In the two decades that we are now to consider we find the working out of all the large forces mentioned in our last chapter. After a generation of striving the white South was once more thoroughly in control, and the new program well under way. Predictions for both a broader outlook for the section as a whole and greater care for the Negro's moral and intellectual advancement were destined not to be fulfilled; and the period became one of bitter social and economic antagonism.
All of this was primarily due to the one great fallacy on which the prosperity of the New South was built, and that was that the labor of the Negro existed only for the good of the white man. To this one source may be traced most of the ills borne by both white man and Negro during the period. If the Negro's labor was to be exploited, it was necessary that he be without the protection of political power and that he be denied justice in court. If he was to be reduced to a peon, certainly socially he must be given a peon's place. Accordingly there developed everywhere—in schools, in places of public accommodation, in the facilities of city life—the idea of inferior service for Negroes; and an unenlightened prison system flourished in all its hideousness. Furthermore, as a result of the vicious economic system, arose the sinister form of the Negro criminal. Here again the South begged the question, representative writers lamenting the passing of the dear dead days of slavery, and pointing cynically to the effects of freedom on the Negro. They failed to remember in the case of the Negro criminal that from childhood to manhood—in education, in economic chance, in legal power—they had by their own system deprived a human being of every privilege that was due him, ruining him body and soul; and then they stood aghast at the thing their hands had made. More than that, they blamed the race itself for the character that now sometimes appeared, and called upon thrifty, aspiring Negroes to find the criminal and give him up to the law. Thrifty, aspiring Negroes wondered what was the business of the police.
It was this pitiful failure to get down to fundamentals that characterized the period and that made life all the more hard for those Negroes who strove to advance. Every effort was made to brutalize a man, and then he was blamed for not being a St. Bernard. Fortunately before the period was over there arose not only clear-thinking men of the race but also a few white men who realized that such a social order could not last forever.
Early in the nineties, however, the pendulum had swung fully backward, and the years from 1890 to 1895 were in some ways the darkest that the race has experienced since emancipation. When in 1892 Cleveland was elected for a second term and the Democrats were once more in power, it seemed to the Southern rural Negro that the conditions of slavery had all but come again. More and more the South formulated its creed; it glorified the old aristocracy that had flourished and departed, and definitely it began to ask the North if it had not been right after all. It followed of course that if the Old South had the real key to the problem, the proper place of the Negro was that of a slave.
Within two or three years there were so many important articles on the Negro in prominent magazines and these were by such representative men that taken together they formed a symposium. In December, 1891, James Bryce wrote in the North American Review, pointing out that the situation in the South was a standing breach of the Constitution, that it suspended the growth of political parties and accustomed the section to fraudulent evasions, and he emphasized education as a possible remedy; he had quite made up his mind that the Negro had little or no place in politics. In January, 1892, a distinguished classical scholar, Basil L. Gildersleeve, turned aside from linguistics to write in the Atlantic "The Creed of the Old South," which article he afterwards published as a special brochure, saying that it had been more widely read than anything else he had ever written. In April, Thomas Nelson Page in the North American contended that in spite of the $5,000,000 spent on the education of the Negro in Virginia between 1870 and 1890 the race had retrograded or not greatly improved, and in fact that the Negro "did not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery." Later in the same year he published The Old South. In the same month Frederick L. Hoffman, writing in the Arena, contended that in view of its mortality statistics the Negro race would soon die out.[205] Also in April, 1892, Henry Watterson wrote of the Negro in the Chautauquan, recalling the facts that the era of political turmoil had been succeeded by one of reaction and violence, and that by one of exhaustion and peace; but with all his insight he ventured no constructive suggestion, thinking it best for everybody "simply to be quiet for a time." Early in 1893 John C. Wycliffe, a prominent lawyer of New Orleans, writing in the Forum, voiced the desires of many in asking for a repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment; and in October, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, writing in the same periodical of a recent and notorious lynching, said, "It was horrible to torture the guilty wretch; the burning was an act of insanity. But had the dismembered form of his victim been the dishonored body of my baby, I might also have gone into an insanity that might have ended never." Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that the politician made capital of choice propaganda.
In this chorus of dispraise truth struggled for a hearing, but then as now traveled more slowly than error. In the North American for July, 1892, Frederick Douglass wrote vigorously of "Lynch Law in the South." In the same month George W. Cable answered affirmatively and with emphasis the question, "Does the Negro pay for his education?" He showed that in Georgia in 1889-90 the colored schools did not really cost the white citizens a cent, and that in the other Southern states the Negro was also contributing his full share to the maintenance of the schools. In June of the same year William T. Harris, Commissioner of Education, wrote in truly statesmanlike fashion in the Atlantic of "The Education of the Negro." Said he: "With the colored people all educated in schools and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated in a Christian theology interpreted in a missionary spirit, and finding its auxiliaries in modern science and modern literature; with these educational essentials the Negro problem for the South will be solved without recourse to violent measures of any kind, whether migration, or disfranchisement, or ostracism." In December, 1893, Walter H. Page, writing in the Forum of lynching under the title, "The Last Hold of the Southern Bully," said that "the great danger is not in the first violation of law, nor in the crime itself, but in the danger that Southern public sentiment under the stress of this phase of the race problem will lose the true perspective of civilization"; and L.E. Bleckley, Chief Justice of Georgia, spoke in similar vein. On the whole, however, the country, while occasionally indignant at some atrocity, had quite decided not to touch the Negro question for a while; and when in the spring of 1892 some representative Negroes protested without avail to President Harrison against the work of mobs, the Review of Reviews but voiced the drift of current opinion when it said: "As for the colored men themselves, their wisest course would be to cultivate the best possible relations with the most upright and intelligent of their white neighbors, and for some time to come to forget all about politics and to strive mightily for industrial and educational progress."[206]
It is not strange that under the circumstances we have now to record such discrimination, crime, and mob violence as can hardly be paralleled in the whole of American history. The Negro was already down; he was now to be trampled upon. When in the spring of 1892 some members of the race in the lowlands of Mississippi lost all they had by the floods and the Federal Government was disposed to send relief, the state government protested against such action on the ground that it would keep the Negroes from accepting the terms offered by the white planters. In Louisiana in 1895 a Negro presiding elder reported to the Southwestern Christian Advocate that he had lost a membership of a hundred souls, the people being compelled to leave their crops and move away within ten days.
In 1891 the jail at Omaha was entered and a Negro taken out and hanged to a lamp-post. On February 27, 1892, at Jackson, La., where there was a pound party for the minister at the Negro Baptist church, a crowd of white men gathered, shooting revolvers and halting the Negroes as they passed. Most of the people were allowed to go on, but after a while the sport became furious and two men were fatally shot. About the same time, and in the same state, at Rayville, a Negro girl of fifteen was taken from a jail by a mob and hanged to a tree. In Texarkana, Ark., a Negro who had outraged a farmer's wife was captured and burned alive, the injured woman herself being compelled to light the fire. Just a few days later, in March, a constable in Memphis in attempting to arrest a Negro was killed. Numerous arrests followed, and at night a mob went to the jail, gained easy access, and, having seized three well-known Negroes who were thought to have been leaders in the killing, lynched them, the whole proceeding being such a flagrant violation of law that it has not yet been forgotten by the older Negro citizens of this important city. On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record. Henry Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received, seized the officer's three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore her body to pieces. He was tortured by the child's father, her uncles, and her fifteen-year-old brother, his eyes being put out with hot irons before he was burned. His stepson, who had refused to tell where he could be found, was hanged and his body riddled with bullets. Thus the lynchings went on, the victims sometimes being guilty of the gravest crimes, but often also perfectly innocent people. In February, 1893, the average was very nearly one a day. At the same time injuries inflicted on the Negro were commonly disregarded altogether. Thus at Dickson, Tenn., a young white man lost forty dollars. A fortune-teller told him that the money had been taken by a woman and gave a description that seemed to fit a young colored woman who had worked in the home of a relative. Half a dozen men then went to the home of the young woman and outraged her, her mother, and also another woman who was in the house. At the very close of 1894, in Brooks County, Ga., after a Negro named Pike had killed a white man with whom he had a quarrel, seven Negroes were lynched after the real murderer had escaped. Any relative or other Negro who, questioned, refused to tell of the whereabouts of Pike, whether he knew of the same or not, was shot in his tracks, one man being shot before he had chance to say anything at all. Meanwhile the White Caps or "Regulators" took charge of the neighboring counties, terrifying the Negroes everywhere; and in the trials that resulted the state courts broke down altogether, one judge in despair giving up the holding of court as useless.
Meanwhile discrimination of all sorts went forward. On May 29, 1895, moved by the situation at the Orange Park Academy, the state of Florida approved "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Youth from being Taught in the same Schools." Said one section: "It shall be a penal offense for any individual body of inhabitants, corporation, or association to conduct within this State any school of any grade, public, private, or parochial, wherein white persons and Negroes shall be instructed or boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class or at the same time by the same teacher." Religious organizations were not to be left behind in such action; and when before the meeting of the Baptist Young People's Union in Baltimore a letter was sent to the secretary of the organization and the editor of the Baptist Union, in behalf of the Negroes, who the year before had not been well treated at Toronto, he sent back an evasive answer, saying that the policy of his society was to encourage local unions to affiliate with their own churches.
More grave than anything else was the formal denial of the Negro's political rights. As we have seen, South Carolina in 1895 followed Mississippi in the disfranchising program and within the next fifteen years most of the other Southern states did likewise. With the Negro thus deprived of any genuine political voice, all sorts of social and economic injustice found greater license.