Twenty-five millions in fifty years! Next century fifty millions! I did think of it; and it was a thought to give one pause. Perhaps a more careful estimate would somewhat reduce the figures. Cautious statisticians, proceeding on the best available data, place the probable number of negroes at the beginning of the next century somewhere about 35,000,000—that is to say, some 10,000,000 more than the whole population of the eighteen Southern States at last census.[[16]]
As I left Mr. Shipton I asked whether his practice was mainly among his own people. “Yes,” he said; “ninety nine per cent. of it; though, by-the-by, I got divorces for a couple of white men the other day.”
And now a word of amends to Louisville. An hour before sunset I took a car down all the long length of Broad Street, till it landed me at the entrance to Shawnee Park. |An Idyll.| This expanse of lush and yet delicate verdure is embraced by a bend of the majestic Ohio. The steep banks of the river are nobly wooded, and you look across the splendid sheet of water to what might be primeval forest beyond. In that soft sunset hour, the air was full of the scent of flowering shrubs. A mocking-bird was singing in a thicket; far off I heard voices of children playing, and, on the river, the clunk of a pair of oars in rowlocks; but within sight there were only two lovers on a grassy mound, and a student bent over his book. As the sun touched the trees of the opposite bank and threw a glow over the yellow eddies of the great river, I thought it would be hard to picture a more peaceful, a more beautiful, a more idyllic scene. So even Louisville is not without its charms.
[11]. “There are more coloured barbers in the United States to-day than ever before, but a larger number than ever cater to only the coloured trade.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Negro in the South,” p. 99. On this point, however, a wise word of Mr. E. G. Murphy’s deserves to be noted: “If the man who ‘disappears’ as a barber reappears as a carpenter, or as a small farmer on his own land, he may figure in the census-tables to prove all sorts of dismal theories; but, as a matter of fact, he has been forced into a sounder and stronger economic position. Many negroes are suffering displacement without gaining by the process; but it is a mistake to assume that displacement in itself is always an evidence of industrial defeat.” “The Basis of Ascendancy,” p. 64.
[12]. “If my own city of Atlanta had offered it to-day the choice between five hundred negro college graduates—forceful, busy, ambitious men of property and self-respect—and five hundred black, cringing vagrants and criminals, the popular vote in favour of the criminals would be simply overwhelming. Why? Because they want negro crime? No, not that they fear negro crime less, but that they fear negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can. But the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Negro in the South,” p. 180.
[13]. According to Mr. W.H. Thomas, a negro writer violently hostile to his race, negroes in the year 1901 owned about $700,000,000, and paid state and municipal taxes of over $3,000,000. This, he reckons, would mean property to the amount of about $90 per head, or a saving of about $2·60 (ten and sixpence) per head per year since emancipation. Mr. Thomas also states that before the war there was in the South a free negro population of a quarter of a million, owning between thirty-five and forty million dollars’ worth of property. “The American Negro,” pp. 39 and 74. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page also points out that some negroes accumulated wealth during the Reconstruction period “by other means than those of honest thrift.” But it is probable that in most cases the money thus gained was not so employed as to constitute a permanent addition to the wealth of the race.
[14]. See foot-note, p. [171].
[15]. Mr Booker Washington declares (“The Negro in the South,” p. 73) that “the race has acquired ownership in land that is equal in area to the combined countries of Belgium and Holland.” He does not say how much of it is under mortgage. Elsewhere, Mr. Washington has stated (on the authority of the census of 1900) “that from a penniless population just out of slavery, 372,414 owners of homes have emerged, and of these 255,156 are known to own their homes absolutely free of encumbrance.” See E. G. Murphy: “The Present South,” p. 184. But the negroes were not absolutely “penniless” at the outbreak of the war. See p. 33.
[16]. But see foot-note, p. 189.