As viewed by The New Republic, the situation in the summer of 1916 was thus stated:
“To the Northern Negro the war in Europe has been of immense and unexpected advantage. It has shut out the immigrant who is the Negro’s most dangerous competitor, has doubled the demand for the Negro’s labor, raised his wages, and given chances to him, which in the ordinary course would have gone to white men. If immigration still lags after the war or is held down by law, the Negro will secure the great opportunity for which he has been waiting these fifty years.... In Southern cities, Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Richmond, Nashville, Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, Negroes constitute one-third to one-half the population and more than that proportion of the wage earners and are given a chance to earn their living, because, without them, the work of these cities could not be done. In the city of Philadelphia, on the other hand, Negroes form only 5½ per cent of the population, in Chicago only 2 per cent, in New York a little less than 2 per cent.... If white men will not work with them, if the employer is forced to choose between a large supply of white labor and a small supply of Negro labor, he will choose the former.... The Negro gets a chance to work only when there is no one else.... The wronged are always wrong and so we blame the Negro. If we are fair, however, we must place the responsibility of a social effect for those responsible for the cause. If the Northern Negroes have a higher death rate and breed a larger proportion of criminals and prostitutes than do the whites, it is in large part our own fault. We cannot understand the problems of the Negro in the North unless we constantly bear in mind the fact of industrial opportunity. The Northern Negro has the right to vote, the right and duty to send his children to school, and technically, at least, many civil and political rights. We do not put him into Jim Crow cars or hold him in prison camps for private exploitation. Nevertheless, the pressure upon him is almost as painful, though not nearly so brutal or debasing, as that upon the Southern Negro. The Northern Negro is urged to rise but held down hard.... Immigration after the war seems likely to be kept down at a low level during several years or possibly decades.... It is the Negro’s chance, the first extensive widening of his industrial field since emancipation.”[353]
The fact that this very able statement is not entirely exact in all its details takes very little from the value of the presentation of it. As has been disclosed by Mr. Warne, in his, “Immigrant Invasion,” the Negro had quite a chance until the decade 1900-1910. That he did not improve it as fully as he might have done was due; first, to his ignorance; second, to his retention for quite a while of servile instincts; third, to the determination, on the part of a very considerable and influential portion of the Northern and Western public, that the Negro must be kept out of the North and West; and of the controlling portion of the Southern public, assisted by the Republican Supreme Court of the United States, that he should be kept, as near to the condition of a serf of the soil in the South, as he could be by those so restraining him, keeping themselves, meanwhile, on the windy side of the law; fourth, to an active, continuous, well financed propaganda, led by the most influential member of the race, that he should cling to the South.
Against such forces what could be affected by the few Southern white men, Carlyle McKinley, Wade Hampton, and M. C. Butler, as early as 1889, preaching “Diffusion”?
North and South, in the main for purely selfish reasons, the force of the country was against diffusion of the Negro and for banking him in the South, where he had been so long a slave. For such a paper, therefore, as The New Republic, to advocate diffusion was a matter of the very first importance.
Continuing the discussion in its issue of July 1, 1916. The New Republic declared:
“For the nation as a whole, such a gradual dissemination of the Negro among all the States would ultimately be of real advantage. If at the end of half a century, only 50 per cent or 60 per cent instead of 89 per cent of the Negroes were congregated in the Southern States, it would end the fear of race domination, and take from the South many of its peculiar characteristics, which today hamper development. To the Negro it would be of even more obvious benefit.... For if the Southern Negro finding political and social conditions intolerable, were to migrate to the North, he would have in his hand a weapon as effective, as any he could find, in the ballot box.... Against the opposition of the preponderant white population, the Southern Negro has few defenses. He has no vote, he has no wealth; and as for the protection of the law, that is a sword held by the white man with the edge towards the Negro. He cannot better his condition by political action or armed revolt. His one defense is to move away.”[354]
Weighing duly what is urged above, without necessarily accepting all of it as accurate, is it not apparent, that, for a Southern white man to argue that the Negroes should remain in the South, in the masses in which they now exist there, is an indication that he refuses to consider anything as beneficial, which affects industrial conditions he has become accustomed to? For the Negro so to think is simply the survival of the servile instinct, which the bulk of the Southern whites claim is latent in all Negroes.
To stress the matter a little further, the view of a Southern and a Northern Negro will be submitted and contrasted.
The first is the view of a colored man, Rev. Richard Carroll, who, in 1890, had attracted the attention of George William Curtis, as has been before mentioned, by his bold and original utterance, that Tillman had made the whites as well as the Negroes readers and thinkers. Some eight years later this colored man had served as the chaplain of a colored regiment in Cuba. Later he had occupied himself with a colored school near Columbia, South Carolina, and, to some extent, had become, to the press of the State of South Carolina, the type of the good Negro, who agrees with the best of the whites. That is the distinct ear mark of the “Good Negro.”