The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

One of the curious by-currents of this discussion is the preposterous conviction of many Southern writers that, inasmuch as these relations are between white men and negro women, there is no “pollution of the Anglo-Saxon blood;” thus Thomas Dixon, Jr., insists that the present racial mixture “has no social significance ... the racial integrity remains intact. The right to choose one’s mate is the foundation of racial life and civilization. The South must guard with flaming sword every avenue of approach to this holy of holies.”

On the other hand, and just as powerful, is the absolute determination of the Whites never to admit the mulattoes within their own circle. The usual legal phrase “person of color” includes commonly everybody who has as much as an eighth of negro blood, and in two states anyone who has a visible trace. But social usage goes far beyond this limit, and no person supposed to have the slightest admixture of negro blood would be admitted to any social function in any Southern city. In 1905 there was a dramatic trial in North Carolina brought about by the exclusion from a public school of six girls, descendants from one Jeffrey Graham, who lived a hundred years ago and was suspected of having negro blood. The Graham family alleged that they had a Portuguese ancestor, and brought into court a dark-skinned Portuguese to show how the mistake might have arisen; and eventually the court declared them members of the superior race.

The reason for the intense Southern feeling on race equality is to a large extent the belief that friendly intercourse with the Negro on anything but well-understood terms of the superior talking to the inferior is likely to lead to an amalgamation, which may involve a large part of the white race. The evils of the present system are manifest. The most reckless and low-minded Whites are preying on what ought to be one of the best parts of the negro race. Thousands of children come into the world with an ineffaceable mark of bastardy; the greater part of such children are absolutely neglected by their fathers; the decent negro men feel furious at the danger to their families or the frailness of their sisters. Both races have their own moral blemishes, and it is a double and treble misfortune that there should be inter-racial mixtures on such degrading terms.

As for a remedy, nobody seems able to suggest anything that has so far worked. A recent writer soberly suggests that a way out is to make a pariah of the mulatto, including that part of the mulattoes who are born of mulatto or negro parents; they are to be shut from the schools, excluded from all missionary efforts, made a race apart; and that action he thinks would be a moral lesson to the full-blooded Africans! Another method is that of the anti-miscegenation league of Vicksburg, Miss., which aims to make public the names of offenders and to prosecute them. A better remedy would be the systematic application of the existing laws of the state, with at least as much zeal as is given to the enforcement of the Jim Crow laws. In the last resort there is no remedy except such an awakening of public sentiment as will drive out of the ranks of respectable men and women those who practice these vices. Such a sentiment exists in the churches, the philanthropic societies, and an army of straightforward sensible men and women. The evil is probably somewhat abating; but till it is far reduced how can anybody in the South argue that education and material improvement of the Negro are what most powerfully tends to social equality? Just so far as the negro man and the negro woman are, by a better station in life, by aroused self-respect and race pride, led to protect themselves, so far will this evil be diminished.

The subject cannot be left without taking ground upon the underlying issue. All the faults of the Southern men who are practical amalgamators add weight to the bottom contention of the South that a mixture of the races, now or in the future, would be calamitous. That belief rests upon the conviction that the negro race, on the average, is below the white race; that it can never be expected to contribute anything like its proportion of the strength of the community; and hence to fuse the races means slight or no elevation for the Negro, and a great decline for the white race. With that belief the writer coincides. The union of the two races means a decline in the rate of civilization; and the fact that so much of it is going on is not a reason for legalizing it, but for sternly suppressing it. If amalgamation is dangerous and would pull down the standard of that higher part of the community which must always be dominant, then such steps must be taken in all justice, in all humanity, with all effort to raise both races, as are necessary to prevent amalgamation.

While thus in one way fully recognized as a human being and of like blood with the Whites, upon the other side the Negro is set aside by a race prejudice which in many respects is fiercer and more unyielding than in the days of slavery. One of the few compensations for slavery was the not infrequent personal friendship between the master and the slave; they were sometimes nursed at the same tawny breast; and played together as children; Jonas Field, of Lady’s Island, to this day remembers with pride how after the war, when he became free, his old master, whose body servant he had been, took him to his house, presented him to his daughters, and bade them always remember that Jonas Field had been one of the family, and was to be treated with the respect of a father. The influence of the white mistress on those few slaves who were near to her is one of the brightest things in slavery. She visited the negro cabins, counseled the mothers, cared for the sick, and by life and conversation tried to build up their character. It is almost the universal testimony that such relations are disappearing; rare is the white foot that steps within the Negro’s cabin. John Sharp Williams, of Mississippi, says: “More and more every year the negro’s life—moral, intellectual, and industrial—is isolated from the white man’s life, and therefore from his influence. There was a kindlier and more confidential relationship ... when I was a boy than between my children and the present generation of negroes.”

It is a singular fact that the feeling of race antagonism has sprung up comparatively recently; to this day there are remnants of the old clan idea of the great plantations. Thousands of Negroes choose some White as a friend and sponsor, and in case of difficulty ask him for advice, for a voucher of character, or for money, and are seldom disappointed. The lower stratum of the Whites, which is thrown into close juxtaposition with Negroes, finds no difficulty in a kind of rude companionship, provided it is not too much noticed. The sentimental and sometimes artificial love for the old colored “mammy” is a disappearing bond between the races, for though the white children are cared for almost everywhere by negro girls, there seems little affection between the nurse and her charge.

Some Southern authorities assert that race hatred was fomented toward the end of Reconstruction. Says “Nicholas Worth”: “Men whose faithful servants were negroes, negroes who had shined their shoes in the morning and cooked their breakfasts and dressed their children and groomed their horses and driven them to their offices, negroes who were the faithful servants and constant attendants on their families,—such men spent the day declaring the imminent danger of negro ‘equality’ and ‘domination.’” The same genial writer goes on to describe the gloom at the supposed flood of African despotism; they said: “Our liberties were in peril; our very blood would be polluted; dark night would close over us,—us, degenerate sons of glorious sires,—if we did not rise in righteous might and stem the barbaric flood.” Though in all the states the Negroes were swept out of political power by 1876, to this day they are popularly supposed to be planning some kind of domination over the Whites. This made-up race issue is not yet extinct. Nobody knows the inner spirit of a certain section of the South better than Thomas E. Watson, of Georgia, who has recently said: “The politicians keep the negro question alive in the South to perpetuate their hold on public office. The negro question is the joy of their lives. It is their very existence. They fatten on it. With one shout of ‘nigger!’ they can run the native Democrats into their holes at any hour of the day.”

How does this feeling strike the Negro? Let an intelligent man, Johnson, in his “Light Ahead for the Negro,” speak for himself. He complains that the newspapers use inflammatory headlines and urge lynchings—“a wholesale assassination of Negro character”; that it is made a social crime to employ Negroes as clerks in a white store; that the cultured Southern people spread abroad the imputation that the Negro as a race is worthless; that the news agents are prejudiced against the Negro and give misleading accounts of difficulties with the Whites; that people thought to be friendly are hounded out of their positions; that there is a desire to expatriate the negroes from the country of their fathers. Kelly Miller, a professor in Howard University, Washington, objects to using physical dissimilarity as a mark of inferiority, and thinks “that the feeling against the negro is of the nature of inspirited animosity rather than natural antipathy”; and that “the dominant South is determined to foster artificial hatred between the races.”

Race prejudice has always existed since the races have lived together; but, whether because taught to the boys of the Reconstruction epoch, or whether because the Negroes have made slower progress than was hoped, it is sharper now than in the whole history of the question. Is it founded on an innate race repulsion? Does the white man necessarily fear and dislike the Negro? The white child does not, nor the lowest stratum of Whites, who are nearest the Negro intellectually and morally. John Sharp Williams says: “If I were to call our race feeling anything etymologically, I would call it a ‘post-judice’ and not a ‘pre-judice.’ I notice that nobody has our race feeling or any race feeling indeed until after knowledge. It is a conviction born of experience.”