If these tests were applied equally to the two races, the negro would have no ground of complaint. But exceptions are made in favour of the whites in the very laws establishing the tests. Most of them contain clauses analogous to what is known in Alabama as the “grandfather clause,” which provides that illiteracy shall not bar any one whose father or grandfather was entitled to vote at the outbreak of the Civil War. This exception is defended on the ground that even an illiterate person of the original Anglo-Saxon stock (the South is nothing if not Anglo-Saxon) is generally a very shrewd fellow, and eminently capable of exercising the franchise. Under the “grandfather clause,” then, only illiterate aliens and illiterate negroes are excluded from the register; and this discrimination is naturally resented by the negro.
But if the matter stopped there, the black race would not feel themselves so very much aggrieved. The real burden of their complaint is not the inequality of the laws, but the inequality of their administration. The tests of intelligence are applied (they declare) by unscrupulous registrars, who will ask a white man some simple question, such as whether imprisonment for debt is permitted, while they will pose a negro with some impossible technicality concerning a bill of attainder or an estate in tail. The upshot is that admission to the register depends entirely on the arbitrary will and pleasure of the registrars. Their decisions can be appealed against, but the appeal is said to be practically useless.
Nor is this all. When a negro happens to be a man of such property, education, and position that it is absolutely impossible to reject his vote, there is always the last resource of omitting to count it. One of the Charleston group spoke of a particular election in which he himself, and others of his people to his certain knowledge, cast Republican ballots; but the result, as announced, showed not a single Republican vote.
On this matter, as on so many others, it is very hard to get at the truth. White men aver, and will prove by statistics, that in proportion to his taxation the negro has very fair voting power, and is freely permitted to exercise it. But I met no single negro who would admit this; and most of them, like my Charleston friends, were very bitter on the question, as well as on the exclusion of even the most respectable of their race from the councils, the “machine,” of their party.
A remark made by one of this very intelligent Charleston group struck me as a curious comment on the belief of white Charleston that it has a special genius for dealing with the black race. “We negroes,” said this member of the race, “have no respect for the Southern white man’s opinions or his prophecies. He has always prophesied wrong. This thing is going to work out in the usual mysterious way, that the South will be very much surprised over.”
I quote word for word. “The usual mysterious way” may seem an odd phrase, but its meaning is not very far to seek.
In Charleston, under the guidance of a genial Southern gentleman placed in high educational authority, I saw a good deal both of white and of coloured schools. My guide was an enthusiast for negro education. “What’s the good,” he said, “of talking about being a superior race if you’re afraid to educate the negro? |White Negroes.| There’s not much superiority in that.” He admitted with regret that accommodation for negro children was very deficient, and said that those who were fighting for better accommodation had been crippled by the recent appointment of a negro to a Federal office in the town.
In a school containing twelve hundred black children, the fire alarm was given, and in exactly three minutes every child was in the playground, the whole school being ranged in “column of companies,” or, rather, of classes. Assuredly, such discipline cannot but be salutary. It was in this school too, that I heard five hundred negro children (most of them quite small, for three-fourths of them drop out after passing through the primary classes) singing in their clear, shrill voices—
“In Dixie Land
I take my stand,