But the unfortunate result of the dominance of the single idea of the Negro upon politics has been to benumb the South intellectually; to stifle free thought and free speech. Let a man advance a new issue and if the party leaders do not favour it they have only to cry out “Negro,” twisting the issue so as to emphasise its Negro side (and every question in the South has a Negro side), and the independent thinker is crushed. I once talked with the editor of a newspaper in the South who said to me, “such and such is my belief.”
“But,” I said, “you take just the opposite position in your paper.”
“Yes—but I can’t talk out; it would kill my business.”
This timorousness has touched not only politics, but has reached the schools and the churches—and still shackles the freest speech. George W. Cable, the novelist, was practically forced to leave the South because he advocated the “continual and diligent elevation of that lower man which human society is constantly precipitating,” because he advocated justice for the Negro.
Professor Andrew Slade was compelled to resign from Emory College in Georgia because he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly taking a point of view not supported by the majority in Southern sentiment! Professor John Spencer Bassett was saved from a forced resignation from Trinity College in North Carolina for a similar offence after a lively fight in the Board of Trustees which left Trinity with the reputation of being one of the freest institutions in the South.
The situation in the South has made people afraid of the truth. Political oratory, particularly, often gets away entirely from the wholesome and regenerative world of actual facts. I quoted in the last chapter from a speech of Governor Swanson of Virginia, in which he said: “The business houses and financial institutions are 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.”
Negro’s Progress in Richmond
What a curious thing oratory is! Right in Governor Swanson’s own city of Richmond there are four banks owned and operated by Negroes; one of the Negro bankers sat in the convention to which Governor Swanson was at that moment speaking. There is a Negro insurance company, “The True Reformers,” in which I saw eighty Negro clerks and stenographers at work. It has a surplus of $300,000, with a business in thirty states. Negroes also own and operate in Richmond four clothing stores, five drug stores, many grocery stores (some very small, of course), two hotels, four livery stables, five printing establishments, eight fraternal insurance companies, seven meat markets, fifty eating-places, and many other sorts of business enterprises, small, of course, but growing rapidly. In Richmond also, there are ten Negro lawyers, fifteen physicians, three dentists, two photographers, eighty-five school teachers, forty-six Negro churches.
Southerners Who See the Danger
When I make the assertion regarding “free speech” and the fear of truth in the South, I am making no statement which has not been far more forcibly put by thoughtful and fearless Southerners who see and dread this sinister tendency.