NEGRO CHARACTER

The social organization of the Anglo-Saxons in the South, their relations with each other, their strife for leadership, takes little account of the other race, though it is diffused throughout the country; it is everywhere with the Whites, but not of them. Although to the Southern mind the community is made up entirely of white people, numerically almost one third of the inhabitants of the former slaveholding states are Negroes, and in the Lower South there are five million blacks against seven million Whites. The moral and material welfare of the South is intimately affected by their presence, and still more by their character. They are as much children of the soil as the Whites; they are everywhere distributed, except in the mountains; their labor is necessary for the prosperity of the section; they have a social organization of their own and many of the appliances of civilization; they own some land, travel, are everywhere in evidence, yet they are distrusted by nearly all the Whites, despised by more than half of them, and hated by a considerable and apparently increasing fraction.

Even the names habitually used by the Whites for their neighbors show contempt. “Nigger,” though often used among the blacks, is felt by them to be depreciatory; “Darky” is jocular; “Negro” is condescending; “Blacks” as a generic term is incorrect in view of the light color of a large fraction of the race. Afro-American, the invention of the Negroes, is pedantic. The Negroes themselves much prefer “Colored person,” which is also a term used in directories.

Every Southern man and woman consciously or unconsciously makes generalizations as to the whole race from those comparatively few individuals with whom he is acquainted. Hence conventional and offhand statements, obviously based upon little direct knowledge of the Negro, abound in private conversation, in public addresses and in print. For example, a few months ago the mayor of Houston, himself the son of a Massachusetts man, who went down to Texas before the Civil War, was led by an accidental question to deliver an extempore indictment of the whole negro race under twelve heads then and there noted down as follows:

(1) The old Negroes in slavery times were a good lot, but Negroes nowadays are worthless.

(2) The Negro is the best laborer that the South ever had.

(3) Education destroys the value of the Negro, by making him unwilling to work.

(4) The South makes great sacrifices to educate the Negroes.

(5) The Negroes on the farms often do well; but those are the old slaves.

(6) The young Negroes will not work on the land but drift off, probably to the cities.

(7) The pure Negro is much superior in character to the Mulattoes, who are the most vicious part of the race.

(8) The mulatto is physically weak and he is rapidly dying out.(9) Five sixths of all the Negroes in this city have some white blood.

(10) The educated Negroes fill the prisons.

(11) Booker T. Washington has good ideas.

(12) Negroes must be “kept in their place,” otherwise there will be general rapine and destruction.

Some curious errors of perspective are discernible in this picture: the Negro is at the same time the best laborer and the worst laborer; the South continues to make great sacrifices to educate blacks who will not work and who fill the prisons; the mulatto is at the same time dying out and furnishing five sixths of the colored population of a large city. Such generalizations are the daily food of the South. Judge Norwood, of Georgia, on retiring from the bench of the city court of Savannah, where he had tried twelve thousand colored people, recently left on record his formal opinion that the Negro never works except from necessity or compulsion, has no initiative, is brutal to his family, recognizes no government except force, knows neither ambition, honor nor shame, possesses no morals; and the judge protests against “the insanity of putting millions of semi-savages under white men’s laws for their government.” The mayor of Winona, Miss., publicly announces that “The negro is a lazy, lying, lustful animal, which no conceivable amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate has said: “So the poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentiaries and our jails.” Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, in his farewell message to the Legislature, in January, 1908, called the Negroes, who are in a majority in his state: “A race inherently unmoral, ignorant and superstitious, with a congenital tendency to crime, incapable unalterably of understanding the meaning of free government, devoid of those qualities of mind and body necessary to self-control, and being unable to control themselves.”

One of the sources of confusion with regard to the Negro is that people speak of “the African Race” which they suppose to be pictured on the Egyptian monuments, to be briefly mentioned by Herodotus, and to be in the same condition now in Africa as it was when first described. As a matter of fact, there are several native races, varying in color from the intensely black and uncouth Guinea Negro of the West Coast to the olive-brown Arabs of the Sahara desert, and in civilization from the primitive dwarf tribes of Central Africa to the organized kingdoms of the Zulus and the thriving states of the Central lake region. Many arguments as to the negro character are based upon the supposed profound barbarism and cannibalism of all Africa. The truth is that the African tribes, with all their ferocity and immorality, had advanced farther in the path of civilization previous to their first contact with the Europeans than the North American Indians of the Atlantic and Mississippi regions; they had gone farther in the arts, had built up more numerous communities, and established a more complex society. The curse of Africa, from which the Indians were not free, was slavery and slave-hunting, which from time immemorial have led to ferocious wars and reckless destruction of life. On the side of religion, the African has built up a weird and emotional system, honeycombed with witchcraft and a belief in magic, stained with bloodshed and human sacrifice. Yet all explorers and residents in Africa find many attractive traits in the Negro; he loves a joke, makes a tolerable soldier, often shows faithful affection for his leaders, and under the supervision of white officials, seems capable of a peaceful and happy life.

That the character of the Negro should need to be a matter of absorbing interest to the Southern Whites and a study to Northern observers, is the fault of the Sixteenth Century European. The Negroes have for ages been in contact with white races on their northern and eastern borders; Ethiopian captives were brought to Rome, and the black slave is a favorite character in the “Arabian Nights.” But that this race, situated on the other side of the globe, should affect the commerce and obstruct the political development of America, is one of the oddities of history. The Negroes, who have never made a conquest outside their own continent, who were first brought to Europe on the same footing as ostrich feathers and elephants, as objects of trade and as curiosities, have, through the greed and cruelty of our ancestors, planted a colony of ten million people in our land; and other groups, mounting up to several millions, in the West Indies and Brazil.

Many attempts are made to determine the ability of the Negro by what he has done in Africa and in Latin America. He has not lifted himself out of barbarism in his own continent, though he has founded large and prosperous states carried on solely by Africans; and Winston Spencer Churchill, from his recent visit to the heart of Africa, sees reason to predict that he will form permanent communities. The curses of Africa for centuries have been inhuman superstitions and devastating slave raids, dignified by the name of wars, for which the white and Arab slave dealers are partly responsible. Torture of captives, sack of towns, murder of infants, coffles of slaves marching to a market, are not so far away from the practice of European nations two or three centuries ago that we can brand them as evidence of irreclaimable barbarism. Pappenheim at Magdeburg and Lannes at the takings of Saragossa could match many of the worst crimes of the African impi on a raid, or of a white agent of the Congo Free State collecting his rubber tax. Protestant Germany and England left off the cruelest treatment of supposed witches only about two centuries ago. Cannibalism and the slave trade seem now on their last legs in Africa, and those white men who have lived longest in the heart of Africa seem to have the largest hope that the Dark Continent may be enlightened and a confidence in an African capacity for an existence much above the savage traditions.

These hopes are based in most cases on the expectation that white people will furnish the government and direct the industries. Whatever Africa may do for itself, the one notable effort to create an African state on an Anglo-Saxon model has been a failure. The Republic of Liberia was founded nearly a century ago, as a means of regenerating Africa by Christian civilization diffused from this spot on the coast into the interior; it was to be an outport for tropical products and to furnish Africa an example of democratic state building. Liberia is the African state in which the United States is especially interested, for it was planted by American missionaries and agents of the Colonization Society; and has been an offshoot and almost a colony of this country. From the first it has been cursed by malaria, by the inroads and pressure of savages, and by a situation off the world’s highways of commerce. To be sure its 15,000 civilized people have a public revenue of about $300,000, with a total import and export trade of about $1,000,000; but all efforts to induce a considerable number of Negroes from America to try their fortunes in Liberia have been failures. A colored magazine in Boston has had the humor and good-temper lately to reprint the following squib upon the opportunities in that country for the American Negro:

Liberia’s bridges, mills, and dams,
Need many thousand Afro-Ams.
Liberia’s ewes, Liberia’s lambs,
Like black sheep, baa for Afro-Ams.
Liberia’s road, Liberia’s trams,
For steady jobs want Afro-Ams.
The barber shops, like Uncle Sam’s,
Give hope to myriad Afro-Ams.
There’s bacon, hominy, yes, hams,
For all industrious Afro-Ams.
With faintest praise Liberia damns
The slow-arriving Afro-Ams.
Unless their woes at home are shams,
Why don’t they go, the Afro-Ams?

The inquiry of the final stanza is to the point, for though the American Colonization Society is still in existence, and within a few years has tried to send out a shipload of Negroes, Liberia attracts almost nobody and is a failure, either as a tropical home for the American Negro or as a center of Christianity and civilization for Africa.

How is it with the colonies and independent states of Americanized Africans in the West Indies, where there have been blacks for as much as four centuries? Of these communities Cuba, Porto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, the Windward and Leeward Islands were, or have been until recently, European colonies. Cuba’s population is about half Negro; and they come nearer social and political equality with the Whites than anywhere else in the world; but there the dominant element is the pure Spanish or Spanish mestizo. In Jamaica since the emancipation of 1833 the races have had but one conflict, that of 1866, which was at the time thought to be due to the cruelty and panic of Governor Eyre. The blacks of Jamaica, to a large extent small proprietors, support themselves in the easy fashion of the tropics; but the 15,000 Whites who live among the 750,000 blacks seem less able than the like class in the Southern states to organize negro labor and make it profitable. The Negroes are taught to read and write, they have furnished thousands of acceptable laborers for the Panama Canal, and their death-rate is nearly down to the normal figures of the white people for their latitude. Their illiteracy, however, is about that of their brethren in the United States and nearly two thirds of all the children are illegitimate. Their government is practically still, as for two centuries and a half, out of their hands and in control of the English.

The Negroes in Hayti are popularly supposed to have deteriorated intellectually and morally. To be sure the alternating series of despotism and anarchy in that unhappy country are not very different from the course of things in the white community of Venezuela; and it would be a great mistake to suppose that the Haytian Negroes when they became independent a century ago had absorbed the civilization of their Spanish and French masters; most of them were still a fierce and intractable folk recently brought from Africa. Their experience, however, and that of their neighbors in Santo Domingo, throws light upon the capacity of the African to build up a state, for both these lands are wholly governed by people of the African race. Neither has gained stability or improved in education or morals in half a century, though the Haytians are trying to set forth one of the arts of civilization by borrowing more money than they are willing to pay. The moral, or rather unmoral, conditions of this and other West Indian islands are a fair basis for argument as to the average character of the race.

The experience of the race in the Northern states leads rather to negative than to positive conclusions as to their intellectual and moral power. Time was when there were slaves on Beacon Hill; when Venus, “servant to Madam Wadsworth,” was admitted to the First Church of Cambridge; and the Faculty of Harvard College warned the students not to consort with Titus, “servant of the late President Wadsworth.” The colonial Negroes, who in no Northern colony were more numerous than six or seven per cent of the population, have left an offspring to which, since the Civil War, has been added a considerable immigration from the South. In 1900, 356,000 Africans born in the South were living in the North, and that proportion has since steadily increased. Nobody can pretend that this movement has improved the conditions of the Northern states, and the Negroes themselves encounter many hardships; they can vote, they get some small offices, and would get more if they could settle factional quarrels and unite behind single candidates; they have full and equal rights before the courts; they are commonly admitted to the public schools. On the other hand, separate negro schools have been provided in Indianapolis, in some places in New Jersey, and are likely to spread farther. Partly because many trades unions will not receive them, partly because they are thought to be less effective than Whites, partly from sheer race prejudice, they find many avenues of employment closed to them. Few people like them as neighbors, and though admitted to most Northern high schools and colleges they do not find that free intercourse of mind with mind which is not only one of the joys of living, but is a great upbuilder of character.

The situation of the Negroes in the North is frankly discouraging, both from their own point of view and that of the Northern White. Here if anywhere the race ought to show those qualities of determination and thrift and uprightness which its friends desire for it. Many of the Northern Negroes live on the same plane as the white people; many others do well, considering their lesser opportunities; and as a whole they earn their living; for where the men are lazy the women take care of them. But they are the objects of a steady prejudice; the reason for the school separation is that parents do not wish their children to be on such terms of acquaintance that they can learn all that the negro children know. Throughout the North there is a distrust of the negro voter, a belief that the Negroes furnish more than their share of the criminals.

To a large degree this is simply saying that the lowest part of the population is thought to be low; people dislike Negroes for the same reason that they object to many other persons, whether foreign or American born; the woeful difference is that any incompetent white individual may pull himself or push his children out of the slums and into association with the best, while color sets the Negro apart, no matter what his success in life; and the most respectable of them is treated as though responsible for the worst of his race. The door of opportunity is open in the North, but it does not open wide; the Northern colored man enters into what our ancestors called the half-way covenant; he, like his Southern brother, walks within the veil. Or is the bottom difficulty described by the immigrant from South Carolina to the North who said, “Yes, dere mought be more chances in New York than dere is in Charleston, but, please Gawd, ’pears like you ain’t so likely to take dem chances.”

The fundamental reason why race relations in the South are regulated by the white people, and are circumscribed by what they think best for themselves, is the universal white belief that the African is of an inferior race, so inferior that he cannot be trusted to take a part in the political life of the community, or even to manage his own affairs. That opinion is temperately stated by Thomas Nelson Page as follows: “After long, elaborate, and ample trial the Negro race has failed to discover the qualities which have inhered in every race of which history gives the record, which has advanced civilization, or has shown capacity to be itself greatly advanced.” It is brutally stated by Governor Vardaman: “God Almighty created the Negro for a menial—he is essentially a servant.... When left to himself, he has universally gone back to the barbarism of his native jungles. While a few mixed breeds and freaks of the race may possess qualities which justify them to aspire above that station, the fact remains that the race is fit for that and nothing more.”

The supposed inferiority of the negro race is not a foregone conclusion. First it rests on the tacit assumption that there is a “negro race” which can be distinguished from the white race, not only by color but also by aptitudes, moral standards and habits of mind. Some experts in the South, who have studied the race as scientific men study the Indians of the Amazon, declare that they are unable to find any large body of traits which all Negroes possess; that they observe in no colored person characteristics which cannot be found in some Whites; and that they possess every variety of intellectual power and moral capacity. Then there is the question of the mulatto, who in his race mixture may be more white man than Negro. Is he to be included in the general indictment of inferiority? And, finally, what is to be argued from the men of power whom the negro race has displayed—a few in slavery days, and many in these later times?

The most extravagant statement of negro inferiority is that the worst white man is better than the best Negro because of the supernal quality of the white race. A Southern writer talks of “The endless creations of art and science and religion and law and literature and every other form of activity, the full-voiced choir of all the Muses, the majestic morality, the hundred-handed philosophy, the manifold wisdom of civilization—all of this infinite cloud of witnesses gather swarming upon us from the whole firmament of the past and proclaim with pentacostal tongue the glory and supremacy of Caucasian man.” Judged by their achievements from the dawn of history to the present moment, the white race has indubitably achieved immensely more than the black race, but it has also achieved more than its own ancestors whom Taine thus characterizes: “Huge white bodies, ... with fierce, blue eyes, ... ravenous stomachs, ... of a cold temperament, slow to love, home stayers, prone to brutal drunkenness: ... Pirates at first: ... seafaring, war, and pillage was their whole idea of a freeman’s work.... Of all barbarians ... the most cruelly ferocious.”After all, a race cannot be proved inferior by what it has not done; the United States as a war-making power has so far been inferior to the Germans and the Japanese, but its strength has not been tested. The real question is, does the Negro now, in the things that he is actually doing, show as much power as low and ignorant white people who have had no more than his opportunity? The Reconstruction governments, which are the stock in trade of those who decry the Negro, are little to the point, because they were to a considerable degree engineered by Whites, and because they lasted only from one to eight years. On the other hand, the great powers of a few select members of the race, and the excellent mentality and character of many others, are not proof that its average stamina is up to that of the white man; they must be tested by what they do.

The African in America has had little opportunity to work out a civilization of his own, and it certainly cannot be charged against him as a fault that he has accepted the white civilization which was at first forced upon him. As one of their own number says: “The Negro has advanced in exactly the same fashion as the white race has advanced, by taking advantage of all that has gone before. Other men have labored and we have entered into their labors.” Yet, having accepted a heritage of literature, law and religion, from his white brother, the Negro cannot escape from the standard of the white man among whom he lives who have had like opportunities; and if he does not measure up to it it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the race is inferior. Either the Negro is a white man with a black skin, who after a reasonable term of probation must now take the responsibilities of equal character (though not as yet of equal performance), or else it must be admitted that, though a man, he is a somewhat different kind of man from the White.

A favorite Southern phrase is: “The Negro is a child,” and many considerable people accord him a child’s privileges. The ignorant black certainly has a child’s fondness for fun, freedom from care for the morrow, and incapacity to keep money in his pocket; but some planters will talk to you all day about the shrewdness with which he manages to get money out of the unsuspecting white man; and when it comes to serious crime, it is not every judge who makes allowance for childishness in the race. The theory that the negro mind ceases to develop after adolescence perhaps has something in it; but there are too many hard-headed and far-sighted persons, both full bloods and mulattoes, who have unusual minds, to permit the problem to be settled by the phrase, “The Negro is a child.”

Genuine friends and well-wishers of the Negro feel intensely the irresponsibility of the race. A business man who all his life has been associated with them says: “He has all the good qualities of the lazy, thriftless person, he is amiable, generous and tractable. He has no activity in wrongdoing. He has the imitative gift in a remarkable degree, and always I love him for his faults, he is without craftiness, without greed. You will find no Rockefellers nor Carnegies among them. He is not a scoundrel from calculation.... He takes as his pattern the highest type of white man he is acquainted with. He has no sort of regard for what he thinks the poor white trash.... I don’t know how best to help him, but I like him, like him and his careless devil-may-care ways. I like him because his whole soul is not absorbed in this craze for getting money. I like him because he does no evil by premeditation, because he sees no evil in everything he does, then goes and does it. I like him because some day in the distant past I was like him.”

The main issue must be fairly faced by the friends as well as the enemies of the colored race. Measuring it by the white people of the South, or by the correspondingly low populations of Southern or Northern cities, the Negroes as a people appear to be considerably below the Whites in mental and moral status. There are a million or two exceptions, but they do not break the force of the eight or nine millions of average Negroes. A larger proportion of the mulattoes than of the pure bloods come up to the white race in ability; but if fifty thousand people in the negro quarter of New Orleans or on the central Alabama plantations be set apart and compared with a similar number of the least promising Whites in the same city or counties, fewer remarkable individuals and less average capacity would be found. Race measured by race, the Negro is inferior, and his past history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior in race stamina and race achievement.