The slave trade

by Theodore D. Jervey

But in justice to this most excitable man, it must be admitted that there can be found whites of cultivation and intellect just as wild. Take the case of Dr. H. J. Seligman.

With all the insufferable conceit of a certain class of white, he appropriates the work of Negroes, (easily recognized by those who have heard their most intelligent speakers), denatures it of the humor which makes its appeal and presents it to the public, as his own indictment of the South. “The Southern dogma colors the rest of the country,” he says. Yet he admits—“In so far as the South is concerned, conditions improve as the Negro moves out.” Another writer, Stephen Graham, starts his book with crediting to the Negro slaves emancipated in 1863 the “twelve millions out of a total of a hundred millions of all races blending in America.”[367] As the census postdating his book gives only 10,389,328 Negroes for 1920, and as in all reason nearly two millions of these may be argued to be the progeny of the free persons of color of 1860, the contribution to the race from the class of colored person invariably ignored by English and Northern writers must approach almost a third. But that is not sensational. So journeying through Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, visiting Negroes, accepting their hospitality and practicing social equality, Graham most inconsiderately denounces their smell and, because he failed to reach and establish any spiritual touch, in his attempt to address them, stupidly decides there was none to be attained. Expressing the belief that the Negroes of New York and Chicago were firmer in flesh and will than those in the South and yield more hope for the race in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes, he nevertheless crawls back to the feet of Northern prejudice with the declaration against the migration of the Negroes from the South to the North and the consequent even distribution over the whole of the country, because it would take “hundreds of years to even them out” and “they would probably crowd more and more into the large cities and be as much involved in evil conditions, as they were in the South.” Can it be possible that there are nothing but evil conditions in the great cities of the North and West? Is it not the belief of the Northern authorities, that what the Negro needs is education? What education is equal to residence in these great pulses of our civilization? Has not Mr. Graham, himself attested “the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes?” Why then attempt to throw doubts on the benefits to the Negro from diffusion? It might as well be faced without any more squirming. It is inevitable. By the law of compensation, that section of our great country, which for a hundred years or more has represented to the admiring world all the virtue, intelligence and civilization of the United States, especially in its treatment of the colored race will have to endeavor to live up to its reputation. The aspiring Negro is not going to be denied that contact with the most advanced civilization of this country, which those who freed him owe to him. If he crowds into the great cities, it is because there he finds its most advertised display, and so the most active and energetic push into it with some contempt for their feeble self elected leaders, who have preached against or kept quiet concerning it.

For three decades prior to the war between the States, the Southern States of the Union had made railroad development secondary to the Negro question. Constituting as they did in area at that time fully one-half of the States; peopled with 3,575,634 whites and 2,176,127 Negroes, they had been led to base their civilization on the substratum of an inferior race, putting that wild conception even above the Federal Union, that great experiment in government, which they had been most instrumental in framing. After their overthrow, Reconstruction raised the spectre of the Negro outstripping the whites in the South and almost assuredly in the lower South. And what establishes the wonderful clearness of the vision of the Negro, William Hannibal Thomas, was his ability, two years before the overthrow of Reconstruction, to see through the mists of 1874, which so completely shrouded the vision of Judge Albion Tourgee as late as 1888 in his “Appeal to Caesar.”

For Thomas realized, from the outset, that the Negro majority of South Carolina could not last.

In the hundred years which have elapsed since 1820, the proportion of the Negro population to the whites in the United States, as a whole, has dropped from 19 per cent to 9.9 per cent, the whites rising from 81 per cent to 90.1 per cent. With regard to the Negro population in the Southern States as compared with the rest of the United States, the proportion in the South has dropped from 92.5 per cent to 84.2 per cent, the percentage of the rest of the United States rising from 8 per cent to 15.98 per cent. But while it is treated as a movement of one hundred years, as far as the South is concerned, on account of the unknown accretions prior to 1860 through the illicit slave trade and the magnetic attraction of Reconstruction, it could be more accurately represented as a movement of forty years.

In the five great States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, embracing an area of about 224,960 square miles of contiguous territory, the white population had risen from 4,112,564 in 1880, to 7,444,218 in 1920; while in the same period the Negro population had increased from 2,408,654 only to 3,223,791. But what is even more striking is the fact that in the last decade there has been an actual decrease of 143,288 in the Negro population of this Southern area.

At the same time in the five great States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin the Negro population has risen to 514,589, and to the East of the great Northwest, in the Middle States and New England 709,453 were found to be; while West of the Mississippi river, outside of the old South, into a region, which before the war between the States was prairie and almost unexplored mountain and desert, 314,879 Negroes have moved. Yet in the South they still constitute 26 per cent of the population to only 3 per cent outside, in the rest of the Union.

Mr. Graham’s impression, however, that it will “take hundreds of years to even them out” is a hasty and illconsidered judgment. Louisiana, which forty years ago had a colored majority of 28,707, had by the Census of 1920 a white majority of 396,360. Georgia had increased its white majority from 90,773 in 1880 to 482,749 in 1920; while the great cotton planting State of Alabama had raised its majority in the same period from 62,083 to 546,972. Considering what the Census figures show for Virginia, suffering as no State suffered from the war between the States, engaged in by her for no purpose of sustaining a black substratum for her civilization; but for a purpose identical with that which the civilized world acclaimed for Belgium and supporting the shock of war with a courage and devotion not surpassed by France in the Great War, she was shorn of about a third of her area and four-tenths of her white population, in utter defiance of the Constitution; but, now with a white majority which has risen from 57.5 per cent to 70.1 per cent, she is in a healthier condition than the portion which was carved out of her flank. The gain of North Carolina is even greater. Taking the whole South, we find, that from 1880 to 1920 the white population has increased from 12,309,087 to 25,016,579; while during the same period the colored has only risen from 6,013,215 to 8,801,753. It is true that by the Census of 1920 two Southern States, Mississippi and South Carolina still each had a colored majority; but one which had shrunk from 213,227 to only 46,181 in South Carolina and from 170,893 in Mississippi to 81,262; the percentage of whites in South Carolina being 48.6 per cent and in Mississippi 48.3 per cent.[368]

Until the Census of 1930 is published we shall not know positively; but in this, the fifth year since the last census, all available information seems to indicate that in both States the white minority has been converted into a white majority. By the census of the United States for 1920 in the 875,670 square miles which constitute the Southern States there were 25,016,579 whites and 8,801,753 colored inhabitants; while the remaining 2,150,600 square miles of the Union held 70,925,032 whites and 1,552,402 Negroes, with 109,966 under strictly Federal control at Washington. But again, North of the Northern line of the United States extends a region greater in area than the United States in which as indicated by the Canadian census of 1921 there are only 8,750,643 inhabitants. The door of opportunity therefore still remains open to the Negro in America and his inability to see this, throughout the fifty eight years of his freedom in which it has been accessible to him by foot, while handicapped by their ignorance of our wants, our customs and our language, the impoverished whites of Europe have crossed the three thousand miles of water which barred them, offers the most striking proof of the Negro’s lack of capacity to help himself.

Perhaps, in justice to the Negroes as a whole, it should be noted that in no race that has ever existed has it been easier to use the supposed leaders against the true interests of the masses, than is apparent in the history of the Negroes. Yet even these, as they now clash with each other, emit some sparks of political intelligence. Meanwhile the masses are growing more accustomed to judge for themselves. Northern environment has not been without its effect upon them. They are taking something from it and they are going to give something to it.