he legal status of the Negro in the United States is difficult to define or describe, because on paper he is an American citizen, entitled to the rights of an American citizen, but in practice he does not get what he is entitled to or anything like it in certain parts of the Republic. His life is safe-guarded by written law, and so is his liberty and his activities in pursuit of happiness and to better his condition. Moreover in order that he may protect himself against the predatory aggression and greed of other citizens he is invested by the supreme law of the land with the right to vote, with a voice in the Government, to enable him to defend himself against the enactment of bad and unequal laws and against their bad and unequal administration. Certainly the Negro seems to be the equal in rights of any other American. That he is on paper there is not a doubt, but that he is not in reality there is not a doubt either. What he is entitled to does not anywhere in the South and in some states of the North square itself with what he actually enjoys. There is an enormous discrepancy in his case between National promise or guarantees and National performance or possessions. He is an American citizen under the National Constitution. To be sure he is, but with a big qualification. He has the right to reach up and out and to grow in every direction like other American citizens whose race and color are different from his own. Not a doubt of it in legal theory but when he puts his theoretical rights to the test of fact he finds that he is different, that he may not do many of the things which white men all about him are doing all the time. He finds that even the Chinese who are denied citizenship in the Republic, receive better treatment, are accorded larger liberties as men than are allowed him in the South.
Why is this? Why does the Negro occupy this very anomalous position in his country? Is it because he is an alien? It cannot really be that, because he is not an alien. But perhaps it is because the whites choose to make believe that he is an alien, which comes nearer the real reason. Nevertheless no alien is he any more than are the whites themselves, if duration of occupancy of the soil has anything to do with making a race native and to the manner born. Is it because the Negro has proved himself an undesirable citizen? Certainly not if past services to the country of the greatest value are any proof to the contrary. In the Revolutionary War he was no insignificant factor in achieving American independence; and in the War of 1812 which defended this independence against British aggression; and in the Civil War which saved the Union and abolished slavery; and in the Spanish-American War which removed a chronic peril to the National peace and added immensely to the National domain. Nor has he failed as a laborer, for he does annually his share of the work of the Nation, and in the production of its wealth. Without Negro labor how much less cotton would the South produce annually, or sugar or rice or tobacco, think you? His labor besides is very much in evidence in southern mines and mills and trades. Then, has he ever plotted against the Government, state or national, was he ever as a class a menace to law and order, or an enemy to property, or a breeder of industrial unrest and violence? On the contrary has he not been patient and peaceful and cheerful under wrongs which would have made any other class of Americans sullen and dangerous and lawless? No, he is not an undesirable citizen for these sufficient reasons, but there is yet another good answer on this head. Negro labor could not in any considerable numbers leave the South voluntarily because Southern capital and landed interests would not let it, would resist by force if found necessary its migration to other parts.
This sounds singular in this land of the free and it is singular, for of no other class of American labor could it be said that its right to migrate from one state to another is actually obstructed by law and would be resisted by force. It is singular but it is nevertheless true. If a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand agricultural laborers in the West were to make up their minds to move to the cotton belt of the South, they would be free to do so, regardless of the injury which Western farmers might suffer in consequence of their migration. But if one hundred thousand, or ten thousand, or even one thousand Negro cotton pickers desired to quit picking cotton and to seek their fortune in other states, does anyone imagine that they would be allowed to depart in peace, that they would not find rather by violent experience that they are not at liberty to make the change? The South does not regard the Negro laborer then as undesirable but quite the contrary—only it wants to retain possession of it on its own terms, not on those advantageous to that labor.
As an American citizen then the Negro has a paper right to move freely from one place to another, but in the South were he to attempt to realize on this right he would in all probability find himself realizing on a totally different proposition—maybe the chain gang at the hands of a prejudiced court on some trumped up charge of an employer, or death at the hands of a mob. This sounds amazing and it is amazing because it fits the Negro’s case so exactly, because it is an accurate description of his condition as an agricultural laborer in many of the Southern states.
On every hand over against his paper rights as a citizen, the Negro faces facts which make his citizenship seem like a snare and a delusion. Let us suppose that a member of the American Negro Academy wishes with wife or daughter to visit Florida for his health. He cannot make the journey there like a white man, whether citizen or foreigner, or like any other traveller to that section whatever his race since he be not a Negro. And it makes no difference how refined or educated or wealthy or infirm or aged a colored passenger may be, whether man, woman or child, he encounters the same unjust and unequal treatment at the hands of the railroads. What though he has paid for himself and wife or daughter the same fare which passengers of the favored class pay, he finds that there is a vast difference between what he gets and what they get for precisely the same money. They get always the best accommodations for themselves and families, while he gets the worst. There is not a restaurant along the route where he may get a meal, and not a hotel which would give him a bed over night. If he can afford it he may procure a seat in a Pullman, and then again he may not be able to do so, and in this case as in the event of his not being able to afford to buy a seat in a Pullman, he must make the journey in a “Jim Crow” car, without separate toilet arrangements for the sexes, deficient in soap and towels, in water and in general and particular cleanliness, exposed constantly to the intrusions and the fumes, alcoholic and tobacco, of white men passing to and from their smoker, which is one-half of the “Jim Crow” coach and divided from it only by an inadequate partition.
The colored passenger is, to be sure, an American citizen on paper, but what is it worth to him under the circumstances? Can it compel railroads to furnish him decent accommodations, which federal law provides shall be equal to those furnished to white passengers, and for which the colored passenger pays the same fare as the white one? It is notorious that the accommodations furnished by the railroads in interstate commerce to their colored passengers are inferior to those which they furnish white passengers for the same fare. The Interstate Commerce Commission knows this and knows it well, yet it makes no determined and persistent attempt to compel railroads to give to their colored passengers accommodations equal to those which they furnish their white ones. It is too busy attending to the more important business relating to the property rights and interests of shippers and capitalists to spare the time to break up an evil which makes the existence of colored interstate passengers an unbroken experience of bitter hardships and humiliations. Surely there are American citizens and American citizens—citizens whom Government protects and enables to make good their claim to equality before the law, and other citizens whom Government does not protect or enable to make good their claim to equality before the law. And to this latter class belongs the Negro nearly every time and almost everywhere.
The Negro is the great American anomaly. Judged by his rights on paper his citizenship is indisputable, but judged by his rights in fact it is full of mutilations and amputations which disfigure it almost beyond recognition. One-half of it appears in the light clothed with fragments of his rights, and the other half is in eclipse, exposed naked to biting cold and bitter wrong. He appeals to good men and true in the South and in the North and in the Government too, to give him what he is entitled to. He does not get it or anything like it. There does not appear to be common honesty and decency enough in the railroads to give him what he pays for as an interstate traveller, human compassion to say nothing of common justice enough in the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce against the railroads the law made by the Government to conciliate the race prejudice of the South. The separate car feature of the Railroad Rate Bill was inserted in deference to the demand of the South, and the equal accommodation feature as an act of plain commercial justice to the Negro. The South has never failed to get its separate cars, while the Negro has never failed either to receive the most unequal accommodations in open violation of the provisions of that bill.
But this is not all or anything like all that mars almost beyond recognition the citizenship of the Negro. If one doubts this, let him go into the South and let him venture to incite the Negroes there to an assertion of their rights. Freedom of the press is theirs under the Constitution. Does anyone suppose that they would be allowed to say publicly what they think about the un-Christian and undemocratic way in which they are treated? Let them try it and see what will happen to them, that is, if they be wholly reckless of consequences. Freedom of the press is another of their rights, one of the boasted bulwarks of the Constitution. Does anyone suppose that they would be allowed to write as freely or anything like as freely about white men and women, especially the latter, as white men write about colored men and women? Let some colored editor make the experiment and tell afterward what happened to him hot on the heels of his article. He may not be able to enlighten the public but the associated press dispatch will give the grim facts relating to the end of that editor, who undertook to monkey with the buzz saw of the freedom of the press in a Southern community.
Another of the sacred rights which appertain to the Negro’s American citizenship is the right of public assembly to consider his grievances and discuss measures for their redress. Well, if any group of Negroes in almost any part of the South are hunting for trouble, let them get up a public meeting for such a purpose, and give vent to the righteous indignation against oppressions which ought to stir the blood of any man who is not a slave, and then watch results. A flaming spirit will presently appear in the midst of that meeting, and it will not be the flaming spirit of liberty, but of a Southern mob on arson and murder bent. Negro property will be burned and Negro blood will be shed, and that without stint or mercy. The Negro’s Constitutional right to assemble to consider his wrongs is in reality too weak to resist the murderous violence of a Southern mob. The mob burns Negroes and their property almost everywhere in the South with absolute impunity. Nothing is done by the authorities to punish the mob or to protect their victims. And yet both the mob and its victims are American citizens, entitled alike on paper to the law’s protection and amenable alike to its penalties. The white man enjoys a monopoly of the first and the Negro gets the lion’s share of the second. The colored man who has the temerity to agitate for his rights in the South may find himself agitating speedily at the end of a rope, unless he more speedily finds some hole in the ground to give him the protection which Government refuses him. He would in that event be surer of the thing which he seeks if the hole in the ground were a hole in some grave yard, for then the hole might be pulled in after him, when he would find rest at last—surcease from all the cruel perplexities and inequalities of his American citizenship.