In relative numerical strength the negro is not holding his own, because of the large immigration from Europe. In 1790, the negro population formed 19.3 per cent of the whole, and since that time it has almost steadily declined, reaching at the last census 10.7 per cent of the whole. Even in the southern states where the stream of foreign immigration is the least, the negro population has fallen from 35.2 per cent in 1790 to 29.8 per cent in 1910. In education, the negro has undoubtedly made great progress since the War, but it must be remembered that he was then at the bottom of the scale. The South, though poor as compared with the North, has made large expenditures for negro education, but it is authoritatively reported that "nearly half of the negro children of school age in the South never get inside of the schoolhouse."[6] The relative expenditures for the education of white and colored children there are not ascertainable, but naturally the balance is heavily in favor of the former. When we recall, however, the total illiteracy of the race under slavery and then discover that in 1910 there was an average daily attendance of 1,105,629 colored children in the southern schools, we cannot avoid the conclusion that decided changes are destined to be made in the intellectual outlook of the race.
Reports also show that negroes are accumulating considerable property and are becoming in large numbers the holders of small farms. Nevertheless a very careful scholar, Dr. Walter Willcox, believes that the figures "seem to show that the negro race at the South, in its competition with the whites, lost ground between 1890 and 1900 in the majority of skilled occupations which can be distinguished by the aid of the census figures." Taking the economic status of the race as a whole, the same authority adds: "The conclusion to which I am brought is that relatively to the whites in the South, if not absolutely as measured by any conceivable standard, the negro as a race is losing ground, is being confined more and more to the inferior and less remunerative occupations, and is not sharing proportionately to his numbers in the prosperity of the country as a whole or of the section in which he mainly lives."
The conclusions of the statistician are confirmed by the impressions of such eminent champions of the negro as Dr. W. B. Dubois and Mr. Thomas Fortune. The former declares that "in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary." The latter holds that the negro has simply passed from chattel to industrial slavery "with none of the legal and selfish restraints upon the employer which surrounded and actuated the master." These writers attribute the slow advance of the race to the bondage of law and prejudice to which it is subjected in the South, and everywhere in the country, as a matter of fact. Whatever the cause may be, there seems to be no doubt that the colored race has not made that substantial economic advance and achieved that standard of life which its friends hoped would follow from emancipation. Those writers who emphasize heredity in social evolution point to this as an evidence of the inherent disabilities of the race; while those who emphasize environment point out the immense handicap everywhere imposed on the race by law, custom, and prejudice.
Whatever may be the real truth about the economic status of the race, and after all it is the relative progress of the mass that determines the future of the race, there can be no doubt that there is an increasing "race consciousness" which will have to be reckoned with. The more conservative school, led by Booker T. Washington, is working to secure for the negro an industrial training that will give him some kind of an economic standing in the community, and if this is achieved for large numbers, a radical change in social and political outlook will follow, unless all signs of history fail. On the other hand, there is growing up a radical party, under the inspiration of Dr. W. B. Dubois, which pleads for unconditional political and social equality as a measure of immediate justice. Dr. Dubois demands "the raising of the negro in America to full rights and citizenship. And I mean by this no halfway measures; I mean full and fair equality. That is, a chance to work regardless of color, to aspire to position and preferment on the basis of desert alone, to have the right to use public conveniences, to enter public places of amusement on the same terms as other people, and to be received socially by such persons as might wish to receive them."
With both of these influences at work and all the forces of modern life playing upon the keener section of the colored population, nothing but congenital disabilities can prevent a movement which ruling persons, North and South, will have to take into account. How serious this movement becomes depends, however, upon the innate capacity of colored masses to throw off the shiftlessness and indifference to high standards of life that, their best friends admit, stand in the way of their gaining a substantial economic basis, without which any kind of a solid political superstructure is impossible. The real negro question now is: "Can the race demonstrate that capacity for sustained economic activity and permanent organization which has lifted the white masses from serfdom?"
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In 1894 the Democrats during Cleveland's administration completed the demolition of the system by repealing the remaining provisions.
[2] Disfranchising provisions were adopted in other southern states as follows: North Carolina, in 1900; Alabama and Virginia, in 1901; Georgia, in 1908. See Lobingier, The People's Law, pp. 301 ff.; W. F. Dodd, Revision and Amendment of State Constitutions.
[3] The Political Science Review, November, 1906, p. 20.
[4] Giles v. Harris, 189 U. S., 474.