Following the Color Line / An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy

by Unknown

And this is one of the dangers of the race problem in this country—the fostering of such an instinct to make money or to get political office. Such a basis of personal prosperty is all the more dangerous because the white man is in undisputed power in this country; the Negro has no great navy behind him; he is like a child in the house of a harsh parent. All that stands between him and destruction is the ethical sense of the white man. Will the white man’s sense of justice and virtue be robust enough to cause him to withhold the hand of unlimited power? Will he see, as Booker T. Washington says, that if he keeps the Negro in the gutter he must stay there with him? The white man and his civilisation, not alone the Negro, will rise or fall by that ethical test.

The Negro, on his part, as I have shown repeatedly in former chapters, employs the same methods as the white man, for Negro nature is not different from human nature. He argues: “The white man hates you; hate him. Trade with Negro storekeepers; employ Negro doctors; don’t go to white dentists and lawyers.”

Out of this condition proceed two tendencies. The first is the natural result of mutual fear and suspicion, and that is, a rapid flying apart of the races. All through my former chapters I have been showing how the Negroes are being segregated. So are the Chinese segregated, and the blacks in South Africa, and certain classes in India. Parts of the South are growing blacker. Negroes crowd into “coloured quarters” in the cities. More and more they are becoming a people wholly apart—separate in their churches, separate in their schools, separate in cars, conveyances, hotels, restaurants, with separate professional men. In short, we discover tendencies in this country toward the development of a caste system.

Now, one of the most striking facts in our recent history is the progress of the former slave. And this finds its world parallel in the progress of people whom the vainglorious Anglo-Saxon once despised: the Japanese, Chinese, and East Indians. In forty years the Negro has advanced a distance that would have been surprising in almost any race. In the bare accomplishments—area of land owned, crops raised, professional men supported, business enterprises conducted, books and poetry written, music composed, pictures painted—the slaves of forty years ago have made the most astonishing progress. This leads to the second tendency, which proceeds slowly out of the growing conviction that hatred and suspicion and fear as motives in either national or individual progress will not work; that there must be some other way for different people to work side by side in peace and justice. And thus we discover a tendency toward a friendly living together under the new relationship, in which the Negro is not a slave or a dependent, but a man and a citizen. Booker T. Washington preaches the gospel of this new life. And gradually as race prejudice becomes inconvenient, threatens financial adversity, ruffles the smooth current of comfortable daily existence, the impulse grows to set it aside. Men don’t keep on fighting when it is no longer profitable to fight.

And thus, side by side, these two impulses exist—the one pointing toward the development of a hard caste system which would ultimately petrify our civilisation as it has petrified that of India; and the other looking to a reasonable, kindly, and honourable working together of the races.

What Are the Remedies for the Evil Conditions?

So much for conditions; what of remedies?

I have heard the most extraordinary remedies proposed. Serious men actually talk of the deportation of the entire Negro population to Africa, not stopping to inquire whether we have any right to deport them, or calculating the economic revolution and bankruptcy which the deportation of the entire labouring class would cause in the South, without stopping to think that even if we could find a spot in the world for 10,000,000 Negroes, and they all wanted to go, that all the ships flying the American flag, if constantly employed, could probably not transport the natural increase of the Negro population, let alone the 10,000,000 present inhabitants. I have heard talk of segregation in reservations, like the Indians—segregation out of existence! I have even heard unspeakable talk of the wholesale extinction of the race by preventing the breeding of children! All quack remedies and based upon hatred, not upon justice.

There is no sudden or cut-and-dried solution of the Negro problem, or of any other problem. Men are forever demanding formulæ which will enable them to progress without effort. They seek to do quickly by medication what can only be accomplished by deliberate hygiene. A problem that has been growing for two hundred and fifty years in America, and for thousands of years before that in Africa, warping the very lives of the people concerned, changing their currents of thought as well as their conduct, cannot be solved in forty years. Why expect it?

And yet there are definite things that can be done which, while working no immediate miracles, will set our faces to the light and keep us trudging toward the true goal.