The Call of the South

by Robert Lee Durham

"In providing against this danger my people are moved from without by the sight of no occasional negro such as at odd times crosses this New Englander's vision, nor from within by any unreasonable or jealous hatred of the negro such as has characterized certain 'Northern whites' from the time they burned negro orphan asylums in resentment at being drafted to fight their country's battles down to this good day when they mob a negro for trying to do an honest day's work. No! the Southern white man is driven to his defences by a sentiment void of offence toward the negro, and by the daily impending spectacle of black, half-barbarous hosts who menace the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South and of the nation.

"President Phillips has modestly borrowed from one of his predecessors words with which to defend his social amenities to negroes. He quotes and says he would 'bow his head in shame' were he 'by word or deed to add anything to the misery of the awful isolation of the negroes who have risen above their race.' Two things may be said of that, Mr. President: first, isolation has been the price of leadership in all ages, and the negroes who are the pioneers of their race in their long and painful journey upward may not hope to escape it: second, the President's borrowed sentimental reason cuts the ground from under his feet, for that forcible Rooseveltian phrase, 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race,' concedes the premises on which the South's contention is based, since it admits there is such a great gulf between the negro race and the risen negro that his isolation fitly may be described in the words 'misery,' 'awful.' It is a peculiar order of Executive intellect and sensibility that can have such a keen sense of the misery which association with the lowly of his own race brings to an educated negro—who cannot in the very nature of things have put off all his hereditary deficiencies and tastes in a generation; and that yet seems not to be touched with any sense of the unspeakable misery such association and its inevitable consequences would have for my people—his Anglo-Saxon brethren—who, if there be any virtue in the refining processes of civilization, any redemptive power in the Christian religion, any progression in the purposes of God in the earth, are a thousand years ahead of the negro—any negro—in every racial excellence.

"Oh, but, you say, President Phillips means for us to associate only with those who are worthy, those who have 'risen.' Even that would be fatal, Mr. President. Beyond the truth already stated that considerations of merit will be forgotten and brushed aside if the social racial barrier is broken down at any point, and that social intermingling inevitably leads to intermarriage, there is a greater fact, a deeper truth, underlying this question. That fact, that truth, is that in estimating the result of mixing racial bloods not the man only and his personal accomplishments or individual culture must be considered, but his heredity, his race peculiarities and proclivities, every element that has gone into his blood.

"An occasional isolated negro may have broken the shackles of ignorance, measurably and admirably brought under control the half-savage passions of his nature, acquired palpable elegances of person and manner, and taken on largely the indefinable graces of culture: yet beneath all this creditable but thin veneer of civilization there slumber in his blood the primitive passions and propensities of his immediate ancestors, which are transmitted through him as latent forces of evil to burst out in his children and grandchildren in answer to the call of the wild. A man is not made in one generation or two. Every man gets the few ruling passions of his life from the numberless endowments of a hundred progenitors, and these few show out, while scores of others run so deep in his blood that they never crop out in his deeds but pass quietly on as static forces of good or evil to his children and their children before rising to the surface as dynamics in life and character.

"A Northern gentlewoman in a recent magazine article, defending her willingness to offer social courtesies to a prominent negro, speaks of him as one 'of whom an exquisite woman once said he has the soul of a Christian, the heart of a gentleman, and the eyes of the jungle.' That illustrates the idea perfectly, Mr. President,—the eyes of the jungle. Despite the fact that it is easier to breed up physical than temperamental qualities in man or beast, easier to breed out physical than mental or moral or spiritual blood-traits, this negro, with all his culture, with a large mixture of white blood in his veins, has yet in his very face that sinister mark—the eyes of the jungle: and in his blood who shall say what jungle passions, predilections and impulses, nobly and hardly held in check, that hark back to the African wilds from which they are so lately transplanted.

"A negro—any primitive being—may be developed mentally in one or two generations to the point where a certain polish has been put upon his mind and upon his manners; his purposes may be gathered and set toward the goal of final good; the whole trend of his life may be set upward: but there is yet between his new purposes and the savagery of the primitive man in him a far thinner bulwark of heredity than protects a white man from the elemental brute and animal forces of his nature. A number of educated negroes in this country to-day are superior in culture of mind and in personal morals to many white men, but even these individual shining lights of the negro race do not possess the power to endow their offspring so favourably as white men of less polish but longer seasoned hereditary strength of mental and moral fibre.

"It always offends a proper sense of decency to hear the suggestion that the negro may be bred up by crossing his blood with that of white men,—for the obvious reason that with our ideas of morals the most common principles of the breeder's art cannot be applied to the problem: but one single fact which eliminates such cold-blooded animal methods from our consideration is that when animals are cross-bred it is in the hope and for the purpose of combining mutually supplementary elements of strength and of eliminating supplementary weaknesses; while in this race matter the Anglo-Saxon is the superior of the negro in every racial characteristic—in physical strength and grace, in mental gifts and forces, and in spiritual excellence. Even if amalgamation did the very best that could be expected of it, it offers to the world nothing and to the white man less than nothing: for it would be a compromise, a striking of an average, by which naught is added to the total: it would pull down the strong to upraise the weak, degrade the superior to uplift the inferior: it would be a levelling process, not a method of progress. And yet amalgamation does not even that much, for it does not make an average-thick, even-thick retaining wall of culture between the hybrid product and the weaknesses of his mottled ancestry. There are always blow-holes in this mongrel culture, for heredity does not work by averages. It is an elusive combination of forces whose eccentricities and resultants cannot be formulated, calculated, or fore-determined. It is certain only that by no mere manipulation of it can the slightest addition be made to the stock of ancestral virtues. Only slow processes working in each individual through generation after generation can add increments of strength to racial fibre.

"Therefore, if the negro will insist upon some race manipulation in order to raise the average of intelligence, thrift and morality in our national citizenship, the only safe and sane method is to take measures to restrict the increase of the negro race and let it die out like the Indian. But, you scream, that would be to suggest the annihilation of a race God has put here for some wise purpose! Even so: but amalgamation would no less surely annihilate the race—two races—and fly in the face of a Providence that has segregated all races with no less distinctness of purpose, and so far has visited with disaster all attempts to violate that segregation.

"Now, Mr. President, what is the immediate past history, status and condition in Africa and America of this race with which Southern white men are asked to mingle socially? What are the racial endowments of these risen negroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike?

"Let answer the scientists and explorers, missionaries and travellers,—a long list of them, English, French, German, stretching all the way back a hundred years before there was a negro problem in the South. I quote verbatim, as nearly as the form will permit, their very words and phrases. Listen.