The concentration of land-owning on the other hand in the hands of the single white proprietors has gone on to a much larger extent than the country realizes. This is shown not simply in the increase of the average size of farms in the last decade but it must also be remembered that the farms do not belong to single owners but are owned in groups of five, forty or fifty by single landed proprietors. There are 140,000 owners who own from two to fifty farms in the South and there are 50,000 owners who have over twenty farms apiece.
It is not true then to-day that land-buying for the average colored farmer in the South is an easy thing. The land which has been bought has been bought by the exceptional men or by the men who have had unusual opportunity, who have been helped by their former masters or by some other patrons, who have been aided by members of their own families in the North or in the cities, or who have escaped the wretched crop system by some sudden rise in the price of cotton, which did not enable the landlord to take the whole economic advantage. It is therefore in spite of the land system and not because of it that the Negroes to-day own 12,000,000 acres of land (see Note 13).
The net result of the whole policy of serfdom was so to deplete the ranks of laborers that a new solution of the labor problem must be found.
Here it was that the southern city came forward. The city had new significance, especially new cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and Chattanooga as contrasted with Charleston and Savannah. They saw a new industrial solution of the problem of Negro labor. It was a simple program: Industry and disfranchisement; the separation of the masses of the Negroes from all participation in government, and such technical training as should fit them to become skilled working men.
There was an arriere pensee here too, born in the minds of northern capitalists. The white southern working men were becoming unionized by northern agitators; here was a chance to keep them down to reasonable demands by black competition and the threat of more competition in the future. Moreover working men without votes would be far more docile and tractable. Politics had already spoiled the Negroes. Let the whites rule and the blacks work.
The plea was specious, it had the sanction of great names, of wealth and social influence, and it convinced not only those who wanted to be convinced but practically all Americans who were eager to be relieved of troublesome questions and difficult public duties.
All the more eagerly was this solution seized upon because of the definite and distinct promises which it made. Disfranchise the Negro, said the South, and the race problem is solved; there is no race problem save the menace of an ignorant and venal vote;—relieve us from this and the lion and the lamb will lie down together;—the Negro will go peacefully and contentedly to work and the whites will wax just and rich. We all remember with what confidence and absolute certainty of conviction this program was announced when Mississippi disfranchised her Negro voters seventeen years ago. It was repeated twelve years ago in South Carolina, ten years ago in Louisiana, and still more recently in North Carolina and Alabama.
What has been the result? Is the race problem solved? Is the Negro out of politics in the South? Has there been a single southern campaign in the last twenty years in which the Negro has not figured as the prime issue? Have the southern representatives in Congress any settled convictions or policy save hatred of black men, and can they discuss any other matter? Is it not the irony of fate that in the state that first discovered the legal fraud of disfranchisement a hot political battle is to-day waging on the old, old question: the right of black men to vote?
The reason for all this is not far to seek. In modern industrial democracy disfranchisement is impossible. The fate, wishes, and destiny of ten million human beings cannot be delivered, sealed and bound into the keeping of Dixon, Tillman, Vardaman, and Nelson Page. They are bound to vote even when disfranchised.
Disfranchised and voiceless though I am in Georgia to-day by the illegal White Primary system, there are still fifty congressmen in Washington fraudulently representing me and my fellows in the councils of the nation (see Note 14).