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

It was promised that disfranchisement would lead to more careful attention to the Negro's moral and economic advancement. It has on the contrary stripped them naked to their enemies; discriminating laws of all sorts have followed, the administration of other laws has become harsher and more unfair, school funds have been curtailed and education discouraged, and mobs and murder have gone on.

If the new policy has been a farce politically and socially, how much more has it failed as an economic cure-all! No sooner was it proclaimed from the house-tops than the rift in the lute appeared. "We do not want educated farmers," cried the landlords, "we want docile laborers." "We do not want educated Negro artisans," cried the white artisans, and they enforced their demands by their votes and by mob violence. "We do not want to raise the Negro; we want to put him in his place and keep him there," cried the dominant forces of the South. Then those northerners who had lightly embraced the fair sounding program of limited labor training and disfranchisement found themselves grasping the air.

Not only this, but the South itself faced a puzzling paradox. The industrial revolution was demanding labor; it was demanding intelligent labor, while the supposed political and social exigences of the situation called for ignorance and subserviency. It was an impossible contradiction and the South to-day knows it.

What is it that makes a successful laboring force? It is laborers of education and natural intelligence, reasonably satisfied with their conditions, inspired with certain ideals of life, and with a growing sense of self-respect and self-reliance. How is the caste system of the South influencing the Negro laborer? It is systematically restricting his development; it is restricting his education so that the public common schools of the South except in a few cities are worse this moment than they were twenty years ago; it is seeking to kill self-respect by putting upon the accident of color every mark of humiliation that it can invent; it is discouraging self-reliance by treating a class of men as wards and children; it is killing ambition by drawing a color line instead of a line of desert and accomplishment; and finally, through these things, it is encouraging crime, and by the unintelligent and brutal treatment of criminals, it is developing more crime.

This general attitude toward the main laboring class reflects itself less glaringly but as certainly in the treatment even of white laborers. So long as white labor must compete with black labor, it must approximate black labor conditions—long hours, small wages, child labor, labor of women, and even peonage. Moreover it can raise itself above black labor only by a legalized caste system which will cut off competition and this is what the South is straining every nerve to create.

The last fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta Massacre was an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and farmers against the growing competition of black men, so that black men by law could be forced back to subserviency and serfdom. It succeeded so well that smouldering hate burst into flaming murder before the politicians could curb it.

There is, however, a limit to this sort of thing. The day when mobs can successfully cow the Negro to willing slavery is past. The Atlanta Negroes shot back and shot to kill, and that stopped the riot with a certain suddenness (see Note 15). The South is realizing that lawlessness and economic advance cannot coexist. If the wonderful industrial revolution is to develop unhindered, the South must have law and order and it must have intelligent workmen.

It is only a question of time when white working men and black working men will see their common cause against the aggressions of exploiting capitalists. Already there are signs of this: white and black miners are working as a unit in Alabama; white and black masons are in one union in Atlanta (see Note 16). The economic strength of the Negro cannot be beaten into weakness, and therefore it must be taken into partnership, and this the Southern white working man, befuddled by prejudice as he is, begins dimly to realize.

It is this paradox that brings us to-day in the South to a fourth solution of the problem: Immigration. The voice that calls foreign immigrants southward to-day is not single but double. First, the exploiter of common labor wishes to exploit this new labor just as formerly he exploited Negro labor. On the other hand the far-sighted ones know that the present freedom of labor exploitation must pass—that some time or other the industrial system of the South must be made to conform more and more to the growing sense of industrial justice in the North and in the civilized world. Consequently the second object of the immigration philosopher is to make sure that, when the rights of the laborer come to be recognized in the South, that laborer will be white, and just so far as possible the black laborer will still be forced down below the white laborer until he becomes thoroughly demoralized or extinct.

The query is therefore: If immigration turns toward the South as it undoubtedly will in time, what will become of the Negro? The view of the white world is usually that there are two possibilities. First, that the immigrants will crush the Negro utterly; or secondly, that by competition there will come a sifting which will lead to the survival of the best in both groups of laborers.