The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Could the desired result of keeping Whites and Negroes from too confining a contact be reached by a less drastic method? A favorite suggestion eloquently championed by Grady is “race separation,” which he defined to mean: “That the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the South. As near as may be, these paths should be made equal—but separate they must be now and always. This means separate schools, separate churches, separate accommodation everywhere—but equal accommodation where the same money is charged, or where the State provides for the citizen.” That is, in every city Negroes are to occupy separate quarters, go to separate schools, ride in separate sections of the street cars, use separate sidewalks, buy in separate stores, have separate churches, places of amusement, social organizations, banks, and insurance companies. This system, which in many directions has already been carried out, rests upon a conviction of the Negro’s ability to maintain an economic and intellectual life of his own, without danger to the white race. It has the great disadvantage of cutting off the third of the population which most needs uplift from the influences which bear for progress. It still further diminishes that association of the superior with the inferior race, that kindly interest of employer in employee, that infiltration of culture and moral principles which is the mightiest influence among the white people.

Furthermore, where is the black man to acquire the skill to carry on his own enterprises, to build cotton gins and oil mills, to stock stores, to found banks, if he is to be separated from the white man? Where is he to buy his goods? Here the whole system breaks down; the drummer is no respecter of persons, and not only is willing to sell to a solvent Negro, but is likely to insist that the negro merchant shall not give all his orders to a colored wholesaler. Then what is to be done with the hundreds of thousands of landowners, tenants, croppers, and wage hands, who depend on advances from the Whites? There is no such thing as commercial segregation; as in other directions, when any remedy is proposed which means the cutting off of negro labor, or of the profits derived from negro custom, the South invariably draws back.

On the other hand, race separation would give greater opportunities to the Negroes and reduce the contact with the lower class of the Whites, out of which comes most of the race violence in the South. It is substantially the method applied in Northern cities, though nowhere to any such degree as in the South. It is a method which, with all its hardship to Negroes of the higher class, comes nearest being a modus vivendi between the races.

As for white communities without Negroes, there are many such in the mountain regions, and an unsuccessful effort was made in the town of Fitzgerald, Ga., by Northern immigrants to keep the Negroes out of it, but in such places who will do the odd jobs and perform the necessary rough labor? How shall houses be built, drays be driven and dirt shoveled, if there are no Negroes?

Try which way you may, there seems no method consonant with the interests of the South and the principles of humanity by which Negroes can be set apart from the white people. It was not the choice of their ancestors to change their horizon; nor were the Africans now in the United States consulted as to their neighbors; but they were born on American soil; they have shared in the toil of conquering the continent; they have their homes, their interests, and their traditions; they have never known any life except in dependence on and close relations with the Whites. However happier the South and the whole country might be were there no race question, there seems no possibility of avoiding it by taking away all race contact.

A method of supposed relief widely applied, frequently invoked, and strenuously defended, is to terrorize the Negro. And the North is not free from that spirit. As Mr. Dooley philosophizes: “He’ll ayther have to go to th’ north an’ be a subjick race, or stay in th’ south an’ be an objick lesson. ’Tis a har-rd time he’ll have, anyhow.... I’m not so much throubled about th’ naygur whin he lives among his opprissors as I am whin he falls into th’ hands iv his liberators. Whin he’s in th’ South he can make up his mind to be lynched soon or late an’ give his attintion to his other pleasures iv composin’ rag-time music on a banjo, an’ wurrukin’ f’r th’ man that used to own him an’ now on’y owes him his wages. But ’tis the divvle’s own hardship ... to be pursooed by a mob iv abolitionists till he’s dhriven to seek police protection.” Still the Northern police do give protection against assaults on the Negro which Southern police sometimes refuse. Lawlessness is the plague of the South. Attention has already been called to the negro crime against person and life, the shocking frequency of white crime, the weakness and timidity of the courts, and the resort to lynching as an alleged protest against lawlessness. The number of homicides and mob murders is not so serious as the continual appeals to violence by editors and public men who are accepted as leaders by a large minority and sometimes a majority of the white people. Thus John Temple Graves calls for “a firm, stern, and resolute attitude of organization and readiness on the part of the dominant race.... Is this black man from savage Africa to keep on perpetually disturbing the sections of our common country? Is this running sore to be nursed and treated and anodyned and salved and held forever to our breasts?” Southern newspapers abound in fierce and exciting headlines: “The Burly Black Brute Foiled!” “A Ham Colored Nigger in the Hen House!” “The Only Place for You is Behind a Mule,” and so on—what somebody has called “The wholesale assassination of negro character.” Senator Tillman in a public lecture has said: “On one occasion we killed seven niggers; I don’t know how many I killed personally, but I shot to kill and I know I got my share.” And in another speech, in November, 1907, in Chicago, the same man, who has repeatedly been elected to the Senate from a once proud state, said: “No matter what the people in the North may say or do, the white race in the South will never be dominated by the Negro, and I want to tell you now that if some state should ever make an attempt to ‘save South Carolina,’ we will show them in their fanaticism that we will make it red before we make it black.”

Observe that this ferocity is not directed against the Negro simply because he does ill, but equally if he does well. Thus a correspondent in Georgia writes: “Let me tell you one thing,—every time you people of the North countenance in any way, shape or form any form of social equality, you lay up trouble, not for yourselves, or for us so much, but for the negro. Right or wrong the Southern people will never tolerate it, and will go through the horrors of another reconstruction, before they will permit it to be. Before we will submit to it, we will kill every negro in the Southern states. This is not idle boasting or fire-eating threats, but the cold, hard facts stated in all calmness.” Could hate, jealousy, and meanness reach a higher pitch than in the following declaration of Thomas Dixon, Jr., sent broadcast through the country in the Saturday Evening Post two years ago? “Does any sane man believe that when the Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man, this ‘arrogant,’ ‘rapacious,’ and ‘intolerant’ race will allow the Negro to master his industrial system, take the bread from his mouth, crowd him to the wall and place a mortgage on his house? Competition is war—the most fierce and brutal of all its forms. Could fatuity reach a sublimer height than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and see this performance? What will he do when put to the test? He will do exactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread—kill him!” Could blind race hostility go farther than in the Atlanta Riots of 1907, for which not one murderer has ever been subjected to any punishment?

These violent utterances come almost wholly from the Superior Race. The Negroes have their grievances; but any intemperate publication toward the white race would almost certainly lead to a lynching. An instance has actually occurred where a Negro was driven out of a community, and glad to escape with his life, because he had in his newspaper said with regard to a woman of his own race whose character had been assailed, that she was as virtuous as any white woman. Doubtless some of the cruel and incendiary language that has been quoted is intended for home consumption; it is supposed to be a striking way of saying to the Negroes that they ought to behave better; and alongside every one of these vindictive utterances could be placed a message of hope and encouragement from Southern white men to the blacks. These expressions of white ferocity in condemnation of negro ferocity are overbalanced by such strong words as those of Senator Williams: “It cannot be escaped by the extermination of either race by the other. That thought is absolutely horrible to a good man, a believer in the divine philosophy of Jesus Christ, who taught mutual helpfulness, and not mutual hatred to mankind.” Nevertheless, it remains true that a large number of Southern people who are in places of influence and authority advise that the race problem be settled by terrorizing the Negro.

The commonest form of terror is lynching, a deliberate attempt to keep the race down by occasionally killing Negroes, sometimes because they are dreadful criminals, frequently because they are bad, or loose-tongued, or influential, or are acquiring property, or otherwise irritate the Whites. A saucy speech by a Negro to a white man may be followed by swift, relentless, and tormenting death. In every case of passionate conflict between two races the higher loses most, because it has most to lose; and lynch law as a remedy for the lawlessness of the blacks has the disadvantage of occasionally exposing innocent white men to the uncontrollable passion of other white men, of filling the mind with scenes of horror and cruelty, of lowering the standard of the whole white race.

This subject is inextricably connected with the crimes by Negroes, for which lynching is held to be an appropriate punishment. The statistics collected by Mr. Cutler, and stated in a previous chapter, show in the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903 a record of 1,997 lynchings in the South; of the Negroes lynched, 707 were charged with violence to women and 783 with murder. These figures absolutely disprove the habitual statements in the South that lynching is common to all sections of the Union; that it is almost always caused by rape; and that rape is a crime confined to Negroes. The details of some of these cases would show that the mob not infrequently gets an innocent person; that it is liable to be carried away into the most horrible excesses of burning and torture; that a lynching is really a kind of orgy in which not only the criminal class among the Whites, but people who are ordinarily swayed by reason simply let go of themselves and indulge the primeval brutishness of human nature. Said Confucius: “The Master said, ‘I hate the manner in which purple takes away the luster of vermilion. I hate the way in which the songs of Ch’ing confound the music of Gna. I hate those who with their sharp mouths overthrow kingdoms and families.’”