Papers of the American Negro Academy Part 3

Porto Bello and Cartagena in Colombia were the ports of entry for the slave trade, the channel by which not only Panama was supplied with Negroes but from whence the traders were allowed to bring with them such quant.i.ty of provisions as was thought necessary both for their own use and that of their slaves of both s.e.xes. Here was the Appian road through which the Spaniards carried the slaves into Peru to work the gold mines; and they became so useful that in the celebrated Sanabria mines Negroes were used exclusively during the night and Indians in the day time.

Ulloa, during his visit to Lima, found that people of African descent formed the greater part of the population of Lima, and they were, as a rule, mechanics and worked side by side with the Europeans who did not consider the contact disgraceful to them, since cleanliness was the ruling pa.s.sion of the Negroes.

General Pelage, "an agricultural slave" when General Moore stormed St.

Lucia, was Governor of Guadeloupe until 1803, when he resigned and returned to France to lead his soldiers against Spain, where he was killed at the head of his regiment.

It is a remarkable fact that the first native American to be consecrated a Bishop was a Negro. He was Right Reverend Francisco Xavier de Luna y Victoria, Bishop of Panama, of which see he took possession in August, 1751. He founded and maintained the cathedral at his own expense, and was later removed to the see of Trujillo in Peru. His mother, who had been a slave devoted her time to the sale of charcoal in order to attain her ambition to see her son become an eminent man. This devotion has been characteristic of the African woman and every reward and praise won on the new continent has been due to her sacrifices.

In the Spanish countries under the more liberal manumission laws a very much higher proportion of free people of color existed from the very earliest times. In Cuba of the total population in 1811 about 274,000 were whites, 212,000 slaves and 114,000 free persons of color, rather less than two slaves to one freeman. In the United States at the same time the slave population of 1,191,364 is more than six times the free population of 186,446 (total U. S., 7,239,814). The conditions in Cuba were characteristic of the Spanish and Portuguese countries and explained the total abolition of slavery as well as the more rapid a.s.similation of the colored people in the economic and political life of those countries.

With the records such as this the Negro found himself at the close of the eighteenth century a vital factor in every phase of the development of Latin America. I have not attempted to treat his services in the Southern States of the North American Union for the facts here are too well known to require discussion within the limits of the present article. Suffice it to say that the position which the Negro and his mixed progeny of European or Indian blood had won in South America, they have also earned, if even they have not as yet received, due recognition therefore in North America.

With a firm faith in our ability and the consciousness of our inalienable t.i.tle to a worthy share in the development of the New World.

We may look forward with confidence to the inevitable reward of industry sustained by the courage which demands that an honest toiler shall not be despoiled of the fruits of his labor. We may expect therefore that as Negro slavery began in the West Indies and South America and crept northward, so also will come to the United States the gradual dissolution of the problem of color in the general problems of a progressing human race.

William Pickens. The Const.i.tutional Status of the Negro from 1860-1870

The second decade of the latter half of the nineteenth century was the most epochal period in American legal history since the time of the national const.i.tution. So far as the American Negro is concerned, this period marks the greatest possible changes in legal and const.i.tutional status. Three years before the opening of this decade the highest court of the nation had declared the Negro to have only the status of the lower animals, while at the close of the decade the Negro had acquired a status in the organic law of the land which ent.i.tled him to members.h.i.+p in the Supreme Court itself. In this period the Negro changed from a chattel to a person, from an animal to a man, from a slave to a citizen,-so far as the supreme law of the land is concerned.

This period also contains the two extremes on the scale of discriminations against the American Negro in statute law. Before this period there were comparatively few statutory discriminations against the black race in the Southern States. For in that section the Negro had no personal rights at law, and discriminatory statutes were not necessary. When a discrimination is made against a cla.s.s in statute law, it is thereby implied that this cla.s.s has at least some rights based on the fundamental law of the land. Therefore the legislative discriminations against black people before this period were found chiefly in the border states and in the "free" states against "free"

Negroes,-a strange contradiction of terms.-But this decade, from 1860 to 1870, also contains the extremes of the Negro's legal status in the South: at the opening of the decade stood the Negro slave, at the close stood the Negro senator; after the middle of this period the South pa.s.sed the extreme "Black Laws," intended to nullify the effect of the Thirteenth Amendment as far as possible, while at the end of the decade came the Fifteenth Amendment, marking an epoch. These "Black Laws" of the South were enacted between 1865 and 1868 and were inspired by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. They had for their models, it is said, the similar laws that had been pa.s.sed in previous decades against the helpless "free" Negroes of the North and the border states.

But they outdid the models.

These "Black Laws" are worth considering, for in them are found a sufficient cause and a very cogent reason for the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments. There is really no need for the charge that these two Amendments were the inspiration of revenge or of the desire for political advantage of the party in power. At any rate, such great products of statesmans.h.i.+p should stand on their merits, and not be condemned, even if it could be shown that they were originally based in unworthy motives. It does not lessen the beauty of the rose if the plant was sprouted in manure. But the argument of ultra-motive is unnecessary, for the "Black Laws" of the South were the immediate occasion, and doubtless the only efficient cause, of the Fourteenth Amendment. After the pa.s.sage of the Thirteenth Amendment, if the former slave states had accorded the ex-slaves even half justice, it is very likely that the Negro's friends in Congress would have quickly forgotten him,-as they have since done in the face of the worst injustices. But it was not unnatural for the South, after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment which gave the Negro only the lowest degree of freedom, to try to pa.s.s systems of laws that would cause the Negro's freedom to make as little change as possible in the social organism and in his relation to the white race. Not to have done so would have been evidence of superhuman foresight and self-control. From the standpoint of the Negro's interests, however, these laws were "black," not only in name and aim but in their very nature. Instead of being the property of a personally interested master, the Negro was to be converted into the slave of a much less sympathetic society in general. The "free" Negro's lot was to be much harder than that of the slave had been; for altho no longer ent.i.tled to "board and keep" from his employer, yet he was to be forbidden by law to move or to change his employment. This would have left his wages at the mercy of the employer. It is a law of economics that the mobility of labor is necessary to the normal regulation of wages. Some states absolutely forbade the freedmen to engage in skilled work, leaving for them only the most menial and least profitable occupations. In the famous old state of South Carolina the employer was to be allowed to inflict corporal punishment, or as the euphemism of the law put it, to "moderately correct" the servants. "Master" and "servant"

were the terms used in these laws,-not employer and employee. The vagrancy laws and laws of apprentices.h.i.+p were all of a nature to entrap the ignorant and take advantage of the weak. Famous old South Carolina even sought to regulate the amount of "politeness" due from the "servant" to the "master's family."

In the face of all these stereotyped facts, why should any honest student of history have to resort to any intangible and indefinite thing like a feeling of revenge or a desire for political and party advantage as an explanation of the motives of those who conceived and pa.s.sed by the Fourteenth Amendment? This Amendment was pa.s.sed by the friends of freedom to keep the Thirteenth Amendment from being a mere farce. They sought thereby to secure for the Negro the protecting power of the ballot, as the only effective means of influencing his civil and political interests in a government like this. There was no thought or hope of making him dominant in a country that was predominantly white.

But the backers of the Amendment sought to lead the state governments to this reasonable end by inducing rather than by compelling them. The effect of this amendment was to be based on impartial mathematics, and the choice was to be left to the majority of voters of the state. The state was simply not to have a power in the national government based on a population which the state itself did not recognize as a part of its own citizenry.

Up to 1865 nearly all the states of the Union had restricted the right to vote to white men. After the Negro was freed some Northern states voluntarily removed this restriction. The friends of freedom hoped that the Fourteenth Amendment would induce others to do so, by making it to the advantage of their national representative power. But from the ratification of the Amendment in 1868 to 1870 not a single state, with the sole exception of Minnesota, heeded the warning or yielded to the inducement of the suffrage clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And it might be noted in pa.s.sing that there were not enough Negroes in Minnesota to make any difference either way. Up to 1870 fourteen states still restricted the suffrage to white men. This obstinacy on the part of the reactionaries caused the friends of freedom in 1870 to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, which subst.i.tuted _must_ for persuasion and virtually penalized discriminations against any race in the matter of the suffrage. What evidence is there that any of these steps were taken in a spirit of revenge? Revenge usually acts in haste and without waiting on the development of other sufficient causes. The persuasion of the Fourteenth Amendment was not resorted to till three years after the close of the war, and when there had risen the plainest need for even more than persuasion in the interests of justice and humanity. And the Fifteenth Amendment did not appear till five years after the war, when even the Fourteenth Amendment had failed to persuade. Why should revenge wait so long and advance so reluctantly? It seems that the friends of freedom, who had the political power in their hands, were slow to anger and plenteous in hope.

This suffrage amendment was to be a bulwark to the liberties not only of black men but of all men in America; it was directed not only against the "Black Laws" of the South but against political and civil slavery everywhere in the nation. It is interesting to note that of the states who were members of the Union up to 1865, only five can be listed in the honor roll of those who have never discriminated against the Negro voter: Maine, Ma.s.sachusetts, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The constant question raised by these discriminating laws is: What is a Negro? When are we are going to discriminate against a fellow, we must be careful and definite in pointing him out. And so each set of discriminating laws contains its own definition of the word _Negro_, and the definitions have differed widely. At first in some parts of the North the Negro was defined as any person who was _visibly_ colored. It is plain, however, that if the matter is left to the eyes, millions of American "Negroes" will have to be taken into the Caucasian race,-and so most of the state legislatures reduced their definition to the finer discriminations of mathematics. These mathematical definitions vary all the way from one fourth of the blood of the black man to a mere one sixteenth; but some laws of the gallant South go so far as to say that if one has even one drop of Negro blood in his veins he is a Negro. Thus it is seen that "the Negro," so far as the United States are concerned, is an arbitrary creature of law and includes within its scope hundreds of thousands of people who by every law of G.o.d and nature and reason are members of the Caucasian race, princ.i.p.ally Anglo-Saxons. For whatever the legal definition, it is the common practice in the United States to cla.s.s as Negroes all persons known to have any part of Negro blood. The white American therefore ascribes the same potency to Negro blood which he ascribes to the blood of Jesus Christ,-that it only takes one drop "to make you whole." The statement needs no proof that there are thousands of people in America who are related to the Negro and do not know it, and others who know it but also know that its acknowledgment would not increase their comforts in life.

It was especially necessary to define the term _Negro_ when the intermarriage laws were being considered. These queer laws have always had the support of the vast majority of white people, wherever the Negro has become a considerable part of the population, and especially after the Negro was freed. I call them "queer laws" because they always, in spirit and in effect if not in letter, tend to make the naturally honorable relation of marriage a worse crime than the naturally dishonorable practice of illicit intercourse,-which abuse, however, is practiced chiefly by the men of the stronger against the women of the weaker group. For this illicitness there is in practice no punishment, while the sure penalties of intermarriage range all the way from a fine of one hundred dollars to ten years in the penitentiary,-and the danger of still more horrible extra-legal penalties. There could be but one result of thus outlawing decency and tolerating indecency,-of putting honor under the foot of dishonor,-and that result has been attained in the United States: namely, millions of interracial illegitimates, and some admixture of Caucasian blood in at least nine-tenths of the American Negro group.

Such is the American group against which these discriminating laws have directly and indirectly aimed. In the historic decade (1860 to 1870) many forms of discrimination and distinction began to appear in the laws of the South: in public travel, in the courts and in the matter of the suffrage. In 1865 and 1866 "Jim Crow" laws were pa.s.sed in Florida, Mississippi and Texas, but not in the other states until 1881 when Tennessee started the new era of "Jim Crow," which has since overrun the whole South and threatens, as did slavery itself, to invade the North.

Is it not queer that this pa.s.sion should have gained such headway so long after slavery? It would seem that the more the Negro advances in education and refinement, the less acceptable he becomes to a large number of white people. In North Carolina or South Carolina a Negro may be taken into the white people's car if he be a criminal or a lunatic; but if he be a gentleman and a scholar, it will be a serious offense against earth and heaven, subject to heavy fines,-and when his train reaches Georgia, even the conductor may be fined one thousand dollars!

This race distinction on the cars serves no useful, honorable purpose which cla.s.sified pa.s.senger tickets would not serve. But of all the humiliation, wrong and robbery possible against a free people, the devil and the Sicilian tyrants working together could never have devised a more ingenious scheme than the "Jim Crow" car.

As to the courts. Until 1870 the laws of Iowa forbade the Negro to practice law; many states sought to invalidate or restrict the testimony of a Negro witness against a white person; and most reluctantly of all has any state conceded the Negro the right to be a juror, even where both parties to the suit are Negroes. In law and in theory the Fifteenth Amendment, March 30, 1870, repealed all statutes and nullified all const.i.tutional clauses discriminating against people on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, but in practice in the United States the Negro is still handicapped as a lawyer, discredited as a witness and almost universally excluded from juries. This is queer again in the face of the almost unanimous testimony of the courts to the effect that the Negro juryman is more inclined to convict a real Negro criminal than is the white juryman.

The Reconstruction const.i.tutions of the South, in 1868 and 1869, following the Fourteenth Amendment, gave the Negroes the ballot. It is needless to say that this was not the will of the white majority. And it must always be said of these Reconstruction governments that, whatever faults they may have had, they made the first, and up to the present time the _last_ serious and straight-going efforts to establish real democratic-republican organization in the South. In this era the Congress of the United States was in the hands of the friends of freedom, and in 1866 the Negro was given the ballot in all the territories of the United States. On June 8, 1867, the Congress gave the ballot to the Negroes of the District of Columbia, over the President's veto and against the will of the white inhabitants. In a popular vote on the proposition the city of Was.h.i.+ngton returned 6521 votes against enfranchising the blacks and 35 votes for it; while Georgetown returned the interesting figures of 812 votes against the proposition, and for it one vote. This record of fifty years ago is sufficient to indicate what would be the conditions in Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., if it were left to its own devices.

Such are the facts of obstinate resistance to the Negro's actual freedom, which brought the friends of freedom in Congress rather slowly around to the necessity of adopting the Fourteenth, and when that failed, the Fifteenth Amendment. I repeat that if, after the pa.s.sage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the legislatures and courts and other creatures of the popular suffrage had shown a genius for doing justice to the Negro, it is likely that his friends in Congress would have forgotten him entirely, that the two subsequent Amendments would not have been proposed and that he would have been left outside of the Const.i.tutional pale of citizens.h.i.+p indefinitely. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments put the enemies of freedom successively on trial and each time they failed. Yea, even against the decree of the Fifteenth Amendment have they defeated democracy by indirection and duplicity. If the aim of the Fifteenth Amendment should be finally defeated, it would be the ultimate failure of democracy,-but there are late indications that in the end it will not fail. And of all the many-angled struggles which the colored people are supporting in this country for their advancement and ultimate security, the central aim of every fighting line should be full-fledged citizens.h.i.+p.

There is no doubt about the truth of the plain statement that the Negro race in the United States of America does not get a "square deal." But we observe frequent efforts to minimize the appearance of the great wrong by the ambiguous statement that it is "natural" under the circ.u.mstances. I call the statement ambiguous, because in one sense of the word every fact of life and history is _natural_: all virtue and vice, l.u.s.t and love are natural. Many natural things are very undesirable, and fortunately some of them are not indestructible or unalterable. It may be natural for the white race to disfranchise, "Jim-Crow" and burn Negroes, but the Negro is _naturally_ opposed to that procedure. Is it not natural for the victim to be uncomfortable under these things, to complain against them, to organize and fight them? The naturalness of injustice, if it be natural, does not make it one whit more just. It is natural, or at least it is historic, that men will rob and commit murder and b.a.s.t.a.r.dy-but there seems to be something in man which is higher than nature and which fights against these things.

The same sort of fallacy in reasoning is resorted to when the effort is made to palliate the wrongs done in one section by stating the fact that the same or similar wrongs have been done, are being done or will be done to the Negro in other sections or eventually in all sections of the United States. What on earth has this to do with the wrong, except to make it more horrible? Does it justify wrong to show that other people did it, do it or may do it? If so, then sin itself ought to be the fairest thing in the world, for all men in all ages and all countries have committed it. The poor sinning South pains-takingly points out and tabulates every single instance of its own wrongs against black men which can be found repeated in the North,-and when the North slips from virtue in the same path, it cries out Pharisaically that such horrors are common or even popular in the South. If mere ubiquity justifies, remember that the devil's work is ubiquitous, too.

Again, I have read books and arguments that sought to minimize the importance of industrial, civic and political discriminations against the Negro by saying not only that these practices are "not confined to any section of the country," but also that such-and-such an evil did not even "originate" in the South. We are told with great unction that Philadelphia and San Francisco once excluded Negroes from street cars altogether, that slavery originated in the commerce of the North, and that Jim-Crowism was first met in Ma.s.sachusetts. I have heard that the devil was first met in the Garden of Eden, but he is none the less the devil. And as to origin, who cares where the smallpox or the yellow fever originated? It is their nature, not their origin, which makes them horrible.

There is really no room for one section to boast or to proudly accuse the other. So far as the Negro's experiences go, both sections need to improve perhaps in their ideals but certainly in their practices respecting democratic liberties and human brotherhood. Let the Negro and his friends realize that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Const.i.tution represent not a backward step but a stride forward in civilization, and that they were fostered and ratified, not for the sake of the temporary burden which they may have put upon the white race in the South, but for the benefit of all races, at all times, in all America.

John W. Cromwell. The American Negro Bibliography of the Year

The following resolution adopted at the last meeting is self-explanatory: "That the Academy publish a list of books, pamphlets, magazines and newspaper articles bearing on the Negro Question, with appropriate comment." A letter sent to the Library of Congress brought from the Chief Bibliographer the following reply: "t.i.tles of books relating to the Negro may be found by means of the c.u.mulative Book Index, published monthly; articles in magazines, etc., are listed in the Readers' Guide to periodical literature and its supplements, and in the annual magazine subject index; legal literature is indexed in the index to legal periodicals and the literature of medicine in the Index Medicus. These publications are all subject indexes and to approach the matter from the side of Negro authors.h.i.+p it would be necessary to start with some such book as "Who's Who of the Colored Race," which would enable the compiler to pick out the Negro authors. It would then be necessary to go through the indexes to see whether these authors had published anything during the current year. A source of additional t.i.tles," continues the letter, "would be the periodicals devoted to the interests of the Negro race. These frequently note pamphlets, privately or obscurely printed books which do not get into the regular lists."

This reference to "Who's Who," a book just issued, shows that the Academy is beginning this work at a very propitious time. One year ago "Who's Who" was only a prospect; now it is a realization, the most important this year in this field of bibliography. Its price, $6.00, may restrict its circulation to public libraries, colleges and universities until some worthier publication appears to take its place by the side of similarly named publications which include leaders of thought and action the world over.

Scarcely less important is the Negro Year Book, by Monroe N. Work, in charge of Division of Records and Research at Tuskegee. This is an annual encyclopedia of the Negro, for its scope includes the population of the earth by races, the periodicals published by Africans, "where black men govern," Negroes and Spanish Explorers, Negro Slavery in Colonies and in States, Abolition, Agitation, Slavery and Religious Denominations, Slave Insurrections, the Underground Railroad, Civil Status, Civil and Political Rights, Negro Soldiers, The Church, Education Before and Since the Civil War, Arts, Occupations, Inventions, Agriculture, Crime, Health, Population, National and Fraternal Organizations, Social Settlements, Periodical publications and bibliographies pertaining to the Negro. In no other publication of more than four hundred pages is so much information a.s.sembled. The price, 35 cents, should warrant its circulation wherever there is found school, college or church, student or professional man who affects a serious study of our relative conditions and their adaptation to the broader ones of country and civilization.

"The Negro," by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Ph. D., No. 91 in the Home University Library of H. Holt & Co., New York, traces in twelve chapters the evolution of the race from Ethiopia and Egypt, from its original habitat, from the Cross and the Crescent to the period when the power and the influence of the race were generally recognized, up to the rise of the slave trade, with its blighting effect on conditions in the New World, and the introduction of the Negro Problem in the United States.

Suggestions for further reading follow. An index and maps add to its adaptation and value.

"Education of the Negro Before 1860," by Carter G. Woodson, Ph. D.

(Macmillan), embraces the results of an intensive study of educational conditions prevalent in the United States from Colonial days to the Civil War. The influence of the Quaker, the Jesuit and the Abolitionist is traced to its fruitage, contributory to the laws which gave the public school system in the South. This book deserves to be consulted by the investigator and the student.

"The Black Man's Burden," by William H. Holtzclaw, princ.i.p.al of the Utica (Miss.) N & I. Inst.i.tute for the training of colored young men and women, is also a book of the year. The introduction is written by Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton. It tells the story of the establishment of a school in the black belt of Mississippi hardly less thrilling though on a smaller scale than that of Tuskegee itself, of which the author is a graduate.

Among publications of a sociological nature are "Colored People of Chicago, Ill.," L. H. Bowen; "Industries Among Negroes in St. Louis," by W. A. Crossland; "The Negro as a Dependent, Defective and Delinquent,"

by C. H. McChord; "Urban Conditions in Harlem," by E. F. Dycloff (Outlook, 108:949-54); ditto, by E. D. Jones (Outlook, 109:597); "Manual of Freedmen's Progress," by Francis H. Warren, Secretary of Freedmen's Progress Commission. This volume of 372 pages was authorized by Act 47, Public Acts of Michigan, 1915.

Political conditions of the Negro Problem are discussed in the "Aftermath of the Civil War," by Powell Clayton; "Political History of Slavery," by J. Z. George; "Studies in South: Parties and Politics of Georgia," by C. M. Thompson; "President Lincoln's Att.i.tude," by H. W.

Wilbur; "Police Control in South Carolina," by H. M. Henry; "Slavery Early Heritage of the South"; "America's Greatest Problem," R. W.

Shufeldt. Though all these are white authors, they are in an objective sense inclusive in an American Negro Bibliography.

"Negro Wit and Humor," by. M. F. Harmon; "Mexico as an Asylum for the Negro," by O. M. Donaldson; "Morals and Manners Among Negro Americans,"

by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois are other t.i.tles that reflect current thought.

When we invade the realm of the magazine, the newspaper or other periodical we find a variety of topics and different, phases of the same general subject. The range discussed in the magazine intensifies popular thought to a greater degree than the reading of books by the relatively smaller number of individuals.

"Thinking White Down South," in Outlook 111:9-10, does not on its face suggest its pertinence to this question.

"My View of Segregation Laws," by Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, in New Republic, 51:113-14.

The Negro Exposition at Richmond is given greater prestige in the Review of Reviews (52:85-8) than elsewhere. "The Country's Att.i.tude Towards the Negro," by Oswald G. Villard, in Nation (99:788-40), and the same publication (100:187-8); the conferring of the Spingarn medal to E. E.

Just, member of this Academy; "The Education of the Mind of the Negro Child in School and Society" (1:357-60), and "The Southern Tribute to a Negro," in Dial (59:409-10).

"Segregation and the Vote" embraces more than a third of fifty t.i.tles not otherwise mentioned. The recent opinion of the United States Supreme Court dealing with what is popularly known as the Grandfather clauses of Southern const.i.tutions and statutes, is discussed in 8 Law and Bankruptcy, 8:236-6. The Literary Digest (Vol. 15:5) gives a symposium on the subject. The Nation prophesies the end of the Negro politically in 100 years (100:443 of April 12, 1915). The Independent on the other hand (Vol. 88:3-4), sees the wrong of these clauses righted. The Outlook in 110:486-7 (June 30, 1915), gives another view.