The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

At the end the Negroes must rise by their own exertions and their own approach to the standards by which peoples rise. And the chief aid in this is the sympathy of those among whom they live.

Left alone, the whites and the blacks of the South would settle their difficulties along the lines of substantial justice and substantial equity.

Yet another principle is that the final settlement must be one in which the great body of that portion of the white race who know the Negroes best shall acquiesce. No other will ever be final.

The “MacVeagh Commission,” which visited Louisiana in 1876, reported that the Negro party had a great majority in the State, had had possession of every branch of the State Government, and had been sustained by the United States Government, and yet the whites had defeated and ousted them. Were the same conditions to exist to-day the same results would occur. This country is as “fatally reserved for” the Anglo-Saxon race as it was when the Virginia Adventurers declared it to be so in their first report to Elizabeth.

And, lastly, I am satisfied that the final settlement must be by the way of elevating both races.

There is much truth in the saying that unless the whites lift the Negroes up, the Negroes will drag them down, though it is not true in the full sense in which it was intended. It is not true to the extent that the white must lift the Negro up to his own level; it is true to the extent that he must not leave him debased—at least, must not leave him here debased. If he does, then the Negro will inevitably hold him, if not drag him down. No country in the present state of the world’s progress can long maintain itself in the front rank, and no people can long maintain themselves at the top of the list of peoples if they have to carry perpetually the burden of a vast and densely ignorant population, and where that population belongs to another race, the argument must be all the stronger. Certainly, no section can, under such a burden, keep pace with a section which has no such burden. Whatever the case may have been in the past, the time has gone by, possibly forever, when the ignorance of the working-class was an asset. Nations and peoples and, much more, sections of peoples, are now strong and prosperous almost in direct ratio to their knowledge and enlightenment.

It can readily be demonstrated by unquestioned proof that the wealth and strength of modern nations are in almost exact proportion to the education of the population. It is not, however, necessary for the present argument to go outside of America. Viewing the matter economically, the Negro race, like every other race, must be of far more value to the country in which it is placed, if the Negro is properly educated, elevated, and trained, than if he is allowed to remain in ignorance and degradation. He is a greater peril to the community in which he lives if he remains in ignorance and degradation than if he is enlightened. If the South expects ever to compete with the North, she must educate and train her population, and, in my judgment, not merely her white population, but her entire population.

I know well all the arguments against educating the Negroes. I know the struggle that the South made in the days of her poverty to educate that race, even at the expense of her white children; expending upon them, out of taxes levied by the whites on the property of the whites, over $110,000,000, though over a fifth of the whites were left in ignorance.[101] I know the disappointment from which she has suffered. What is charged as to the educated Negro’s being just educated enough to make him worthless as a laborer and leave him useless for anything else has in it often too much truth. I am well aware that often the young Negro thinks his so-called education gives him a license to be insolent, and that not rarely it is but an aid to his viciousness. But, for all this, the economic laws are as invariable and as certain in their operation as any other laws of nature.

In the first place, it seems to me that our plain duty is to do the best we can to act with justice and a broad charity and leave the consequences to God.

But there are other reasons for our continuing in well-doing. And not for sentimental reasons and not for political reasons, but for reasons on which depend the future of the South and of the Southern people; for reasons as certain as that light is safer than darkness, and that intelligence is better than stupidity, or even mere craftiness, the South must educate all her population. She must do this, or she must fall behind the rest of the country. She has no option in this matter. She has the population and they are increasing. The matter seems to me to be not susceptible of question on sound economic grounds. We must educate them. It is not a question of choice, but of necessity.