The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Of all the remedies suggested, education is the most direct and the most practical because it has so far been neglected; education is needed for the safety of the race. As Leroy Percy, the successful planter, puts it: “You cannot send these men out to fight the battle of life helplessly ignorant. In slavery, he was the slave of one, and around him was thrown the protecting care of the master. In freedom you cannot, through the helplessness of ignorance, make him the slave of every white man with no master’s protection to shield him”; and he adds, “The education of the Negro, to the extent indicated, is necessary for the preservation of the character and moral integrity of the white men of the South.” Professor Garner roundly declares that “Governor Vardaman’s contention that education increases the criminality of the negro is nothing but bold assertion and has never been supported by adequate proof.”

Education is just as much needed to break windows into dark minds, to open up whatever of the spiritual the Negro can take to himself. It is the one remedy in which the North can take direct part, and never was there more need of maintaining the schools in the South, supported chiefly by Northern contributions; for they have the opportunity to teach those lessons of cleanliness of body and mind, of respect for authority, of thrift, personal honesty, of human relations, which the public schools are less fitted to inculcate. Many of these schools have white teachers, all have white friends; they interfere in no way with the education furnished by the South; they teach no lessons harmful to the Negro or the white man; they perform a function which the Whites in the South offer to their own race by endowed schools and colleges, and which they do not attempt to provide for the Negroes. Education is not a cure-all, education is only the bottom step of a long flight of stairs; but neither race nor individual can mount without that step.

Throughout this book it has been steadily kept in mind that there are two races in the South between which the Southern problem is divided; and that there can be no progress without both races taking part. Here is the most difficult part of the whole matter: the two races, so closely associated, are nevertheless drifting away from each other. Time was when men like Wade Hampton, of South Carolina, and Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, expected that Whites and Negroes would coöperate in political parties; time was when former slaveholders joined with former slaves in a confident attempt to bring the Negroes up higher. Those voices of encouragement still are heard, but there is in them a note of weariness. Almost everybody in the South would be pleased if the Negroes (of course without prejudice to the white domination) would rise or rise faster. It would mean also much to the white race if the cook always came in the morning, and the outside man never got drunk, and the cotton hand would raise a bale to the acre, and the school child would learn to read about how to keep his place toward the white man.

Every thinking man in the South knows that he is worse off because the Negro is not better off. That is the reason of the rising dissatisfaction, wrath and resentment in the minds of many Whites. They feel that the Negro has no sense of responsibility to the community; they accuse him of sullenness, of a lack of interest in his employment and his employer. Just what the Negro thinks in return is hard to guess. “Brer Rabbit, ’e ain’t sayin’ nuffin”; but it is plain that the races are less friendly to each other, understand each other less, are less regardful of each other’s interests, than at any time since freedom was fairly completed. We have the unhappy condition that while both races are doing tolerably well, and likely to do better, race relations are not improving.

In other parts of the country where there are such rivalries, efforts are made to come to an understanding. Each side has some knowledge of the arguments of the other; they appeal to the same press; the leaders sooner or later are brought together in legislatures or in a social way, and gradually come to understand each other’s difficulties. Some efforts have been made in the South to study this question in association. The Negroes have now several organizations which bring people together for discussion. The Agricultural and Industrial Fairs which they are beginning to carry on are one such influence. The negro schools of the Calhoun and Talladega type do something; the large annual conferences organized by Atlanta, Tuskegee, and Hampton, with their subsequent publications, are a kind of clearing house of opinions on the conditions of the Negro and of sound advice. A few years ago the attempt was made in the so-called Niagara Movement to organize the Negroes in defense of their political rights.

On the side of the Whites there has been the Ogden Movement, for the improvement of the Southern white education, part of the outcome of which has been the formation of the General Education Board and Southern Education Board. The South Atlantic Quarterly, published at Trinity College, North Carolina, encourages a free exchange of views on Southern conditions; and though the Manufacturers’ Record lays the responsibility for the Atlanta riots upon the Southern white people who have been urging moderation in the South, the Southern educational movement goes on steadily, and seems to be gaining ground.

An effort was made after the riots to bring about a Southern commission of three white men from each state, to discuss plans for keeping up the race integrity of the Whites, including the Negro to stay on the soil, educating both races, and reforming the courts, but it was allowed to fail. Some Southern newspapers bitterly attacked it on the ground that no discussion was necessary; that everybody knew all the facts that were cogent, and that any such discussion of the negro problem would be likely to bring down criticism from “doctrinaires, theorists and self-constituted proprietors of the universe in the North.” To the Northern mind this seems one of the most alarming things about the whole matter. The labor question in the Northeast, the land question in the Northwest, are openly discussed man to man, and newspaper to newspaper. Nobody thinks that the conditions in the South are agreeable; everybody would like to see some betterment; and the refusal to discuss it simply makes the crisis worse.

This opposition is still stronger against any form of joint discussion between representatives of the white and negro races. The real objection seems to be that it would be a recognition that the Negro had a right to some share in adjusting his own future, and that what he thinks about the question ought to have weight with the white people. This is another of the cruel things about the whole situation. The whole South is acquainted with the negro criminal and the shiftless dweller on the borders of the cities; almost no white people are acquainted by personal observation with the houses, with the work, and still less with the character and aims of the best element of the Negroes. For this reason, Northern investigators have a certain advantage in that they may freely read the statements of both sides, supplement them out of personal experience and conversation, and try to strike a balance. There are plenty of reasonable people in both races, each of whom knows his own side better than anybody else can possibly know it; hence mutual discussion, common understanding, some kind of programme toward which public sentiment might be directed, would seem an obvious remedy, and is upheld by such men as Thomas Nelson Page; yet it is a remedy which is never tried.

All the suggestions that have been discussed above may be roughly classified into remedies of push and remedies of pull, and this classification corresponds to the points of view of the two dominant classes of Southern Whites. In studying the books, the articles and the fugitive utterances on this subject, in talking with men who see the thing at first hand, in noting the complaints of the Negroes and the Whites alike, it is plain that there is in the South a strong negro-hating element, larger than people like to admit, which appeals to drastic statutes, to unequal judicial punishments, to violence outside of the law; in a word, to “keeping the nigger down.” Alongside it the thinking class of Southern people (which appears to be gaining ground) seeks the elevation of both races, and especially of that one which needs it most. Meanwhile the Negro sits moodily by, waiting for the superior race to decide whether he shall be sent to the calaboose or to school.

The Southern problem is thus brought down in its last analysis to the simple question whether the two races can permanently live apart and yet together. That depends, in the first place, on the capacity of the Negro to improve far enough to take away the reproach now heaped upon him; and in the second place in the willingness of the Whites to accept the deficiencies of the negro character as a part of the natural conditions of the land, like the sterility of parts of the Southern soil, and to leave him the opportunity to make the most of himself.