The Negro in the South / His Economic Progress in Relation to his Moral and Religious Development

by W. E. B. Du Bois; Booker T. Washington

What now has been the reaction of this group on the environment thrown around it since slavery days?

The slaves had their select classes in the house servants and the artisans. After freedom came, the Negro made four distinct efforts to reach economic safety. The first effort was by means of the select house-servant class; the second, by means of competitive industry; the third, by land-owning; and the fourth, by what I shall call the group economy.

First, let us look at the effort of the house servants. The one person under the slave régime who came nearest to escaping from the toils of slavery and the disabilities of caste was the favorite house servant. This was because the house servant was brought into contact with the culture of the master and the family, because he had often the advantages of town and city life, was able to gain some smattering of education, and also because he was usually a blood relative of the master class. These house servants, therefore, became the natural leaders of the emancipated race and the brunt of the burden of reconstruction fell upon their shoulders. When the history of this period is carefully written it will show that few men ever made a more meritorious fight against overwhelming odds.

Under free competition it would have been natural for this class of house servants to enter the economic life of the nation directly. In some cases this happened, especially in the case of the barber and the caterer. For the most part, however, the black applicant was refused admittance to the economic society of the nation. He held his own in the semi-servile work of barber until he met the charge of color discrimination in his own race, and the competition of foreigners. The caterer was displaced by palatial hotels in which he could have no part.

On the whole, then, the mass of house servants soon found the doors in their own lines closed in their faces. They could remain good servants but they could not by this means often escape into higher walks of life. The better tenth of them went gradually into professions and thus found economic independence for themselves and their children. The mass of them either remained house servants or turned toward industry.

The second attempt of the freedmen toward economic safety lay in industry. It was a less ambitious effort than that of the house servants, and included larger numbers of men. It was characterized by a large migration to the towns. Here it was that the class of slave artisans made themselves felt in freedom and they were joined by numbers of unskilled workmen, such as steam railway hands, porters, hostlers, etc. This class attracted considerable attention and bore the brunt of the economic battle in competition with white working men. It is a class that is growing and in the future it is going to have a large development. At present, however, its fight is difficult.

The third effort of economic elevation was by land owning. This was the ideal toward which the great mass of black people looked. They at first thought that the government was going to help them, and the government did in a few instances, as when Sherman distributed land in Georgia and the government sold South Carolina lands for taxes. For the most part, however, the Negroes had to buy their own lands which they did in some cases by means of their bounty money for serving in the army or by means of special monies which they earned as workmen during the war or by the help of the former masters. Some too, by the share tenant system gained enough to buy land. In this way about 200,000 to-day own their farms and thus approximate economic independence.

The fourth and last effort, which I call the Group Economy, is of great importance, but is not very well understood. It consists of a coöperative arrangement of industry and service in a group which tends to make the group a closed economic circle, largely independent of surrounding whites. This development explains many anomalies in the situation of the Negro. Many people think that the colored barber is disappearing, yet there are more colored barbers in the United States to-day than ever before, but a larger number than ever cater to only colored trade. The Negro lawyer serves almost exclusively colored clientage, so that his existence is half forgotten by the white world. The new Negro business men are not successors of the old. There used to be Negro business men in Northern cities and a few even in Southern cities, but they catered to white trade; the Negro business man to-day caters to colored trade. So far has this gone to-day that in every city in the United States which has considerable Negro population, the colored group is serving itself in religion, medical care, legal advice and often educating its children. In growing degree also it is serving itself in insurance, houses, books, amusements.

So extraordinary has been this development that it forms a large and growing part in the economy of perhaps half the Negroes of the United States, and in the case of perhaps 100,000 town Negroes, representing at least 300,000 persons, the group economy approaches a complete system. To these we may add the bulk of 200,000 farmers who own their farms. Thus we have a group of half a million who are reaching economic safety by means of group economy (see Note 9).

Here then are the two developments—a determined effort at an established serfdom on the part of landholding capitalists, and a determined effort on the part of freedmen and their sons to attain economic independence.