The "form black with the mist of centuries" has left two grandsons.
One is a thrifty, law-abiding gentleman; too thrifty to be a beggar and too busy acquiring an education or accumulating wealth or educating his race to be a loafer or criminal. In his home are all the comforts of modern life that his purse can afford. He loves his country and his Southland, and is educating his children to do likewise. He even contributes his mite to the literature, science and art of to-day. He is modest and retiring and is known as the new Negro.
The other grandchild is a thriftless loafer. He is not willing to pay the price of an education; but he likes to appear intellectually bright and entertaining. He often works, but merely to obtain the means for gratifying his abnormally developed appetites. He laughs, he dances, he frolics. He knows naught of the value of time nor of the deeper meanings of life. In the main he is peaceable and law-abiding; but, under the excitement of the moment, is capable of even the worst of crimes. This thriftless slave of passion, this child-man, this much condemned clog to the progress of Southern civilization is called the vagrant Negro.
Prejudice is older than this age. A comparative study of animal psychology teaches that all animals are prejudiced against animals unlike themselves, and the more unlike they are the greater the prejudice. A comparative study of history teaches that races are prejudiced against races unlike themselves, and the greater the difference the more the prejudice. Among men, however, dissimilarity of minds is a more potent factor in causing prejudice than unlikeness of physiognomy. Races whose religious beliefs are unlike the accepted beliefs of our race we call heathens; those whose habits of living fall below the ideals of our own race we call uncivilized. In both cases we are prejudiced. When a highly civilized race is brought in contact with another people unlike it in physiognomy but in the same stage of intellectual advancement, at first each is prejudiced against the other; but when they become thoroughly acquainted prejudice gives way to mutual respect. For an example of this recall the relations of the nations of Europe to the Japanese.
The new Southerner is prejudiced against the new Negro because he feels that the Negro is very unlike him. He does not know that a similar education and a like environment have made the new Negro and himself alike in everything except color and features. Did he but know this he and the new Negro would join hands and work for the best interest of the South and there would be no Negro problem. At present he does not and cannot know this, for the white trash and vagrant Negro form a wedge separating the new Southerner from the new Negro so completely that they cannot know each other. Every unmentionable crime committed by the vagrant Negro, every lynching bee conducted by white trash, every Negro disfranchisement law passed by misguided legislators, every unjust discrimination against the Negro by the people drives this wedge deeper and deeper.
Render this wedge so thin that it will no longer be a barrier and the Negro problem is solved. This cannot be done by banishing white trash and the vagrant Negro; for that is neither possible nor practicable. The only way to accomplish the thinning of this wedge is to transform a large number into the new Southerners and the new Negroes. Will education do this?
In order to transform the majority of white trash and vagrant Negroes into new Southerners and new Negroes it will be necessary to instill into them the following regenerating virtues:
1. The manners of a gentleman. Not the swagger of the dude nor the cringing of a scapegoat, but the manners of a being permeated with the Golden Rule.
2. Cultured homes. Not necessarily extravagant mansions, but comfortable dwellings, wherein impoliteness, intemperance, slander and indecent tales have given place to politeness, temperance, intelligent conversation and refined pleasantries.
3. Business honesty. Not only punctual in the payment of debts, but also truthful in making sales.