And the doctrine of work in the South has become a great propaganda, almost, indeed, a passion. It has found expression in a remarkable growth of industrial activities, cotton-mills, coal-mines, iron and steel industries; in new methods of farming; in spreading railroads. But more than all else, perhaps, it has developed a new enthusiasm for education, not only for education of the old classical sort, but for industrial and agricultural education—the training of workers. All this, indeed, represents the rebound from years of agitation in which the Negro has been “cussed and discussed,” as one Southerner put it to me, beyond the limit of endurance. Wherever I went in the South among the new industrial and educational leaders I found an active distaste for the discussion of the Negro problem. These men were too busy with fine new enterprises to be bothered with ancient and unprofitable issues.
New Prescriptions for Solving the Negro Problem
When I asked Professor Dillard of New Orleans how he thought the Negro question should be treated, he replied:
“With silence.”
“My prescription,” says President Alderman in his address on “Southern Idealism,” “is ‘silence and slow time,’ faith in the South, and wise training for both white and black.”
Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama, himself one of the new leaders, has thus outlined the position of the rising Southern leadership:
“The South is growing weary of extremists and of sensational problem-solvers.... Our coming leadership will have a sense of proportion which will involve a steady refusal to be stampeded by antique nightmares and ethnological melodrama. It will possess an increasing passion for getting hold of the real things in a real world. And it will ... deal with one task at a time. It will subordinate paper schemes of distant amelioration to duties that will help right now.”
Emphasis here is laid upon “real things in a real world” and “duties that will help right now”; and that is the voice everywhere of the new statesmanship.
But let us be clear upon one point at the start. The platforms of these parties are matters of emphasis. One emphasises rights; the other emphasises duties. I have no doubt that Booker T. Washington believes as firmly in the rights of the Negro as any leader of his race; he has merely ceased to emphasise these rights by agitation until his people have gained more education and more property, until by honest achievement they are prepared to exercise their rights with intelligence.
In the same way, the views of many of the new Southern white leaders of whom I shall speak in this article have not radically changed, so far as the Negro is concerned; some of them, I have found, do not differ from Tillman upon essential points; but, like Washington, they have decided not to emphasise controversial matters, and go to work and develop the South, and the people of the South, for the good of the whole country. If the test has to come in the long run between white men and coloured men, as it will have to come and is coming all the time, they want it to be an honest test of efficiency. The fittest here, too, will survive (there is no escaping the great law!), but these new thinkers wish the test of fitness to be, not mere physical force, not mere brute power, whether expressed in lynching or politics, but the higher test of real capacity. They have supreme confidence that the white man is superior on his merits in any contest; and Washington, on his side, is willing to (indeed, he must) take up the gauntlet thus thrown down.