The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

The methods of dealing with the race question discussed in the last chapter all go back to the idea that the Negro can be improved only by some process distasteful to him. Race separation he dislikes, expatriation he shudders at, and violence brings on him more evils than it removes, to say nothing of the effect on the Whites. The world has tried many experiments of civilizing people by the police, and they are all failures, from the Russian Empire to the West Side of New York, especially since both the Cossacks and the metropolitan police have faults of their own. In the South and in Russia alike there is doubtless a feeling that the people at the bottom of the scale are things below the common standard, that force is necessary because they will not listen to reason.

None of the forcible remedies meets the most obvious difficulty in the South—that the present condition of the lower race is not a foundation for great wealth and high prosperity. If the Negro has reached his pitch, if he is to remain at his present average of morals and industry and productivity, the South may well be in despair, for it is far below that of the low Southern White, and farther below that of the Northwestern farmer. The condition of the black is a menace to society—if it must stay at the present level.

In the chapter on “Is the Negro Rising?” some reasons are given for believing that the status of the race has much improved in the last forty years and is still gaining. Upon this critical point numbers of both races testify. Kelly Miller says of the achievements of his people: “Within forty years of only partial opportunity, while playing as it were in the backyard of civilization, the American negro has cut down his illiteracy by over fifty per cent; has produced a professional class some fifty thousand strong, including ministers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, editors, authors, architects, engineers and all higher lines of listed pursuits in which white men are engaged; some three thousand negroes have taken collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from the best institutions in the North and West established for the most favored white youth; ... negro inventors have taken out some four hundred patents as a contribution to the mechanical genius of America; there are scores of negroes who, for conceded ability and achievements, take respectable rank in the company of distinguished Americans.”

This opinion is not confined to members of the negro race; even so cordial an enemy of the Negro as John Temple Graves admits that “The leaders of no race in history have ever shown greater wisdom, good temper and conservative discretion than distinguishes the two or three men who stand at the head of the negro race in America to-day”; and elsewhere he declares that there are two good Negroes for every bad Negro, a proportion which does not obtain in every race. Thomas Nelson Page is of opinion that, “Unquestionably, a certain proportion of the Negro race has risen notably since the era of emancipation,” and John Sharp Williams commits himself to the statement that “Fully ninety per cent of the negro race is behaving itself as well as could be expected; it is at work in the fields, on the railroads, and in the sawmills, and does not, for the most part, know that there is a fifteenth amendment.” A cloud of witnesses confirm the belief that a fourth to a fifth of all the Negroes in the South are somewhat improving and slowly saving. Some of them have hearkened to the advice of an English writer: “Try to realize two things: first, that you are living in a commercial republic; a country whose standard, in all things, is material; second, that you are the greatest economic power in this country.”

The possibility of a general industrial uplift depends upon several factors which are not easy to fix. It is a question whether the lower four fifths of the negro race has anything like the potentiality of the upper fraction, for it is made up mostly of plantation Negroes, who have certainly advanced a long way from slavery times, are better clothed, better fed, better housed, better treated, but are still a long way below most of the Whites in their own section. The most appalling thing about the negro problem is, this mass of people on the land who are doing well in the sense that they work, make cotton, yield profits, help to make the community prosperous, but who are ignorant, stupid, and have no horizon outside the cotton field and the cornfield. In spirit they still hark back to Whittier’s plantation song,

De yam will grow, de cotton blow,
We’ll hab de rice an’ corn;
O nebber you fear if nebber you hear
De driver blow his horn.

Is there anything stirring in the minds of that great, good-natured, inert and unthinking mass which will bring them up where the reproach now heaped upon them shall fade away? Still more, if they try to arise, will the Whites permit them? That is no idle question, for rising means that some of them will seek other pursuits, and the white people have already given notice that certain avenues of labor are closed to them. Contrary to many assertions confidently made, the Negroes are not as a race crowded out of the skilled trades in the South; but the trades union is bound to appear and the effort will be to shut negro mechanics out of the unions altogether, as has been done in some Northern places. The Negro as he rises to higher possibilities may find those possibilities withdrawn. Listen to the philosophy of Thomas Dixon, Jr., a Christian minister: “If the Negro is made master of the industries of the South he will become the master of the South. Sooner than allow him to take the bread from their mouths, the white men will kill him here, as they do North, when the struggle for bread becomes as tragic.... Make the Negro a scientific and successful farmer, and let him plant his feet deep in your soil, and it will mean a race war.... The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, or the leopard his spots. Those who think it possible will always tell you that the place to work this miracle is in the South. Exactly. If a man really believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a Negro in marriage. That is the test.” This is nothing more nor less than the negro preacher’s exhortation to his congregation: “My dear hearers, dar is two roads a-lyin’ straight before you, and a-branchin’ off de one from de odder at the nex’ corners; one of ’em leads to perdition, and de odder to everlastin’ damnation. Oh, my friends, which will you choose?” If the Negro will not rise, argues Dixon, he gives nothing to the community, away with him! If he does rise, he may take work that otherwise some white man might do, lynch him!

The real argument of competition works just the other way. The inferior Negro is not likely to take the bread out of the mouth of the superior white man; but, when relieved from the abnormal conditions of slavery and of Reconstruction, he may still be able to hold his own in the struggle for existence. Emancipation threw upon the Negro the responsibility for his own keeping. The most that he can ask is a fair field without artificial hindrances or limitations; and in such a field a race on the average inferior may nevertheless find tasks in which it excels, and may maintain its race life unimpaired. Kelly Miller says: “You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, I was born with an iron hoe in my hand”; and the world needs the hoe hand just as much as the silversmith.

It would appear that for the uplift of the Negro something is needed on the white side: remembrance of the foundations of American liberty, of the workings of Christianity, of the economic truth that you are not made poor because your neighbor gets on in the world. The curse of the South is that its people do not more genuinely realize that the more active, industrious, and thrifty a people become, the more their neighbors receive out of the enlarged contribution to the community. If the Negroes were all as intelligent as Roscoe Conkling Bruce, as forehanded as Benson of Kowaliga, as lyric as Paul Dunbar, the Whites in the South might get rich out of the trade of the Negro, and some of them see it so. For instance, President Winston, of the Agricultural College of North Carolina: “Greater industrial efficiency would prove an everlasting bond between the races in the South. It is the real key to the problem. Let the Negro make himself indispensable as a workman, and he may rely upon the friendship and affection of the whites.... Public sentiment in the South still welcomes the Negro to every field of labor that he is capable of performing. The whole field of industry is open to him. The Southern whites are not troubled by his efficiency but by his inefficiency.” Meantime the really industrious Negroes, of whom there are a couple of million or more, follow the advice of Paul Dunbar:

I’ve a humble little motto
That is homely, though it’s true,—
Keep a-pluggin’ away.
It’s a thing when I’ve an object
That I always try to do,—
Keep a-pluggin’ away.
When you’ve rising storms to quell,
When opposing waters swell,
It will never fail to tell,—
Keep a-pluggin’ away.