“Education is all very well; but if it removes some difficulties it raises others. It tends to make the negro unwilling to work where he is wanted, and desirous of working where he is not wanted—at any rate by the white artisan who is in the field before him. The industrial education of the black race, which is in some quarters regarded as a panacea, will no doubt do a great deal of good; but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that it will intensify race-friction in the labour market.”
“Still, you are not one of the Southerners who want to keep the black ignorant—who think that education, as a whole, merely teaches him ‘not to know his place’?”
“That is an outworn and impossible point of view. But you can understand that even the reasonable Southerner feels a certain bitterness on the subject of education when he sees the black child marching off to a school provided by Northern philanthropy, while the child of the ‘poor white’ goes into the cotton-factory.”[[3]]
“You say you have black servants?”
“Oh yes, I have; and many people still have. But you know the race as a whole is turning against domestic service. I have friends in Mobile, Alabama, who tell me that their servants make the most fantastic conditions. For instance, they won’t do a stroke of work after three o’clock. If you want a meal after that hour, you must prepare and serve it yourself. As for the abstraction of household stuff from the kitchen, it is carried on openly and systematically—they call it ‘Cook’s excursion.’ In the case of domestic service, in fact, the difficult conditions which are being felt all over the world are intensified by—what shall I call it?—the race pride, or the race resentment, of the black. Domestic service was one of the badges of slavery; and now, if he or she will undertake it at all, it must be on such terms as shall remove from it all taint of servility.”
“A very natural feeling,” I remarked.
“No doubt; but not calculated to relieve the friction between the races.”
[3]. It is not only the child of the “poor white,” in the special Southern sense of the term, that goes to the factory. Mr. Stannard Baker, in “Following the Colour-Line,” says: “One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a negro woman to cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to school!”