The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Statistics are unfortunately too available, inasmuch as for twenty years the number of such crimes has been nearly balanced by the number of lynchings for that offense, which have been tabulated from year to year by the Chicago Tribune, and have been thoroughly analyzed by Professor Cutler in his recent book “Lynch Law.” From 1882 to 1903 these statistics show an average of thirty-two lynchings per year for violence or attempted violence to white women, though of late they have been reduced to under twenty. This includes some cases of innocent men, probably balanced by assailants who escaped. These figures completely dispose of the allegation that the crime is very frequent. Contrary to common belief in the North, some such cases are tried before regular courts; and in Missouri the Governor in 1908 very properly refused to pardon a Negro under a sentence of death for that crime. Adding in these cases, and the half dozen which perhaps escaped the newspaper reporter, at the utmost there are not over fifty authenticated instances of this crime in the whole South in a twelvemonth. Among something like 3,000,000 adult negro males the ratio of the crime to those who might commit it is about 1 to 600,000; and out of 6,000,000 white women, not over fifty become victims, or 1 in 120,000. For this degree of danger to white women ten million human beings are supposed to be sodden with crime and actuated by malice, and the whole South from end to end is filled with terror.

The allegation frequently made that these crimes are committed by highly educated Negroes, graduates of Hampton and Tuskegee, is absolutely without foundation. Most of them are by men of the lowest type, some undoubtedly maniacs. Most of these occurrences take place where the Whites and Negroes are most closely brought into juxtaposition, sometimes where they are both working in the fields. Hence they are of rare occurrence where the Whites are fewest and the Negroes most numerous. In many places in the Black Belt, white people have no fear of leaving their families, because sure that their negro neighbors would give their lives, if necessary, for the protection of the white women. The Northern white teachers, who are accused of arousing in the Negro’s mind the belief that he is the equal of the Whites, have never in a single instance been attacked; and in communities where the Negroes are literally fifty to one, have not the slightest fear of going about alone at any necessary hour of day or night.

These statements are not intended to minimize the dreadful effects of a crime which brings such wretchedness upon the innocent. The two worst enemies of the white woman in the South are “The Black Brute,” whom the Southern press is never tired of describing in unrepeatable terms, and the white buzzard journalist who spreads her name and her dreadful story abroad to become the seed of another like crime. Where is the Southern chivalry and respect for white women when every such crime is sought out and flashed abroad, in all the details obtainable, and the victim is doomed to a second wrong in the lifelong feeling that she is known and branded throughout the land?

A general and well-grounded complaint is that any fugitive, no matter what his reason for flight, even though he is guilty of rape, is fed and sent on his way by his own people, a practice which goes back to slavery days when there were many strays whose only offense was a love of liberty. “The worst feature,” says an observer, “is that other negroes help to conceal them and their crimes. They seem to have entered into a racial agreement that they must help each one of their race to escape the penalties of the white man’s law by resorting to every artifice of untruthfulness and concealment.” Judge Cann, of Georgia, charges that “as a race, negroes shelter, conceal and protect the criminals of their race; that they produce riots by attacking officers of the law while in the discharge of their duty; that they openly show sympathy with the negro criminal; that they conspire against the enforcement of law; that they have made first a hero, and then a martyr, of a legally convicted and executed murderer.”

Like all such general statements, these allegations go too far. In the first place, it is not altogether a sentiment of race solidarity. Negroes have been known to give similar shelter to white vagabonds and criminals. In the second place, black criminals are frequently apprehended through blacks, and large numbers are brought into court, tried and convicted, entirely on negro testimony. Something has been done in the way of negro Law and Order Associations, which pledge themselves to give up criminals. Still, it is discomposing to know that when a search was making for a particularly odious fellow in Monroe, La., who had for a year or two made himself the nuisance of the neighborhood by looking into windows, his father and brothers, who must have known his practices, unhesitatingly signed such a law-and-order pledge. The Brownsville incident of 1907 also, with the apparent determination of scores of men not to “split” on some ruffians and murderers among them, produced a painful feeling throughout the country. In few respects could the Negroes do so much good for themselves as by helping in the detection of the crime of their own people.

If Negroes are violent to Whites and among themselves, they follow an example daily and hourly set them by the members of the Superior Race. In the first place, the Negro listens habitually to rough and humiliating language. You get a new view of race relations when a planter in his store on Saturday night calls up for you one after another three specimen Negroes. “This man Chocolate,” he says, “is a full-blooded nigger, the real thing.” “Chocolate” says nothing, shrugs his shoulders, and looks as he feels, literally like the devil. The next is introduced as “One of your mixed ones—How did that come about, hey!” and the mulatto, who has been the official whipper on the plantation, grins at the superior man’s joke. The third is called up and presented as “The Preacher, very fond of the sisters.” This is a fair sample of what constantly takes place wherever there is a rough, coarse white man among Negroes.

The office of the whipper is usually performed by the master himself, if he is one of those numerous employers who believe in that method. As one such put it: “I follow up a hand and tell him to do what he ought? If he won’t, I just get off and whip him.” “Suppose he summons you before a magistrate?” “I lick him again before the magistrate and send him home.” Other planters have given up whipping and charge a fine against the Negro’s account. Of course such fellows would rather be whipped than prosecuted, and think that the riders (that is, the overseers), if they once take it out of them in a thrashing, will harbor no further malice. In some states, as North Carolina, whipping is unusual; in others it is frequent.

Another race trouble is the driving out of blacks who make themselves disliked by the Whites. A Negro passes an examination for post office clerk, but is warned that if he tries to take the place he will be shot. A colored editor, whose paper is much less offensive than any of the white journals in his neighborhood in bad language and incitement to crime, is thought well treated because he leaves the state alive. A Negro who is too conspicuous, who builds a house thought to be above his station, who drives two horses in his buggy, may be warned to leave the place; and if he refuses to sacrifice his little property, may be shot. A black doctor may be warned out of the county because there are enough white doctors. The South is not the only community where people that are obnoxious are hustled out of town, and Southern Whites sometimes receive the same unofficial “ticket of leave”; but it makes bad blood when irresponsible people, often in no way superior in character to the Negroes whom they assail, uproot their neighbors.

Then comes the long list of homicides of Negroes by Whites. Ever since Ku Klux times there have been occasional instances of “whitecapping”—that is, of bodies of disguised men riding through the country, pulling people out of their houses and whipping them. Such practices are not confined to the South and are condoned sometimes in the North. Down on Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts a few years ago a jury absolutely refused to convict the perpetrators of a similar outrage on a white man; while in Alabama, in 1898, five Whites were sentenced for twenty years each for killing a Negro in that sort of way. Still convictions of white men for killing Negroes are very unusual. Since practically every adult negro man has a gun about him, the theory of the White is that if you get into a quarrel and the Negro makes any movement with his hands, you must shoot him forthwith. To this purport is the testimony of a Mississippi planter who reproved a hand for severely whipping his child; the black replied that it was his business and nobody should stop it; the white man said he would stop it; whereupon the Negro drew, but was met by a bullet in his forehead; and, explained the planter, “A steel bullet will go through a nigger’s skull.” Take another case: An assistant manager on an estate in the Delta of Mississippi tried to take a pistol away from a new hand and felt himself safe because the man had his hands in his pockets; but the Negro fired through the pocket, instantly killed the white man, and decamped. It afterwards was shown that he had previously killed another white man.

The responsibility is not always on the Negro’s side. There are many disputes over labor contracts, in which the Negro justly believes that the white man has cheated him, and his attempt to audit is stopped by a quarrel in which the black is killed. Even boys under twelve years of age have been known to shoot Negroes over trivial disputes, and a young lady in Washington recently shot and killed a black boy who was stealing fruit. The Negroes complain of harsh treatment by the police. For instance, a good-looking, very black young man is glad to get out of Savannah and among the white people on the Sea Islands. “They like the colored people better; even if they do get drunk and are fierce, they treat them better. In Savannah the other day I saw a man going back to his vessel, and a policeman asked him where he was going. He answered up rough like,—I wouldn’t do that, I’d go down on my hands and knees to ’em rather than have any trouble with em,—and the policeman broke his club over his head, arrested him, and they sent him to the chain gang. I don’t want to be arrested; I never have been arrested in my life.” That the police are often in the wrong is shown by such instances as the recent acquittal of a Negro by direction of an Alabama judge; he had shot a policeman who was arresting him without reason, and the judge who heard the case justified him.