The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

Moreover, the percentage of mulattoes in the total Negro population is decidedly greater in cities than in the country.

Although the reports are admittedly incomplete,[100] “yet even so,” says the Director, “it is a step away from ignorance to have the observation of many thousand enumerators at four independent inquiries as evidence that in the United States between one-ninth and one-sixth of the Negroes were of mixed blood, while in Cuba one-half and in Porto Rico five-sixths have been so classed by the census.”

As race feeling grows the intermixture of the two races will necessarily grow less and less.

The solution of the question, then, must be along one of the other lines suggested. That is, the Negro race must either remain distinct and keep to itself, or it must be removed to some region, whether within or without the confines of the United States, where it will be substantially separated.

There are those who advocate warmly the attempt, however apparently Herculean, to remove the Negro race without further delay. That it may come to this in the future is certainly possible. It is, however, much more likely that the Negro race will find its best security in remaining in this country, a people within a people, separate and distinct, but acting in amity with the stronger race and trying to minimize rather than magnify contentions upon those points as to which the stronger race is most determined. Should the time ever come when, for any reason whatever, a conflict arises between the two races, which would appear to jeopard the supremacy of the stronger race, the weaker race would go down, never to rise again on this continent.

When the writer first began to study the conditions of the race problem they appeared to be most disheartening. As, however, he surveyed the entire field, he has become more hopeful, and certainly more firm in his convictions as to a few principles.

One of these principles is the absolute and unchangeable superiority of the white race—a superiority, it appears to him, not due to any mere adventitious circumstances, such as superior educational and other advantages during some centuries, but an inherent and essential superiority, based on superior intellect, virtue, and constancy. He does not believe that the Negro is the equal of the white, or ever could be the equal. Race superiority is founded on courage (or, perhaps, “constancy” is the better word), intellect, and the domestic virtues, and in these the white is the superior of every race.

Another principle is that many, if not most, of the difficulties of the race problem since the war have been caused, or at least increased, by the ignorance of those outside of the South, who, most cocksure of their position where they were most in error, have tried to force a solution on lines contrary to natural and unchangeable laws. The selfish politician and the cocksure theorist have equally contrived to create problems where none might have been but for their bigotry and their folly.

The first step toward the solution of the problem would be taken if the Negro were simply let alone and left to his own resources, with such help as equity or philanthropy might contribute—in other words, if the whites and blacks were left to settle their difficulties and troubles in the various States and sections precisely as they would be left were all whites or all blacks.

Among the errors made in the early years none was more fatal than the inculcation in the mind of the Negro that he was the ward of the nation, and, as such, would be sustained. He was not sustained in the end and he never can be; but he learned just enough from the experience of that time to know that the Government was powerful enough to trample down the Southern whites. The memory of that time has been an ignis fatuus to delude him ever since. And the continual harping on this theme by the section of the Northern press and the politicians, who forget that this is no longer the decade following the war, is just sufficient to mislead them.