The constant question raised by these discriminating laws is: What is a Negro? When are we are going to discriminate against a fellow, we must be careful and definite in pointing him out. And so each set of discriminating laws contains its own definition of the word Negro, and the definitions have differed widely. At first in some parts of the North the Negro was defined as any person who was visibly colored. It is plain, however, that if the matter is left to the eyes, millions of American "Negroes" will have to be taken into the Caucasian race,—and so most of the state legislatures reduced their definition to the finer discriminations of mathematics. These mathematical definitions vary all the way from one fourth of the blood of the black man to a mere one sixteenth; but some laws of the gallant South go so far as to say that if one has even one drop of Negro blood in his veins he is a Negro. Thus it is seen that "the Negro," so far as the United States are concerned, is an arbitrary creature of law and includes within its scope hundreds of thousands of people who by every law of God and nature and reason are members of the Caucasian race, principally Anglo-Saxons. For whatever the legal definition, it is the common practice in the United States to class as Negroes all persons known to have any part of Negro blood. The white American therefore ascribes the same potency to Negro blood which he ascribes to the blood of Jesus Christ,—that it only takes one drop "to make you whole." The statement needs no proof that there are thousands of people in America who are related to the Negro and do not know it, and others who know it but also know that its acknowledgment would not increase their comforts in life.
It was especially necessary to define the term Negro when the intermarriage laws were being considered. These queer laws have always had the support of the vast majority of white people, wherever the Negro has become a considerable part of the population, and especially after the Negro was freed. I call them "queer laws" because they always, in spirit and in effect if not in letter, tend to make the naturally honorable relation of marriage a worse crime than the naturally dishonorable practice of illicit intercourse,—which abuse, however, is practiced chiefly by the men of the stronger against the women of the weaker group. For this illicitness there is in practice no punishment, while the sure penalties of intermarriage range all the way from a fine of one hundred dollars to ten years in the penitentiary,—and the danger of still more horrible extra-legal penalties. There could be but one result of thus outlawing decency and tolerating indecency,—of putting honor under the foot of dishonor,—and that result has been attained in the United States: namely, millions of interracial illegitimates, and some admixture of Caucasian blood in at least nine-tenths of the American Negro group.
Such is the American group against which these discriminating laws have directly and indirectly aimed. In the historic decade (1860 to 1870) many forms of discrimination and distinction began to appear in the laws of the South: in public travel, in the courts and in the matter of the suffrage. In 1865 and 1866 "Jim Crow" laws were passed in Florida, Mississippi and Texas, but not in the other states until 1881 when Tennessee started the new era of "Jim Crow," which has since overrun the whole South and threatens, as did slavery itself, to invade the North. Is it not queer that this passion should have gained such headway so long after slavery? It would seem that the more the Negro advances in education and refinement, the less acceptable he becomes to a large number of white people. In North Carolina or South Carolina a Negro may be taken into the white people's car if he be a criminal or a lunatic; but if he be a gentleman and a scholar, it will be a serious offense against earth and heaven, subject to heavy fines,—and when his train reaches Georgia, even the conductor may be fined one thousand dollars! This race distinction on the cars serves no useful, honorable purpose which classified passenger tickets would not serve. But of all the humiliation, wrong and robbery possible against a free people, the devil and the Sicilian tyrants working together could never have devised a more ingenious scheme than the "Jim Crow" car.
As to the courts. Until 1870 the laws of Iowa forbade the Negro to practice law; many states sought to invalidate or restrict the testimony of a Negro witness against a white person; and most reluctantly of all has any state conceded the Negro the right to be a juror, even where both parties to the suit are Negroes. In law and in theory the Fifteenth Amendment, March 30, 1870, repealed all statutes and nullified all constitutional clauses discriminating against people on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, but in practice in the United States the Negro is still handicapped as a lawyer, discredited as a witness and almost universally excluded from juries. This is queer again in the face of the almost unanimous testimony of the courts to the effect that the Negro juryman is more inclined to convict a real Negro criminal than is the white juryman.
The Reconstruction constitutions of the South, in 1868 and 1869, following the Fourteenth Amendment, gave the Negroes the ballot. It is needless to say that this was not the will of the white majority. And it must always be said of these Reconstruction governments that, whatever faults they may have had, they made the first, and up to the present time the last serious and straight-going efforts to establish real democratic-republican organization in the South. In this era the Congress of the United States was in the hands of the friends of freedom, and in 1866 the Negro was given the ballot in all the territories of the United States. On June 8, 1867, the Congress gave the ballot to the Negroes of the District of Columbia, over the President's veto and against the will of the white inhabitants. In a popular vote on the proposition the city of Washington returned 6521 votes against enfranchising the blacks and 35 votes for it; while Georgetown returned the interesting figures of 812 votes against the proposition, and for it one vote. This record of fifty years ago is sufficient to indicate what would be the conditions in Washington, D. C., if it were left to its own devices.
Such are the facts of obstinate resistance to the Negro's actual freedom, which brought the friends of freedom in Congress rather slowly around to the necessity of adopting the Fourteenth, and when that failed, the Fifteenth Amendment. I repeat that if, after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the legislatures and courts and other creatures of the popular suffrage had shown a genius for doing justice to the Negro, it is likely that his friends in Congress would have forgotten him entirely, that the two subsequent Amendments would not have been proposed and that he would have been left outside of the Constitutional pale of citizenship indefinitely. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments put the enemies of freedom successively on trial and each time they failed. Yea, even against the decree of the Fifteenth Amendment have they defeated democracy by indirection and duplicity. If the aim of the Fifteenth Amendment should be finally defeated, it would be the ultimate failure of democracy,—but there are late indications that in the end it will not fail. And of all the many-angled struggles which the colored people are supporting in this country for their advancement and ultimate security, the central aim of every fighting line should be full-fledged citizenship.
There is no doubt about the truth of the plain statement that the Negro race in the United States of America does not get a "square deal." But we observe frequent efforts to minimize the appearance of the great wrong by the ambiguous statement that it is "natural" under the circumstances. I call the statement ambiguous, because in one sense of the word every fact of life and history is natural: all virtue and vice, lust and love are natural. Many natural things are very undesirable, and fortunately some of them are not indestructible or unalterable. It may be natural for the white race to disfranchise, "Jim-Crow" and burn Negroes, but the Negro is naturally opposed to that procedure. Is it not natural for the victim to be uncomfortable under these things, to complain against them, to organize and fight them? The naturalness of injustice, if it be natural, does not make it one whit more just. It is natural, or at least it is historic, that men will rob and commit murder and bastardy—but there seems to be something in man which is higher than nature and which fights against these things.
The same sort of fallacy in reasoning is resorted to when the effort is made to palliate the wrongs done in one section by stating the fact that the same or similar wrongs have been done, are being done or will be done to the Negro in other sections or eventually in all sections of the United States. What on earth has this to do with the wrong, except to make it more horrible? Does it justify wrong to show that other people did it, do it or may do it? If so, then sin itself ought to be the fairest thing in the world, for all men in all ages and all countries have committed it. The poor sinning South pains-takingly points out and tabulates every single instance of its own wrongs against black men which can be found repeated in the North,—and when the North slips from virtue in the same path, it cries out Pharisaically that such horrors are common or even popular in the South. If mere ubiquity justifies, remember that the devil's work is ubiquitous, too.
Again, I have read books and arguments that sought to minimize the importance of industrial, civic and political discriminations against the Negro by saying not only that these practices are "not confined to any section of the country," but also that such-and-such an evil did not even "originate" in the South. We are told with great unction that Philadelphia and San Francisco once excluded Negroes from street cars altogether, that slavery originated in the commerce of the North, and that Jim-Crowism was first met in Massachusetts. I have heard that the devil was first met in the Garden of Eden, but he is none the less the devil. And as to origin, who cares where the smallpox or the yellow fever originated? It is their nature, not their origin, which makes them horrible.
There is really no room for one section to boast or to proudly accuse the other. So far as the Negro's experiences go, both sections need to improve perhaps in their ideals but certainly in their practices respecting democratic liberties and human brotherhood. Let the Negro and his friends realize that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution represent not a backward step but a stride forward in civilization, and that they were fostered and ratified, not for the sake of the temporary burden which they may have put upon the white race in the South, but for the benefit of all races, at all times, in all America.