NEGRO LIFE

The negro problem in the South cannot be solved, nor is much light thrown upon it by the conditions of the race elsewhere. The immediate and pressing issue is the widespread belief that the great numbers of them in the South are an unsatisfactory element of the population. The total Negroes in the United States in 1900, the last available figures, was 8,834,000. They are, however, very unequally distributed throughout the Union; in twenty Northern states and territories there are only 50,000 altogether; in the states from Pennsylvania northward there are about 400,000; from Ohio westward about 500,000; while in the one state of Georgia there are over a million; 7,898,000 lived in the fifteen former slaveholding states; 7,187,000 in the eleven seceding states; and 5,055,000 in the seven states of the Lower South. At the rate of increase shown during the last forty years there will soon be 10,000,000 in the South alone. These figures have since 1900 been somewhat disturbed by the natural growth of population and by the interstate movement, so that the proportion of blacks in the North is doubtless now a little larger; but the fact remains that the habitat of the black is in the Southern States. Even there, great variations occur from state to state, and from place to place. In Briscoe County, Texas, there are 1,253 Whites and not a single Negro; in Beaufort County, S. C., there are 3,349 Whites and 32,137 Africans; on the island of St. Helena in this last county are 8,700 colored and 125 white people; and on Fenwick’s Island there are something like 100 Negroes and not a white person.

As between country and city, the Negro is a rural man; the only Southern cities containing over 50,000 of them in the Lower South are New Orleans and perhaps Atlanta; in the former slaveholding states out of 8,000,000 Negroes only about 1,000,000 lived in cities of 8,000 people and upwards, which is less in proportion than the Whites. In a very black district like the Delta of the Mississippi they form a majority of the city population. In 72 of the Southern places having a population of 2,500 or more at least half the population is African; but their drift cityward is less marked than that of the white people, eighty-five per cent of all the Negroes live outside of cities and towns. The Negroes have no race tradition of city life in Africa, are no fonder than Whites of moving from country to city, and throw no unendurable strain on the city governments.

A favorite assertion is that the American Negroes are either dying out or nearing the point where the death-rate will exceed the birth-rate. Hoffmann, in his “Race Traits,” has examined this question in a painstaking way, and proves conclusively that both North and South the death-rate of the black race is much higher than that of the Whites. In Philadelphia, for instance, the ratios are 30 to 1,000 against 20 to 1,000. Upon this point there are no trustworthy figures for the whole country; but an eighth of the Negroes live in the so-called “registration area,” which includes most of the large cities; and in that area the death-rate in 1900 is computed at 30 to 1,000 for Negroes and 17 to 1,000 for the Whites. This excess is largely due to the frightful mortality among negro children, which is almost double that among Whites in the same community. In Washington in 1900 one fifth of the white children under a year old died and almost one half of the colored children.

When Hoffmann attempts to show that the negro death-rate is accelerating, he is obliged to depend upon scanty figures from a few Southern cities. In Charleston, for instance, the records show in the forties (a period of yellow fever) a white death-rate of 16 and a colored death-rate of 20, against recent rates of 22 and 44 to the 1,000 respectively; but in New Orleans Mr. Hoffmann’s own figures show a reduction of the colored death-rate from 52 in the fifties to 40 in the nineties. The only possible conclusion from these conflicting results is that the earlier mortality statistics on which he relies are few and unreliable.

Nevertheless, the present conditions of negro mortality are frightful. They appear to be due primarily to ignorance and neglect in the care of children, and secondly, to an increase of dangerous diseases. The frequent statement that consumption was almost unknown among Negroes in slavery times is abundantly disproved by Hoffmann; but the disease is undoubtedly gaining, for much the same reason that it ravages the Indians in Alaska, namely, that the people now live in close houses which become saturated with the virus of the disease. Syphilis is also fearfully prevalent, and the most alarming statements are made by physicians who have practice or hospital service among the Negroes; but the testimony as to the extent of the disease is conflicting, and there are other race elements in the United States which are depleted by venereal disease. The blacks also suffer from the use of liquor, though drunkards are little known among the cotton hands; but drugs, particularly cocaine and morphine, are widely used. In one country store a clerk has been known to make up a hundred and fifty packages of cocaine in a single night.

Notwithstanding the undoubtedly high death-rate, the birth-rate is so much greater that at every census the negro race is shown to be still growing; as Murphy says: “Whenever the Negro has looked down the lane of annihilation he has always had the good sense to go around the other way.” The census of 1870 was so defective that it must be thrown out of account, but the negro population, which was about 4,400,000 in 1860, and 6,600,000 in 1880, had grown to 8,800,000 in 1900. It is true that the rate of increase is falling off both absolutely and in proportion to the white race. In the South Central group of states, which includes most of the Lower South, the population increased about forty-eight per cent from 1860 to 1880 and only thirty-nine per cent in the next double decade; while the white population has in both periods increased at about sixty per cent, with a rising ratio.

The urban Negro has a high death-rate, not only in the South but in Northern cities; in Boston and Indianapolis the birth-rate of the Negroes does not keep pace with the deaths, and they would disappear but for steady accessions from the South. The Southern blacks on the land are doing better and are growing steadily; neither statistics nor observations support the theory that the Negro is dying out in the South; and comparatively slight changes in resort to skilled physicians, in the spread of trained nurses, in infants’ food, may check the child mortality. On the other hand, any increase in thrift and in saving habits will almost certainly affect the size of families and diminish the average birth-rate.

The very words “The Negro” suggest the misleading idea that there is within the Southern states a clearly defined negro race. In fact, physically, intellectually, and morally, it is as much subdivided as the white race. What is supposed to be the pure African type is the Guinea Negro, very black, very uncouth, and hard to civilize. What these people are is easy to find out, for a great part of the inhabitants of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia are of that race and speak what is called the Gullah dialect, which Joel Chandler Harris has preserved in his “Daddy Jack.” Besides these children and grandchildren of imported Negroes there is near Mobile a small group of sturdy people perfectly well known to have been brought into the United States in 1858 in the yacht Wanderer. These may be part of a cargo from which Senator Tillman’s family bought a gang, and he says of them: “These poor wretches, half starved as they have been, were the most miserable lot of human beings—the nearest to the missing link with the monkey I have ever put my eyes on.”

The whole African problem is immeasurably complicated and contorted by the fact that of the Negroes in the United States not more than four fifths at the highest are pure blacks. The remainder are partially Caucasian in race, and occupy a midway position, often of unhappiness and sometimes of downright misery. As to the number of mulattoes, there is no trustworthy statistical statement; the census figures for 1890 reported that out of the total “negro” population eighteen per cent was mulatto in the northern group of Southern states, and about fifteen per cent in the Lower South; but these figures are confessedly defective and are probably vitiated by including some members of the lighter negro races as mulattoes.

Shannon, in his “Racial Integrity,” while unhesitatingly accepting these very imperfect figures, attempts to supplement them by calculations made from an inspection of crowds; and it is his opinion that in the smaller cities, the towns and villages, about twenty-two per cent are mulattoes—“and that unless this amalgamation is effectually checked in some way, this ratio will continue to rise until practically the whole of the negro race will come to be of mixed blood.” Shufeldt, in his “The Negro, A Menace,” asserts that at least sixty per cent of the Negroes have some white blood, and is confident that the proportion is increasing. The census authorities of 1900 commit themselves only to the generalization that the mulattoes are most numerous in proportion to the number of Whites in any given community. As to the testimony of observers, there is every variety of appearance. You may see crowds of Negroes at a railway station in Georgia, of whom two thirds are purely mulatto; you may visit islands in South Carolina in which not one fortieth part have white blood.

The number of mulattoes is less important than their character and general relation to the negro problem. Most Southerners assert and doubtless believe that the mulatto is physically weak; but you see them working side by side with pure blacks, as roustabouts and plantation hands, and some planters tell you that one is as good as another in the field. People assert that mulattoes are more susceptible to disease, so that they are dying out; and some authorities say that there are no mulatto children after the third or fourth generation. There is no scientific ground for these assertions, and one of the highest medical authorities in the South is of the conviction that except for a somewhat greater liability to tuberculosis they are as healthy as the full bloods. Of course, the greater number of mulattoes in the United States are the children of mulattoes, and to what extent the proportion is kept up by further accessions from the white race is absolutely impossible to determine. Many statements on the whole subject come from people who hate the mulatto and like to think that he is a poor creature who is going to relieve the world of a disagreeable problem by leaving it.

From the same source comes the assertion that the mulatto is fundamentally vicious, frequently made by people who argue in the same breath that the so-called progress of the negro race means nothing, because it is all due to mulattoes. The mulattoes do include a much larger proportion of the educated than the pure bloods, and hence are more likely to furnish such criminals as forgers and embezzlers; but there seems no ground for the widespread belief that the mulattoes are more criminal than the pure blacks. That there is a special temptation more likely to come to some members of the mulatto section than to the pure black was suggested by a Southern gentleman when he said: “The black girls won’t work and the yellow girls don’t have to, they are looked after!” When asked to suggest who it was who looked after them, the conversation languished. The question of the character of the mulatto is a serious one, because most of the spokesmen and markedly successful people of the race are not pure bloods; and because of the unhappy position of thousands of men and women who have the aptitudes, the tastes, and the educations of white people; yet in the common estimation are bracketed with the rudest, most ignorant and lowest of a crude, ignorant and low race.The status of the Negroes is in many ways altered by the steady though limited movement from South to North. The Negroes are subject to waves of excitement, and in 1879 a colored agitator created a furore for colonization by spreading abroad the news that in Liberia there was a “bread tree” and another tree which ran lard instead of sap, so that all you had to do was to cut from one and catch from the other. A systematic effort has been made to settle colored people in Indiana, in order to hold that State in the Republican column; and there are now probably nearly a hundred thousand there, a third of whom are settled in Indianapolis, where they furnish a race problem of growing seriousness. The Negroes in the city of Washington have increased eight times in forty years. They have repeatedly been brought into the North as strike breakers, often with the result of serious riots. In 1879 thousands of them left various parts of the South for Kansas, and in some cases the river boats refused to take them. As a result some Southern states passed statutes requiring heavy license fees (sometimes as much as $1,000 a year) from labor agents who should induce people to go to other states. Nevertheless, there are now over 50,000 in Kansas and over 100,000 in the neighboring new State of Oklahoma. At present there are in New York and Philadelphia nearly a hundred agents who draw Negroes northward, and they bring thousands of people every year, chiefly to enter domestic service. The movement is ill organized and does not by any means include the most thrifty, since passage money is often advanced by the agents.

The numbers of the Negroes are not in themselves alarming. In most Southern states they are fewer in proportion than the foreign element in many Northern states. The hostility to the Negro is not based on his numbers, but on his supposed inferiority of character. On this point there is a painful lack of accurate knowledge, because there is so little contact between the Whites and their negro neighbors. The white opinion of the blacks is founded with little knowledge of the home life of the other race. How many white people in the city of Atlanta, for instance, have actually been inside the house of a prosperous, educated Negro? How many have actually sat over the fire of a one-room negro cabin? The Southern Whites, with few exceptions, teach no Negroes, attend no negro church services, penetrate into no negro society, and they see the Negro near at hand chiefly as unsatisfactory domestic servants, as field hands of doubtful profit, as neglectful and terrified patients, as clients in criminal suits or neighborhood squabbles, as prisoners in the dock, as convicted criminals, as wretched objects for the vengeance of a mob.

An encouraging sign is the disposition of both white and colored investigators to study the Negro in his home. Professor DuBois has directed such researches both in Southern cities and in the open country; there are also two monographs upon the religious life of the Negro, one directed by Vanderbilt University and the other by Atlanta University; and Mr. Odum, of the University of Mississippi, has prepared a study upon the Negro in fifty towns in various states which, still in manuscript, is one of the most instructive inquiries ever made into negro life.

Naturally, such investigations are easier in the cities, and we know much more about the urban Negro, a sixth of the population, than of the rural black, who are five sixths. In the large cities there is an African population, a considerable part of which is prosperous. Here are the best colored schools, the greatest demand for African labor, the largest opportunity for building up small businesses among the Negroes themselves. Here are to be found most of the rich or well-to-do Negroes; and there is a large contingent of steady men employed in all kinds of capacities, about whom there is little complaint. On the other hand, a broad fringe of the population lives in houses or rooms actually less spacious and less decent than the one-room cabin in the fields. This floating and unsteady part of the negro race finds a favorable habitat in the towns and small cities, where there is less opportunity for steady employment than in the large cities. From this class come the domestic servants, who will be considered in a later chapter.

The typical social life of the Negro is that of the field laborer, who lives in a poor and crude way. The most common residence is the one-room house, without a glass window, set in a barren and unfenced waste, with a few wretched outhouses, the worst cabins being on the land of the least progressive and humane planters. You may see on the land of a wealthy White one-room houses with chinks between the logs such that the rain drives into them, the tenant family crowded into the space between the fireplace and the unenticing beds, dirty clothing hanging about, hardly a chair to sit upon, outside the house not a paling or a building of any kind, and pigs rooting on the ground under the floor. On a tolerable Mississippi plantation with seventy-four families, seventeen had one-room cabins, and one of those families comprised eleven persons. Some Southerners have a theory that you can be sure that a cabin with a garden is occupied by a White; but that is a fallacy, for there are many negro gardens, although some planters prohibit them on the ground that they will become weed spots. In the cities the Negroes live for the most part in settlements by themselves, in which there are miserable tenements, usually owned by white people and no better than the one-room country house. Of course, thrifty colored people in country or city are able to build comfortable houses for themselves.

Inasmuch as both father and mother work either in the fields or in domestic service, there is little family life either in country or city. The food is poor and monotonous; it is chiefly salt pork, bacon, corn bread (usually pone), and some sort of molasses. Fresh meat is almost impossible to get outside of town, chickens are raised though not very plentiful, vegetables are few. For little children this diet is intolerable, and that is why so many of them die in infancy. Close observers declare that Negroes are brutal to their children, but one may be much among them without seeing any instances. They are also accused of deserting their old people; children often wander away and lose track of their parents, but you will find districts where the old are well looked after by their kindred. The most serious interference in family life is the field work of the women, and the breaking up of families by the desertion of the father; but somehow in all these family jars the children are seldom left without anyone to care for them.

Public amusements are almost wanting for the Negro. They are commonly not admitted to white theaters, concerts, and other similar performances. In the country there is nothing better than to crowd the plantation store of a Saturday night in a sort of club. Few of them read for pleasure, and there is little to relieve the monotony. Perhaps for that reason they are fond of going about the country, and you see them everywhere on horseback, or in little bull carts, or on foot. They will spend their last dollar for an excursion on the railroad, and at the turn of the year, January 1st, many of them may be seen moving. The circus is one of the greatest delights of the Negro; he will travel many miles for this pleasure. The field hand is thrown back on coarse enjoyments; hard drinking is frequent among both men and women, yet the habitual drunkard is rare; the country Negro is fond of dances, which often turn out unseemly and lead to affrays and murders.

For their social and jovial needs Negroes find some satisfaction in their church life. Their own statisticians claim 3,254,000 communicants worshiping in 27,000 church buildings, of which the greater part are in the country. Contrary to expectation forty years ago, the Negroes have been little attracted to the Catholic Church, which is so democratic in its worship, and possesses a ritual which might be expected to appeal to negro nature. Nearly half the church members are some sort of Baptists, and half of the rest adhere to the Methodist denominations. Some city churches have buildings costing twenty, thirty, and even fifty thousand dollars, and they are pertinacious about raising money for construction and other similar purposes.

These churches do not represent an advanced type of piety. Conversions are violent and lapses frequent, and the minister is not certain to lend the weight of his conduct to his words. There are many genuinely pious and hard-working ministers, but at least half of them in both city and country are distrusted by the Whites and discredited by their own people. Simply educating the minister does not solve the problem, for what the people want is somebody who will arouse them to a pleasurable excitement. That is, the present type of piety among the negro churches is about that which prevailed among the white people along the frontier fifty years ago, and which has not entirely died out in the backwoods and the mountains. A genuine colored service is extremely picturesque, the preacher working like a locomotive going up a heavy grade, while the hearers assist him with cries of, “Talk to um, preacher—Great God—Ha! Ha! You is right, brudder—Preaching now—Talk ’bout um—Holy Lord.” Then the brethren are called upon to pray; in that musical intoning which is so appropriate for the African voice; then the minister lines out the hymns and the congregation bursts out into that combination of different minor keys which is the peculiar gift of the negro race.

Another negro enjoyment is the secret orders, which are almost as numerous as the churches and probably have as many male members. These societies are first of all burial and benefit orders with dues ranging from fifty cents a month upward, for which sick benefits of four dollars a week are paid and about forty dollars for burial. The societies build lodge houses not only in cities but in plantation regions; and the judgment of those who have most carefully examined them is that they are on the whole a good thing. They give training in public speaking and in common action; they furnish employment to managers and clerks; and their considerable funds are for the most part honestly managed. Some of them publish newspapers chiefly devoted to publishing the names of officers and members. In Mississippi there are thirty-four licensed orders with 8,000 members. They carry $30,000,000 of risks, and in a year paid $430,000 to policy holders. Naturally they have rather high-sounding names, such as “Grand Court of Calanthe,” “Lone Star of Race Pride,” “United Brethren of Friendship and Sisters of Mysterious Ten,” “Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise.” Some efforts are making to build up national societies such as the “Royal Trust Company” and “The Ethiopian Progressive Association of America,” which, according to its own statement, is “incorporated with an authorized Capital Stock a hundred times larger than the next most heavily capitalized Negro corporation on Earth. It is designed to fraternize, build and cement the vital interests of Negroes throughout the world into one colossal Union.” The order and the church are both social clubs and include a good part of the race both in city and country, and these organizations are the work of the last forty years, for in slavery times the negro churches were closely watched by the Whites, and secret societies would have been impossible.