IS THE NEGRO RISING?

That the Negro is inferior to the Whites among whom he lives is a cause of apprehension to the whole land; that his labor is in steadiness and efficiency much below that of his intelligent white neighbors is a drawback to his section. Yet neither deficiencies of character nor of industry really settle his place in the community. A race may be as high as the Greeks and yet go to nothingness; a race may be as industrious as the Chinese, and have little to show for it. The essential question with regard to the Negro is simply: Is the race in America moving downward or upward? No matter if it be low, has it the capacity of rising?

To answer these questions requires some study both of present and past conditions. A very considerable number of Southern Whites are sure that physically and morally the Negro is both low and declining; and some go so far as to assert that every Negro is physically so different from the white man that he ought not to be considered a member of the human race. The argument was familiar in slavery times, and has been recently set forth by F. L. Hoffman in his “Race Traits of the American Negro”; from chest measurements, weight, lifting strength, and power of vision, he is convinced that “there are important differences in the bodily structure of the two races, differences of far-reaching influence on the duration of life and the social and economic efficiency of the colored man.” Professor Smith, of Louisiana, in his “The Color Line, A Brief for the Unborn,” goes much farther in an argument intended to show that the brain capacity of the Negro, the coarseness of his features, the darkness of his color, the abnormal length of his arm, his thick cranium, woolly hair and early closing of the cranial sutures, prove that he may be left out of consideration as a member of a civilized community.

The tendency of scientific investigators during the last forty years has been to minimize the distinctions between races; and the argument that the Negro is to be politically and socially disregarded because of structural peculiarities, though the stock in trade of the proslavery writers two generations ago, now seems somewhat forced. To the Northern mind there is a kind of unreality in the whole argument of physical inferiority; it is like trying to prove by anatomy, physiology, and hygiene that the Hungarian laborer is always going to be an ignorant and degraded element in our population.

These technical arguments throw very little light upon the real African problem, which is not, what does the structure of the Negro indicate that he must be, but what is he really and what does he perform? If the Negro can work all day in the cotton field, save his wages, buy land, bring up his children, send them to school, pay his debts, and maintain a decent life, no cranial sutures or prognathism will prevent his being looked upon as a man; and the whole physical argument, much of which is intended to affect the public mind against amalgamation, cannot do away with the plain fact that the white and the black races are so near to each other that some hundreds of thousands of people come of white fathers and negro or mulatto mothers. The Negro is entitled to be measured, not by brain calipers, nor by two-meter rods, but by what he can do in the world.

What he can do in the world depends upon the inner man and not the outer; and here we approach one of the most serious problems connected with the race. Has the Negro character? Can he conceive a standard and adhere to it? Can he fix his mind on a distant good and for its sake give up present indulgences? Can he restrain the primal impulses of human nature?

That the Negroes as a race are impure and unregulated is the judgment of most white observers whether ill-wishers or fair-minded men. Thomas Nelson Page, for instance, declares that the immorality of the negro race has increased since slavery times. Thomas, himself a Negro, asserts that the sexual impulse “constitutes the main incitement to the degeneracy of the race, and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting.” Kelsey, a Northern observer, says: “Many matings are consummated without any regular marriage ceremony and with little reference to legal requirements.” On this subject as on all others the most preposterous exaggerations are rife; a plantation manager will tell you that not two in a hundred couples on his plantation are married; a stock statement, a thousand times repeated, is that there is no such thing as a virtuous negro woman. Yet the truth is gruesome enough; there are plenty of plantations where barely half the families are married; bastard children are very numerous; and this condition applies not only in the cities and towns where people are put into new and trying environments, but everywhere among the Negroes upon the land. It is the most discouraging thing about the race, because it saps the foundation of civilization. Nor is it an explanation to say that under slavery family ties were disregarded. The race has now had forty years of freedom and undisturbed religious training, such as it is. Still they ought to show decided improvement in morals if the race is capable of living on a high moral plane.

This is a gloomy and delicate subject, but cannot be allowed to pass without a few positive illustrations. When Kelsey suggested to a Negro that he might go back to the plantation and board in a negro family, he replied: “Niggers is queer folks, boss. ’Pears to me they don’ know what they gwine do. Ef I go out and live in a man’s house like as not I run away wid dat man’s wife.” A girl whose mistress was trying to put before her a higher standard of conduct said: “It’s no use talking to us colored girls like we were white. A colored girl that keeps pure ain’t liked socially. We just think she has had no chance.” A negro boy twelve years old has been known to reel off two hundred different obscene rhymes and songs. Divorce is frequent, particularly the easy form which consists of the husband throwing his wife out of doors and bringing in another woman. The negro preachers are universally believed to be the worst of their kind, and very often are. If the things that are regularly told by white people and sometimes admitted by colored people are true, the majority of the Southern Negroes, rural and urban, are in a horribly low state both physically and morally.

The more credit to those members of the race who are pure and upright; who are showing that it is a libel to brand as hopelessly corrupt ten million people, including probably two million mulattoes; to say nothing of the numerous examples of chaste and self-respecting Negroes of both sexes in the Northern states. The most furious assailant of negro character will usually tell you of one or two Negroes that he knows to be perfectly straightforward; and the writer can bear personal testimony to the apparent wholesomeness of family life in negro homes that he has chanced to visit. Here, a young mother in her scrupulously clean log house hovering over her little children as affectionately as though she and they were white; there, gathered around the hearth of a new house with good furniture and pretty pictures, a family of seven children, neat, clean, attractive, respectful, intelligent, and apparently attached to father and mother. Again, a fine specimen of the thrifty colored man who boasts that he has lived forty-one years with one wife: “I got a good wife, she take keer of me.” Where such homes are, all is not vile. It is a favorite Southern delusion that education and Christian teaching have no effect on the animal propensities of Negroes; there are thousands of examples to the contrary.

It would do no good to anybody to minimize the terrible truth that the Negroes as a race are in personal morality far below the Anglo-Saxons as a race, that the heaviest dead weight upon them is their own passions; but it would be equally futile to blink at the fact that the Whites do not set them in this respect a convincing example. Anglo-Saxons the world over are not unreasonably virtuous; and the divorce cases of Pittsburg might not be safe reading for impressionable people like the blacks. If the negro race is depraved it cannot but have a demoralizing effect on the white race, most of whom have colored nurses; and the male half of whom have all their life been exposed to a particularly facile temptation. Heaven has somehow shielded the white woman of the South from the noxious influences of a servile race; in slavery times and now there is not a fairer flower that blooms than the white Southern girl; although it is a delusion that she is never pursued by men of her own race. No visitor, no clean Southern man, knows the abysses in both races or can fix the proportion in which both need to rise if the Southland is to be redeemed from its most fearful danger. Great numbers of the Negroes are immoral, and great numbers of white men can testify to their immorality, for the building up of character is a long and weary process in both races.

So far as the future of the Negro is concerned, the real problem is whether he can suppress his bad traits and emphasize his higher nature, but that is a question with regard to all other races. The blacks are ignorant, not only of books, but of the world, of life, of the experience of the race. They are untrustworthy, but at the same time faithful; as one of their own number says: “They’ll loaf before your face and work behind your back with good-natured honesty. They’ll steal a watermelon, and hand you back your lost purse intact.”

In any case, it may safely be affirmed that the Negro is not retrograding. On the Sea Islands, where it has been reported that the Negroes had sunk to savagery, where on one small island a white face had not been seen for ten years, there is undoubtedly a widespread belief in magic, or what a fluent colored preacher, in a discourse apparently intended for white ears, referred to as “Hindooism.” On such subjects the Negroes are reticent; but no evidence of paganism is visible to long-time residents on the islands. When it comes to fortune-telling and charms, and a fetich that will insure you against having your mortgage foreclosed, about the same thing may be found among otherwise intelligent people in any Northern city. Degradation is frequent; and marital relations are loose on the islands, though no more so than on the plantations of Mississippi, or among the Negroes of the cities of Georgia. The population is in general healthier than on the mainland, though much exposed to severe malaria. Two or three of the African superstitions do survive; one is that you must always keep a door open during the day so that you may not shut the bad spirit in with you; but at night doors and shutters must be closed to keep the spirit out. Another superstition is the “Basket-name,” which is the plague of the Northern teachers, who are a long time in learning that Louisa’s basket name is “Chug,” or that when you call Ezra, “Mantchey” will come. Churches of various denominations are kept up, and, together with the various lodges, furnish the principal social life of the people. To be sure they often have African dances at their religious services; but these are very like the Shaker dances, which can hardly be called pagan worship.

The error as to the progress of the Negro arises both from an unfounded notion of the virtues and the civilization of the Negroes under slavery, and an equally unfounded idea that the average conditions of the Negro to-day are hopeless. The Negro was busier in slavery times than now because there was always the whip in the background, but there is no reason to suppose that his average annual product was as great as that of the present freeman. Falsehood, thriftlessness, and immorality are the charges which were constantly brought against the slaves, both by outsiders and by their own masters. Judged by the standards which the white man most readily applies to himself—namely, the proportion of educated and progressive men and women, the average amount of property, the interest in the welfare of the race—there is no reason to doubt that the Negro is higher up than he was half a century ago.

How far does the desire for uplift extend, and how far is it effective? The negro population shows a distinct interest in the future of the race. The field hand who has the ambition to save and improve, to buy his own land, feels that he is benefiting not only himself, but giving an object lesson of the power of his race. Some of the leaders have personal ends to gain, but they all expect to gain them by showing a power to improve the conditions of their fellows. Yet even though the Negro may be working steadily, he may also be gaining nothing from generation to generation; if he gets better wages, he may be squandering them; a small part of the race might conceivably be going forward, while a large part was dropping back.

A piece of testimony on the highest phases of negro character which is too often forgotten in the South is that on the occasion when the race had the best opportunity to show black-heartedness it gave the world a noble example of patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. As that great Southerner, Grady, wrote: “History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during the war. Often five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety, and the unprotected homes rested in peace. Unmarshalled, the black battalions moved patiently to the fields in the morning to feed the armies their idleness would have starved, and at night gathered anxiously at the big house to ‘hear the news from marster,’ though conscious that his victory made their chains enduring. Everywhere humble and kindly. The body guard of the helpless. The rough companion of the little ones. The observant friend. The silent sentry in his lowly cabin. The shrewd counsellor. And when the dead came home, a mourner at the open grave. A thousand torches would have disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted.” That achievement was a vast advance above the savagery of the native African; and why should the capacity for improvement stop there?

Keeping in mind the fact that with all his patience the slave in the best days of slavery was still a low and vicious type in whom his slavehood strengthened native propensities to lying, theft, and lust, it is undeniable that the greater part of the race has made great advances; even John Temple Graves, a harmful enemy of the Negro, 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.” Under slavery no such success or influence was possible; there could be no negro orators, or reformers, or leaders in the South.

An invariable answer to the plea that the character of the negro leaders is a proof of the capacity for uplift is that they are substantially white men. At the same moment the critics deny to those substantially white men the privileges of actual white men. But may not “substantially white men” have an uplifting influence such as indubitably white men had in earlier times? Most candid white observers, however hostile to the race, admit that somewhere from a tenth to a fourth of all the Negroes are doing well and moving upward; and this applies to the Negro on the land as well as in cities. In many scattered areas in the South, groups of plantation Negroes have bought land and are saving money. Here are a few examples taken from the writer’s notebook:

At Calhoun, Ala., may be found nearly a hundred Negroes who have bought or are buying their own farms, and have made $60,000 of savings to do it. A negro woman on one of those farms said of her new house: “We don’t need no rider (overseer) now, dis house is our rider. It will send us into the field, it will make us work, and it will make us plan. We’s got to plan. When Ise out in the pit I has to stop to look up at dis house, and den Ise so pleased I don’t know how I am working.” Near Nixburg, Ala., is another settlement started by a Negro, Rev. John Leonard, soon after the war, which is called thereabouts “Niggerdom,” because the blacks have acquired the best tract of land in the region, have put up the best schoolhouse in the county, and as a neighbor said of them: “They have got to the place now where they’re no more service to the Whites. They want to work for themselves.” At Kowaliga, Ala., is the Benson settlement, where a Negro has bought his former master’s plantation, largely extended it, has built a dam and mill, owns three thousand acres of land with many tenants, and is one of the few large planters of that section who combines cattle raising with cotton. He gave land and assistance to a good school with commodious buildings, carried on entirely by Negroes (including Tuskegee graduates); is building what is probably the best planter’s house in the county, and has plenty of outside investments. At Mound Bayou, Miss., is another purely negro settlement, with a population of about two thousand, among whom not a single white man lives. Under the guidance of two brothers named Montgomery, they bought their land direct from the railroad company, claim to own 130,000 acres, and have paid for considerable parts of it; maintain their own stores, carry on a little bank, and elect a negro municipal government. The results show as much capacity for managing their own affairs as the neighboring white towns.

There are two or three settlements of the same kind in the South, on a smaller scale, as at Goldsboro, Fla., and one in Alabama. Different in type, but a proof of prosperity, are the negro settlements on the Sea Islands; here is no personal leader like Leonard, or Benson, or Montgomery; but on several of the islands is a large group of colored landowners who have been there ever since the Civil War, and whose houses are much superior to the usual negro cabins. While not progressive, they hold on to their land with great tenacity, and are not running into debt.

These specific examples prove beyond question that Africans can advance. Every one of the settlements above mentioned is planted in an unpromising region, among Negroes presumably of a lower type than the average. Lowndes County, in which Calhoun is situated, is one of the most backward in the South; the Sea Islands have the densest negro population to be found anywhere. Similar instances, on a smaller scale may be found in every state and almost every county of the South. However backward the people, you are everywhere told that a few save money, buy land, and try to give their children better conditions. Nor is it the mulattoes only who show this disposition to get on in the world; the pure Negroes sometimes are the most industrious and sensible of their race.

Houses and lands are not the only measure of uplift; and the numerous Negroes who, according to the impression of white men not likely to exaggerate, are really thrifty, might be unable to raise the average of their race; but it seems clear that the Negro is nowhere reverting to barbarism; that a considerable part of the race, certainly one fourth to one fifth, is doing about as well as the lowest million or two of the Southern Whites; though perhaps a fifth (of whom a great part are to be found in towns and cities) are distinctly doing ill; that the Negroes on the land, though on the average low, ignorant, and degraded, are working well, making cotton, and helping to enrich the South. For, as one of themselves puts it: “The native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with.” The real negro problem is the question of the character and the future of the laborer.

But deep in the breast of the Average Man
The passions of ages are swirled,
And the loves and the hates of the Average Man
Are old as the heart of the world—
For the thought of the Race, as we live and we die,
Is in keeping the Man and the Average high.

The only real measure of uplift is character, but character cannot be reduced to statistical tables. The accumulation of property, especially by a race nearly pauperized when it first acquired the right to hold property, can be traced and throws much light on the important question whether the Negroes are rising or falling. It is difficult to separate out the contribution which the Negro makes to the wealth of the South, and to estimate his own savings, because the only available census figures on this subject deal with the three classes of owners, renters, and croppers of land; and do not, and probably cannot, make a separate account of negro wage hands on the plantations, and workmen and jobbers of every description. As nearly as can be judged, more than half the cotton comes off plantations tilled by negro laborers, or tenants; and for the rest, a notable portion is raised by independent negro farmers, chiefly on the hills—some on the lowlands. The wage hands and the town Negroes have, in general, little to show for their work at the end of the year. They receive or are credited with wages, live on them, and they are gone. Negroes are extravagant, tempted by peddlers and instalment-goods men, and fond of spending for candy, tobacco, and liquor. There are few savings banks in the South, and the failure of the Freedman’s Bank in Reconstruction times was a terrible blow to the long process of building up habits of thrift. It seems to be the conviction of the best friends of the Negro in the South that the great majority of the day laborers have made little or no advance in habits of saving during the last forty years, although most of them have more to show in the way of clothing and furniture than their fathers had.

This is a great misfortune to the race, because, as Booker Washington never wearies of pointing out, now is the golden time for the Negro to acquire land. After the war, good farm land could be bought up at from $1 to $5 an acre; and to-day a family with $500 in cash, and saving habits, can, in most parts of the South, pick up an out-of-the-way corner of land, with a poor house on it, and begin the kind of struggle to support the family and pay for improvements which has been the practice of the Northwest. It is true that good land has now become expensive; there are under-drained Delta lands which are held at $50 to $100 an acre, and although planters grumble at the trouble and loss of making cotton with shiftless hands, not one in a hundred wants to break up his plantation and sell it out to the Negroes. The successful communities of negro farmers who have acquired land during the last ten years have, with half a dozen exceptions, been organized by Northern capitalists, or philanthropists who have bought estates in order to sell them out. The reason for this reluctance of the planter is very simple: his business is to raise cotton on a large scale; if he sells out even at a good figure, he loses his occupation; and the South, as a community, has not yet seized the great principle that the prosperity of everybody is enhanced by an increase in the productive and purchasing power of the laborer.

No figures can be found for the city real estate holdings of Negroes, but in 1900 there were 188,000 so-called farms owned by Negroes, subject, of course, like white property, to mortgages for part of the purchase money, or for debts afterward incurred. In addition, 560,000 negro families were working plots of land, as croppers and renters, and received either a share or the whole of the crop that they made. These people altogether were working 23,000,000 acres, an average of about 30 acres to a family; and produced $256,000,000 worth of products. These 750,000 “farmers” represent something over 3,000,000 individuals, which figures to an annual output of $80 per head; and it is difficult to see how that value could possibly be produced if the Negroes were not there. The families of the day laborers count up to at least 3,000,000 more; and their product was probably somewhere near as large as that of the renters and croppers, although the share of the planter is rather greater. It would seem reasonable to assert that $500,000,000 of the $1,200,000,000 of farm products in the South was raised by negro labor; and that by their work in the cities and towns they probably add another $200,000,000 to the annual product.

It is not, however, certain that the Negroes have accumulated in their own hands so much as the value of one year’s output. A. H. Stone, a practical planter, says that, on his plantation, negro property was irregularly subdivided; his renters had property accumulated to an average of $400 a family, while the share hands did not average $50 a family. That is, the greater part of the negro property is owned by the smaller part of the population. That is not peculiar to Negroes; in New York City nearly the whole property is said to be owned by 20,000 people; and in Galveston most of the valuable real estate is said to be in the hands of, or controlled by, a score of individuals. In the cities and towns, many prosperous Negroes are rent payers, and own no real estate, but there may be 50,000 owners besides the 190,000 farm owners. In Kentucky half the Negroes who are working land independently own their farms. Even in Mississippi the owners and renters together are more than the share hands.

Since no Negro can successfully rent unless he owns mules and farm tools, and the renters are considerably more numerous than the owners, we may add 250,000 more families on the land who have accumulated something. That makes 550,000 families, or between a third and a fourth of the Southern Negroes, who are getting ahead. If the 550,000 families averaged $900 each of land and personal property they would hold $500,000,000; $900 is, however, a high figure, and it may be roughly estimated that negro land owners and renters had accumulated in 1900 not more than $300,000,000 or $400,000,000 worth of property. The rest of the Southern Negroes are about 7,000,000 in number; at the low average of $15 a head of accumulations they would count up nearly $150,000,000 more. A fair estimate of negro wealth in the South, therefore, would be something above $500,000,000, and constantly rising.

This estimated proportion is confirmed by investigations into taxes paid by Negroes. In 1902 the 2,100,000 Negroes in the four states of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arkansas were assessed for taxes on $54,000,000. At the same proportion throughout the South, their assessment would have been about $170,000,000, which by this time has probably increased to over $200,000,000; and $200,000,000 is a fortieth of the present total assessment. The sum is great, but the proportion to the wealth of the South is small. At best it can be said that the Negroes, who are a third of the population, own a fortieth of the property in the South; and that one fourth of the Negroes own four fifths of all the negro property. The taxes do not tell the whole story, and there are probably rich Northern cities in which the poorest third of the population does not directly pay more than a fortieth of the taxes. If a race is to be held up as worthless because it is not on the tax books, what will become of some of the most lively members of the Boston City Council and New York Board of Aldermen? Everybody knows that in every community the poorest people pay the largest proportionate taxes through their rent, and through the increased cost of living which is pushed down upon them by landlords and storekeepers. If the colored people were all to move out of their tenements and farms and to go on general strike and earn nothing with which to buy their supplies, the taxpayers of record would very quickly find out who paid a part of their taxes for them. Nevertheless, whatever excuses are made for him, it is undeniable that the Negro has no such spirit of acquisition, no such willingness to sacrifice present delight for future good, as the Northern immigrant, or even the Southern Poor White.