[52]. In this connection it is perhaps worth noting that the hookworm—that “vampire of the South”—is now pretty clearly proved to be an importation from Africa. On the other hand, it is a far greater scourge to the white than to the black race, the negro possessing a power of resistance to its ravages which amounts almost to immunity.
[53]. “It has become the fashion of late for certain negro leaders to talk, in conventions held outside the South, of fighting for their rights. For their own sake and that of their race, let them take it out in talking. A single outbreak would settle the question.”—T. N. Page: “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” p. 281.
[54]. This distinction is illustrated by the anecdote of a negro in a Northern city going from door to door of a long street, asking for work and food, and being everywhere met by a polite and regretful refusal. At last he came to a door which was flung open by a man, who thus addressed him: “You d——d black hound, how have you the impudence to come to the front door! Go to the back door, ask for a broom, and sweep out the yard.” “Bless de Lord!” said the negro, “He’s led me to my own Southern people at last!”
[55]. Negro labour is indispensable to the South only inasmuch as the negro has kept and keeps out the white labourer. “Should the negro be deported, there would be no trouble in filling his place with white men, who would bring the South up to its proper agricultural standard.” William P. Calhoun, “The Caucasian and the Negro,” p. 15. Mr. A. H. Stone, a large employer of negro labour, writes: “It has been the curse of the South for a hundred years that her people have clung, and stubbornly, to a conviction, never reasonable or well-founded, that negro labour was essential to the cultivation of her soil.”—“The American Race Problem,” p. 174.
[56]. See foot-note, p. 64.
[57]. Mr. Booker Washington said to Mr. Wells: “May we not become a peculiar people—like the Jews? Isn’t that possible?” What so long kept the Jews a peculiar people was the constancy with which Jewish women declined to intermingle with the Gentiles around them. If negro women showed such a spirit of racial chastity, the problem would be very different.
[58]. On p. 47 of “Race Adjustment,” by Mr. Kelly Miller, a coloured professor at Howard University, the author says, addressing Mr. Thomas Dixon, Junr., “You are mistaken. The negro does not ‘hope and dream of amalgamation.’... A more careful reading of the article referred to would have convinced you that I was arguing against amalgamation as a probable solution of the race problem. I merely stated the intellectual conviction that two races cannot live indefinitely side by side, under the same general régime, without ultimately fusing.” For practical purposes, the difference is not great between “hoping and dreaming” of amalgamation, and merely looking forward to it as inevitable.
[59]. Of course this does not imply that many individual negroes would not be as unwilling as any white man or woman to marry outside their colour limits.
It is on the whole very difficult to state my point in the above paragraph, without seeming to imply a great deal more of conscious and formulated will than I am, as a matter of fact, assuming. There are doubtless thousands of negroes who oppose a race-pride of their own to the race-pride of the whites, and hundreds of thousands who have no conscious desire whatever regarding the future of their race. I am trying to state what I believe, rightly or wrongly, to be deep instinctive tendencies, which seldom, perhaps, emerge into consciousness.
[60]. This I wrote from deep conviction, yet with a certain sense of daring; for I thought the idea entirely my own, and feared it might give dire offence. More than a year later, I was reassured on reading the following passage in “The Basis of Ascendancy,” by Mr. E. G. Murphy (p. 52): “Much of the South’s talk against the negro has therefore been the South talking to itself; it has been its rebuke, by implication, of those corrupting elements within the limits of its own life which answer to no high policy of social self-respect, to no fine purpose of racial conservation, but which, under the lowest impulses, would degrade the present and betray the future.”