We are rich enough and have land enough to give the negro this State, which is his due from us. His especial need is to exercise political and civil privileges, in his own community, all the way up from town meeting to congress.
If something like this is not done it is extremely probable that the great mass of the lower class of the negroes will die out. Let not this crime be committed by the American nation.
9. We should be extremely liberal to the negro in education—in primary, in industrial, and also in the higher. Especially ought we to combine the second with the first, and give it the lead for both races.
10. All the southern states should at once by proper constitutional and legal provisions substitute judicial for mob lynching.
CHAPTER XVII
THE RACE QUESTION—THE SITUATION IN DETAIL
The distinction between the two classes of southern negroes, glanced at in the last chapter, is to be always kept in mind—at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, of our discussion. Its importance commands that we say something of it here. Consider how enormously the two differ in numbers. Five per cent of these negroes, that is, some four hundred thousand, in the upper; ninety-five per cent, that is, seven million and four hundred thousand, in the lower class. The latter, being nineteen times as large as the other, first demands attention.
In the country many of the men are croppers. A group of negroes—generally parents and children—do the labor of preparation, cultivation, and gathering, while the owner contributes the land, necessary animals, and feed for the latter. The croppers get half the crop, and the land owner half. The latter retains out of their half whatever he has advanced the croppers. The advances must be limited with firmness, otherwise they will cause loss. These croppers are the great bulk of the agricultural laborers. So few of the men work for standing wages that they need not be noticed. In the towns the men subsist upon day labor, the pay of which ranges from 50 cents to $1.25. It hardly averages 80 cents. Some of the women, both in country and town, take places as house servants and nurses at weekly wages that vary from $1 to $2 with board. The growing disinclination of the women to these places is much stronger in the country than in town. In country and town the women do laundry for the whites at an average price per family of a dollar a week; and they get jobs of sewing, cleaning kitchen utensils, scrubbing, etc. In the country these women do some field labor, sometimes plowing, often hoeing. If trained in childhood they make expert cotton-pickers. But the women agricultural workers steadily decrease in number.