The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

We have the Negro here among us to the number of ten millions and increasing at a rate of about twenty-five per cent. every ten years. They are here; what must we do with them? One of three courses must be taken: We must either debase them, keep them stationary, or improve them.

Everyone will discard the first plan.

No one can make the second feasible. A race, like a class, is always in a state of change, at least, under conditions like those in America.

Then, we must adopt the third course.

At this point, the question arises: How shall they be improved? One element says, Improve them, but only as laborers, for which alone they are fitted; another, with a larger charity, says, Enlarge this and give them a chance to become good mechanics, as they have shown themselves capable of improvement in the industrial field; a third class goes further yet, and says, Give them a yet further chance—a chance to develop themselves; enlighten them and teach them the duties of citizenship and they will become measurably good citizens. Yet another says, Give him the opportunity and push him till he is stuffed full of the ideas and the learning that have made the white race what it is.

The last of these theories appears to the writer as unsound as the first, which is certainly unsound. Keep them ignorant, and the clever and the enterprising will go off and leave to the South the dull, the stupid, and the degraded.

The question is no longer a choice between the old-time Negro and the “new issue,” but between the “new issue,” made into a fairly good laborer and a fairly enlightened citizen, who in time will learn his proper place, whatever it may be, or the “new issue,” dull, ignorant, brutish, liable to be worked on by the most crafty of those who would use him; a noisome, human hot-bed, in which every form of viciousness will germinate.

Perhaps, the best argument ever advanced for general suffrage was that of George Mason in the Constitutional Convention: that through a general suffrage it may be known what is underneath. The Negroes will always have their leaders, and it is better to have enlightened leaders than ignorant.

Nothing could be more disheartening than the poor return that the Southerner has received for his outlay and patience. Often, worthlessness and insolence on the part of the beneficiaries of his bounty, and misunderstanding and abuse on the part of Pharisaical critics, have been his reward. But, for all this, let us keep on doing what we believe to be right. We have in the past had experience of the Negro fairly well trained and in amity with the white, where he recognized the latter’s superiority. We have the high authority of one of the leading Negro teachers and leaders, that the Negro yearns toward the white. This is strongly corroborated by the well-known fact that wherever the Negroes and the Southern whites are let alone, and are not affected by outside influences, they, for the most part, live in harmony. If we keep on and manage the race question with firmness and with equity, we shall yet show the Negro that his true interest lies in maintaining amity with the Southern white. This we can never do if we take ground against educating him and leave the Northern white to advocate uplifting him. In such case, the North would always have an argument, and the Negro always proof, that the Northerner is his friend and the Southerner not.

The alleged danger of the educated Negro becoming a greater menace to the white than the uneducated is a bugaboo which will not stand the test of light. That this might be true if the white is allowed to remain uneducated, may readily be admitted. The answer, however, to the argument, if it has any merit whatever, is that we must give a sound and not a spurious education and simply educate our whites better. If there were not a Negro on the continent of America, we shall have to do this anyhow, unless we are willing to have the Southern people fall ever further and further behind the people of the North and West.[102]