The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

In the next place, though it was frankly admitted that the motive of the disfranchisement clauses was to disfranchise the ignorant colored vote, while the ignorant white vote was admitted for a time, provided the voters or their fathers had been soldiers, this is but a temporary inequality; and that the ignorant colored vote does not come within the grandfather clause or other saving clauses is an incident of the time. In a comparatively short time the effect of these saving clauses will have passed away and the suffrage will be based on a purely educational or property qualification.

A writer in The Outlook of June 13, 1903, in an article entitled, “Negro Suffrage in the South,” says: “How far do they exclude him (the Negro) in point of fact? In answering this question the reader must note that in three of the States, Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia, a Negro who possesses property amounting in value to $300 and has paid his taxes may vote. He may not be able to read and write, he may not be able to understand the Constitution when it is read to him. But if he has had the industry, the sobriety, the thrift which have enabled him to accumulate taxable property to the amount of $300, he has the ballot. How many Negroes there are in the South who under this provision are admitted to the ballot we have no means of knowing. It has been estimated that the total ownings of Negroes in the Southern States mount up to $300,000,000 worth of personal and real estate. It is officially reported that in Virginia they own one-twenty-sixth of all the land in the State. These facts would seem to indicate that a not inconsiderable number of Negroes are admitted to the ballot in the Southern States under the property qualification. On the other hand, a considerable white population has been disfranchised under this property-qualification clause. We are informed by a Southern correspondent, whose means of acquaintance justify our placing some confidence in his statement, that in Alabama fully fifty thousand white men, under the practical operation of the Constitution, by non-payment of poll-taxes or other clauses, have been disfranchised.”

It may also be well to consider the effect of such a penalizing measure on the future of the Negro himself. To adopt it would be to violate the one principle on which the permanent advance of the Negro race must be founded. That is, the recognition, even at this late hour, by the Negro that he must stand on his own merits and is to be left to work out politically, as well as economically, his own future. To adopt it would mislead him into thinking he is still the ward of the nation and is to be supported by it, irrespective of his conduct—an idea to which may be traced a considerable portion of all that has retarded the Negro’s advance in the past. It will tend to divert once more his aim from the paths of industry to which it is being turned by the wisest of his friends. It will engender a new hostility to him on the part of the stronger race, on whose friendship his future welfare must depend.

Finally, should such a measure be adopted, it might lead the whites of the South to do what they have hitherto steadfastly refused to do—apply the money derived by taxation on the property of each race exclusively to the education of that race. It has been publicly alleged and appears to be generally assumed that the recent election in Mississippi was in a measure reactionary. The ground for this assumption seems to be that the successful candidate for the Governorship had declared himself to a certain extent opposed to a continuance of the prevailing system. The writer, while recognizing the disappointing results that have followed the large expenditure for the education of the Negroes, would deplore immeasurably any backward step in the matter of education in the South. Light, however glimmering, is far better than darkness. The present system of education may be a poor one, but it is infinitely better than none. Every consideration of public policy would seem to urge its continuance until a better system can be devised. And one consideration would appear unanswerable. The Negroes will always have their own leaders, and it is better that these leaders should be enlightened rather than ignorant. No more deplorable disaster could befall the South than in this age of advancing enlightenment to have a great pariah class hopelessly and irrevocably ignorant established within her borders.

In this view he believes the great body of thoughtful Southerners will unite. But no one can foretell what effect on public sentiment a crusade against the South, based on her attitude toward the Negroes, might produce. It might sweep away the last remnant of good feeling that remains, and with it every dollar raised by taxation on the property of the whites to educate the blacks. The South is now spending on the education of the Negro race, by voluntary taxation of the property of the white race, over five and one-half millions of dollars annually. It would be a poor bargain to exchange for the figment of a right which ignorance should never have had, the remaining good-will of the Whites of the South and the sum they annually expend from their own pockets in trying to uplift the Negro and fit him for the exercise of that right.

It is the conviction of the writer, and he gives it for what it is worth, that the disfranchisement of the main body of the Negro race in the Southern States was a measure of high necessity. He further believes that this disfranchisement is for the permanent welfare of both races. It removes for the time being what is the chief cause of bitterness—a bitterness from which the Negro is a greater sufferer than the white. It will turn the Negro generally from the field where, in his present condition, he has proved a failure, and leave him to develop himself in a field where he may be the equal of any other man.

One who has been a serious and, as is generally agreed, a profound student of our Government and our people has recently given his conclusions after study of conditions in the South, and they agree substantially with the views of the more conservative element of the Southern whites.[57] Mr. James Bryce declares, “that those who rule subject Races on despotic methods ... do not realize all the difficulties that arise in a Democracy. The capital instance is afforded by the history of the Southern States since the Civil War....

“The moral to be drawn from the case of the Southern States seems to be that you must not, however excellent your intentions and however admirable your sentiments, legislate in the teeth of facts. The great bulk of the Negroes were not fit for the suffrage; nor under the American Federal system was it possible (without incurring other grave evils) to give them effective protection in the exercise of the suffrage. It would, therefore, have been better to postpone the bestowal of this dangerous boon. True it is that rocks and shoals were set thick around every course; true that it is easier to perceive the evils of a course actually taken than to realize other evils that might have followed some other course. Nevertheless, the general opinion of dispassionate men has come to deem the action taken in A.D., 1870, a mistake.

“The social relations of two Races which cannot be fused raise problems even more difficult, because incapable of being regulated by law....

“The tremendous problem presented by the Southern States of America, and the likelihood that similar problems will have to be solved elsewhere, as, for instance, in South Africa and the Philippine Isles, bid us ask, What should be the duty and the policy of a dominant Race where it cannot fuse with a backward Race? Duty and policy are one, for it is equally to the interest of both Races that their relations should be friendly.