It is almost certain that the foregoing estimates do great injustice to the whites. They assume that there is no inferiority of the negro to the white except the per diem quantity of cotton picked. Ponder the statement as to a county of Georgia which I now give.
“According to the ginners’ report, Madison county made sixteen thousand bales of cotton in 1902. Its negro population is about three thousand, its white, twelve thousand. The negroes are one-fifth and the whites four-fifths, and out of every five bales the negroes ought to have made at least one and the whites four. But the former do not average as well as the others. The white who runs one plow, whose wife and children do the hoeing and picking, probably makes ten bales. The negro who runs one plow, whose wife and children hoe and pick, hardly makes more than five or six bales. The greater part of the cotton credited to negro labor is made by negroes who are superintended by white men.”[181]
Weighing all that I have just told, I am as sure as I can be of anything in the near future, that the negro will soon be of greatly diminished importance as laborer, cropper, renter, or farming landowner in the staples of southern agriculture.
There are other kinds of property than improved lands set out in the report of the comptroller-general, such as $3,531,471 of horses, cattle, and stock of all kinds, $810,553 of plantation and mechanical tools. Such needs no separate consideration. These holdings do not in view of what we have told, give the negro farmer any strong foothold.
Nearly all that remains of the rural upper class—the negroes in trades, professions, mercantile business, etc.—is so evidently dependent upon the masses of the lower class, now gravitating away from the country that the most of it can be incidentally disposed of at certain places later on in the chapter and the rest be treated as negligible.
The “city or town property” of the negroes of Georgia, according to the report of the comptroller-general for 1903, amounts in value to $44,668,620. From all that I can learn, while it is largely, it is considerably less, encumbered than the real and personal property of the negro farmers.
A large admixture of Caucasian blood marks nearly every member of the upper class both in country and town. I note that occasionally a coalblack acquires property, on which his miser grip is tighter than that of an accumulating Irishman; but such are very few. There is hardly a well-to-do negro in work, occupation, profession, or property, who is not several shades at least removed from coalblack. Mr. Tillinghast observes “that the porters, cooks, and waiters on a Pullman train are usually mulattoes, while the laborers in the gang on the roadbed are nearly all black.”[182] In this day when the pictures of prominent men and women are in many illustrated magazines and papers, it is to be observed that hardly one of a negro shows unmixed blood. Thus a recent monthly contains pictures of Judson W. Lyons, R. H. Terrell, Kelly Miller, Archibald H. Grinke, T. Thomas Fortune, Daniel Murray, and Booker Washington.[183] Of these the third only, to my eye, seems all negro; and I cannot be confident that he is wholly without appreciable white blood. His head has the shape of a white man’s.
It is my observation that a negro entirely pure in blood hardly ever gets out of the lower class; and that if he does he is much more unprogressive than an average member of the upper class. Note what Bishop Holsey says of how amalgamation with the white improves the descendants of the blacks, in a passage quoted later herein.
This upper class contains only persons of exceptional blood, talent, or some other rare fortune. The higher education, and the education which is now best of all for the negro—industrial education—is for this little circle only. Hampton and Tuskegee do not open to all comers. Mr. Tillinghast convincingly proves that those who have got really good training at the two institutions just named are far above the average negro in physical stamina, education, and other important particulars.[184] The graduates go forth, not to benefit their brothers in the lower class, but to win for themselves surer and higher standing in the upper class.
Some of the resources which this urban section of the upper class have enjoyed for a while they are losing, as I shall tell when I hereinafter summarize the details of white encroachment. But other resources open to them. Such are professions like dentists, eye, ear, and throat surgeons, doctors, barbers, and others who must content themselves with only colored patronage; such the growing retail trade, multiplying boarding-houses, restaurants, and saloons, finding their custom exclusively in the increasing negro town population. The number of negroes who become teachers, lecturers, preachers, authors, etc., steadily augments. Other resources of this upper class can be pointed out, but it needs not here. Although nearly always when the father who has struggled up dies, his property, as we saw to be the case with the negro farmer, goes, and no child succeeds to his occupation, there is perhaps generally compensation for his loss by the accession of some other who has got up out of the lower class by an extraordinarily lucky jump. It is clear that the class is without the wholesome influence of uninterrupted inheritance, from generation to generation, of faculty and character progressively improving. Take this inheritance away from the men and women of any enlightened nation and it would be to lower them very near to the level of barbarism. It is also nearly certain that there will be no further infusion of white blood into this class, by reason of the hostility to inter-mixture which becomes stronger—yea, intenser—every year. The probable consequence will be the dilution of much of the white blood now in the upper class through the lower class to such an extent that it will practically disappear. But some of it, I think, will persist, perhaps increase in degree—preserved by the aversion of many to intermarriage with persons less white than themselves, and occasional intermarriage with white persons in northern States.