The Klan Unmasked

by W. J. Simmons

I have always felt that superficial minds have a peculiar tendency to lay hold of the Negro problem. For instance, witness the illogical claims of some of those who think they are the special friends of the Negro and who continually emphasize the necessity for an enlarged sphere for Negro opportunity. On the one hand they boast of the very great progress the Negro has made during his half century of freedom. On one page they will emphasize Negro accomplishment. More than half of our adult Negro population, for instance, can read and write. Tens of thousands of Negro families own their own farms or city homes. An even greater number of Negroes are attending high schools and colleges. Then, on the very next page, the same author will take pains to show that the Negro is most foully treated. He is kept in ignorance and poverty. The wicked white population which surrounds him denies him every advantage and means of progress. Of course both of these tales can not be true at the same time.

Those of us who grew up among the Negroes and have lived with them on terms of mutual kindness and of helpfulness all our lives are inclined to the conclusion that it is easy to exaggerate the progress of the Negro. The record of what we people of the South have done and have tried to do for the Negro during these fifty years is an open book to all the world. It need not be described or analyzed here. Our task has not been easy. In general, I think we have tried to do it in a way to win both the approval of our own conscience and the commendation of our fellow citizens of other sections of the country. Yet we have acted not only according to our means, but also according to our knowledge of what could be accomplished. In so far as we have failed we simply ask that our fellow citizens of the North and West make special effort to understand the true cause of our failure.

This brings us to the main issue of this discussion. The Negro problem is not peculiar to the South. The Negro problem is the burden of the nation as a whole. The Negro was brought here during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the merchant ships which sailed mostly from the ports of Great Britain and New England. Some few put forth from Philadelphia and New York, but none from the South. This was not due to the fact that all Southern people were morally above taking advantage of the African slave trade. It was because commerce on the high seas was not developed in the South. We were then wholly agricultural. But the fact remains. The Negroes were brought to us by the ships of old England and New England. For this terrible error of all the English-speaking world of colonial times we in the South have paid and paid and paid. We have paid by reason of the very fact of slavery, which continued so long among us because no one knew how to make an end of it. We have paid and are still paying in the form of the most inefficient labor force in the world. We paid in the War Between the States and during the Reconstruction, until extinction threatened us; and we still pay. Not the least portion of our bill is the disesteem in which we are often so wrongly held by those of our own language and blood throughout the world. Yet we patiently await the day of complete understanding, of perfect reconciliation.

How long will it be before our modern knowledge of the fundamental facts of American history are accepted and used in our political and social thinking? Slavery continued in the South and died out in the North not because our people were different at the start. They were quite the same. But the climate was different. Crops were different. In the South the slaves produced cotton, tobacco, and sugar-cane during a long growing season, and hence slaves were profitable to their masters. In the North where they produced only food and fodder crops during a short growing season, slaves were an economic loss. Short summers and long winters do not permit the Negro to become a permanent inhabitant of Northern climes. So the few Northern slaves were mostly sold South and total emancipation followed.

Meanwhile, let it not be forgotten that during the period when cotton was king, the North shared with the South in the profits of slave labor. The economic system of our country was based upon cotton and tobacco. For a full generation it took the following form: the South sent her products to Europe, America received, in return, not commodities but capital. This capital was invested in railroads and other public improvements. Pennsylvania, New York and New England furnished the articles of manufacture which the South needed at prices much higher than obtained in Europe. These high prices were maintained through a protective tariff. The profits of slave labor were thus divided between the South and the North. When, in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Virginia led the border states in demanding the Constitutional prohibition of African slave trade, the New England delegates joined with those of the far South in keeping this nefarious traffic open for twenty-one years more. When we say to-day that the problem is in every sense a national problem, we base our statement not only upon present necessity—but also upon the basis of historical facts which lead to definite conclusions.

Finally, the title of this chapter has a wider significance which I would emphasize with all possible vigor. In maintaining that the Negro is a ward of the nation I wish to place emphasis upon WARD. The Negro's presence among us requires an ever greater interest and care on our part. It is high time that the people of the South made a wider appeal to their fellow citizens of the North and West. A stupendous moral responsibility is involved in the presence of these ten millions of black people. Not only the past, but the future, too, is looking down upon us. All Americans may well realize that in this, as in so many other matters, we are being weighed in the balance as a nation. As a people we are fortunate in being quick to let bygones be bygones. We of the South know that if other sections come to understand us and our peculiar problem better, not only we, but they also, will be the ultimate gainers. The sooner the nation unites in looking upon our ten millions of colored folk as ten millions of children for whose protection and care we are morally responsible, the sooner we shall all be placed upon solid ground.

Let me repeat here what I have been constantly touching upon in these chapters. The maxims of our democracy are not for universal application. Some Europeans are a hundred years, others five hundred years, behind us in the process of democratic evolution. We may guess, but we can not know, how long they will be in catching up. How far behind them the Negro may be in these things I leave for the anthropologists to determine or surmise. But what we of the South assuredly know, because of our experience, is just this—to treat the Negro as the political equal of the white is to do grave injustice not only to the white, but to the Negro as well. We can not justly enforce the laws among children that we make for adults. To enforce the white man's law, in all cases, upon the Negro is an injustice so great that the effort often causes sorrow to every normal mind among us. Cared for and protected as a child, the Negro's better qualities are developed and made evident by his works. But when he is burdened by moral and legal responsibilities which neither his mind nor his character is prepared to bear, in the vast majority of cases he breaks and falls under the load. The errors of our mistaken policies during the past fifty years have caused unfathomable suffering among our Negroes. Our country took its foolish fling and sowed its wild oats of democratic Utopia during Reconstruction days. We proved then that the vote is an unmitigated curse to the Negro. From this curse he still suffers. We were forced by Federal act to make him everywhere subject to the white man's civil and criminal law. Often enough the white man's law sends him to the penitentiary for twenty years when twenty days of hard work upon the public highway would be punishment enough for his unthinking crime. In this matter we have simply tried to put a gallon of water into a quart bottle. So we have spilled much water and come near breaking the bottle. The people of the Philippine Islands are, on the average, much more highly developed than our Negroes. Yet the better advised among them realize that they are not yet ready to get on without our supervision and help.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not here trying to offer any permanent solution for certain aspects of this problem. That solution if ultimately sought will require, for many years, the painstaking and united efforts of our best thinkers in all sections. I am now merely stating certain facts and principles upon which any future solution whatsoever must be based. All I ask is that we take these facts into every phase of our argument. The Negro is not yet prepared, mentally or morally, to share all the results of our civilization with us. Amid the great complexities of modern social and political life, it is difficult indeed to prepare our white electorate to bear the responsibilities of government. Wherever the Negro numbers twenty per cent of our population, his vote on election day would endanger democracy. In every state where he lives there are and will be vicious white demagogues who will work upon his credulity to mislead him and misuse him politically. Where he numbers forty per cent of the population, his suffrage would throw us back to Reconstruction times and make democracy impossible. Let us not refuse to shoulder the full burden of this responsibility. But the burden belongs rightfully to the Nation as a whole, not to the people of the South alone. We of the South know full well that, once rightly understood by thoughtful minds in other sections, we can ask the nation to undertake those larger policies of reform and readjustment which conditions undoubtedly require.

Revealing the Mysteries at Midnight