(I) The first is the dominance of the white race, which will not surrender any of the present privileges. As Page puts it: “The absolute and unchangeable superiority of the white race—a superiority, it appears to him, not due to any mere adventitious circumstances, such as superior educational and other advantages during some centuries, but an inherent and essential superiority, based on superior intellect, virtue, and constancy. He does not believe that the Negro is the equal of the White, or ever could be the equal.” That means that the low Negro is inferior to the low White, the average Negro to the average White, and the superior Negro, however high his plane, moral and intellectual, is also to be put into a position of permanent inferiority to the higher Whites. Because inferior morally and mentally, he is held also in political inferiority. The South does not intend that even intelligent and educated Negroes shall have a share in making or administering the laws.
(II) Partly from a sense of its own superiority, partly from a disdain of a formerly servile race, chiefly from a well-founded belief that amalgamation would be a great misfortune for the community, the South is determined that there shall be no legalized admixture of the races. That miscegenation is still going on in an unknown degree heightens the determination that it shall at least be put under the ban of law; the very danger makes the South more determined that the races shall be kept separate.
(III) The dominant white Southerners are further absolutely determined that any settlement of the question shall come from their volition; and that means that the Southern Negro is not expected to exercise anything more than a mild academic influence. The character of the Negroes, their thriftlessness or industry, their crime or virtue, their stupidity or their intelligence, may deflect the white mind one way or another; their preferences, outside the iron fence which the South has erected round the question, will receive some attention; but they will have to accept what the white people assign to them.
(IV) The South is as yet little awakened to the idea that the status of the lower Whites is a part of the whole race problem. Inasmuch as the Poor White is emerging from seclusion and poverty, people do not sufficiently realize that he needs education, intellectual and moral; that his passions, his animal instincts, his violence stand in the way of the uplift of both races.
(V) The North is expected by the South not to act by legislation or any other active method in behalf of the Negro. The Southerners in general consider the Fifteenth, or suffrage Amendment, to be an affront, which they avoid by shifty clauses in their constitutions and would repeal if they could. Some Southerners resent even inquiry about the South, and apparently remember how their fathers received visiting abolitionists.
(VI) It would, however, be a great injustice to the immense number of broad-minded people in the South to leave the impression that nobody down there welcomes investigation or reads criticisms. Upon the negro question in general there are two different and opposing Southern points of view. The one-sided and arrogant statements of the Vardamans, the Dixons, the Graveses, and the Tillmans have no right to call themselves the voice of the South, in the face of the appeals to common justice and American principles of fair play that flow from the pens of the Bassetts, the Murphys, the Mitchells, the Flemings, and the Percys. It is a happy omen that the South is divided upon its own question; for it means that the taboo has been taken off discussion; that Southern men may honestly differ on the question of the rights and the character of the Negro.
On the one side is a numerous class of Whites, some coarse and ignorant, others of power and vitality, including many small farmers and managers of plantations, and also a large element in the towns, who are not much interested in the uplift of the Whites and do not wish well to the Negro, but are full of a blind hostility to the negro race and take the ground that this is a white man’s government, and accept the Negro only as a tool for their use.
On the other side stand a great part of the high-bred, well-educated and masterful element; the people who count in the church, the club and university, the pulpit and the bench; people who have a material interest and genuine public spirit in providing for the future of their own commonwealth. In general the best people in the South, the most highly trained, most public-spirited, most religious, wealthiest, and most responsible people wish well to the Negro. The plantation owner, the manufacturer, the railroad manager, want efficient laborers; the minister wants God-fearing people; the judge wants law-abiding men; the educator wants good schools; they all want to raise the community, the bottom as well as the top. How far is the superior class in the South to control the action of legislatures and the movement of public sentiment, and the behavior of those of a ruder cast? Which of these two classes speaks for the South?