“That should wealth, culture and character come to the great body of the Negroes, all trace of race prejudice would disappear from our Southern section as effectually as it has been obliterated in Portugal and the Latin countries.”[277]
If Washington happened then to hold the same view as the above, even without expressing it, there was no discord between him and his lieutenant, Fortune, and therefore, while Mr. Stone was pondering the problem of the mulatto, Washington, looking with steady eye toward the future infusion of virile blood, cried to the applauding white people of the South;—“Cast down your bucket where you are.”
Is it for the best interest of all that the bucket should be cast down where we of the South are now?
By the census of 1900, Mr. Stone’s State was the one State of the three, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana with a Negro majority in 1890, which showed no improvement in this respect.
Louisiana’s Negro majority of 789 had given place to a white majority of 78,808; South Carolina’s tremendous Negro majority of 226,926 had at last felt the beginning of the ebb, and was 225,415; but Mississippi’s 197,708 had risen to 266,430, and, therefore, in Mississippi were the very worst conditions and those most fruitful for race friction; for Mr. Stone has declared:
“A primary cause of race friction is the vague rather intangible, but wholly real feeling of ‘pressure’ which comes to the white man almost instinctively in the presence of a mass of people of a different race. In a certain important sense, all racial problems are distinctly problems of racial distribution.... So today, no State in the Union would have separate car laws where the Negro constituted only 10 or 15 percent of its total population.”[278]
In another lecture Mr. Stone had declared:
“Negroes constitute practically a third of the population in the South both city and country. In the North they constitute but one fortieth of the city population and only an insignificant, really negligible one-ninetieth of that of the country.”
Yet, Mr. Stone quotes as an authority, Booker T. Washington, who declared:
“If we were to move four millions of the eight millions of Negroes from the South into the North and West ... a problem would be created far more serious and complicated than any now existing in the Southern States.”[279]