The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Many observers are alive to the possibility of removing temptations which are thought to be specially alluring to the Negro. The ill-disposed country black is a rover, a night-hawk, and has his own kinds of good times, including a supply of whisky; the bad town Negro finds his pleasures right at hand, and is frequently abetted in them by the white man. To be sure, low drinking houses, gambling houses and worse places, flourish among all races in New York, and are no more likely to be exterminated in New Orleans than in the Northern city for such considerations. John Sharp Williams would resort to “some sort of common-sense remedies of the negro question upon the criminal side, principally in the nature of preventives. In the first place, they suggest the rigid enforcement of vagrant laws by new laws whenever, in justice and right, they need strengthening. In the second place, they suggest a closing of all low dives and brothels where the vagrant, tramp, and idle negroes consort and where their imaginations—they being peculiarly a race of imagination and emotion—are inflamed by whisky, cocaine, and lewd pictures. It must be remembered that that which would not inflame the imagination of a white man will have that effect upon the tropical, emotional nature of the darky.... We ought, like Canada and Cape Colony, to have mounted rural police or constabulary, whose duty it would be to patrol the country districts day and night.” The cry in the Southern newspapers against negro dives generally ignores the fact that many of them are carried on by white people, and others are partially supported by white custom. At the bottom of humanity race distinctions disappear, and you could find, if you searched for it, in many Southern towns, beneath the lowest negro deep a lower white deep. The difficulty with Southern legislation is that it is more hostile to negro dives than to white dives.

A more promising legislative remedy is an efficient vagrant law, by which the hopelessly idle, the sponges on the industry of their race, should receive the dread punishment of work. Northern states which are unable to find statutes and magistrates strict enough to put an end to the intolerable white tramp nuisance, have little cause to criticise the Southern loafers, of whom the Whites are found in quite as large a proportion as the Negroes. Several states already have vagrant laws, but they are applied chiefly to Negroes, often very inequitably, and play into the iniquitous system by which sheriffs make money in proportion to the number of prisoners that they arrest and keep in jail. The Birmingham Age Herald says that to abolish imprisonment for nonpayment of criminal costs is “as much out of our reach as is a flight to Mars.... We must build jails to suit the operations of the collectors of fees. There is no help for it.”

Suggestions that there be a kind of negro court for the less serious negro crimes, have been made by Thomas Nelson Page and others; and Negroes could probably administer as good local justice as some of their dominant race. In the island of St. Helena, for instance, where seven thousand people for a long time had no local court, a white magistrate was sent over who sat day after day drunk on the bench, finally shot a man (the second homicide on that island in forty years), and was put on his trial, but still held his judicial office. Perhaps a special negro court for petty crimes would increase the sense of responsibility; but it collides with the present system of selling petty criminals to the planters.

Something could be done by an efficient system of rural police such as is needed all over the country, North and South. In Georgia and South Carolina bills have lately been pending for a state mounted police which would be a sort of revival of the volunteer patrols of slavery times. The suggestion is fought hard, however, on the ground that white men might be obliged to give an account of themselves as well as Negroes.

The only thoroughgoing legislative measure which seems likely to help the Negro is prohibition, which is now sweeping through the Lower South. It is a region which suffers from hard drinking, and there has long been a strong sentiment against the traffic; but the tumultuous success of prohibition laws in communities like Alabama and Mississippi is due in great part to the conviction of employers of labor in cotton mills, in ironworks, in the timber industry, and on the land, that they are losing money because their laborers are made irregular by drunkenness. That objection applies as much to the selling of liquor to Whites as to Negroes; but the drinking white men have an influence over prosecuting officers that the Negroes cannot command; and it looks as though the result would be a kind of prohibition which shuts off the stream from the dusky man’s throat while leaving it running for the white man. If the South succeeds in keeping liquor away from the Negro in the Southern cities, it will show more determination than exists in any Northern center of population.

In general, legislation is not a remedy for the race question, because breaches of the law come from both sides; and nobody is skillful enough to draft a bill which will, if righteously applied, apply only to criminal and dissolute Negroes. The cutting down of drinking shops, the arrest of the drones, a rural police, enforcement of the liquor laws, will help in the South because it will bring about a feeling of responsibility in both races—but race hostility is not caused by laws, is not curable by laws, and relies upon defying laws.

Perhaps the most striking failure of the Whites to exercise an influence over the Negroes is through the negro schools. They are, to be sure, carried on under laws made by white men, administered by state and county white officials, but there the relation ends. Even from the point of view of an unsympathetic superior race, the schools are badly supervised; and when it comes to the teachers, the lower race is thrown back upon teachers of the lower race. In the North the raw children from the alien families are Americanized by their fellows in the public schools, under the influence of teachers taken from the class of the population which has most opportunity for training. Not so in the South, where the blind are expected to lead the blind, where negro teachers trained by Negroes are expected to inculcate the principles of white civilization.

The refusal of the South to permit white people, and especially white women, to teach the Negroes, is a plant of recent growth. In slavery times the white mistresses and their daughters habitually taught the household servants their duties and set before them a standard of morals. Beyond that, they were often proud of teaching capable slaves to read and write. On every theory of the relation of the races this transmittal of civilization was not only allowable, but a sacred duty. Nowadays the mistresses have the smallest control over or influence upon their domestic servants; and, with few exceptions, the South absolutely refuses to improve the low estate of the Negroes by permitting the white young people to teach them.

The arguments against putting white teachers into negro schools are altogether weak. The first is that it is unsafe for white women, but the Northern women who have been for years among Negroes as teachers have no fear nor cause for fear; and the influence of a pure and refined white woman would tend to diminish some of the worst crimes of the black race. It is urged, however, that even men could not teach Negroes, first, because the Negroes would not trust their girls to them; secondly, because it would cut off the field or negro employment; thirdly, because a white man does not wish to teach Negroes; and, finally, because none but inferior men would seek such employment.

Surely the poor little black children are not likely under any circumstances to suppose that they are the equals of the members of the proud families that held their fathers in slavery! The white people sorely need the employment; the Negroes still more need the example and admonition of trained and high-minded people. The relation is not unknown. In the public schools of Charleston, for forty years, the negro children have been taught by white ladies, and as well taught as the white children. In Alabama, and even in Virginia, public schools were for a time taught by Whites, and you hear of sporadic cases elsewhere, as in a district of Louisiana, where the mother of the chairman of the school board was a teacher, and she was so incapable that no white school would have her on any terms, so they compromised by giving her a negro school. With these small exceptions, a relation between the races, through which none of the dreaded evils of race equality could come about, was rejected; and that is the main reason why the negro schools have been poor and continue inferior. The Southern woman is not below the Northern in a sense of duty; the Southern schoolmarm is the equal of her Yankee sister in refinement and in pluck; and the Southern woman was the only class of people in the South who could at the same time have taught the pickaninnies to read, and the older people to recognize that the Whites were their best friends.