The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.
In cutting off an $8,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured) Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said:
“I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic. God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn College.”
Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political leadership in the South.
Economic Cause for White Supremacy
Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to monopolise government and learning, is because it wishes to supervise the division of labour and the products of labour. That is the bottom fact.
In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely and took all the profits. In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage, he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits. But as the Negro has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour. He is no longer willing to be an abject “hewer of wood and a drawer of water” as he was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own business, employ his own professional men, and so on. He will not “keep his place” as a servant. And that is the basis of all the trouble.
Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into a statement of this position.
At the American Bankers’ Association last fall Governor Swanson of Virginia said:
“At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God’s help and our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is.”