The hatred and fear of such relationships have grown most rapidly, of course, among the better classes of white people. The class of white men who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago, or than it was in slavery times.
And the Negroes on their part are also awakening to the seriousness of this problem. I found in several Negro communities women’s clubs and other organisations which are trying, feebly enough, but significantly trying, to stem the evil from their side. It is a terrible slough to get out of. Negro women, and especially the more comely and intelligent of them, are surrounded by temptations difficult indeed to meet. It has been and is a struggle in Negro communities, especially village communities, to get a moral standard established which will make such relationships with white men unpopular. In some places to-day, the Negro concubines of white men are received in the Negro churches and among the Negroes generally, and honoured rather than ostracised. They are often among the most intelligent of the Negro women, they often have the best homes and the most money to contribute to their churches. They are proud of their light-coloured children. And yet, as the Negroes begin to be educated, they develop an intense hatred of these conditions: and the utter withdrawal of the best sort of Negro families from any white associations is due in part to the dread of such temptations. I shall never forget the bitterness in the reply of a coloured blacksmith who had a number of good-looking girls. I said to him jokingly:
“I suppose you are going to send them to college.”
“Why should I?” he asked. “What good will it do? Educate them to live with some white man!”
The Tragedy of the Negro Girl
A friend of mine, Southern by birth, told me a story of an experience he had at Nashville, where he went to deliver an address at Fisk University, a Negro college. On his way home in the dark, he chanced to walk close behind two mulatto girls who had been at the lecture. They were discussing it. One of them said:
“Well, it’s no use. There is no chance down here for a yellow girl. It’s either get away from the South—or the usual thing.”
In that remark lay a world of bitter knowledge of conditions.
It is remarkable, indeed, that the Negroes should have begun to develop moral standards as rapidly as they have. For in the South few people expect the coloured girl to be moral: everything is against her morality. In the first place, the home life of the great mass of Negroes is still primitive. They are crowded together in one or two rooms, they get no ideas of privacy, or of decency. The girls are the prey not only of white men but of men of their own race. The highest ideal before their eyes in many cases is the finely dressed, prosperous concubine of a white man. Moreover, in nearly all Southern towns, houses of prostitution are relegated to the Negro quarter. At Montgomery, Ala., I saw such places in respectable Negro neighbourhoods, against which the Negro people had repeatedly and bitterly objected to the city authorities, to no purpose. The example of such places of vice on Negro children is exactly what it would be on white children. In the same way, although it seems unbelievable, Negro schools in several cities have been built in vice districts. I saw a fine new brick school for coloured children at Louisville placed in one of the very nastiest streets of the city. The same conditions surround at least one coloured school which I saw at New Orleans.
And yet the South, permitting such training in vice, wonders at Negro immorality and is convulsed over the crime of rape. Demanding that the Negro be self-restrained, white men set the example in every way from concubinage down, of immorality and lack of restraint. They sow the whirlwind and look for no crop!