The Southern South Part 17

THE WRONG WAY OUT

Except within the postulates stated in the last chapter, there can be no rational expectation of improvement of race relations in the South. Even within those conditions many suggestions are from time to time made which are out of accord with white and negro character, with the physical conditions, or with the general trend of American life. Before coming to practical remedies, it is necessary to examine and set aside these no-thoroughfares.

First of all, can the Southern race question be solved by any action of the North? The Reconstruction amendments with the clause authorizing Congress to enforce them by "appropriate legislation" seem intended to give the federal government power to protect the Negro against either state legislation or individual action; but the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights decision of 1883 held that the action of Congress under those amendments was confined to meeting positive official action by state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment provides for a special penalty in case of deprivation of political rights, by reducing the representation in Congress of the states which limit their suffrage. Any such legislation must be general in terms and would therefore apply to the Northern states in which there are educational or tax qualifications. Beyond that difficulty is the remembered ill effect of Reconstruction laws, and the conviction in the North that the negro problem is not one simply of race hostility and definition of rights--that the Negroes are in many ways a menace. To take the matter a second time out of the hands of the people on the ground, even though they are not solving their own problems, would mean a storm in Congress, a weight on the administration, possibly a contest with the Supreme Court, which no responsible Northern public man likes to contemplate.

Through the control of Congress over federal elections there is another opportunity to interfere in behalf of the Negro, but the federal laws put on the statute book in Reconstruction times were repealed in 1894; and n.o.body now proposes to renew them. By the recent experience of the nation in the Philippines, Porto Rico, and Cuba, a lesson has been taught of the difficulty of handling non-European races. The nation begins to doubt the elevating power of self-government. For whatever reason, there is no evidence of any intention in the North to make the Negro the ward of the nation. The writer is one of those who believe that any general federal legislation would revive friction between the sections, would sharpen the race feeling in the South, and in the end could accomplish little for the uplift of the Negro; even federal aid to education could hardly be so managed as to keep up the feeling of white responsibility from which alone proper education of the Negro can be expected.

Is there any likelihood of a private propaganda in behalf of the Negro like that of the abolitionists? A considerable cla.s.s of Northern people have a warm sense of resentment at what they think the injustice and cruelty of the superior race, especially in the withdrawal of the suffrage by state const.i.tutional amendments; and there is a lively interest in the education of Negroes and in work among the Poor Whites. A propaganda, with societies, public meetings, journals, and a literature is, however, no longer possible--the North has too much on its own hands in curing the political diseases of its cities, in absorbing the foreigners; like Congress, it recognizes that the South is sincere, even if somewhat exaggerated, in its nervousness about the Negroes. The most that can be expected of Northern individuals in the way of bettering Southern conditions is attempts like that of this volume to get into the real nature of the problems and to offer good advice.

Notwithstanding the horror felt toward amalgamation, from time to time in unexpected Southern quarters reappears the suggestion that it is impossible for the two races to live alongside each other separate, and that the logical and unavoidable outcome is fusion; that the relentless force of juxtaposition is too much for law or prejudice or race instinct.

Over and over again one is told that nowhere in history is there an example of two races living side by side indefinitely without uniting.

This is not historically true; Mohammedans and Hindoos (originally of the same race) have lived separate hundreds of years in India; Boers and Kaffirs have been side by side for near a century; the English colonists and the American Indians were little intermixed. Amalgamation could only be accomplished by a change in white sentiment about as probable as the Mormonization of the Northern Whites; and if it were possible, it would lead to a new and worse race question, the rivalry of a mixed race occupying the whole South against a white race in the rest of the country, which would make all present troubles seem a pleasant interlude.

Amalgamation as a remedy welcomed by the Southern Whites is unthinkable; as a remedy against their convictions, brought about by time, it is highly unlikely.

At the other extremity is the idea, now more than a century old, that the way to get rid of the race question is to remove one of the races altogether. This notion of curing the patient by sending him to a hospital for incurables goes back to 1775. Jefferson favored it; the Colonization Society organized it in 1816, and in the forty years from 1820 to 1860 succeeded in sending about ten thousand Negroes to Liberia. Abraham Lincoln favored it. It is often suggested nowadays. This plan, if it could be carried out, would so completely relieve the immediate difficulties that it deserves the most careful consideration.

The first objection at the outset is ten million objections--namely, the Negroes themselves, who have never taken kindly to expatriation, for the simple reason that it is flying to evils that they know not of. The second difficulty is to find a place to receive the exiles. Experiments in the West Indies, in Central America, and in Africa have all been failures. No European country or colonies will welcome people sent away on the ground that they are inimical to white civilization; and the settlements of American Negroes in savage Africa have been entire failures. As has been shown above, Liberia, after nearly ninety years of existence, has no influence on the back country; its trade is scanty, its health is depleted, and its conditions are in every way less favorable to physical and moral well-being than those of the United States.

Then follows the financial difficulty; to be sure a correspondent of a Georgia newspaper suggests: "Let the government appropriate $20,000,000 for five successive years each for deportation, judiciously forcing off first the ages from eighteen to forty-five, as far as can be done without too violent a separation of dependent ages, and five years will substantially settle the exodus. All separations can be reunited in a few years and not a negro's heart broken." But a single hundred millions would be only a drop in the bucket. To bring over the ten million foreigners now in the United States, and get them started in a country abounding in work and opportunities, has probably averaged a cost of a hundred dollars a head, or one thousand millions. The thing must be done completely, if at all; for from the point of view of its advocates, to expatriate a part of the race would be like cutting out a portion of a cancer; and where are you going to find, say, a thousand million dollars to carry away ten million people upon the proceeds of whose continued labor in America you must depend for the Southern share of the money?

In the next place, would a world which still has tears for the Acadians deported from Nova Scotia in 1755, which is aroused by the banishment of political suspects to Siberia, be impressed with the high civilization of a nation which would send ten million people to their death in a continent where as yet neither Briton, Frenchman, Portuguese, or German has ever been able to establish any considerable colony of European emigrants? If the superior race, with all its resources, prudence, and medical skill cannot live in Africa, what would become of ten million Negroes deported on the plea that they were not capable of partic.i.p.ating in the white man's civilization? Though descended from Africans there is no reason to suppose that they have transmitted immunity from the deadly tropical diseases.

Again, there is not a state, city, or county populous with Negroes in the South which would not resent, and if need be resist, the sudden taking away of its laborers. Whenever the question is brought to an issue, the Southern people admit that, with all the race difficulties, the Negro does raise the cotton and drive the mule; and without him the white man must take the hoe and the reins. As John Sharp Williams puts it: "The white people of the South do not want to hasten the departure of the good negroes; ... whenever you suggest that he leave the Southern darky replies in Scriptural phrase, 'Ask me not to leave thee.' They are here, and they are going to remain here so long as there is a cotton field in sight." The people who preach expatriation, deportation, elimination, or whatever they choose to call it, are not the people who employ the Negro or wish him well, or would be pleased to see him succeed in any hemisphere.

A milder suggestion is that the essential Negro be slowly and quietly replaced by somebody else. What somebody else? Shall it be Northerners?

Senator Williams, of Mississippi, says: "I would like to see established a great land company with a capital of about a million dollars, to buy lands in the cotton States and sell them out to home-seeking immigrants on a ten years' instalment plan." In 1907 the Southern press was convinced that a great flow of immigration had set in from the North, but in reality outside of Florida and Texas nearly all colonies of Northerners have been unsuccessful, though there is a slow stream of people, partly from the Northwest, who take up farms in the South and mix with the Southern white population. These people are p.r.o.ne to be dissatisfied with the schools; they are in despair over the wretched domestic service; the women are filled with terror by the lynchings and by the frequent cause of them; the newcomers dislike the Negroes more than the Southern-born people dislike them, and cannot be depended upon to remain a permanent part of the population. In any case, they do not replace the negro laborer for wages.

The only hope of a subst.i.tute population of plantation hands is in the foreign immigrants, who have been described in a previous chapter, and of whom, up to 1909, the South seems to have expected a brisk influx. The federal government even set out to build immigrant stations in Charleston and Savannah. But in 1907 all the Southern ports (excepting Baltimore) together received only 21,000 out of 1,300,000. To-day the whole scheme is a failure and there is no prospect of importing large numbers of foreigners to work for wages. A member of Congress from Mississippi recently declared from his seat in the House that there was a conspiracy of federal and Italian officials to prevent Italians from coming into his state.

The first reason for the failure of the promising plan is the many undoubted cases, and the more rumored and reported instances, of peonage of white men. In the second place the Italians, who have been chiefly relied upon, have no intention of spending their lives and bringing up their children as plantation laborers; they work so well and are so profitable to both the plantation owners and themselves that after a few years they save money enough to do something that they like better, and that is the end of their service on other people's land. The experience of South Carolina in 1906, detailed in the chapter on Immigration, seems conclusively to prove that most foreigners prefer the North because they think they are better treated there.

The fundamental difficulty with the whole plan of immigration is that a great many people in the South believe that the average foreigner is an undesirable member of the community. They have no familiarity with that grinding-down process by which even unpromising races are transformed into Americans. They read of the "Black Hand," which is not very different from some forms of the old Ku Klux Klan; of the Vendetta, which can be paralleled in the Southern mountains; and they show little willingness to receive even the better foreign elements on equal terms. It is a fair question whether if the Italians, for example, should come to have a majority of votes in Louisiana they would ever be permitted to elect and inaugurate a governor out of their own number; whether the phrase "White man's government" does not apply as much against the "Dago" as against the Negro.

If the Negroes cannot be replaced, is it not possible to segregate them into districts of their own? For forty years a process has been going on by which the black counties grow blacker and the white counties become whiter; Negroes move into the counties where there is most work and therefore the greatest number of laborers, and the Whites gradually move out of the districts in which the Negroes are very numerous. Could not that process be carried still farther? Some people in despair predict that the Whites will eventually find their way into the West and Northwest, leaving the fruitful South to the Negro. Although there is a steady drift of white people out of the Southern states, it is of the same kind as the movement from New England and the Middle states to the West, and the Whites have not the slightest intention of abandoning their section; buildings go up, mills appear, skysc.r.a.pers intensify the city, and in every Southern state the Whites grow richer and more powerful.

The desired result might be brought about if the Negroes would move to other parts of the Union, and much is made of the present drift into the Northern cities, but the conditions of life are not favorable to them there, and their number is only kept up by new immigrations. Booker Was.h.i.+ngton advises the Negro to stay in the South because "The fact that at the North the Negro is confined to almost one line of employment often tends to discourage and demoralize the strongest who go from the South, and to make them an easy prey to temptation." Many of the keenest observers in the South desire that the Negroes should spread through the country, partly to relieve the pressure in the South, and partly in the conviction that it would furnish an object lesson to the Northern people of the disadvantage of the presence of Negroes. Whatever the number of emigrant Negroes out of the South, the number left there goes on steadily increasing from decade to decade; and whenever they show a disposition to leave in large numbers, the Southerners oppose and resist, because they see no hope of supplying their place with any other than more negro laborers.

Could the two races divide the land into districts? Such a separation is favored both by Bishop Turner, a negro leader, and by John Temple Graves, of Atlanta, a negro hater, and there are a few examples of such separate communities. Many white counties and a few white towns will not admit Negroes; and in perhaps half a dozen colored villages no white man lives.

Here is perhaps an opportunity for considerably reducing race friction, for there is no reason to suppose that such separate towns go backward in civilization; and they give opportunities for negro business and professional men, which are important for the encouragement of the best members of the race. The most serious practical objection is, however, that such towns take away laborers, actual or potential, from the white plantations; and the industrial cotton system depends on keeping those Negroes on other people's land.

A broader proposition is phrased by Reed in the "Brother's War"--"Let us give the negro his own State in our union.... We are rich enough and have land enough to give the negro this State, which is due from us. His especial need is to exercise political and civil privileges, in his own community, all the way up from the town meeting to congress." Possibly this remedy might have been applied forty years ago, but it is now absolutely unworkable. When Reed suggests that the Negro be allowed to take over some state and carry it on as a negro community, the instant question is, which state? Louisiana will not allow her laborers to go _en ma.s.se_ to Texas; and Texas would drive them back with shotguns from the border if they tried to move. The blackest states have the least disposition to become blacker, the lighter states are just as determined to remain light; and since there is no longer any great area of good land not taken up by anybody, colonization of the Negro within the limits of the United States is impossible.

Could the desired result of keeping Whites and Negroes from too confining a contact be reached by a less drastic method? A favorite suggestion eloquently championed by Grady is "race separation," which he defined to mean: "That the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the South. As near as may be, these paths should be made equal--but separate they must be now and always. This means separate schools, separate churches, separate accommodation everywhere--but equal accommodation where the same money is charged, or where the State provides for the citizen."

That is, in every city Negroes are to occupy separate quarters, go to separate schools, ride in separate sections of the street cars, use separate sidewalks, buy in separate stores, have separate churches, places of amus.e.m.e.nt, social organizations, banks, and insurance companies. This system, which in many directions has already been carried out, rests upon a conviction of the Negro's ability to maintain an economic and intellectual life of his own, without danger to the white race. It has the great disadvantage of cutting off the third of the population which most needs uplift from the influences which bear for progress. It still further diminishes that a.s.sociation of the superior with the inferior race, that kindly interest of employer in employee, that infiltration of culture and moral principles which is the mightiest influence among the white people.

Furthermore, where is the black man to acquire the skill to carry on his own enterprises, to build cotton gins and oil mills, to stock stores, to found banks, if he is to be separated from the white man? Where is he to buy his goods? Here the whole system breaks down; the drummer is no respecter of persons, and not only is willing to sell to a solvent Negro, but is likely to insist that the negro merchant shall not give all his orders to a colored wholesaler. Then what is to be done with the hundreds of thousands of landowners, tenants, croppers, and wage hands, who depend on advances from the Whites? There is no such thing as commercial segregation; as in other directions, when any remedy is proposed which means the cutting off of negro labor, or of the profits derived from negro custom, the South invariably draws back.

On the other hand, race separation would give greater opportunities to the Negroes and reduce the contact with the lower cla.s.s of the Whites, out of which comes most of the race violence in the South. It is substantially the method applied in Northern cities, though nowhere to any such degree as in the South. It is a method which, with all its hards.h.i.+p to Negroes of the higher cla.s.s, comes nearest being a _modus vivendi_ between the races.

As for white communities without Negroes, there are many such in the mountain regions, and an unsuccessful effort was made in the town of Fitzgerald, Ga., by Northern immigrants to keep the Negroes out of it, but in such places who will do the odd jobs and perform the necessary rough labor? How shall houses be built, drays be driven and dirt shoveled, if there are no Negroes?

Try which way you may, there seems no method consonant with the interests of the South and the principles of humanity by which Negroes can be set apart from the white people. It was not the choice of their ancestors to change their horizon; nor were the Africans now in the United States consulted as to their neighbors; but they were born on American soil; they have shared in the toil of conquering the continent; they have their homes, their interests, and their traditions; they have never known any life except in dependence on and close relations with the Whites. However happier the South and the whole country might be were there no race question, there seems no possibility of avoiding it by taking away all race contact.

A method of supposed relief widely applied, frequently invoked, and strenuously defended, is to terrorize the Negro. And the North is not free from that spirit. As Mr. Dooley philosophizes: "He'll ayther have to go to th' north an' be a subjick race, or stay in th' south an' be an objick lesson. 'Tis a har-rd time he'll have, anyhow.... I'm not so much throubled about th' naygur whin he lives among his opprissors as I am whin he falls into th' hands iv his liberators. Whin he's in th' South he can make up his mind to be lynched soon or late an' give his attintion to his other pleasures iv composin' rag-time music on a banjo, an' wurrukin' f'r th' man that used to own him an' now on'y owes him his wages. But 'tis the divvle's own hards.h.i.+p ... to be pursooed by a mob iv abolitionists till he's dhriven to seek police protection." Still the Northern police do give protection against a.s.saults on the Negro which Southern police sometimes refuse. Lawlessness is the plague of the South. Attention has already been called to the negro crime against person and life, the shocking frequency of white crime, the weakness and timidity of the courts, and the resort to lynching as an alleged protest against lawlessness. The number of homicides and mob murders is not so serious as the continual appeals to violence by editors and public men who are accepted as leaders by a large minority and sometimes a majority of the white people. Thus John Temple Graves calls for "a firm, stern, and resolute att.i.tude of organization and readiness on the part of the dominant race.... Is this black man from savage Africa to keep on perpetually disturbing the sections of our common country? Is this running sore to be nursed and treated and anodyned and salved and held forever to our b.r.e.a.s.t.s?" Southern newspapers abound in fierce and exciting headlines: "The Burly Black Brute Foiled!" "A Ham Colored n.i.g.g.e.r in the Hen House!" "The Only Place for You is Behind a Mule," and so on--what somebody has called "The wholesale a.s.sa.s.sination of negro character." Senator Tillman in a public lecture has said: "On one occasion we killed seven n.i.g.g.e.rs; I don't know how many I killed personally, but I shot to kill and I know I got my share." And in another speech, in November, 1907, in Chicago, the same man, who has repeatedly been elected to the Senate from a once proud state, said: "No matter what the people in the North may say or do, the white race in the South will never be dominated by the Negro, and I want to tell you now that if some state should ever make an attempt to 'save South Carolina,' we will show them in their fanaticism that we will make it red before we make it black."

Observe that this ferocity is not directed against the Negro simply because he does ill, but equally if he does well. Thus a correspondent in Georgia writes: "Let me tell you one thing,--every time you people of the North countenance in any way, shape or form any form of social equality, you lay up trouble, not for yourselves, or for us so much, but for the negro. _Right or wrong the Southern people will never tolerate it, and will go through the horrors of another reconstruction, before they will permit it to be. Before we will submit to it, we will kill every negro in the Southern states._ This is not idle boasting or fire-eating threats, but the cold, hard facts stated in all calmness." Could hate, jealousy, and meanness reach a higher pitch than in the following declaration of Thomas Dixon, Jr., sent broadcast through the country in the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ two years ago? "Does any sane man believe that when the Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man, this 'arrogant,' 'rapacious,' and 'intolerant' race will allow the Negro to master his industrial system, take the bread from his mouth, crowd him to the wall and place a mortgage on his house? Compet.i.tion is war--the most fierce and brutal of all its forms. Could fatuity reach a sublimer height than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and see this performance? What will he do when put to the test? He will do exactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread--kill him!" Could blind race hostility go farther than in the Atlanta Riots of 1907, for which not one murderer has ever been subjected to any punishment?

These violent utterances come almost wholly from the Superior Race. The Negroes have their grievances; but any intemperate publication toward the white race would almost certainly lead to a lynching. An instance has actually occurred where a Negro was driven out of a community, and glad to escape with his life, because he had in his newspaper said with regard to a woman of his own race whose character had been a.s.sailed, that she was as virtuous as any white woman. Doubtless some of the cruel and incendiary language that has been quoted is intended for home consumption; it is supposed to be a striking way of saying to the Negroes that they ought to behave better; and alongside every one of these vindictive utterances could be placed a message of hope and encouragement from Southern white men to the blacks. These expressions of white ferocity in condemnation of negro ferocity are overbalanced by such strong words as those of Senator Williams: "It cannot be escaped by the extermination of either race by the other. That thought is absolutely horrible to a good man, a believer in the divine philosophy of Jesus Christ, who taught mutual helpfulness, and not mutual hatred to mankind." Nevertheless, it remains true that a large number of Southern people who are in places of influence and authority advise that the race problem be settled by terrorizing the Negro.

The commonest form of terror is lynching, a deliberate attempt to keep the race down by occasionally killing Negroes, sometimes because they are dreadful criminals, frequently because they are bad, or loose-tongued, or influential, or are acquiring property, or otherwise irritate the Whites.

A saucy speech by a Negro to a white man may be followed by swift, relentless, and tormenting death. In every case of pa.s.sionate conflict between two races the higher loses most, because it has most to lose; and lynch law as a remedy for the lawlessness of the blacks has the disadvantage of occasionally exposing innocent white men to the uncontrollable pa.s.sion of other white men, of filling the mind with scenes of horror and cruelty, of lowering the standard of the whole white race.

This subject is inextricably connected with the crimes by Negroes, for which lynching is held to be an appropriate punishment. The statistics collected by Mr. Cutler, and stated in a previous chapter, show in the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903 a record of 1,997 lynchings in the South; of the Negroes lynched, 707 were charged with violence to women and 783 with murder. These figures absolutely disprove the habitual statements in the South that lynching is common to all sections of the Union; that it is almost always caused by rape; and that rape is a crime confined to Negroes. The details of some of these cases would show that the mob not infrequently gets an innocent person; that it is liable to be carried away into the most horrible excesses of burning and torture; that a lynching is really a kind of orgy in which not only the criminal cla.s.s among the Whites, but people who are ordinarily swayed by reason simply let go of themselves and indulge the primeval brutishness of human nature. Said Confucius: "The Master said, 'I hate the manner in which purple takes away the l.u.s.ter of vermilion. I hate the way in which the songs of Ch'ing confound the music of Gna. I hate those who with their sharp mouths overthrow kingdoms and families.'"

Professor Smith, of Tulane University, is spokesman for thousands of respectable and educated men when he says: "Atrocious as such forms of rudimentary justice undoubtedly are, and severely reprehensible, to be condemned always and without any reserve, it cannot be denied that they have a certain rough and horrible virtue. Great is the insult they wreak on the majesty of the law and brutalizing must be their effect upon human nature, yet they do strike a salutary terror into hearts which the slow and uncertain steps of the courts could hardly daunt. In witness stands the fact that lynch-lightning seldom strikes twice in the same district or community. Such frightful incidents tend to repeat themselves at wide intervals, both of time and place."

They tend to repeat themselves immediately; it is not an accident that Mississippi, in a large part of which the Negroes are renowned for their freedom from the crime so much reprehended, nevertheless, has more lynchings than any other state; it is because Mississippi has the lynching habit. Strange that in a community like the South, so intelligent, so proud of the superiority and the supremacy of the white race, the deeds of fifty abandoned black men each year should throw millions of Whites into a frenzy of excitement; and that for the crime of those fifty, ten million innocent people are held responsible. Lynching is no remedy for race troubles, and never has been; it intensifies the race feeling a hundredfold; it is a standing indictment of the white people who possess all the machinery of government, yet cannot prevent the fury of their own race. "Surely," says President Roosevelt, "no patriot can fail to see the fearful brutalization and debas.e.m.e.nt which the indulgence of such a spirit and such practices inevitably portend.... The nation, like the individual, cannot commit a crime with impunity. If we are guilty of lawlessness and brutal violence, whether our guilt consists in active partic.i.p.ation therein or in mere connivance and encouragement, we shall a.s.suredly suffer later on because of what we have done. The corner stone of this republic, as of all free governments, is respect for and obedience to the law." That the South can get on without lynchings is shown by the gradual diminution in the number of instances. In 1901 there were 135, in 1906 only 45, and in this good result the protests of the good people in the South have been aided by the criticism of the North. Murders of Whites by Negroes are probably just as frequent, but they are more likely to go to the courts.

Some things can still be done to reduce the crime of the individual without increasing the crime of the mob. John Temple Graves has suggested for the Negro that: "Upon conviction of his crime he would cross a 'Bridge of Sighs' and disappear into a prison of darkness and mystery, from which he would never emerge, and in which he would meet a fate known to no man save the Government and the excutioners of the law--that the very darkness and mystery of this punishment would strike more terror to the soul of superst.i.tious criminals than all the vengeance of modern legal retribution."

A kindred suggestion is that a special court of Whites shall be set up to deal with certain aggravated crimes, outside of the technicalities of the ordinary criminal law. If the Negroes would deliver up those of their own number whom they suppose to have committed such crimes, they would relieve themselves of the odium of protecting the worst criminals. The Whites are right in insisting on a stronger feeling of race responsibility, but where is their own sense of race responsibility when the Salisbury lynchers, the Atlanta murderers and the scoundrel Turner, who practically kidnapped and then tortured to death a Negro woman, are protected by public sentiment? Extraordinary remedies are not necessary if the white people will make their own courts and sheriffs do their duty, by speedy trials, followed by swift and orderly punishment; and most of all by disgracing and driving out of society men who take upon themselves the hangman's office without the hangman's plea of maintaining the majesty of law.

Lynching is part of the same spirit as that which inspires peonage, the meanest of all crimes in the calendar; for to steal a poor Negro's labor is to rob a cripple of his crutches; to knock down the child for his penny; it is the fleecing of the most defenseless by the most powerful.

One of the remedies for the ills of the South is that the white people shall sternly set themselves against the crime of peonage, which exists in every state of the Lower South, either with or without the color of law; and which secures the most expensive labor that the South can possibly employ, since it alarms and discourages a thousand for every man whose forced labor is thus stolen.

The terrible thing about all the suggestions of violence and hatred as a remedy is that they react upon the white race, which has most to lose in property and in character. "There are certain things," said Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, in a public proclamation, "that must be done for the control of the negro which need not be done for the government of the white man. In spite of the provisions of the federal const.i.tution the men who are called upon to deal with this great problem must do that which is necessary to be done, even though it may have the appearance at times of going somewhat without the law.... If the people of the respective communities of this state will only come together and resolve to convert every negro into a laborer and self-supporter, even though it be necessary to make him a laborer upon the county's or the state's property, they will serve their communities and their state well." No idea is more futile than that you can drive people with whips into the Kingdom of Heaven; that you can teach an inferior race to observe laws by yourself breaking them; that you can put one half the community outside the law, while claiming American liberty for the other half. Though the negro race has little to urge in public, it feels the degradation and the hurt. Violence solves no problems; it does not even postpone the evil day. The race problem must be solved by applying to Negroes the same kind of law and justice that the experience of the Anglo-Saxon has found necessary for its own protection.

CHAPTER XXVI

MATERIAL AND POLITICAL REMEDIES

The methods of dealing with the race question discussed in the last chapter all go back to the idea that the Negro can be improved only by some process distasteful to him. Race separation he dislikes, expatriation he shudders at, and violence brings on him more evils than it removes, to say nothing of the effect on the Whites. The world has tried many experiments of civilizing people by the police, and they are all failures, from the Russian Empire to the West Side of New York, especially since both the Cossacks and the metropolitan police have faults of their own. In the South and in Russia alike there is doubtless a feeling that the people at the bottom of the scale are things below the common standard, that force is necessary because they will not listen to reason.

None of the forcible remedies meets the most obvious difficulty in the South--that the present condition of the lower race is not a foundation for great wealth and high prosperity. If the Negro has reached his pitch, if he is to remain at his present average of morals and industry and productivity, the South may well be in despair, for it is far below that of the low Southern White, and farther below that of the Northwestern farmer. The condition of the black is a menace to society--if it must stay at the present level.

In the chapter on "Is the Negro Rising?" some reasons are given for believing that the status of the race has much improved in the last forty years and is still gaining. Upon this critical point numbers of both races testify. Kelly Miller says of the achievements of his people: "Within forty years of only partial opportunity, while playing as it were in the backyard of civilization, the American negro has cut down his illiteracy by over fifty per cent; has produced a professional cla.s.s some fifty thousand strong, including ministers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, editors, authors, architects, engineers and all higher lines of listed pursuits in which white men are engaged; some three thousand negroes have taken collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from the best inst.i.tutions in the North and West established for the most favored white youth; ... negro inventors have taken out some four hundred patents as a contribution to the mechanical genius of America; there are scores of negroes who, for conceded ability and achievements, take respectable rank in the company of distinguished Americans."

This opinion is not confined to members of the negro race; even so cordial an enemy of the Negro as John Temple Graves admits that "The leaders of no race in history have ever shown greater wisdom, good temper and conservative discretion than distinguishes the two or three men who stand at the head of the negro race in America to-day"; and elsewhere he declares that there are two good Negroes for every bad Negro, a proportion which does not obtain in every race. Thomas Nelson Page is of opinion that, "Unquestionably, a certain proportion of the Negro race has risen notably since the era of emanc.i.p.ation," and John Sharp Williams commits himself to the statement that "Fully ninety per cent of the negro race is behaving itself as well as could be expected; it is at work in the fields, on the railroads, and in the sawmills, and does not, for the most part, know that there is a fifteenth amendment." A cloud of witnesses confirm the belief that a fourth to a fifth of all the Negroes in the South are somewhat improving and slowly saving. Some of them have hearkened to the advice of an English writer: "Try to realize two things: first, that you are living in a commercial republic; a country whose standard, in all things, is material; second, that you are the greatest economic power in this country."

The possibility of a general industrial uplift depends upon several factors which are not easy to fix. It is a question whether the lower four fifths of the negro race has anything like the potentiality of the upper fraction, for it is made up mostly of plantation Negroes, who have certainly advanced a long way from slavery times, are better clothed, better fed, better housed, better treated, but are still a long way below most of the Whites in their own section. The most appalling thing about the negro problem is, this ma.s.s of people on the land who are doing well in the sense that they work, make cotton, yield profits, help to make the community prosperous, but who are ignorant, stupid, and have no horizon outside the cotton field and the cornfield. In spirit they still hark back to Whittier's plantation song,

De yam will grow, de cotton blow, We'll hab de rice an' corn; O nebber you fear if nebber you hear De driver blow his horn.