Races and Immigrants in America

by John R. Commons

The negro trade unionist has not as yet shown the organizing capacity of other races. Only among the mine workers, the longshoremen, and bricklayers are they to be found in considerable numbers, although the carpenters have negro organizers. But in most of these cases the negro is being organized by the white man not so much for his own protection as for the protection of the white workman. If the negro is brought to the position of refusing to work for lower wages than the white man he has taken the most difficult step in organization; for the labor union requires, more than any other economic or business association in modern life, reliance upon the steadfastness of one’s fellows. Unfortunately, when the negro demands the same wages as white men, his industrial inferiority leads the employer to take white men in his place, and here again we see how fundamental is manual and technical intelligence as a basis for other progress.[21]

It must not be inferred because we have emphasized these qualities of intelligence—manliness and coöperation as preparatory to political rights—that the negro race should be deprived of the suffrage until such time as its members acquire these qualities. Many individuals have already acquired them. To exclude such individuals from the suffrage is to shut the door of hope to all. An honest educational test honestly enforced on both whites and blacks is the simplest rough-and-ready method for measuring the progress of individuals in these qualities of citizenship. There is no problem before the American people more vital to democratic institutions than that of keeping the suffrage open to the negro and at the same time preparing the negro to profit by the suffrage.

Neither should the negro be excluded from the higher education. Leadership is just as necessary in a democracy as in a tribe. Self-government is not suppression of leaders but coöperation with them. The true leader is one who knows his followers because he has suffered with them, but who can point the way out and inspire them with confidence. He feels what they feel, but can state what they cannot express. He is their spokesman, defender, and organizer. Not a social class nor a struggling race can reach equality with other classes and races until its leaders can meet theirs on equal terms. It cannot depend on others, but must raise up leaders from its own ranks. This is the problem of higher education—not that scholastic education that ends in itself, but that broad education that equips for higher usefulness. If those individuals who are competent to become lawyers, physicians, teachers, preachers, organizers, guides, innovators, experimenters, are prevented from getting the right education, then there is little hope for progress among the race as a whole, in the intelligence, manliness, and coöperation needed for self-government.

Growth of Negro Population.—After the census of 1880 it was confidently asserted that the negro population was increasing more rapidly than the white population. But these assertions, since the census of 1890, have disappeared. It then became apparent that the supposed increase from 1870 to 1880 was based on a defective count in 1870, the first census after emancipation. In reality the negro element, including mulattoes, during the one hundred and ten years of census taking, has steadily declined in proportion to the white element. Although negroes in absolute numbers have increased from 757,000 in 1790 to 4,442,000 in 1860, and 8,834,000 in 1900, yet in 1790 they were one-fifth of the total population; in 1860 they were one-seventh and in 1900 only one-ninth.

It is naturally suggested that this relative decrease in negro population has been owing to the large immigration of whites, but the inference is unwarranted. In the Southern states the foreign element has increased less rapidly than the native white element, yet it is in the Southern states that the negro is most clearly falling behind. In the twenty years from 1880 to 1900 the whites in eighteen Southern states without the aid of foreign immigration increased 57 per cent and the negroes only 33 per cent.[22] In only six Southern states, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, have the negroes, during the past ten years, increased more rapidly than the whites, and in only three of these states, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, was the relative increase significant. In but two states, South Carolina and Mississippi, does the negro element predominate, and in another state, Louisiana, a majority were negroes in 1890, but a majority were whites in 1900. “At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Southern negroes were increasing much faster than the Southern whites. At the end of it they were increasing only about three-fifths as fast.”[23]

This redistribution of negroes is an interesting and significant fact regarding the race and has a bearing on its future. Two movements are taking place, first to the fertile bottom lands of the Southern states, second to the cities, both North and South. Mr. Carl Kelsey has shown this movement to the lowlands in an interesting way.[24] He has prepared a geological map of Alabama, which with Mississippi has received the largest accession of negroes, and has shown the density of negro population according to the character of the soil. In this map it appears that the prairie and valley regions contain a proportion of 50 per cent to 90 per cent negroes, while the sand hill and pine levels contain only 10 per cent to 50 per cent, and the piedmont or foothill region less than 10 per cent. A similar segregation is found in other Southern states, especially the alluvial districts of Mississippi and Arkansas. In these fertile sections toward which the negroes gravitate, the crops are enormous, and Mr. Kelsey points out a curious misconception in the census summary, wherein the inference is drawn that negroes are better farmers than whites because they raise larger crops. “No wonder the negroes’ crops are larger,” when the whites farm the hill country and the negroes till the delta, which “will raise twice as much cotton per acre as the hills.” Furthermore the negro, whether tenant or owner, is under the close supervision of a white landlord or creditor, who in self-protection keeps control of him, whereas the white farmer is left to succeed or fail without expert guidance.

The migration of negroes to the cities is extremely significant. In ten Southern states the proportion of the colored population was almost exactly the same in 1890 as it had been in 1860,—namely, 36 per cent,—yet in sixteen cities of those states, as shown by Mr. Hoffman,[25] the colored proportion increased from 19 per cent in 1860 to 29 per cent in 1890. This relative increase, however, did not continue after 1890, for, according to the census of 1900, the proportion of negroes in those cities was still 29 per cent. During the past decade the negroes have increased relatively faster in Northern cities. The white population of Chicago increased threefold from 1880 to 1900, and the colored population fivefold. The white population of Philadelphia during the same period increased 50 per cent and the colored population 100 per cent. In the thirty-eight largest cities of the country the negro population in ten years increased 38 per cent and the white population, including foreign immigration, increased 33 per cent. In thirty Northern and border cities during the past census decade the negroes gained 167,000, and in twenty Southern cities they gained 80,000.[26]

The Southern whites also are moving from the South, and in larger proportions than the negroes, though the movement of both is small. In 1900, 7 per cent of the whites of Southern birth lived in the North and West and only 4.3 per cent of the negroes of Southern birth. But the negroes who go North go to the cities, and the whites to the country. Three-fifths (58 per cent) of these northbound negroes moved to the larger cities and only one-fourth (26 per cent) of the northbound whites.[27]

The accompanying map, derived from the census of 1900,[28] shows clearly both of these movements of negro population. The shaded areas indicate the counties where negroes formed a larger proportion of the population in 1900 than they did twenty years earlier, in 1880. Here can be seen the movement to the low and fertile lands of the South and the cities of the North and South. There are but two areas in California and Colorado, not included on the map, where the population of negroes has increased, and one of these contains the city of Los Angeles.

Were the negroes in the cities to scatter through all the sections, the predominating numbers of the white element might have an elevating influence, but, instead, the negroes congregate in the poorer wards, where both poverty and vice prevail. Hoffman has shown that two-thirds of the negroes in Chicago live in three wards, which contain all the houses of ill-fame in that part of the city. The same is true of Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati.[29] In these sections negro prostitution has become an established institution, catering to the Italian and other lower grades of immigrants, and supporting in idleness many negro men as solicitors.