This merely means, it may be said, that education has as yet produced no sensible effect upon the inveterate and inhuman prejudice of the South. Nevertheless, time and patience may justify Mr. Washington’s optimism. There is no saying, indeed, what a great deal of time and a great deal of patience may not effect. Meanwhile, let us see what is really involved in the idea of the Atlanta Compromise.
We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the negro race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general efficiency. Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly civilizable, if not indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level he has yet attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within normal limits; for the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered so by ignorance, poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal system. The next fifty years, if present influences continue to work unimpeded, may see a very large increase in the class of law-abiding, property-holding negroes, and possibly a considerable improvement even in the condition of the black proletariat. But supposing that, by the exercise of infinite patience for fifty or a hundred years, a condition something like that indicated in the Atlanta formula were ultimately attained, would it be desirable? and could it be permanent?
The assumed improvement of conditions would, of course, imply a steady increase in the numbers of the black race; so that, even with the aid of immigration, the white race would probably not greatly add to its numerical superiority. Let us suppose that at the end of fifty years the coloured people were not as one in three, but as one in four, and that this ratio remained pretty constant. Here, then, we should have a nation within a nation, unassimilated and (by hypothesis) unassimilable, occupying one-fourth of the whole field of existence, and performing no function that could not, in their absence, be at least as well performed by assimilable people, whose presence would be a strength to the community.[[55]] The black nation would be a hampering, extraneous element in the body politic, like a bullet encysted in the human frame. It may lie there for years without setting up inflammation or gangrene, and causing no more than occasional twinges of pain; but it certainly cannot contribute to the health, efficiency, or comfort of the organism. Is it wonderful that the Atlanta Compromise, supposing it realized in all conceivable perfection, should excite little enthusiasm in the white South?
But to imagine it realized in perfection is to imagine an impossibility—almost a contradiction in terms. We are, on the one hand, to suppose the negro ambitious, progressive, prosperous, and, on the other hand, to imagine him humbly acquiescent in his status as a social pariah. The thing is out of the question; such saintlike humility has long ceased to form any part of the moral equipment of the American negro. The bullet could never be thoroughly encysted; it would always irritate, rankle, fester. Mr. Washington’s formula in renouncing social equality is judiciously vague as to political rights. But one thing is certain—neither Mr. Washington nor any other negro leader really contemplates their surrender. It is quite inconceivable that the nation within a nation should acquiesce in disfranchisement; and the question of the negro vote will always be a disturbing factor in Southern political life. Either he must be jockeyed out of it by devices abhorrent to democratic principle and more or less subversive of political morality; or, if he be honestly suffered to cast his ballot, he will block the healthy divergence of political opinion in the South, since, in any party conflict, he would hold the balance between the two sides, and thus become the dominant power in the State. This will always be a danger so long as the unassimilated negro is forced, by his separateness, to think and act first as a negro and only in the second place as an American. Even if the Atlanta Compromise were otherwise realizable, the friction at this point would always continue acute.
The Crux of the Problem.
The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise were possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to be prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is unwholesome and demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of what Mr. Ray Stannard Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It seems hard, no doubt, that marriage should be impossible between a white man and a girl in whose complexion, perhaps, an eighth or sixteenth part of negro blood is entirely imperceptible; but such cases are romantic exceptions, and do not constitute a serious factor in the problem. Negroes, at any rate, will tell you proudly that the young men and women of their race, however light-skinned, hold it no hardship that their choice of mates should be restricted to their own people. Whatever be the truth as to these marginal relations, they are not the essence of the matter. The essence is simply this: the youth and manhood of the white South is subjected to an altogether unfair and unwholesome ordeal by the constant presence of a multitude of physically well-developed women, among whom, in the lower levels, there is no strong tradition of chastity, and to whom the penalties of incontinence are very slight. To say, as many Southerners will, that there is no such thing as virtue among negro women is stupidly libellous; but it is impossible to doubt that the average standard of sexual conduct among the lower orders of the black and brown population is anything but high. And this is not a state of things that can be radically amended in one generation or in two. The completest realization of the Atlanta Compromise that is conceivable within, say, a century, would still leave the white male exposed, from boyhood upward, to a stimulation of his animal instincts which, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, cannot be otherwise than unwholesome.
We are here at the very heart of the problem. All other relations are adjustable, at a certain sacrifice; but not this one. If the two races are to live together without open and lawful intermingling, it must be at the cost of incessant demoralization to both. “Miscegenation,” in the sense of permanent concubinage and the rearing of hybrid families, may be held in check by the strong social sentiment against it,[[56]] but nothing can hold in check the still more degrading casual commerce between the white man (and youth) and the coloured woman. It is probably this fact, quite as much as the hideous proclivities of the criminal negro male, that hardens the heart of the white woman against the black race. Nor is the unwholesomeness of the condition measured by the actual amount of laxity to which it leads. Temptation may in myriads of cases be resisted; but this order of temptation ought not to be in the air.[[57]] It cannot be good for any race of men to be surrounded by strongly-accentuated Sex, which, for ulterior reasons, whereof the mere animal nature takes little account, is placed under a tabu.
I venture to say that no one—not even Mr. Washington himself—really believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the problem. The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to speak), never doubt that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of racial intermixture. They see that so long as constant physical propinquity endures, the colour barrier between the sexes is factitious, and in great measure unreal, and they believe that at last the race-pride of the white man will be worn down, and he will accept the inevitable amalgamation.[[58]] The ultimate forces at war in the South are the instinctive, half-conscious desire of the black race to engraft itself on the white stock,[[59]] and the no less instinctive horror of the white stock at such a surrender of its racial integrity. This horror is all the more acute—all the more morbid, if you will—because the white race is conscious of its own frailty, and knows that it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against perfidious nature. It is a hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it is true, that much of the injustice and cruelty to which the negro is subjected in the South is a revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the negro’s part, as for an uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part of the whites.[[60]] It is because the black race inevitably appeals to one order of low instincts in the white, that it suffers from the sympathetic stimulation of another order of low instincts.
Four Possibilities: III. Amalgamation.
This brings us, of course, to the third of the conceivabilities above enumerated—the legalization of marriage between the two races. To the white South, nothing is more inconceivable: to the critics of the white South, nothing is more simple. Which of them is in the right?