For the South itself, at any rate, the discussion is purely academic. Amalgamation is a thousand leagues remote from the sphere of practical politics. I have been endeavouring to state for outsiders the case of the South as I understand it. I may have stated it wrongly, or understated it; but no one can possibly overstate the resolve of the South that the colour line shall not be obliterated by “miscegenation.”
Four Possibilities: IV. Segregation.
Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or without the limits of the United States.
This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at the outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But the more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more urgently did segregation recur to me as the one possible way of escape from an otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the instant, and wholesale, and violent deportation of ten million people—that is a rank impossibility. Between that and inert acquiescence in the ubiquity of the negro throughout the Southern States, there are many middle courses; and I cannot but believe that the first really great statesman who arises in America will prove his greatness by grappling with this vast but not insoluble problem. And, assuredly, the sooner he comes the better.
We have seen that the negro race is not dying out, or that, if it does die out, it can only be, so to speak, at the cost of Southern civilization—through the indefinite continuance of insanitary and barbarous conditions. We have seen that the Atlanta Compromise is illusory and impracticable, that there is no reasonable hope that the two races will ever live together, yet apart—in economic solidarity, yet without social or sexual contact. We have seen that the essence of the whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even though it be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn upward, through physical coalescence, into the white race, and the white man’s intense resolve that, on a large and determining scale, no such coalescence shall take place. Now this state of war—for such it undoubtedly is—will not correct itself by lapse of time. It will continue to degrade and demoralize both races until active measures are taken to put an end to it. Though I sympathize with the white man’s horror of amalgamation, I neither approve nor extenuate the systematic injustice and frequent barbarity in which that horror expresses itself. The present state of society in the South is as inhuman as it is inconsistent with the democratic and Christian principles which the Southern white man so loudly, and in the main sincerely, professes. The Jim Crow car, and all such discriminations in the system of public conveyance, are, I believe, necessities, but deplorable necessities none the less. The constant struggle to exclude the negro from political power is at best a negative and unproductive expenditure of energy, at worst a source of political dishonesty and corruption. The wresting of the law, whether criminal or civil, into an instrument for keeping the negro in a state of abject serfdom, is a scandal and a disgrace to any civilized community. The constant resort to lawless violence and cruelty in revenge for negro crime (real or imaginary) is a hideous blot upon the fair fame of the South, if not rather an impeachment of her sanity. The truth is, in fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship.
Back to Africa?
The deportation of the negro has been urged by many American writers, generally in a somewhat illogical fashion. They start by asserting his total incapacity for self-government, as demonstrated in Haiti, Liberia, and elsewhere, and then recommend the foundation of a new negro republic in some undefined portion of Africa. A curious scheme was put forward in 1889, in an anonymous book entitled, “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” written, I believe, by Mr. Carl McKinley, of Charleston, South Carolina. Mr. McKinley’s proposal was to promote “the voluntary and steady emigration of the active maternal element of the negro race.” He calculated that if 12,500 child-bearing females, between the ages of twenty and thirty, could every year be induced to emigrate (taking their husbands with them), the whole “maternal element” of the coloured population would be removed within fifty years. The plan was, apparently, that as soon as a child was born to a young negro couple, they were to be persuaded to emigrate, and that thus the prolific negro would gradually be transferred to the new negro commonwealth, only the sterile element of the race being left to die off at their leisure. It is unnecessary to criticize this scheme, which is now twenty years old, and does not seem to have found any serious champions. I mention it as perhaps the most carefully considered of the suggestions for an exodus to Africa.
In no form does the African project seem to me at all a hopeful one. The habitable portions of Africa are, I take it, pretty well staked out among the European Powers, so that an elaborate and costly international arrangement would be necessary before the requisite territory would be available. But supposing this difficulty overcome, would the United States be justified in simply dumping its coloured population in Africa, and then washing its hands of them? It might just as well drive them into the sea and have done with it. The negro character has shown no fitness for the very difficult task of combined pioneering and nation-building that it would have to encounter. To the lower elements in the race, the return to Africa might mean repatriation in the sense of a not unwelcome home-coming to savagery; but the better elements would suffer greatly in such a relapse, while of their own strength they probably could not resist it. Toward these better elements, and indeed toward the whole race, the United States has a responsibility that it could not, and certainly would not, shirk; so that it would in effect have to undertake the policing of a distant, troublesome, and unsatisfactory dependency, which might, in addition, not improbably involve it in international difficulties. This would be preferable to the present state of things, but still far from a desirable solution of the problem.
The same objections apply to a settlement in South America, the Philippines, or anywhere else outside the United States. Deportation, in a word, is beset with disadvantages. It would be ruinously costly and indefensibly cruel. If there ever was a time for it, that time is past.