The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather, conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.
(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly unsatisfactory condition, until the negro gradually dies out.
(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic elevation of the black race, may gradually enable them to live side by side in mutual tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but without clashing.
(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean might conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by “miscegenation.”
(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by deportation or otherwise, and established in a community or communities of its own.
The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have already examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only add here that there is one way in which it might conceivably be brought about—a way too horrible to be contemplated, yet not wholly beyond the bounds of possibility. The recurrence of such an outbreak as the Atlanta riot of 1906 might lead to very terrible consequences. On that occasion the white mob found the negroes unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically unopposed. But the lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar onslaught would, in many places, find them armed and capable of a certain amount of resistance. In that case one dares not think what might happen. Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense of intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary, infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or any other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part of the race, be violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to lose that natural buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race, as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic Negerhetze? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr. P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he anticipated.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the brink of such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are present which might one day bring it to pass.[[53]] Sir Sydney Olivier is quite right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners towards the negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the class that is handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises have been written to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a “beast,” and, on scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape than a man. These works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their insanity is by no means peculiar to their individual authors. The word “extermination” is gravely spoken by men who are not therefore held to be maniacs or even monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, is “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk”; and where such a condition prevails, the possibility of sudden disaster is never far off. To recognize the possibility is not to bring it nearer, but rather to indicate the urgent need of measures that shall place it infinitely remote.
Four Possibilities: II. The Atlanta Compromise.
We pass now to the second eventuality—the gradual smoothing away of friction, so that the two races may live side by side, never blending and yet never jarring. This is the conception set forth in Mr. Booker Washington’s celebrated “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, wherein he said, “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Is this a possible—I will not say ideal, for that it manifestly is not—but a possible working arrangement?
One thing is evident at the outset—namely, that the fourteen years that have elapsed since Mr. Washington uttered this aspiration have brought its fulfilment no nearer. Both negro education and white education have advanced in the interim; the “respectable” and well-to-do class of negroes has considerably increased; but the feeling between the races is worse rather than better. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page used to say, “Northerners espouse the cause of the negro as a race, but dislike negroes individually; while Southerners do not dislike negroes individually, but oppose them as a race.”[[54]] Ten years ago there was a large element of truth in this saying; but it becomes less and less true with every year that passes. The old-time kindliness of feeling between the ex-owner and the ex-slave is rapidly becoming a mere tradition. No common memories or sentiments hold together the new generations of the two races; they are growing up in unmitigated mutual antipathy. At best, indeed, the Southern kindliness of feeling towards the individual negro subsisted only so long as he “knew his place” and kept it; and the very process of education and elevation on which Mr. Washington relies renders the negro ever less willing to keep the place the Southern white man assigns him. In the North, too, while the dislike of the individual has greatly increased, the theoretic fondness for the race has very perceptibly cooled. Altogether, the tendency of events since 1895 has not been at all in the direction of the Atlanta Compromise. The Atlanta riot of eleven years later was a grimly ironic comment on Mr. Washington’s speech.