It is the fashion nowadays for every one with a stone in his hand to take a shy at the poor Negro on account of his sins of commission and omission. It is enough that some member of the race is caught flagrante delicto or merely on suspicion of evil doing to get himself into the public pillory and the rest of the colored people into our national rogues’ gallery, where they evoke instantly the loud lamentation of white saints and sinners alike, and the statistical and sophistical conclusions of a lot of fools and hypocrites. Now do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that Negroes commit crimes. Not at all, for I know full well that they do—altogether too many for their own good. But what I object to among other things is that America, because of the crimes of individual Negroes or because of the suspected crimes of individual Negroes, draws an omnibus indictment against the moral character of the whole race, which is monstrously unjust and wicked.
Who cares to inquire into the origin of Negro crime, or into the causes which have contributed mightily to produce the Negro criminal? The book of the Genesis of this man’s crimes awaits to be written by an impartial and sympathetic seeker after truth. The causes which have operated for fifty years to produce Negro criminals will some day, I trust, be traced without fear or bias to their source. I do not pretend to possess any scientific qualification for such a task, but I do intend in these imperfect remarks to try to indicate in outline merely the dismal stream of these causes during the last half century, hoping thereby to cast a little light on a dark and difficult subject: namely, how out of hostile and unequal social, industrial and political conditions Negro crime emerged and why Negro criminals abound.
To say that individuals and races are the creatures of circumstances—that they are the products of their social heredity and environment—is to state a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It is therefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance in the life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery. For it furnished for two and a half centuries both his social heredity and his environment, and so shaped his growth and character along moral, religious and industrial lines. Chattel slaves had no rights, the most rudimentary, which their southern masters were bound to respect. They did not, for example, possess that most elementary of rights, the ownership of self and of the products of their labor. They were the legal property of others and so were the products of their labor. They did not own the cabins they slept in or the clothes they wore or the food they ate or the tools they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank or the bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did the cattle of those self same masters. The slave system owned the minds and bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the masters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaves were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuit of happiness. Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded and moral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, over the souls of masters and slaves alike. And in this moral mud there bred apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and fear—the black brood of man’s inhumanity to man.
At the close of the war which destroyed slavery the two races emerged together into the midst of vast changes. The old social structure had been disrupted in the civil convulsion, and the old political order likewise. The slave half of the national house had tumbled about former masters and slaves. The slave race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen than they had possessed or known as slaves. Yes, they possessed themselves and the hard hands which God had given them for their support. But being landless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the old master class. This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a labor class on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power of the old master class. The outlook for the new freedmen under these circumstances was not propitious. All the same these people, poor and ignorant and at the mercy of a ruthless employer class, were happy as children in the delight of their newfound freedom. The sound of their childlike joy was heard in the land amid the grim desolations of war and the sullen faces of their old masters. Care free and fear free, in spite of unfriendly conditions and a threatening outlook, they gave themselves up to such joy as God has rarely given in the history of the world to four millions of people. Now no race can pass through such a spiritual experience without being the better for it. For great happiness like great suffering operates oftentimes as a moral purifier. Before the overwhelming fact that they could no longer be bought and sold—that they could no longer be separated from their loved ones, these simple black folk fell in transports of gratitude before God, their mighty deliverer, their everlasting Father. Love was in their mouths and love was in their hearts. Cheerful they were by nature and hopeful, and gifted withal with an extraordinary amount of the milk of human kindness. Service was natural and easy for them, and the cherishing of friends and foes in their need; but resentfulness and revenge moved them hardly at all during their long years of bondage. Comparatively few crimes against persons or property had been recorded against them before emancipation. The few slave insurrections or attempted slave insurrections were exceptions to the general tenor of their peaceable disposition and conduct, to the uniform and singular absence of ill-will, of a spirit of revenge in them as a race.
This gentle trait was strikingly illustrated during the war of the rebellion. They had opportunity enough and provocation enough, God knows, to attack the property and the lives of the defenseless families of their hard task-masters during those four dreadful years of sectional strife. But in their beautiful simplicity and kindness of heart and fidelity to the sacred and amazing trust reposed in them—the most sacred and amazing ever reposed in a slave race by a master race in the history of the world—they let their terrible opportunity for revenge pass them by and seized instead the noble one to feed and cherish the helpless women and children of masters who were fighting to rivet the chains of slavery on them and on their children forever. This behavior of the slaves is the supreme example which American Christianity has yet given of the vital presence of the spirit of its divine founder in its midst. No other act in its whole history approaches it in simple grandeur of forgiveness and service. And it came literally out of the humble lives of a much oppressed and long suffering race.
This simple and kindly black folk issued then out of their two and a half centuries of bondage without malice toward the whites, without any of the violent emotions which lead to the commission of great crimes. The only violent emotion which stirred their child-like minds, which filled almost to bursting their kindly hearts was deep thankfulness to God and to Mr. Lincoln for their deliverance—an emotion which no pen can describe and no tongue can put into words. Out of such kindly hearts, out of such deep and holy emotions crime does not come and it would not have come had there been no injection into the race soul of the Negro of new and bitter experiences of wrong at the hands of the whites. But this is exactly what actually took place. On the simple and kindly hearts of the new freedmen the old master class might have graven large the law of peace and goodwill. All that this child-like race needed at this initial stage of their education and forming character were wise and sympathetic guidance and treatment on the part of the whites in order to convert all their deep and holy emotions into moral and civic values, into social and industrial service to the South and to the nation at one and the same time. Did the blacks get this wise and sympathetic guidance and treatment at the hands of the whites? To answer this question is to open up the whole subject of the causation of Negro crime during the last fifty years. And this I will try to do as concisely and clearly as possible.
The first act of the South after the war was most unfriendly to the blacks. For it was state legislation which remanded them to a new species of bondage. Southern slaves they had been but by the new labor legislation they were transformed into Southern serfs, chained to the soil by cunningly devised laws to regulate their labor and movement. Force and violence toward the blacks were relied upon to put through this legislative and administrative program. This program was the cause of Northern interference in the Southern situation at this juncture. But when Congress intervened by its reconstruction measures to defeat the reactionary program of the South, there swept over that section a crime-storm of devastating fury. The old master class organized their purpose in respect to the Negro, and their hatred of everything Northern into a secret society known as the “Ku Klux Klan,” which was nothing else than a gigantic conspiracy for the commission of crime. Lawlessness and violence filled the land, and terror stalked abroad by day and night. The “Ku Klux Klan” burned and murdered by day, and it burned and murdered by night. The Southern states had actually relapsed into barbarism. During that period a new generation was conceived and born to the South by both races—a generation that was literally conceived in lawlessness and born into crime-producing conditions. Lawlessness was its inheritance and the red splotch of violence its birthmark.
The period covered by this crime-storm was a bad way to begin the education of the Negroes in respect for law, in self control and in civilization. For they found no law strong enough to protect them in their lives or property or freedom from the murderous attacks of that terrible secret organization. Education in self-control, and in respect for constituted authority became impossible where the dominating feeling of the Negroes was one of terror. And as for civilization it was beaten down by the red hand of violence. The blacks during these years were crushed between two irreconcilable forces, two antagonistic governments which were locked in a death grapple for possession of that section. The one government was open and regular, while the other was secret and lawless. The first was supported by a few native and Northern whites and by the great body of the blacks, and the second was upheld by the great body of the native whites under the trained and ruthless leadership of the old master class, who would have no government, no social order which was not set up by themselves.
During those dark years the blacks were much more sinned against than sinning. They were sinned against by their white leaders, who in the main used them to advance their personal and party interest, and who employed the positions they thus gained to steal the people’s money, to enrich themselves at the expense of the states. There were colored leaders who followed closely in the footsteps of the white leaders in perverting public trusts to corrupt ends, but the chief malefactors, the biggest scoundrels were members of the white race. In these circumstances the blacks were the helpless victims of the misrule of their own leaders and of the organized lawlessness of the Southern whites. In their need they asked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic and wise leadership and were handed instead a bunch of scorpions. They prayed for peace and for that happiness which goes with freedom, and there swept over them for six dreadful years a crime-storm which filled their nights and days, the season of their planting and the season of their reaping with terror and destruction, and they just out of the house of bondage. They were able in these circumstances to get from the whites no lesson in obedience to law, in reverence for constituted authority, for as we have seen those selfsame whites were everywhere breaking the law and beating down and destroying constituted authority. Nor did they get any training in personal and civic righteousness from their own leaders of either race. For those leaders initiated them promptly by the power of example into the great and flourishing American art and industry of graft.
This much however ought to be said in justice to the carpet-bag governments, namely, that bad as they were the lawlessness and violence of the Southern whites were a great deal worse. For while some good can be placed to the credit of those governments nothing but bad can possibly be set down to the account of Southern lawlessness and violence. To the carpet-bag governments belongs the introduction into the South for the first time of the democratic principles of equality, and of the right of each child in the state, regardless of race or color, to an education at the hands of the state. These are two vital things which the South needed then and which it needs to-day but which the old master class opposed then and which their successors oppose to-day. That is what the whites did to educate the blacks during the most impressionable period of their new freedom in orderly government and in civilization. That was the way their education in citizenship and character building began and that was the way it proceeded until the year 1876.