And the practice is far from dead yet. Every Southern town knows of such cases, often many of them: and a large number of mulatto children to-day are the sons and daughters of Southern white men, often men of decided importance in their communities. In one town I visited I heard a white man expressing with great bitterness his feeling against the Negro race, arguing that the Negro must be kept down, else it would lead to the mongrelisation of the white race. The next morning as chance would have it, another white man with whom I was walking pointed out to me a neat cottage, the home of the Negro family of the white man who had talked with me on the previous evening. And I saw this man’s coloured children in the yard!
The better class of Southern people know perfectly well of these conditions and are beginning to attack them boldly. At a meeting in the Court Street Methodist Church in Montgomery, Ala., in 1907, Dr. J. A. Rice, the pastor, made this statement, significant in its very fearlessness, of changing sentiment:
“I hesitate before I make another statement which is all too true. I hesitate, because I fear that in saying it I shall be charged with sensationalism. But even at the risk of such a charge I will say, for it must be said, that there are in the city of Montgomery, four hundred Negro women supported by white men.”
The next morning this statement was reported in the Montgomery Advertiser.
It may be said also, that these 400 cases in a city of 35,000 people do not represent a condition of mere vice. Many of the women are comfortably provided for and have families of children. Vice is wholly distinct from this system of concubinage; for there are in Montgomery thirty-two Negro dives operated for white patronage—also the statement of Dr. Rice, quoted in the Montgomery Advertiser.
The proportion of such cases in some of the less progressive Southern towns even to-day, is almost appalling: and at the same time that speakers and writers are railing at the mulatto for his disturbing race leadership and his restless desire for political and other rights, and while they are declaiming against amalgamation and mongrelisation, the mulatto population is increasing. Striving to keep the Negro in his place as a Negro, the South is making him more and more a white man.
Attempt to Stop Miscegenation
Among Southern women, not unnaturally, the feeling aroused by these practices has been especially bitter. Here is a remarkable plea, published in the Times-Democrat on June 21, 1907, signed “A woman.”
Will you kindly publish the following without attaching my signature or divulging it in any way? I have several brothers who are old-maidish enough to have nervous prostration if they should see my name signed to such an unmaidenly, immodest letter, but I do my thinking without any assistance from them, and hope for the sake of peace in my family that they will not recognise me in print.
I am a resident of a large town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where miscegenation is common—where, if a man isolates himself from feminine society, the first and only conclusion reached is, “he has a woman of his own” in saddle, of duskier shade. This conclusion is almost without exception true. If some daring woman, not afraid of being dubbed a Carrie Nation, were to canvass the delta counties of Mississippi taking the census, she would find so many cases of miscegenation, and their resultant mongrel families, that she would bow her head in shame for the “flower of Southern chivalry”—gone to seed.