Of his very interesting conversation I shall here record only a few fragments.
“The problem in the South,” he said (almost echoing Mr. Shipton, of Louisville), “is not that of the vagabond or the criminal, but of the negro who is coming forward. That is why even the good people of the South are taking their hands off, saying, ‘We can’t do anything.’
“The older generation of negroes had friends among the white people of their own age; but the boys and girls now growing up have no white friends. The younger white people have no feeling towards the negro but dislike, founded on utter lack of comprehension.
“The race antipathy is fomented in the schools. The progressive negro is held up as a bugbear to the white child, who is told to ‘Look out, or he will get ahead of you!’ Fear, jealousy, and hatred are actively taught to the rising generation of whites. But, after all, they are being taught something, and that’s more than their fathers were. Where intelligence increases there is always hope.”
At one point I did come near to hinting to Mr. Du Bois the doubt lurking in my mind. I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”
“Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites (in the South), they feel acutely the false position in which the negro problems place them.... But ... the present social position of the negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded; if there were nothing to charge against the negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?”
“Now, tell me, Mr. Du Bois,” I said, “whatever these people may say, is it not really just the other way about? The ignorance, shiftlessness, etc., are manifestly temporary and corrigible; is it not precisely the ‘blackness and other physical peculiarities’ that are the true crux of the problem?”
Mr. Du Bois smiled. “No,” he said; “that is the point of view of the outsider, the foreigner. The Southerner, brought up among negroes, has no such feeling.[[41]] In using the argument I there attribute to him he is perfectly sincere.”
I refrained from pressing the point, but Mr. Du Bois’ answer did not quite meet my difficulty. I had no doubt of the Southerner’s sincerity; what I questioned was rather his self-knowledge, or (perhaps I should say) his reading of race psychology. And that doubt, I own, remains.
If the Ethiopian could but change his skin, how trifling would be the problem raised by his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime!