Puzzling as the situation is at some points, its essential elements are far simpler and easier to deal with than slavery presented. There is no longer a vast property interest at stake,—on the contrary, material interest points the same way with moral considerations. There are complexities of the social structure, but nothing half so formidable as the aristocratic system based on slavery. The gravest difficulty now is a race prejudice, deep-rooted and stubborn, yet at bottom so irrational that civilization and Christianity and human progress should be steadily wearing it away. Let us take heart of grace. If our wills are true, it should be no great puzzle for our heads to find the way in this business. Let us test the practical application of our principle—namely, that each man should do his best, each should be allowed to do his best, and helped to do his best—let us see how this should work in industry, education, politics, and social relations.
First in importance is the industrial situation. Broadly, the negro in this country shows himself able and willing to work. The sharp spur of necessity urges him, and his inherited habit carries him on. But he needs a training in youth that shall fit him to work more effectively. For that matter, his white brother needs it, too. But here is the inequality of their situations,—whatever the white worker is qualified to do he is allowed to do, but how is it with the black worker? Let the Northern reader of these pages see at his door the palpable instance of a limitation more cruel than can be found at the South. Let him note, as the children stream out from the public school, the dark-skinned boy, playing good-naturedly with his white mates, at marbles or ball or wrestling,—just as he has been studying on the same bench with them,—he is as clean, as well-dressed, as well-behaved, as they. Now, five years hence, to what occupation can that colored boy turn? He can be a bootblack, a servant, a barber, perhaps a teamster. He may be a locomotive fireman, but when he is fit to be an engineer, he is turned back. Carpentry, masonry, painting, plumbing, the hundred mechanical trades,—these, for the most part, are shut to him; so are clerkships; so are nineteen-twentieths of the ways by which the white boys he plays and studies with to-day can win competence and comfort and serve the community. It is a wrong to whose acuteness we are blunted by familiarity. It can be changed only as sentiment is changed; and for that there must be white laboring men who will bravely go ahead and break the cruel rule by welcoming the black laborer to their side.
In the South the negro as yet enjoys industrial freedom, in the choice of an occupation—or a near approach to it—because his labor is so necessary that he cannot be shut out. But the walls are beginning to narrow. White immigration is coming in. The industrial training of the old plantation is no longer given, and industrial schools are yet very imperfectly developed. Some trades are being lost to the negroes; they have fewer carpenters, masons, and the like; they find no employment in cotton mills, and are engaged only in the least skilful parts of iron manufacture. The trade unions, gradually spreading through the South, begin to draw back from their early professions of the equality and brotherhood of all toilers. An instance comes to hand as these pages are being written—one instance out of a plenty. "The convention at Detroit, Mich., of the amalgamated association of steel and iron workers has postponed for a year consideration of a proposition to organize the colored iron, steel and tin workers of the South. The white employes of the Southern mills led the opposition. They objected to seeing the negroes placed on an equality, and it was further argued that once a colored man obtained a standing in the association, there was nothing to prevent his coming North. President Shaffer urged that all men who are competent workers should be members of the association." Now for next year it is up to President Shaffer, and those of like mind! On this question, of comradeship between black and white laborers, there is a call to the leaders of labor organizations to lead right. These chiefs of labor hold a place of the highest possibilities and obligations. In their hands largely lies the advance or retrogression of the industrial community—and that means our entire community. It is one of the most hopeful signs of the times that stress of necessity is bringing to labor's front rank men of a higher type, men often of large brain, high purpose, and strong will. Brains, purpose, will,—all are needed by these unofficial statesmen. They must look many ways at once, but this way they ought not to fail to look,—to the industrial harmonizing and equality of the two races.
Exclude the colored men from the unions, and what can be expected but that they serve as a vast reserve for the employers when strikes arise between the capitalists and the employes? We read now and then of the introduction of negroes as "strike-breakers," and the bitterness it causes. But will not this be repeated on the largest scale if the millions of negroes are to be systematically excluded from the unions? There may be difficulties in including them,—difficulties partly running back into other injustices, such as the practice of different wage-rates for whites and blacks. But it would seem to be the larger wisdom, in point of strategy, to enroll the two great wings of the host of labor into a united army. And apart from strategy, that character of the labor movement which most deeply appeals to the conscience and judgment of mankind,—the uplift of the great multitude to better and happier things,—that should rise above the barrier of race-prejudice as above all other conventional and foolish divisions. Will the labor leaders see and seize their opportunity at once to strengthen and to ennoble their cause?
The education of the negroes presents a hundred special questions, but its basal principles are not difficult to discern. Here, fortunately, we have in the main an admirable loyalty and good-will on the part of the white South. It is proved by deeds more than by words. The sum spent by the Southern States in the last thirty years for the schooling of the blacks—it is reckoned at $132,000,000, most of it, of course, from white taxpayers—is the best evidence of its disposition. The occasional complaints and protests seem no more significant than the occasional grumbling at the North against its best-rooted institutions,—everywhere and always the children of light must keep up some warfare with the Philistines. The main difficulties at the South are two; limited means for so great a task,—three or four months of schooling burdens Mississippi more than ten months burdens Massachusetts; and the grave puzzle as to what kind of elementary education best fits the negro child.
This puzzle applies almost equally to the white child; throughout the country and the world a reconstruction of education is struggling forward, through great uncertainties but under strong pressure of necessity. It is felt that the old-time book-education, and even its modern revision—all as yet come vastly short of rightly fitting the child for manhood or womanhood. We have advanced, but we have still far to go. To rightly educate "the hand, head and heart," (the watchword of Tuskegee)—to develop strong, symmetrical character and intelligence, the sound mind in the sound body,—to train the bread-winner and the citizen, as well as to open the gates of intellectual freedom and spiritual power,—this is what we have not quite learned. Socrates and More and Rousseau and Pestalozzi and Froebel and Armstrong have done much, but they have left abundant room for their successors. The millionaire's child, as well as the field-hand's, must wait awhile yet. So it is small wonder if the Southern public school is still a challenge to the best wits.
The combined industrial and educational need of the South is excellently summed up by a sympathetic observer, Ernest Hamlin Abbott:
"The chief industrial problem of the South is, therefore, that of transforming an indolent peasantry accustomed to dependence into an active, independent people. This involves an educational problem. Industrial education is something very different from training a few hundred girls to cook and sew for others; it is something, even, very different from supplying a few hundreds of young men with a trade. Industrial training is this larger undertaking, namely, to train hundreds of thousands of young people in habits of industry, in alertness of mind, and in strength of will that shall enable them to turn to the nearest opportunity for gaining the self-respect that comes with being of use to the community."
One thing is clear. More than the system is the teacher. Now and always the first requisite must be instructors of devotion, intelligence, sympathy, inspiration. To train such, and train them in multitudes, there must be institutions, ample in intellectual resource and high in their standards. There can be no fit common schools for the blacks unless there are worthy normal schools and colleges. Atlanta and its class are necessary as well as Tuskegee and its class,—and Atlanta reinforces Tuskegee with a large proportion of its teachers. On broader grounds, too, the need of the higher education for the black man is imperative. It can hardly be better stated than in the words of Professor DuBois, in his book of irresistible appeal, The Souls of Black Folk:
"That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery, at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university education seems imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the negro."