The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

At Calhoun, Ala., may be found nearly a hundred Negroes who have bought or are buying their own farms, and have made $60,000 of savings to do it. A negro woman on one of those farms said of her new house: “We don’t need no rider (overseer) now, dis house is our rider. It will send us into the field, it will make us work, and it will make us plan. We’s got to plan. When Ise out in the pit I has to stop to look up at dis house, and den Ise so pleased I don’t know how I am working.” Near Nixburg, Ala., is another settlement started by a Negro, Rev. John Leonard, soon after the war, which is called thereabouts “Niggerdom,” because the blacks have acquired the best tract of land in the region, have put up the best schoolhouse in the county, and as a neighbor said of them: “They have got to the place now where they’re no more service to the Whites. They want to work for themselves.” At Kowaliga, Ala., is the Benson settlement, where a Negro has bought his former master’s plantation, largely extended it, has built a dam and mill, owns three thousand acres of land with many tenants, and is one of the few large planters of that section who combines cattle raising with cotton. He gave land and assistance to a good school with commodious buildings, carried on entirely by Negroes (including Tuskegee graduates); is building what is probably the best planter’s house in the county, and has plenty of outside investments. At Mound Bayou, Miss., is another purely negro settlement, with a population of about two thousand, among whom not a single white man lives. Under the guidance of two brothers named Montgomery, they bought their land direct from the railroad company, claim to own 130,000 acres, and have paid for considerable parts of it; maintain their own stores, carry on a little bank, and elect a negro municipal government. The results show as much capacity for managing their own affairs as the neighboring white towns.

There are two or three settlements of the same kind in the South, on a smaller scale, as at Goldsboro, Fla., and one in Alabama. Different in type, but a proof of prosperity, are the negro settlements on the Sea Islands; here is no personal leader like Leonard, or Benson, or Montgomery; but on several of the islands is a large group of colored landowners who have been there ever since the Civil War, and whose houses are much superior to the usual negro cabins. While not progressive, they hold on to their land with great tenacity, and are not running into debt.

These specific examples prove beyond question that Africans can advance. Every one of the settlements above mentioned is planted in an unpromising region, among Negroes presumably of a lower type than the average. Lowndes County, in which Calhoun is situated, is one of the most backward in the South; the Sea Islands have the densest negro population to be found anywhere. Similar instances, on a smaller scale may be found in every state and almost every county of the South. However backward the people, you are everywhere told that a few save money, buy land, and try to give their children better conditions. Nor is it the mulattoes only who show this disposition to get on in the world; the pure Negroes sometimes are the most industrious and sensible of their race.

Houses and lands are not the only measure of uplift; and the numerous Negroes who, according to the impression of white men not likely to exaggerate, are really thrifty, might be unable to raise the average of their race; but it seems clear that the Negro is nowhere reverting to barbarism; that a considerable part of the race, certainly one fourth to one fifth, is doing about as well as the lowest million or two of the Southern Whites; though perhaps a fifth (of whom a great part are to be found in towns and cities) are distinctly doing ill; that the Negroes on the land, though on the average low, ignorant, and degraded, are working well, making cotton, and helping to enrich the South. For, as one of themselves puts it: “The native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with.” The real negro problem is the question of the character and the future of the laborer.

But deep in the breast of the Average Man
The passions of ages are swirled,
And the loves and the hates of the Average Man
Are old as the heart of the world—
For the thought of the Race, as we live and we die,
Is in keeping the Man and the Average high.

The only real measure of uplift is character, but character cannot be reduced to statistical tables. The accumulation of property, especially by a race nearly pauperized when it first acquired the right to hold property, can be traced and throws much light on the important question whether the Negroes are rising or falling. It is difficult to separate out the contribution which the Negro makes to the wealth of the South, and to estimate his own savings, because the only available census figures on this subject deal with the three classes of owners, renters, and croppers of land; and do not, and probably cannot, make a separate account of negro wage hands on the plantations, and workmen and jobbers of every description. As nearly as can be judged, more than half the cotton comes off plantations tilled by negro laborers, or tenants; and for the rest, a notable portion is raised by independent negro farmers, chiefly on the hills—some on the lowlands. The wage hands and the town Negroes have, in general, little to show for their work at the end of the year. They receive or are credited with wages, live on them, and they are gone. Negroes are extravagant, tempted by peddlers and instalment-goods men, and fond of spending for candy, tobacco, and liquor. There are few savings banks in the South, and the failure of the Freedman’s Bank in Reconstruction times was a terrible blow to the long process of building up habits of thrift. It seems to be the conviction of the best friends of the Negro in the South that the great majority of the day laborers have made little or no advance in habits of saving during the last forty years, although most of them have more to show in the way of clothing and furniture than their fathers had.

This is a great misfortune to the race, because, as Booker Washington never wearies of pointing out, now is the golden time for the Negro to acquire land. After the war, good farm land could be bought up at from $1 to $5 an acre; and to-day a family with $500 in cash, and saving habits, can, in most parts of the South, pick up an out-of-the-way corner of land, with a poor house on it, and begin the kind of struggle to support the family and pay for improvements which has been the practice of the Northwest. It is true that good land has now become expensive; there are under-drained Delta lands which are held at $50 to $100 an acre, and although planters grumble at the trouble and loss of making cotton with shiftless hands, not one in a hundred wants to break up his plantation and sell it out to the Negroes. The successful communities of negro farmers who have acquired land during the last ten years have, with half a dozen exceptions, been organized by Northern capitalists, or philanthropists who have bought estates in order to sell them out. The reason for this reluctance of the planter is very simple: his business is to raise cotton on a large scale; if he sells out even at a good figure, he loses his occupation; and the South, as a community, has not yet seized the great principle that the prosperity of everybody is enhanced by an increase in the productive and purchasing power of the laborer.

No figures can be found for the city real estate holdings of Negroes, but in 1900 there were 188,000 so-called farms owned by Negroes, subject, of course, like white property, to mortgages for part of the purchase money, or for debts afterward incurred. In addition, 560,000 negro families were working plots of land, as croppers and renters, and received either a share or the whole of the crop that they made. These people altogether were working 23,000,000 acres, an average of about 30 acres to a family; and produced $256,000,000 worth of products. These 750,000 “farmers” represent something over 3,000,000 individuals, which figures to an annual output of $80 per head; and it is difficult to see how that value could possibly be produced if the Negroes were not there. The families of the day laborers count up to at least 3,000,000 more; and their product was probably somewhere near as large as that of the renters and croppers, although the share of the planter is rather greater. It would seem reasonable to assert that $500,000,000 of the $1,200,000,000 of farm products in the South was raised by negro labor; and that by their work in the cities and towns they probably add another $200,000,000 to the annual product.

It is not, however, certain that the Negroes have accumulated in their own hands so much as the value of one year’s output. A. H. Stone, a practical planter, says that, on his plantation, negro property was irregularly subdivided; his renters had property accumulated to an average of $400 a family, while the share hands did not average $50 a family. That is, the greater part of the negro property is owned by the smaller part of the population. That is not peculiar to Negroes; in New York City nearly the whole property is said to be owned by 20,000 people; and in Galveston most of the valuable real estate is said to be in the hands of, or controlled by, a score of individuals. In the cities and towns, many prosperous Negroes are rent payers, and own no real estate, but there may be 50,000 owners besides the 190,000 farm owners. In Kentucky half the Negroes who are working land independently own their farms. Even in Mississippi the owners and renters together are more than the share hands.

Since no Negro can successfully rent unless he owns mules and farm tools, and the renters are considerably more numerous than the owners, we may add 250,000 more families on the land who have accumulated something. That makes 550,000 families, or between a third and a fourth of the Southern Negroes, who are getting ahead. If the 550,000 families averaged $900 each of land and personal property they would hold $500,000,000; $900 is, however, a high figure, and it may be roughly estimated that negro land owners and renters had accumulated in 1900 not more than $300,000,000 or $400,000,000 worth of property. The rest of the Southern Negroes are about 7,000,000 in number; at the low average of $15 a head of accumulations they would count up nearly $150,000,000 more. A fair estimate of negro wealth in the South, therefore, would be something above $500,000,000, and constantly rising.