The American negro is passing. The mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, strike the first notes in the octave of his evolution—or his decadence, or extinction, or whatever you may call it. The black negro is rare North and South. Negroes go North, white Northerners come South. In States sanctioning intermarriage, irregular connections obtain as elsewhere between white men and black women; and, in addition, between black men and white women of most degraded type or foreigners who are without the saving American race prejudice. Recent exposure of the “White Slave Syndicate” in New York which kidnapped white girls for negro bagnios, is fresh in the public mind.
Under slavery many negroes learned to value and to practice virtue; many value and practice it now; but the freedwoman has been on the whole less chaste than the bond. With emancipation the race suffered relapse in this as in other respects. The South did not do her whole duty in teaching chastity to the savage, though making more patient, persistent and heroic struggle than accredited with. The charge that under slavery miscegenation was the result of compulsion on the part of the superior race finds answer in its continuance since. Because he was white, the crying sin was the white man’s, but it is just to remember that the heaviest part of the white racial burden was the African woman, of strong sex instincts and devoid of a sexual conscience, at the white man’s door, in the white man’s dwelling.[28]
In 1900, negroes constituted 20.4 per cent. of the population of Texas, the lowest rate for the Southern States; in Mississippi, 58.6, the highest. In Massachusetts, they were less than two per cent. Questions of social intermingling can not be of such practical and poignant concern to Massachusetts as to Mississippi, where amalgamation would result in a population of mulatto degenerates. Prohibitions are protective to both races. Fortunately, miscegenation proceeds most slowly in the sections of negro concentration, the sugar and cotton lands of the lower South. In these, it is also said, there is lower percentage of negro crime of all kinds than where negroes are of lighter hue.
Thinkers of both races have declared amalgamation an improbable, undesirable conclusion of the race question; that it would be a propagation of the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. In a letter (March 30, 1865) to the Louisville “Courier-Journal,” recently reproduced in “The Outlook,” Mr. Beecher said: “I do not think it wise that whites and blacks should mix blood ... it is to be discouraged on grounds of humanity.” Senator Ingalls said: “Fred Douglas once said to me: ‘The races will blend, coalesce, and become homogeneous.’ I do not agree with him. There is no affinity between the races; this solution is impossible.... There is no blood-poison so fatal as the adulteration of race.”
At the Southern Educational Conference in Columbia, 1905, Mr. Abbott, in one of the clearest, frankest speeches yet heard from our Northern brotherhood, declared the thinking North and South now one upon these points: the sections were equally responsible for slavery; the South fought, not to perpetuate slavery, but on an issue “that had its beginning before the adoption of the Federal Constitution;” racial integrity should be preserved. In one of the broadest, sanest discussions of the negro problem to which the American public has been treated, Professor Eliot, of Harvard, has said recently: “Northern and Southern opinion are identical with regard to keeping the races pure—that is, without admixture of the one with the other ... inasmuch as the negroes hold the same view, this supposed danger of mutual racial impairment ought not to have much influence on practical measures. Admixture of the two races, so far as it proceeds, will be, as it has been, chiefly the result of sexual vice on the part of white men; it will not be a wide-spread evil, and it will not be advocated as a policy or method by anybody worthy of consideration.”
“It will not be a wide-spread evil!” The truth stares us in the face. Except in the lower South the black negro is now almost a curiosity. In any negro gathering the gamut of colour runs from ginger-cake to white rivaling the Anglo-Saxon’s; and according as he is more white, the negro esteems himself more honourable than his blacker fellow; though these gradations in colour which link him with the white man, were he to judge himself by the white man’s standard, would be, generally speaking, badges of bastardy and shame.
In Florida, a tourist remarked to an orange-woman: “They say Southerners do not believe in intermingling of the races. But look at all these half-white coons!” “Well, Marster,” she answered, “don’t you give Southern folks too much credit fuh dat. Rich Yankees in de winter-time; crap uh white nigger babies in de fall. Fus’ war we all had down here, mighty big crap uh yaller babies come up. Arter de war ’bout Cuba, ’nother big crap come ’long. Nigger gal ain’ nuvver gwi have a black chile ef she kin git a white one!” Blanch, my negro hand-maiden, is comely, well-formed, black; the descendant of a series of honest marriages, yet feels herself at a disadvantage with quadroons and octoroons not nearly her equals in point of good looks or principle. “I’d give five hundred dollars ef I had it, ef my ha’r was straight,” she tells me with pathetic earnestness; and “I wish I had been born white!” is her almost heart-broken moan.[29] She would rather be a mulatto bastard than the black product of honest wedlock.
The integrity of the races depends largely upon the virtue of white men and black women; also, it rests on the negroid side upon the aspiration to become white, acknowledgment in itself of inferiority and self-loathing. The average negress will accept, invite, with every wile she may, the purely animal attention of a “no-count white man” in preference to marriage with a black. The average mulatto of either sex considers union with a black degradation. The rainbow of promise spanning this gloomy vista is the claim that the noble minority of black women who value virtue is on the increase as the race, in self-elevation, recognises more and more the demands of civilisation upon character, and that dignity of racehood which will not be ashamed of its own skin or covet the skin of another. The virtuous black woman is the Deborah and the Miriam of her people. She is found least often in crowded cities, North and South; most often in Southern rural districts. Wherever found, she commands the white man’s respect.
Hope should rest secure in the white man. If the faith of his fathers, the flag of his fathers, the Union of his fathers, are worthy of preservation, is not the blood of his fathers a sacred trust also? Besides, before womanhood, whatever its colour or condition, however ready to yield or appeal to his grosser senses, the white man should throw the ægis of his manhood and his brotherhood.
The recent framing of State Constitutions in the South to supersede the Black and Tan creations revived the charge of race prejudice because their suffrage restrictions would in great degree disfranchise the negro. As compared with discussion of any phase of the race issue some years ago, the spirit of comment was cool and fair. “The Outlook” led in justifying the South for protecting the franchise with moderate property and educational qualifications applying to both races, criticising, however, the provision for deciding upon educational fitness—a provision which Southerners admit needs amendment. One effect of these restrictions will be to stimulate the negro’s efforts to acquire the necessary education or the necessary three hundred dollars’ worth of property. Another effect will be decrease of the white farmer’s scant supply of negro labour; this scarcity, in attracting white immigrants, provides antidote for Africanisation of the South.