This estimated proportion is confirmed by investigations into taxes paid by Negroes. In 1902 the 2,100,000 Negroes in the four states of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arkansas were assessed for taxes on $54,000,000. At the same proportion throughout the South, their assessment would have been about $170,000,000, which by this time has probably increased to over $200,000,000; and $200,000,000 is a fortieth of the present total assessment. The sum is great, but the proportion to the wealth of the South is small. At best it can be said that the Negroes, who are a third of the population, own a fortieth of the property in the South; and that one fourth of the Negroes own four fifths of all the negro property. The taxes do not tell the whole story, and there are probably rich Northern cities in which the poorest third of the population does not directly pay more than a fortieth of the taxes. If a race is to be held up as worthless because it is not on the tax books, what will become of some of the most lively members of the Boston City Council and New York Board of Aldermen? Everybody knows that in every community the poorest people pay the largest proportionate taxes through their rent, and through the increased cost of living which is pushed down upon them by landlords and storekeepers. If the colored people were all to move out of their tenements and farms and to go on general strike and earn nothing with which to buy their supplies, the taxpayers of record would very quickly find out who paid a part of their taxes for them. Nevertheless, whatever excuses are made for him, it is undeniable that the Negro has no such spirit of acquisition, no such willingness to sacrifice present delight for future good, as the Northern immigrant, or even the Southern Poor White.
CHAPTER XII
RACE ASSOCIATION
In the preceding chapters the effort has been made to analyze and describe the white race and the negro race, each as though it lived by itself, and could work out its own destiny without reference to the other. The white race is faced with the necessity of elevating its lower fourth; the negro race should be equally absorbed in advancing its lower three fourths. In both races there is progress and there is hope; if either one were living by itself it might be predicted that in a generation or two the problems would cease to be specially Southern and would come down to those which besiege all civilized communities. But neither race lives alone, neither can live alone. The commercial prosperity of the Whites largely depends on negro labor; high standards for the negro race depend on white aid and white example; neither race is free, neither race is independent. They are the positive and negative poles of a dynamo, and terrific is the spark that sometimes leaps from one to the other.
In one sense, the Southern Whites are the South, inasmuch as they have complete control of the state and local governments, of the military, of public education, of business on a large scale, and of society; but the Negroes are one third of the population, furnish much more than half the laborers for hire, have schools, property, and aspirations; hence whatever term is used, “Southern Problem,” “Race Problem,” or “Negro Problem,” it refers to the antagonism between those two races. How keen is the Southern consciousness of this peculiar condition may be learned from some of the Southern critics:
Thomas Nelson Page thus states it: “A race with an historic and a glorious past, in a high state of civilization, stands confronted by a race of their former slaves, invested with every civil and political right which they themselves possess, and supported by an outside public sentiment, which if not inimical to the dominant race is at least unsympathetic. The two races ... are suspicious of each other; their interests are in some essential particulars conflicting, and in others may easily be made so; ... the former dominant race is unalterably assertive of the imperative necessity that it shall govern the inferior race and not be governed by it.” Less drastic is the statement of Judge William H. Thomas: “The white man and the negro together make up the citizenship of our Southern country, and any effort to deal with either ignoring the other will diminish the chances of ultimate success. That religion and sentiment, the fixed ideals and prejudices, if you please, of the South are substantial facts that cannot be ignored and must always be reckoned with.” Murphy speaks of the “problem presented by the undeveloped forces of the stronger race. These must largely constitute the determining factor, even in the problem presented by the negro; for the negro question is not primarily a question of the negro among negroes, but a question of the negro surrounded by another and a stronger people.”
To all these attempts to state the case the Northerner is tempted to reply that the South has no monopoly of race problems; that he too has prejudices and repulsions and race jealousies resembling those of the South; and that since he sees them melting away around him, those of his Southern brethren will also disappear of themselves. That is all true, yet much less than all the truth. In the South every white man is determined that there shall be two races forever. Nobody ever stated the Southern point of view on this subject better than the late Henry Grady: “This problem is to carry on within her body politic two separate races, equal in civil and political rights, and nearly equal in numbers. She must carry these races in peace; for discord means ruin. She must carry them separately; for assimilation means debasement. She must carry them in equal justice; for to this she is pledged in honor and in gratitude. She must carry them even unto the end; for in human probability she will never be quit of either.”
“The South” in Grady’s mouth really means the white South, for it is not in the purpose of any Southern man or woman of influence to permit the Negro to take part in deciding race issues. Furthermore, to the settlement of these difficult problems the South along with a genuine humanity, a desire to act in all things within justice and Christianity, brings habits of mind which have been discussed in an earlier chapter, and which make especially difficult moderate public statements on the race question. As in slavery times the simple assertion that there is a race question seems to some people an offensive attempt to bring ruin on the South: there is still something of the feeling candidly set forth by the old war-time Southern school geography: “The Yankees are an intelligent people upon all subjects except slavery. On that question they are mad.”