In the next chapter, under the title “The New Southern Statesmanship,” I shall outline the programme and recount the activities of the new Southern leaders.
The Most Sinister Form of Negro Domination
Travelling in the South one hears much of the “threat of Negro domination,” by which is generally meant political control by Negro voters or the election of Negro officeholders. But there already exists a far more real and sinister form of Negro domination. For the Negro still dominates the thought of the South. For over eighty years, until quite recently, few great or serious issues have occupied the attention of the South save those growing out of slavery and the Negro problem. Though the very existence of our nation is due largely to the courage, wisdom, and political genius of Southern statesmanship—to Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Patrick Henry, and their compatriots—the South, since the enunciation of the Monroe doctrine in 1823, has played practically no constructive part in national affairs. As Professor Mitchell of Richmond well points out, the great, vitalising influences which swept over the entire civilised world during the first half of the nineteenth century, the liberalising, nationalising, industrialising influences, left the South untouched. For it was chained in common slavery with the Negro. Instead of expanding with the new thought, it clung to slavery in opposition to the liberal tendency of the age, it insisted upon states’ rights in opposition to nationality, it contented itself with agriculture alone, instead of embracing the rising industrialism. “It was an instance,” as Professor Mitchell says, “of arrested development.”
Dr. John E. White of Atlanta has ably expressed the ethical result upon a people of confining their thought to a single selfish interest:
“As long as we struggled for that which was good for everybody everywhere,” he says, “we moved with Providence and the South led the van. There were great human concerns in the building up of the Republic. The whole world was interested in it. It was a work ennobling to a people—the inspiration of a great national usefulness. The disaster began when the South began to think only for and of itself—began to have only one problem.”
Thus the South, owing to the presence of the Negro, dropped behind in the progress of the world. And while the new and vitalising world influences are now spreading abroad throughout the South, manifesting themselves in factories, mines, mills, better schools, and more railroads, the old, ugly Negro problem still shackles political thought and cripples freedom of action. In other words, the South is being rapidly industrialised, but not so rapidly liberalised and nationalised, though these developments are certainly following.
Exploiting Negro Prejudice
The cause of this dominance of thought by the Negro lies chiefly with a certain group of politicians whose interest it is to maintain their party control and to keep the South solid. And they do this by harping perpetually on the Negro problem. I observed, wherever I went in the South and found busy and prosperous industries, that the Negro problem was little discussed. One manufacturer in New Orleans said to me, when I asked him about the Negro question:
“Why, I’m so busy I never think about it.”
And that is the attitude of the progressive, constructive Southerner: he is impatient with the talk about the Negro and the Negro problem. He wants to forget it.