
His account of negro morality was very low, and he maintained that the negro Churches could do little to check it, because at least 25 per cent. of the preachers—in some places a much larger percentage—lived as loosely as their flocks. I found other Southern white men of opinion that the influence of the negro Church was, on the whole, a bad influence.
But it was on the necessity for absolute social separation between the races that Judge Mansfield was most emphatic. |“I would Brain him.”| “Jim Crow” regulations, he declared, are essential to prevent constant breaches of the peace. “If a big black man got into the street-car and pressed up against my wife, I would brain him!”
And again: “I was staying with a friend in Ohio last year—a man of wealth and position—in a place where there are several well-to-do coloured people, and where coloured children go to the same school with the whites. I said to my host, ‘Does your wife take her coloured lady friends driving with her?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, because she doesn’t want to.’ ‘Your boy has a rig?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does he ask the coloured girl friends he made at school to drive out with him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to.’ ‘I’ll tell you why he doesn’t want to, and you don’t want him to. It’s because, if he did, the girl’s brother would come to you, and say, “I want to marry your daughter”—and you would brain him!”
A third time this phrase occurred in the Judge’s conversation—I forget the precise context, but it referred to another instance of negro presumption.
I felt that, after all, the key to the Atlanta riot was not so far to seek; nor could I feel in the spirit of Judge Mansfield any absolute guarantee against the recurrence of such unpleasantnesses. None the less do I remember him with kindness and respect. He was as fine a type of the Southern gentleman of the old school as any I met in my travels.
That evening I spent at Atlanta University with Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois. Twilight fell as we stood on the eminence which is crowned by the University buildings, and looked out over a wide expanse of red Georgian landscape. |Atlanta University.| The sunset had left behind it a delicate rosy flush, and, just where it paled off into greenish blue, the slender crescent of a new moon hung in the sky, with a glorious planet above it. Behind us lay the city, with its 60,000 white men ready to “brain” its 40,000 black and brown men on the slightest provocation. Before us lay the silent country and the ineffable peace of heaven. A mood of deep melancholy fell upon me as I reflected that under the silence of the country the same passions were vibrating, and that the peace of heaven was nearer, at any rate to this generation, than any peace on earth.
The influence of the immediate surroundings, too, had something to do with my mood. About Atlanta University there is nothing of the cheerful energy and optimism of Tuskegee. This is a home of intellectual culture; and intellectual culture, however necessary, can scarcely be exhilarating to the negro race at this stage of its history. The more you strive to break through the veil (to use Mr. Du Bois’ favourite metaphor), the more keenly are you conscious of its galling and darkening encumbrance. For assuredly it galls and darkens, whether it be a real barrier or a figment conjured up by the pride and folly of man.
At all events, his culture, which is great, and his genius, which is not small, have not made of Mr. Du Bois a happy man. With perfect simplicity, without an atom of pose, he is and remains a singularly tragic figure. |Professor Du Bois.| He is, perhaps, more impressive than his book, able as that is. In some of its pages we are conscious of a little rhetorical shrillness; but there is nothing of this in the man. He is perfectly urbane and dignified; there is nothing of the apostle, and still less of the martyr about him. He regards and discusses phenomena with the calm of the trained sociologist. But beneath his calm one is conscious of a profound bitterness of spirit. If he is hopeful at all, it is for a day that he will never see; and, in a man still in the prime of life, such hope is not very different from despair.
I met no man in the South with whom I felt more at ease, or seemed to have more in common. And yet, as we talked, there lurked in my mind a sense of hypocrisy, almost of treachery. I could not frankly expose to him my doubts as to whether the stars in their courses did not fight against his racial ideal.
Of his very interesting conversation I shall here record only a few fragments.
“The problem in the South,” he said (almost echoing Mr. Shipton, of Louisville), “is not that of the vagabond or the criminal, but of the negro who is coming forward. That is why even the good people of the South are taking their hands off, saying, ‘We can’t do anything.’
“The older generation of negroes had friends among the white people of their own age; but the boys and girls now growing up have no white friends. The younger white people have no feeling towards the negro but dislike, founded on utter lack of comprehension.
“The race antipathy is fomented in the schools. The progressive negro is held up as a bugbear to the white child, who is told to ‘Look out, or he will get ahead of you!’ Fear, jealousy, and hatred are actively taught to the rising generation of whites. But, after all, they are being taught something, and that’s more than their fathers were. Where intelligence increases there is always hope.”
At one point I did come near to hinting to Mr. Du Bois the doubt lurking in my mind. I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”
“Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites (in the South), they feel acutely the false position in which the negro problems place them.... But ... the present social position of the negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded; if there were nothing to charge against the negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?”
“Now, tell me, Mr. Du Bois,” I said, “whatever these people may say, is it not really just the other way about? The ignorance, shiftlessness, etc., are manifestly temporary and corrigible; is it not precisely the ‘blackness and other physical peculiarities’ that are the true crux of the problem?”
Mr. Du Bois smiled. “No,” he said; “that is the point of view of the outsider, the foreigner. The Southerner, brought up among negroes, has no such feeling.[[41]] In using the argument I there attribute to him he is perfectly sincere.”
I refrained from pressing the point, but Mr. Du Bois’ answer did not quite meet my difficulty. I had no doubt of the Southerner’s sincerity; what I questioned was rather his self-knowledge, or (perhaps I should say) his reading of race psychology. And that doubt, I own, remains.
If the Ethiopian could but change his skin, how trifling would be the problem raised by his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime!
[40]. This typical Southern view is forcibly expressed by Mr. Thomas Nelson Page: “The history of that period, of the Reconstruction period of the South, has never been fully told. It is only beginning to be written. When that history shall be told, it will constitute the darkest stain on the record of the American people.... They took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigour of intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just elevated their race in the sight of mankind, and placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern history.”—“The Negro: the Southerner’s Problem,” pp. 243, 246.
[41]. Another negro writer, Mr. W. H. Thomas (“The American Negro,” p. 295), is still more emphatic on this point: “That colour is the prime cause of American prejudice against negroes is not to be believed for one moment. Every shred of authentic evidence disproves conclusions so preposterous.” Mr. Thomas goes on to argue that the condition of “the low class of whites” in the South is “infinitely inferior to that of the lowest plantation negro.” Somewhat similar is the view of a clergyman who writes to me from Clyde, Kansas: “The problem is simply one of caste, and the negro is the extreme example of the labour caste. The problem is one of aristocracy whatever the colour of the plebeians.... Whatever its professions, the South is still pro-slavery. It wants the negro, but it wants him as a slave. And it would want to enslave any other race that came to take his place.” Both of these views seem to me so manifestly paradoxical and excessive that I venture to maintain the position taken up in the text. At the same time, I would not be understood to mean that the difficulty lies in colour alone, apart from the “other physical peculiarities.” On this point a gentleman in Port Arthur, Texas, writes to me: “I have long had a feeling that negrophobia is not a matter of colour.... No, the thing that rouses a blind disgust—not superficial, not capricious, but deep-rooted—is the body odour, the flat nose, the thick lips, the suggestion of ‘slobber’ in the voice and the mouth-movements, together with the unnatural hair and the animalism of bodily contour at many points. I have often thought that some accidental discovery may at any moment put it in the African’s power to remove the dark pigment from his skin: if this ever happens, it will, I think, be found that the real repulsiveness of the negroid type has been merely unveiled, not dissipated.”
Let me take this opportunity of saying that to the best of my belief the “body odour” of which we hear so much is mainly a superstition. The fact probably is that the negro ought to be at least as scrupulous in his ablutions as the white man—but often is not.
XVI
PROHIBITION
Every one agrees that the most remarkable phenomenon in the recent history of the South is the “wave of prohibition” which has passed, and is passing, over the country. “There are 20,000,000 people in the fourteen Southern States, 17,000,000 of whom are under prohibitory law in some form.” “Yes, sir,” says Mr. Dooley, “in the sunny Southland ’tis as hard to get a dhrink now as it wanst was not to get wan.... Why, Hinnissy, I read th’ other day iv a most unfortunate occurrence down in Texas. A perfectly respectable an’ innocent man, of good connexions, while attemptin’ to dhraw a revolver to plug an inimy, was hastily shot down be th’ rangers, who thought he was pullin’ a pocket-flask. Is no man’s life safe against th’ acts iv irresponsible officers iv the law?”
Georgia led the way in “State-wide” prohibition, by a law which came into force on January 1, 1908. This law nominally affected only fifteen counties, since 135 out of the 150 counties in the State had already “gone dry” under local option. But its importance is not to be measured by the mere number of the counties affected; it lies in the stoppage of the “jug trade” between “wet” counties and “dry.”
Alabama and Mississippi both passed Statewide prohibition laws which came into force in January, 1909. A strong fight is being made for State-wide prohibition in Tennessee, though “all but five of the ninety-six counties in the State are now ‘dry’, and only three cities—Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga—remain ‘wet.’” Though Kentucky has over £30,000,000 invested in distilleries, the saloon has been expelled from 94 out of 119 counties, and from the great majority of its towns and cities. All over the South, in fact, the same tale is being told—even where Statewide prohibition cannot as yet be carried, local option is riddling the defences of the whisky trade.
First-hand Evidence.
Of course I made it my business to inquire into the effects of this great movement, and, of course, I received many conflicting answers to my inquiries.
Many people told me, just as they would in England, that “You can’t make a man sober by Act of Parliament.” They enlarged on the evils of the “blind tiger,” or illicit saloon. They sang to me the refrain:
“Hush, little grog-shop, don’t you cry:
You’ll be a drug-store by-and-by!“
They told me of the “clubs” where each member can keep his private locker full of alcohol, and get drunk at his leisure. As for drink and the negro (they said), what is the use of keeping whisky out of his way, when in ten cents’ worth of a “patent medicine” he can find enough cocaine to make him more dangerous than could a gallon of whisky?
On the other hand, I was told of a State in which the gaol-keepers, who (strange to say) made their living out of catering for the prisoners under their charge, applied for a special “grant-in-aid” on the ground that prohibition had so depopulated their preserves that they could no longer keep body and soul together.
This, though I believe it to be true, sounded a little like a fairy-tale; so I thought I would go to headquarters for exact information. Atlanta was the only city I visited where prohibition was actually in force; so I betook me to Decatur Street Police-court, in the middle of its lowest quarters. I arrived at a fortunate moment: it happened to be the first of May, and Mr. Preston, the Clerk of the Court, was just making up his statistics for April. He took the trouble of looking up the records of the previous year for me, and gave me the following figures:
Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1907 (before prohibition), 6056.
Number of cases tried in the first four months of 1908 (after prohibition), 3139.
Convictions for drunkenness before prohibition, 1955.
Convictions for drunkenness after prohibition, 471.
“Take it all round,” said Mr. Preston, “our work has been reduced by just about one-half.”[[42]]
I afterwards attended a sitting of this Court (Judge Broyle’s), when, in a very light calendar, there was not a single case of drunkenness.
Oddly enough, no distinction of colour seemed to appear on the records, but I gathered that about 75 per cent. of the prisoners who come before Judge Broyle were negroes.
Of the negroes to whom I spoke of prohibition, all but one were strongly in its favour. That one, Dr. Oberman of Memphis, thought that more real good would be done by a “high licence.” Mr. Millard, of Montgomery, was emphatic in his approval. “I believe we’re the ones that are going to get the biggest part of the bargain,“ he said. “My people are going to have better homes and look after their families better—to pay for their schooling and pay their bills.” It is only fair to point out, however, that this was pure prophecy, since in Montgomery prohibition had not then come into force.
Being myself but a small consumer of alcohol, I was not irresistibly impelled to study the various methods of evading the liquor laws. One mild evasion of them I did come across at one of the “Country Clubs” which are such a delightful adjunct to American city life. |Club Law.| Here each member could by law have his locker; but it was found an intolerable nuisance to carry the system literally into effect. So, as a matter of fact, drinks did not come from any individual locker; they were supplied from the club cellar in the ordinary way; only the club must not be paid for them, since that would be a confession that the member ordering them had not stored them for his own use. What, then, was the method adopted? Members bought of the club books of ten-cent coupons, and with these coupons they paid the waiters who brought the drinks—not for the drinks, but for their services in bringing them! It appeared to me a complex and rather childish fiction, but probably it was no one’s business to look into its seams.
It was at this club that a Senator from an adjoining State, who had been very active in the prohibition campaign, was found one day seated before a “high-ball” of imposing dimensions. On being reproached for inconsistency, he replied: “Prohibition is for the masses, not for the classes.” A most un-American sentiment, some will say; but to my thinking characteristically American.
In Savannah, Georgia, 147 “locker clubs” were organized the day after prohibition came into force, one of them, a negro club, numbering 1700 members. But it will not be long before this evasion is dealt with. It is held by able jurists that, even under the present law, such clubs are illegal. In the mean time, I suppose they exist in Atlanta no less than in Savannah; yet, as we have seen, the work of the police court has been reduced by one-half.
As for “blind tigers,” there is no doubt that they follow in the track of prohibition laws, and that it is fairly easy, for those who know how, to procure bad liquor at high prices. |The “Blind Tiger.”| But in the first place you have got to “know how;” in the second place, even for those who know how, it costs more time, trouble, and money than it did of old, to attain the requisite exhilaration; in the third place, “blind tigers” can, and do, have their claws pared now and then. Most of the people I spoke to, at all events, admitted that the evils of the “blind tiger” are not to be compared with the constant temptations offered by the open saloon.
That these evils are serious enough, however, appears from the following brief paragraph which I cut from the Atlanta Constitution:
KILLED AT A BLIND TIGER.
Nashville (Tenn.), April 29.—“At a blind tiger on Knott Creek, Kentucky, Henry Pratt, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, shot and killed Howard Maunds, also aged thirteen. The boys were intoxicated, and the killing followed a game of cards.”
During the days I was in Atlanta, five blind-tiger keepers were prosecuted and “bound over under bonds to the city court,” one in the sum of £200, the rest in sums of £100. What this “binding over” precisely means I cannot say, but it seems to be a painful process to the animals in question, for I read that “their howls filled the court.”
One of the persons “bound over” was a doctor. It was noticed that his practice had of late increased enormously. A stream of patients resorted to his office at all hours of the day, till at last a plain-clothes officer joined the stream. The doctor told him that he was out of whisky, but could fix up a good substitute, which proved to be some form of alcohol, tinctured with syrup, to take away the crude taste. Of this beverage the officer purchased two half-pints at two different times, and then ungratefully arrested his benefactor.
On another occasion a plain-clothes officer was told off to watch a house where it was suspected that an illicit trade was carried on. Near it he came upon a negro lounging against a fence.
“Nager,” said the constable, “do you know where a fellow can get a quart of good whisky?”
“Naw, sir, I don’t; but mebbe I kin find some,” was the reply.
The constable handed him a dollar and a half, and told him to see what he could do.
“Yessir,” said the negro. “Just you hold this shoe-box for me while I step down the street a piece.”
The policeman held the carefully wrapped shoe-box, while his emissary disappeared round the corner. For half an hour he waited in vain, then searched the neighbourhood up and down, and returned to the station enraged at having let himself be victimized. But when he investigated the shoe-box, expecting to find it full of rubbish, behold! it contained a quart bottle of whisky.
Such are the dodges to which the liquor-trade is reduced. But however manifold and ingenious its sleights, I cannot be persuaded that it is so easy to get drunk in Atlanta as it is in New Orleans, with its 2000 open saloons—to say nothing of cities nearer home.
South Carolina was for some time, and is still partially, under the “dispensary” system, the State undertaking the function of providing its citizens with alcohol. The dispensary is open only during limited hours, and no liquor may be drunk on the premises. This system has proved the reverse of satisfactory from the point of view of the temperance reformer, while corruption has fleeced the State of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the purchase of its liquors.
There have been “waves” of prohibition in America before, which have more or less receded as time went on. Will that be the history of this wave? The best authorities do not think so.
Has Prohibition Come to Stay?
In the first place, as I have said before, the South is deeply and earnestly religious. The Churches are all opposed to the liquor traffic, and it has been said that “a proposition to restore it would encounter from them almost the same reception as a proposition to restore a State Church establishment.”
In the second place, the presence of the negro in the South is a tower of strength to the prohibitionist.
In the third place, the rapid industrial revival of the South is making men alive to the economic waste involved in the liquor traffic.
In the fourth place, prohibition has touched the patriotic imagination of the South, which is a very lively faculty indeed.
On this subject I spoke to Dr. E. A. Alderman, President of the University of Virginia. In that State local option has banished the saloon from almost all the country districts and from most of the towns. Charlottesville, the seat of the University, is, according to Dr. Alderman, distinctly a better town since it “went dry.” Manners are better, the standard of comfort is higher, there is more money to spend.
“It seems to me,” said Dr. Alderman, “that society has an absolute right to protect itself against the evils of alcohol, just as it has the right to take compulsory measures of sanitation. Whether the best method of protection has as yet been reached, I won’t undertake to say. But I think you may safely assume that in the Southern States the age of the open grog-shop is past.”
[42]. In Atlanta University Publications, No. IX. p. 49 (published in 1904, when as yet prohibition seemed scarcely within the range of practical politics), I find the following remarkable prophecy: “The fountain-head of crime among the negroes of Atlanta is the open saloon. There is no doubt but that the removal of strong drink from the city would decrease crime by half.”
XVII
THE NEGRO HOME AND THE NEGRO CHURCH
Wherever I went in the South, one invariable experience awaited me, of which I scarcely know how to write. A buggy was ordered out, and I was trotted round to visit six or eight negro “homes.” I came to regard it as an established ritual, and learned to use the responses expected of me.
It would be base and stupid were I to laugh at these simple people who, in all good faith, and with a touching pride, which one felt to be more racial than personal, displayed to me their household gods. As a rule, indeed, I felt much more inclined to weep than to laugh. And yet, in one aspect, the parade was irresistibly ludicrous. It was as though one were led from window to window in Tottenham Court Road and asked to read, in the dining-room, drawing-room, and bedroom “suites,” the capacity of the British people for culture and civilization.
The point, of course, was to show what progress the coloured race had made, in wealth, education, and refinement, during the forty years which had elapsed since their emancipation. Statistics on this point, as we have seen, are apt to be a little deceptive. It is generally assumed that, after the Civil War, the race as a whole started in absolute pauperism. But this is not the fact. There were at that time many free negroes, and not a few who possessed a good deal of property.[[43]] Thus the well-to-do, “home”-owning class of negroes is not entirely a creation of the past forty years. In Charleston, for instance, there were a good many negro slave-holders before the war; and I was told (though for this I should not like to vouch) that negro property-owners are now fewer in that city than they had once been, many of the younger generation having dissipated the savings of their elders. I may add that by far the most homelike of the homes I visited belonged to a professional man who could not truly be said to have risen from slavery.
Nevertheless, the evidence of thrift and material prosperity among a considerable class of negroes is undeniable and very striking. As I was driven from home to home, other homes and institutions were pointed out to me, with details as to the number of dollars they represented, until my head swam, and I began to wonder whether I were not back among the Vanderbilts and Goulds in Fifth Avenue. For when you get well up among the tens of thousands, my power of grasping and comparing numbers very soon fails me.
“The greater part of this street here to the left belongs to the richest man in our community. He pays taxes on half a million dollars.” “There are three or four homes in this street belonging to coloured people worth from 25,000 to 75,000 dollars.” “That is an infirmary for negroes donated by a carpenter who couldn’t read or write. It cost 50,000 dollars. It is supported by various coloured clubs, with contributions from the county and the city.” Such was the unvaried strain as the buggy rattled along.
But one thing I noticed with interest—my coloured cicerones were just as ready to point with pride to the fine residences and institutions of white men as to the homes of their own people. Whatever their grounds of complaint against the other race, they were, so far as they were suffered to be, loyal citizens of their State.
To one negro Crœsus I was personally introduced, and an interesting type he was. |A Coloured Carnegie.| An old man—well on in the sixties, I should say. He had no negro traits that I could discover, and his complexion was the very lightest yellow. His shrewd, many-wrinkled, crab-apple face would have been remarked in Europe as distinctly American, but he would scarcely have been suspected of black blood. In one respect he was ostentatiously millionairish, for every tooth in his head was of gold. Moreover, he wore in his shirt front a splendid diamond pin, which contrasted oddly with his otherwise plain and even rustic attire.
He is a banker, a general trader, an owner of real estate—and a liberal benefactor to his own people. He has established in the negro quarter of the city where he lives a sort of garden and recreation-ground for his race, which is all the more appreciated, as negroes, even when not formally excluded from the public parks, are made very unwelcome in them. In the recreation ground is a plain but well-designed and commodious wooden theatre, where companies of negro actors frequently appear. I am told there is a remarkable development of negro theatrical art in several quarters, but was not fortunate enough to come across any specimens of it.
The keen little walnut-skinned Carnegie-Chrysostom accompanied my guide and me over the garden and theatre. He said very little, but he gleamed appreciation of my guide’s remarks, all tending to impress on me his manifold activities, his astuteness, his success, and his beneficence. Yet one did not feel, as one would have felt had a white millionaire been concerned, that the poorer man was guilty of adulation, the richer of ostentation. There was something impersonal about it all. It was not the men but the race who boasted. The hero of the song of praise was not “I,” nor “he,” but “we.”
And what, now, of the “homes” themselves? |Villa Residences.| Those that I saw were without exception what are called by English house-agents suburban villa residences, which would command, in the neighbourhood of London, rents of from £40 to £70 a year. They were very nice little houses, scrupulously neat and well kept. They had (to my mind) the advantage over English houses of the same class, in the sense of spaciousness which comes with steam-heat and the consequent absence of doors. In some the doorways were filled with bead curtains—hanging strings of glass beads—which seem to be very popular just now in coloured society.
The furniture was always modern and in excellent condition, with a great deal of plush about it. Much of it conveyed the impression (not uncommon in English villa residences) of being intended rather for show than use. The wall-papers ran to large patterns, and were apt to be sombre in tint. Every home, without exception, had its piano, sometimes with open music on it. In the matter of pictures, nicknacks, etc., there was no affectation of “culture.” Æstheticism—that “unanimity of æsthetic appreciations” which so troubled Mr. Wells in Boston—has not yet penetrated the negro home. I did not see a single Wingless Victory. The works of art are simple to the point of primitiveness, and pleasing in so far as they genuinely represent the taste of their owners. One handsomely furnished parlour stands out in my memory, in which a showy overmantel was flanked by two amazing glass transparencies in heavy gilt frames, one representing a moonlit landscape and the other the Houses of Parliament and Clock Tower at Westminster.
As a rule, I would be received by the lady of the house (her husband was apt to be away at business) with the stock phrases of American politeness. In the great majority of cases the lady would be a quadroon, or lighter; and in one or two instances I fancy nature had been assisted by a whiff of the powder-puff. My inspection generally stopped short at the living-rooms on the ground floor; but sometimes I was admitted to regions of more intimate domesticity. It was embarrassing; it was ludicrous; it was, above all, pathetic.
With people of a corresponding class in England the first impulse would have been to offer a visitor “refreshment” of some sort. Never once was there a hint of anything of the kind on the part of my negro hosts. I wondered, and am still wondering, whether it simply was not the custom of the country, or whether they imagined that I would scruple to eat or drink with them.[[44]]
Though I did not partake of their bread and salt, I have a sense of perfidy in thus criticizing the interiors in which they took such a simple pride. |Resolute Refinement.| But, after all, I was there for no other purpose than to report what I saw and felt. What I felt, then, was certainly admiration for the thrift and progressiveness which were apparent on every hand; nor was it the unsophisticated order of taste displayed in furniture and adornment that qualified my admiration. Far be it from me to attribute any absolute superiority to the standards of Brixton, or even of Boston. What troubled me throughout my domiciliary visits was the sense that (with one or two exceptions) these homes were not homes at all. I do not doubt that each roof sheltered a home; but I do not believe that the prim parlours I saw had any essential connection with it. They were no more homelike than the shopwindow rooms of the up-to-date upholsterer. If they were lived in at all, it was from a sense of duty, a self-conscious effort after a life of “refinement.” They were, in short, entirely imitative and mechanical tributes to the American ideal of the prosperous, cultivated home. I could find in them no real expression of the individuality of their inhabitants.
Let it be remembered, however, that this is the first generation of negro prosperity. Will the second or third generation really assimilate the American ideal, or develop a “refined” domesticity of its own?
A remark of my guide on one of these expeditions summed up the phase of culture as I saw it. “We have a little whist club in our set,” he said[said]. “We meet and play once a month. But the best part of it is the good dinner at the end of the season.”
The whist club, so frankly characterized, guided me to the word I had been searching for in the back of my mind through all these experiences. It was the word “veneer.”
A very different class of negro was represented in the congregation of the only church which I had an opportunity of attending.
African Methodism.
It was an African Methodist church—a spacious, airy building, capable, I should think, of seating some 2000 people. It was not full, but fairly well attended; and black, as distinct from brown or yellow, was the prevailing complexion. Every one was quite decently dressed, some of the women in gaudy colours, but many of them, too, in black. The gaudiest colours were in the awful stained-glass windows, which seemed to be made of salvage from the wreck of a cheap kaleidoscope. Two pastors sat on a platform at the end of the hall. There were flowers on a table before them; and, as it was a sweltering morning, each of them held a fan.
The whole service was conducted by one of them, a man of rather Caucasian features, but of dark-brown tint. In the hymn-singing there was nothing peculiar—it was fairly spirited and good. But after the first few sentences of the prayer, ejaculations began to break forth. Their precise meaning, if they had any, I did not catch. They seemed to me like “Yes, oh yes!” They ought, according to the best authorities, to have been “Hallelujah!” “Praise de Lord!” and such phrases; but I certainly did not distinguish them. And presently they grew quite inarticulate, passing over into wails, moans, and now and then a sort of wild, maniac laughing and yodelling.
And the whole sermon, after the first five minutes, was accompanied by similar manifestations. The text was, “Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” I have heard many worse sermons than this competent, fluent, popular discourse, which consisted mainly of an exposition of the overpowering strength of the metaphor of “hunger and thirst.” “We may credit our backs,” said the preacher, “but we must pay our stomachs; we can put the back off, but we can’t put off the stomach.” (“Yes, oh yes!” shouts, moans, and wails.) “No doubt most of you, before you came here, have had a good drink of coffee or tea; but how many of you have had a real good drink from the fountain of everlasting life?” (Confused sounds not unlike the yelpings of a large kennel.) “If some of you didn’t eat and drink more physically than you do spiritually, you’d be skeletons. That’s plain talk.” (Shrieks, wails, and yodelling.) “Some of you good sisters are so anxious to get your people’s breakfasses that you have no time to ask a blessing on the work of the day.” (“Hu! hu!” “Bless de Lord!”—for once articulate—moans, and shrieks.)
These are but fragments of the discourse, which lasted half an hour. What particularly interested me, both in the prayer and the sermon, was the action and reaction between speaker and audience. Never once did he take any notice of the wild sounds, as a political speaker would almost necessarily have done. I do not remember that he even paused for them; his rhetoric seemed to flow smoothly on. In other words, he did not openly “play to the gallery.” Yet there is no doubt that the hysterical cries and ululations were of value to him. He worked them up, and they worked him up. It must not be understood, however, that anything like the whole congregation joined in the noises. They seemed all to proceed from two or three definite points in the hall. One could almost have supposed them the prearranged paroxysms of an epileptic claque.
I stole out, under cover of a hymn, at the end of the sermon, not sorry to find myself once more in America. In the church (where I was the only white or even approximately white person present) I could not but feel that I was in Africa—slightly veneered.
[43]. See pp. 33 and 35. Mr. A. H. Stone declares to be “fallacies” the two widely-accepted opinions “that the negro began life forty years ago with nothing but his freedom, and that the period of his emancipation has been one of marvellous economic achievement.”—“The American Race Problem,” p. 150.
[44]. Mr. Kelly Miller (coloured), author of “Race Adjustment,” in an open letter to Mr. Thomas Dixon, Junr., says: “You will doubtless remember that when I addressed the Congregational Ministers in New York City, you asked permission to be present ... although you beat a precipitous retreat when luncheon was announced.” At the invitation of Professor Du Bois, I had the great pleasure of dining one evening with the (coloured) students of Atlanta University; and at Tuskegee I was most hospitably entertained in the house of the Principal. The (white) instructors at Hampton Institute take their meals apart from the students. For a cruel instance of “discrimination” in hospitality, see Du Bois: “The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 63.
XVIII
CHARLESTON
For any disappointment I had felt in New Orleans, Charleston more than compensated me. Mr. Owen Wister, in “Lady Baltimore,” has in no way exaggerated its charm.
In situation it is not at all unlike New York, being built on a tongue of land between the broad estuaries of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers. At the tip of the tongue (as in New York) is the Battery; but here the Battery is a beautiful, semi-tropical garden, full of live-oaks, palmettos, and flowering shrubs, with an esplanade overlooking the blue expanse of the harbour, the historic Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, and the low shores beyond. This garden is a fascinating spot. I returned to it again and again during my stay in the city. Passing up Meeting Street (the Broadway of Charleston), one finds, instead of the skyscrapers which shoulder one another in the lower end of New York, the simple, dignified old houses of a vanishing generation of Southern aristocrats, each standing end-on to the street, in its little plot of lawn and flowering shrubs. The typical Charlestonian house is a plain two or three storey structure, entirely surrounded at each level with broad verandahs and balconies. In several cases the floor area of verandah and balcony outside the walls must at least equal the floor area of the rooms inside the walls. Now, spacious verandahs always suggest to the mind the lazy luxury of a genial summer-land, deep lounging-chairs, cool drinks, and the glow of cigar-tips in the twilight. I am bound to say that I saw very little of this sort of life proceeding in the verandahs of Charleston; but that only enabled one all the more easily to people them with the ghosts of fifty years ago, before the guns of Fort Moultrie startled their calm. In Charleston I felt, almost for the first time, that the romance of the Old South had once been a reality. All of the South that I had hitherto seen had been remorselessly new.
Further up-town (as they would say in New York) the streets of Charleston become more commonplace, but always retain a character of their own. There is not a vestige of a sky-scraper in the whole peninsula. On the other hand, the city is dotted with old churches of the Wren style, each with its quiet burial-ground around it. Close to St. Michael’s Church and in front of the City Hall, is a sadly mutilated statue of the elder Pitt. It was erected in 1770, and its mutilation was begun by a British cannon-ball in 1780.
Let me add that Charleston, like New Orleans, is proud of its cemeteries, and with much better reason. Magnolia Cemetery, with its live-oaks and its little lake, is a really lovely garden. One historic live-oak of enormous size, draped in Spanish moss and with exquisite little ferns growing along each of its huge boughs, is not only a wonderful but an extraordinarily beautiful tree.
As to the population of Charleston my informants differed. |“No Trouble.”| A white man placed it at 60,000 in all, with 40,000 negroes; a negro at 65,000, with 33,000 negroes. As there has been no census since 1900, probably no one knows exactly; but it seems to be admitted that the blacks more or less considerably outnumber the whites. The white people, by their own account, pay nine-tenths of the taxes; the negroes aver that their real estate is assessed at a million and a half dollars—assessment representing only about 60 per cent. of actual value. Both statements are very likely true.
White Charleston plumes itself on a peculiar and hereditary understanding of the negro, and knowledge of the way to deal with him; whence it happens that there has been “no trouble”—no outrages or lynchings—in or around the city. Moreover, I was assured that negroes were employed in the police force, and that not long ago there was a black lieutenant of police, with white men under him.
But mark how the aspect of things alters according to the point of view from which they are regarded! When I mentioned to a little group of leading negroes this proof of the equal treatment accorded to the two races, I observed on their countenances an expressive smile. On inquiring its reason, I learned that there were indeed three coloured policemen out of a total force of 106; that they and a few others had been appointed at some long-past period of political compromise; and that, when they die off, there is not the smallest chance of their being replaced by men of colour. “Here, as elsewhere, the Irish control the police force; and the Irish hate us worse than the native Americans.”
It was an odd group, this coloured conclave in which I found myself. |The Negro and his Vote.| Only one member (a doctor) was dark-brown in complexion; two were very light-brown; while two others, again, were indistinguishable from white men. One reminded me strongly of a choleric old Scotch General whom I once knew; the other was very English in type, with smooth, silvery hair (prematurely white), and a large, round, placid, bovine face. Meeting him in England, you would have said he was a trifle sunburnt.
Their talk was mainly of their political grievances, and the various methods by which their race, all over the Southern States, were jockeyed out of their votes. Much of what they said I failed to follow; with a good deal of it, on the other hand, I was already pretty familiar.
The different States of the South have adopted methods differing in many details for excluding incompetent and undesirable voters from the polls; but the general principle has always been much the same. It has been to impose some slight test of education and intelligence (generally to read and explain some paragraph of the Constitution) on all who desire to have their names placed on the register.[[45]]
If these tests were applied equally to the two races, the negro would have no ground of complaint. But exceptions are made in favour of the whites in the very laws establishing the tests. Most of them contain clauses analogous to what is known in Alabama as the “grandfather clause,” which provides that illiteracy shall not bar any one whose father or grandfather was entitled to vote at the outbreak of the Civil War. This exception is defended on the ground that even an illiterate person of the original Anglo-Saxon stock (the South is nothing if not Anglo-Saxon) is generally a very shrewd fellow, and eminently capable of exercising the franchise. Under the “grandfather clause,” then, only illiterate aliens and illiterate negroes are excluded from the register; and this discrimination is naturally resented by the negro.
But if the matter stopped there, the black race would not feel themselves so very much aggrieved. The real burden of their complaint is not the inequality of the laws, but the inequality of their administration. The tests of intelligence are applied (they declare) by unscrupulous registrars, who will ask a white man some simple question, such as whether imprisonment for debt is permitted, while they will pose a negro with some impossible technicality concerning a bill of attainder or an estate in tail. The upshot is that admission to the register depends entirely on the arbitrary will and pleasure of the registrars. Their decisions can be appealed against, but the appeal is said to be practically useless.
Nor is this all. When a negro happens to be a man of such property, education, and position that it is absolutely impossible to reject his vote, there is always the last resource of omitting to count it. One of the Charleston group spoke of a particular election in which he himself, and others of his people to his certain knowledge, cast Republican ballots; but the result, as announced, showed not a single Republican vote.
On this matter, as on so many others, it is very hard to get at the truth. White men aver, and will prove by statistics, that in proportion to his taxation the negro has very fair voting power, and is freely permitted to exercise it. But I met no single negro who would admit this; and most of them, like my Charleston friends, were very bitter on the question, as well as on the exclusion of even the most respectable of their race from the councils, the “machine,” of their party.
A remark made by one of this very intelligent Charleston group struck me as a curious comment on the belief of white Charleston that it has a special genius for dealing with the black race. “We negroes,” said this member of the race, “have no respect for the Southern white man’s opinions or his prophecies. He has always prophesied wrong. This thing is going to work out in the usual mysterious way, that the South will be very much surprised over.”
I quote word for word. “The usual mysterious way” may seem an odd phrase, but its meaning is not very far to seek.
In Charleston, under the guidance of a genial Southern gentleman placed in high educational authority, I saw a good deal both of white and of coloured schools. My guide was an enthusiast for negro education. “What’s the good,” he said, “of talking about being a superior race if you’re afraid to educate the negro? |White Negroes.| There’s not much superiority in that.” He admitted with regret that accommodation for negro children was very deficient, and said that those who were fighting for better accommodation had been crippled by the recent appointment of a negro to a Federal office in the town.
In a school containing twelve hundred black children, the fire alarm was given, and in exactly three minutes every child was in the playground, the whole school being ranged in “column of companies,” or, rather, of classes. Assuredly, such discipline cannot but be salutary. It was in this school too, that I heard five hundred negro children (most of them quite small, for three-fourths of them drop out after passing through the primary classes) singing in their clear, shrill voices—
“In Dixie Land
I take my stand,
To live and die in Dixie.”
Poor quaint little mortals! They were unconscious of any irony in the sentiment.
In every negro school or college that I visited—at Tuskegee among the rest—I saw several young people in whom my eye could not discern the slightest trace of black blood.[[46]] But it was in Charleston, at an endowed school for negroes, that the most remarkable instance of this kind came under my notice. I was present at the morning muster of the whole school; and while the hymn was being sung I could not take my eyes off two boys of thirteen or fourteen, evidently brothers, who stood side by side in one of the upper classes. They were not only white, but (one would have said) peculiarly and resplendently white. Their features were delicate and distinguished, their eyes blue or grey, their hair a light brown. They were slightly built, and, although their dress was quite plain, they had somehow an air of grace and breeding. They could have gone to Eton or Winchester and excited no remark.
Shall I confess that the contrast between these boys and the ebony and chocolate manikins among whom their lot was cast stirred in me the race instinct in all its unreasoning crudity? I wanted to swoop down upon them and rescue them from what I felt for the moment to be their horrible and unnatural surroundings. They seemed to me like children in a fairy-tale, carried off by some tribe of brownies or gnomes. And who shall say, indeed, that the impulse to rescue them was wholly quixotic? If they remain in America, there can be no doubt that the life that lies before them will be one of painful misunderstandings, heart burnings, and humiliations.
Before leaving Charleston, let me record a curious little street-car incident. |A Street-car Incident.| Coloured people, in this city, are not confined to a special part of the car; but, each seat being designed to accommodate two passengers, a coloured person and white person must not sit side by side on the same seat. One afternoon I was in a car which was full save for one place. The foremost seat on the left hand was occupied by one negro girl, and there was, of course, a vacant place at her side. Presently a white woman got in and sat down in this place. “Hallo!” I thought, “here is a violation of the rule,”—and I wondered what would happen. The conductor was equal to the occasion. The foremost right-hand seat was occupied by a cadet of the Charleston Military Academy in his neat grey uniform, and by a lady. The conductor touched the cadet on the shoulder and whispered to him. The young man at once stood up, the white woman who had last entered the car transferred herself to his place, and for the rest of the journey the cadet hung on to the strap, while the seat beside the negro girl remained vacant!
[45]. It would appear that in Mississippi there are 15,000 registered negro voters out of a negro male population of voting age stated by the census of 1900 at 197,936, of whom 53 per cent. were illiterate. For four other States the numbers stand as follows:—
| Registered negro | Negro males of | Percentage of | |
| voters. | voting age. | illiterates. | |
| Virginia | 23,000 | 146,122 | 52 |
| S. Carolina | 22,000 | 152,860 | 54 |
| Louisiana | 6,400 | 147,348 | 61 |
| N. Carolina | 6,250 | 127,114 | 53 |
In several States, according to Mr. E. G. Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 198), “Many negroes have been discouraged from offering to register by reason of the fact that the State organization of the party with which they have been associated recently refused to admit even their most respected representatives to its Conventions. [This is the ‘lily-white’ policy referred to by Mr. Shipton, p. 34.] Large numbers have also refrained from registration because of their unwillingness to meet the poll-tax requirement. The interest of the masses of the negroes in things political has, for quite different reasons, been much exaggerated by the representatives of both parties.”
XIX
THE FRINGE OF FLORIDA
At Charleston I was in some sense at a parting of the ways. In order to attend the Educational Conference at Memphis I had been compelled to leave out Virginia and North Carolina from the itinerary I had originally planned. Should I now return to New York, repairing this omission—taking Raleigh, Richmond, the Hampton Institute, and other interesting places, on my way? Or should I set my face once more southward, and return to England by way of the West Indies?
Several considerations determined me in favour of the latter course. Chief among them, perhaps, was the desire to visit the southernmost portion of the United States—a portion unknown to the past, but destined to figure largely in the history of the future—the Canal Zone of Panama.
Still, then, my motto was “Southward Ho!”
A slight misadventure frustrated my design of paying a short visit to Savannah. |St. Augustine.| At Jacksonville, the capital of Florida, I stayed just long enough to find it intolerably hot and excessively uninteresting; though here, as almost everywhere else on the east coast of Florida, a magnificent sheet of water (the St. John’s River) compensates for the monotony of the surrounding country.
I hurried on to St. Augustine, with its huge and really picturesque hotels (the Alcazar and the Ponce de Leon), its narrow, semi-Spanish streets, its fine old fort of the Vauban period, its beautiful lagoon, and (on Anastasia Island) its glorious stretch of silver-white ocean beach. But there was no temptation to linger anywhere in Florida, for the hotels were all shut up and the season was entirely over. I can imagine that, in the season, the Plaza de la Constitucion at St. Augustine is a busy and amusing spot. But no one could explain to me why the great hotels, instead of being placed in view of the bay or (still better) of the open sea, were huddled together, on no “situation” at all, in the centre of the little town. There is no doubt some reason for this; but it passed my divining.
Onward, then, by the Florida East Coast Railway, which is, if I am rightly informed, practically the undivided property of Mr. Flagler, a Standard Oil magnate. |The American Riviera.| (I heard the Governor of the State, Mr. Broward, deliver an attack on its monopolist pretensions in the Plaza at St. Augustine.) With a few hours’ pause at Daytona, I went right on to Miami, which was, till lately, the terminus of the railway—366 miles from Jacksonville.
Undoubtedly this margin of the great peninsula—this Riviera of the United States—has a charm of its own. Physically, however, nothing could be less like the Riviera. Here there are no Alps, no Esterels. There is not even a molehill that can be magnified into a mountain. It is a region of broad skies and broad waters, green scrub, and leagues on leagues of smooth, white beach, with the blue ocean curling idly over it. Apart from gardens and a very few neglected orange groves, I saw absolutely not one patch of cultivation between St. Augustine and Miami. The railroad would pass through miles of tangled scrub and acres of dwarf palmetto; the most dreary and monotonous country imaginable. Then suddenly a blue lagoon would open out, with delightful, low, board-veranda’d houses skirting it, and rich tropical gardens running down to the water’s edge. Then into the wilderness again, with only here and there a clearance and a cabin, and here and there, I grieve to say, acres of beautiful pine-trees bleeding to death for the enrichment of some turpentine company.
Miami—known to the natives as My-ammy—has the air of a busy and prosperous frontier town. It has the usual huge hotel, unusually well situated, at the junction between a beautiful river and a beautiful lagoon. Here we are quite clearly on the very verge of the tropics—coco-nut palms abound on every hand; coco-nut husks cumber the white shell roads; the gardens are full of hybiscus and other splendid flowering shrubs; and everywhere the gorgeous poinsiana regia flames in unabashed vermilion against the deep blue of the sky.
An Ocean-going Railroad.
A wonderful piece of engineering is the railway over the Florida Keys—the low margin of islands, like those of the upper Adriatic, in which the peninsula tails off. By this time it may be completed all the way from Miami to Key West; but when I was there it had a half-way terminus at Knight’s Key.
For an hour after leaving Miami the railway runs through an almost unbroken pine forest. Here and there a rude cabin is visible, occupied, no doubt by platelayers; but there is not a single clearing or attempt at cultivation. Then, all of a sudden, the forest ceases, and we emerge upon open swamp prairies, dotted with clumps of low green scrub. To the north we can see the edge of the pine forest running off, like a black wall, into the dim distance. For another hour or thereabouts we trail through the coarse grass of the swamp prairies or salt marshes, broken only by occasional channels of water. Of habitation or cultivation there is no sign. Then we run out upon vast lagoons dotted with occasional scrub-covered islands. The railroad is built on a piled-up causeway of a sort of white shell-limestone—or is it, perhaps, coral?
On the whole, the outlook is rather monotonous; but there are patches of beauty. I remember vividly a huge green lagoon, with a low green shore beyond; in the foreground some sort of heron lazily flapping its way over the surface; and in the distance the white sails of a fore-and-aft schooner shining in the sun.
Then we pass through many miles of amazing and fantastic jungle. No tree, perhaps, is over thirty feet high; but all are strangely[strangely] contorted and interwoven with vines and creepers—like the forest round the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A few clearings are burnt away in this jungle, and things like banana trees are growing in them. But for an hour and a half after leaving Homestead (the station at the edge of the pine forest) I saw not a single human habitation.
Soon, however, we begin to catch occasional glimpses of the open sea—iridescent and exquisite—through gaps in the outer barrier of reefs. And now there are one or two houses to be seen. We stop at what seems to be a station. Some one in the car calls to a negro navvy on the line: “Say, what’s the name of this town?” Negro: “Illago, sa’.” Passenger: “How many people live here?” Negro: “None at all, sa’.”
Under the Palm-trees.
Now we are practically out at sea, crossing miles of blue water between the islands, sometimes on limestone (or coral?) causeways, sometimes on long bridges of wooden trestles. At one point there lies, about half a mile from the line, a little island, perhaps a mile long, entirely covered with palm-trees, and with a single wooden house upon it—suggesting an atoll of the Southern Seas.
At a place called Long Key we stopped for lunch. Long Key is a settlement of some twenty one-storey wooden houses, all raised on piles about four feet from the ground, and with every doorway and window screened with wire gauze. The whole place is embowered in palms; and under the palms, twenty yards from the green sea, a wooden counter had been set up, with the word “lunch,” rudely painted on a shingle, displayed above it. Two white women served behind the counter and dispensed coffee (the milk poured through a gimlet hole in a tin), sandwiches, coco-nut milk, and little packages of coco-nut candy. I had never before tasted coco-nut milk and am not eager to quaff it again. It suggests nothing so much as weak eau sucrée. The frugal meal, in its romantic surroundings, was pleasant enough; but I could wish that the wire-gauze screens had been run round the lunch-counter. It was a “quick lunch”—only fifteen minutes allowed—yet when I returned to the train I found my neck quite rough with mosquito-bites.
From Long Key we presently ran out on an immense viaduct, some two miles long, I should say, of concrete arches. |Asia and Africa.| Then again across jungle-covered islands and some smaller lagoons. Here signs of life grew more frequent, for we were approaching the point where the extension of the line is actively proceeding. The labourers seem to be for the most part accommodated in huge house-boats, which we saw here and there moored in convenient creeks and channels. The majority, I think, are negroes, with a considerable intermixture of “Dagos” and some East Indian coolies.
At one point we passed a large truck crowded with half-naked negro navvies, who swarmed over it and clung on to it in every possible attitude, grinning, joking, indulging in horse-play, so far as their close quarters would allow—the very picture, in short, of good-humoured, muscular animalism. And in the middle of the swarm, penned in on every side, and yet utterly aloof, stood two turbaned Easterns; austere, unbending, sombre, a trifle sinister. The negroes’ vivacity and humour made them, in a way, more sympathetic, but, at the same time, threw into relief the distinction of the Orientals. They looked like kings in exile among a rabble of savages. “Mere Aryan prejudice,” you will say. Yes; but that means that it is prehistoric and inveterate.
Knight’s Key is but a temporary settlement with a wharf, a railway yard, and one or two warehouses. Thence the comfortable little steamship Miami conveyed us in about five hours to Key West, and in another seven or eight hours to Havana—from the New World to the Old.
PART II
THE PROBLEM FACED
II
THE PROBLEM FACED
The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of language be called “white men’s countries.”[[47]] In the British West Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.
But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the European, and not always very vividly realized even by the Northern American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal observation and through the medium of books. The details of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.
Numbers and Vitality of the Negro
In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers, distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.
It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one million in the North and West.[[48]]
Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they were multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied that by 1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from Maryland to Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself, and appears to have been based on defective enumeration in the census of 1870, which made the rate of negro increase between 1870 and 1880 seem quite inordinate. Now speculation has gone to the other extreme, and prophesies the not very distant extinction of the negro. This view is set forth with uncompromising emphasis by Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):
The only cloud of any portentousness hanging over the prospects of the Southern States is the continued expansion of the black population.... The fact, however, that the white inhabitants, as a body, are steadily outstripping the black in numbers, is an indication that the evils which are now created by the presence of so many negroes in the South will not relatively and proportionately grow more dangerous.... When the development of the Southern States along its present lines has reached its last stage, there is reason to think that an even greater relative decline in the numerical strength of the black population will set in. We have already pointed out the probable effect of the subdivision of Southern lands, and the growth of Southern towns, on the numerical expansion of the negro race. As injurious to that race in the end as being shut out of the general field of agriculture, or being subjected to an abnormally high rate of mortality, will be the relentless competition which is one of the conditions of modern life in all civilized communities. The vaster the growth of the Southern States in wealth and white population, the sharper and more urgent will be the struggle of the black man for existence. In order to hold even his present position as a common labourer he will have to exert himself to the utmost, and in doing so to submit to a manner of life that will be even more unwholesome and squalid than the one he now follows, and sure to lead to a great increase in the already very high rate of mortality for his race. The day will come in the South, just as it came long ago in the North, when for lack of skill, lack of sobriety, and lack of persistency, the negro will find it more difficult to stand up as a rival to the white working-man. Already it is the ultimate fate of the negro that is in the balance, not the ultimate fate of the Southern States in consequence of the presence of the negro. The darkest day for the Southern whites has passed.... The darkest day for the Southern blacks has only just begun.
When I find this forecast cited with approval by Dr. E. A. Alderman of the University of Virginia, it acquires some authority in my eyes; but still it seems far from convincing. It leaves out of account one probability and one certainty. The probability is that what may be called the Hampton-Tuskegee movement—industrial education and moral discipline—will in time so leaven the mass of the negro race as to make it fitter to compete with white labour, and abler to resist the destructive influences on which Mr. Bruce dwells with such gusto. I call this a probability, not a certainty, for it is hard to tell as yet whether the Hampton-Tuskegee spirit is really leavening the mass, or only playing upon the surface. The industrial college at Hampton is barely forty years old; Mr. Booker Washington’s great institute at Tuskegee came into being less than thirty years ago; and the minor offshoots of the movement are, of course, still younger. They have not had time to give any just measure of their influence in promoting the self-respect and the efficiency of the negro race. But there is no doubt whatever that they are doing a remarkable and (from the negro point of view) a beneficent work; the only doubt being as to whether the work is or is not proceeding fast enough to overtake and counteract the forces that make for degradation.[[49]]
This, I say, is doubtful; but what is scarcely doubtful is that the South, for its own sake, cannot suffer Mr. Bruce’s prophecy to fulfil itself. The gist of the forecast is, briefly, this: the rural negro, who is admittedly prolific, and whose children survive in fair proportions, will gradually be driven into the towns, where all possible influences are leagued against his moral and physical well-being, and where the rate of negro mortality, both infant and adult, is always very high and often appalling. Thus, according to Mr. Bruce, the “Afro-American” is being inexorably hounded into the jaws of death, and must in due time perish from off the face of the earth. But what is to be the state of the South while this amiable prophecy is working itself out? If the towns are the jaws of death to the negro, what are they to the white man and his children? Putting all question of humanity aside, can any sane civic policy permit negroes to crowd in their thousands into city slums, and there to die like flies in conditions “even more unwholesome and squalid” than those which at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro mortality so high? Simply because the black folk are less able than the whites to resist the poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as well as physical. But bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one race than to the other, inevitably takes its toll of both. Hear what a Southern health officer has to say on this point:
We face the following issues: First: one set of people, the Caucasian, with a normal death-rate of less than 16 per thousand per annum, and right alongside of them is the negro race, with a death-rate of 25 to 30 per thousand. Second: the first-named race furnishing a normal, and the second race an abnormal, percentage of criminals.... The negro is with you for all time. He is what you will make him, and it is “up to” the white people to prevent him from becoming a criminal, and to guard him against tuberculosis, syphilis, etc. If he is tainted with disease, you will suffer: if he develops criminal tendencies, you will be affected.
What can be more certain than this? And is it to be conceived that the South will deliberately refrain from looking to its physical and moral sewerage until the negro shall have been killed off?[[50]]
It is not to be conceived, and it is not what is happening. Better sanitary conditions are everywhere being secured, though the movement is slow in the cities of the South. In the North a great improvement has already been effected. In a report on “The Health and Physique of the Negro American” (Atlanta University Publications, No. XI., 1906) we read—
Ten years ago the [negro] death-rate was twice the birth-rate in New York; to-day they are about the same, with the death-rate steadily decreasing and the birth-rate increasing. Ten years ago the birth-rate of Philadelphia was less than the death-rate; to-day it is six per thousand higher.... With the improved sanitary condition, improved education, and better economic opportunities, the mortality of the race may, and probably will, steadily decrease until it becomes normal.
If there is any permanence and any efficacy in the “wave of prohibition” that is passing over the South, it must certainly cause a great reduction in negro mortality; and it surely cannot be long before means are found to check the vending of noxious drugs. Unless, in short, the civilization of the South is to stand still while the negro dies off, there seems to be little likelihood of his fulfilling Mr. Bruce’s prognostic. This great and beautiful region cannot possibly find its salvation in making itself a hell for the negro.
When I quoted to Mr. Booker Washington Mr. Bruce’s death-sentence on his people, he was moved to one of his rare laughs. In Mr. Washington’s opinion, which may very well prove to be correct, the natural increase of the negro in the South about keeps pace with that of the white man. The white race, however, is being largely recruited by immigration, so that its numerical preponderance is doubtless increasing. It would appear, then, that, unless conditions very greatly alter, there is little chance of the black race out-breeding and submerging the white, but equally little chance of the black race being obliging enough to die out. “Conservative” statisticians estimate that at the close of this century there will be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five million negroes in America.[[51]]
Taking the Southern States at large, then, we find that one person out of every three is wholly or partly of African blood. It is sometimes maintained that really pure-bred negroes are very rare; but this seems to be a mistake. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a man of mixed origin and not likely to underestimate the number of his own class, thinks that in two-thirds of the negroes of the United States there are no “recognizable traces” of white blood. He adds that white blood doubtless exists in many who show no trace of it; but for practical purposes this speculation may be disregarded. I think we may take it as pretty certain that if, in the South, one person out of every three is of African descent, one person out of every four is either actually or virtually a full-blooded negro. But it must not be supposed that the distribution of the races is by any means even. Some districts, such as the mountainous regions of Tennessee and West Virginia, contain hardly any negroes; while in other districts, not a few, the blacks largely outnumber the whites. These are, no doubt, the districts in which the pure-bred black most abounds.
Is there a “Negro Problem”?
Having ascertained, approximately, the numerical relations of the two races, we are now in a position to consider the problem or problems involved. And first we are confronted with the question, “Is there any real problem at all?”
Some people deny it, or at all events maintain that the problem is created solely by the almost insane arrogance and inhumanity of the Southern white man. This view lingers in the North, among the inheritors of the old abolitionist sentiment. In England, it has been roundly expressed by Mr. H. G. Wells, and somewhat more considerately by even so high an authority as Sir Sydney Olivier. I need scarcely say that it is a very popular view among the negroes in the South itself.
For a typical (though moderate) American utterance of this opinion the following may suffice. It is a passage from “Race Questions and Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of Harvard (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906):
Scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so much problems caused by anything which is essential to the existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies.... Such antipathies will always play their part in human history. But what we can do about them is to try not to be fooled by them, not to take them too seriously, because of their mere name. We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with a dread of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature.
The attitude of the South, then, in the conception of Professor Royce, is no more rational than that of a woman who shrieks, jumps on a chair, and gathers her skirts about her ankles, because a mouse happens to run across the floor. I should have thought that the wiser tendency of modern science was to divine something more than a “caprice” in so deep-rooted an instinct as the dread even of mice. As for the dread of snakes, it was surely by a slip of the pen that Professor Royce adduced it.
Not at all dissimilar is the judgment of Mr. H. G. Wells. Hearing a great deal of loose, illogical, inconclusive talk on the colour question, and having himself taken a “mighty liking” to these “gentle, human, dark-skinned people” as he saw them in a Chicago music-hall and elsewhere, Mr. Wells formed the opinion that there was no reason at all in the Southern frame of mind. His conclusion is that “these emotions are a cult;” and by a cult he evidently means a contagious, fanatical folly.
Now, Mr. Wells is a man for whose essential wisdom I have a very high respect. If I were bound to acknowledge myself the disciple of any living thinker, I should have small hesitation in selecting him as my guide and philosopher. But his chapter on “The Tragedy of Colour” in “The Future in America” is tinged with what I cannot but take to be a dogmatic impatience of all distinctions and difficulties of race. Before writing it, he might, I think, have asked himself whether the theory of sheer race-monomania was not, perhaps, a rather too simple way of accounting for “emotions” felt with absolute unanimity (in a greater or less degree) by some twenty million Southern white people. The arguments he heard might be weak, ill-informed, inconclusive; the conduct in which the emotions expressed themselves might often be indefensible and abhorrent; and yet there might lie at the root of the emotions something very different from sheer unreason. I think Mr. Wells should have been chary of “indicting a nation” without more careful reflection and a closer scrutiny of evidence.
Sir Sydney Olivier, on the other hand, speaks with the authority of one who has spent many years in close contact with negroes, having been a successful administrator of large communities in which they greatly preponderate. It is impossible to suspect him of hastiness or of à priori doctrinairism. What, then, is his view? In his “White Capital and Coloured Labour” (1907), he tells us that both in visiting the United States and in discussing race questions with American visitors to Jamaica, “he found himself, as a British West Indian, unable to entirely account for an attitude of mind which impressed him as superstitious, if not hysterical, and as indicating misapprehensions of premises very ominous for the United States of the future.” He proceeds:
The theory held in the Southern States of America and in some British Colonies, comes, in substance, to this—that the negro is an inferior order in nature to the white man, in the same sense that the ape may be said to be so. It is really upon this theory that American negrophobia rests, and not only upon the viciousness or criminality of the negro. This viciousness and criminality are, in fact, largely invented, imputed, and exaggerated, in order to support and justify the propaganda of race exclusiveness (p. 43).
And again, in another part of his book:
My argument has been that race prejudice is the fetish of the man of short views; and that it is a short-sighted and suicidal creed, with no healthy future for the community that entertains it (p. 173).
I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of a man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply studied; but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one of Southern unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however unwise in much of her talk and her action, the South is in the main animated by a just and far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That there has been an infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in the South alone, no one nowadays denies. But I believe that the problem, far from being unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly difficult that nothing but an almost superhuman wisdom, energy, and courage will ever effectually deal with it.
Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.
White Man’s Land or Brown Man’s Land?
No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the importation of the African into America was an egregious blunder as well as a monstrous crime. Without him the South would perhaps have developed more slowly during the eighteenth century; but she would have escaped the arrest of development which sums up her history during the nineteenth century. She would have escaped the war by which she strove, with misguided heroism, to perpetuate that arrest of development. She would have escaped the “horrors” of that Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory like a nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in the past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her wealth, is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much more truly may he be said to have created her poverty.[[52]]
This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts of Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in America is not the result of a natural movement, an inevitable expansion, a migration springing from economic necessity or from deep impulses of folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of what may almost be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman cupidity in the slave-dealers and economic short-sightedness in the slave-owners.
The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance, would certainly not be a more desirable place of residence if one-fourth of her population were transmuted into the semblance of Dahomeyans, even supposing that the metamorphosis involved no moral or intellectual change for the worse. A monochrome civilization is on the face of it preferable to such a piebald civilization as at present exists in the Southern States.
Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and the West Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to overlook. The West Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white man’s land”; or, if it was ever possible that they should become one, the chance was lost at the very outset of their history. They are once for all black men’s lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and exploiting them. It would be much more reasonable for the black to chafe under the dominance of the white, than for the white to resent the presence of the black. But the case in the Southern States is absolutely different. They were explored, settled, organized by white men; by white men their liberties were vindicated. They are fitted by their climate and resources to be not only a white man’s land, but one of the greatest white men’s lands in the world. The black man came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen) tool for their development. When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims a third part of the heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and exceedingly moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which, after all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern white man would be more than human if he accepted the part with perfect equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no right to assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his case are even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is the essence and foundation of life: in the United States he is a regrettable accident.
Four Possibilities: I. Extinction.
It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions of this piebald community which a violent interference with the normal course of race-distribution has established in the Southern States.
The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather, conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.
(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly unsatisfactory condition, until the negro gradually dies out.
(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic elevation of the black race, may gradually enable them to live side by side in mutual tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but without clashing.
(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean might conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by “miscegenation.”
(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by deportation or otherwise, and established in a community or communities of its own.
The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have already examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only add here that there is one way in which it might conceivably be brought about—a way too horrible to be contemplated, yet not wholly beyond the bounds of possibility. The recurrence of such an outbreak as the Atlanta riot of 1906 might lead to very terrible consequences. On that occasion the white mob found the negroes unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically unopposed. But the lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar onslaught would, in many places, find them armed and capable of a certain amount of resistance. In that case one dares not think what might happen. Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense of intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary, infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or any other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part of the race, be violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to lose that natural buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race, as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic Negerhetze? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr. P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he anticipated.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the brink of such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are present which might one day bring it to pass.[[53]] Sir Sydney Olivier is quite right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners towards the negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the class that is handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises have been written to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a “beast,” and, on scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape than a man. These works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their insanity is by no means peculiar to their individual authors. The word “extermination” is gravely spoken by men who are not therefore held to be maniacs or even monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, is “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk”; and where such a condition prevails, the possibility of sudden disaster is never far off. To recognize the possibility is not to bring it nearer, but rather to indicate the urgent need of measures that shall place it infinitely remote.