RACE ASSOCIATION

In the preceding chapters the effort has been made to analyze and describe the white race and the negro race, each as though it lived by itself, and could work out its own destiny without reference to the other. The white race is faced with the necessity of elevating its lower fourth; the negro race should be equally absorbed in advancing its lower three fourths. In both races there is progress and there is hope; if either one were living by itself it might be predicted that in a generation or two the problems would cease to be specially Southern and would come down to those which besiege all civilized communities. But neither race lives alone, neither can live alone. The commercial prosperity of the Whites largely depends on negro labor; high standards for the negro race depend on white aid and white example; neither race is free, neither race is independent. They are the positive and negative poles of a dynamo, and terrific is the spark that sometimes leaps from one to the other.

In one sense, the Southern Whites are the South, inasmuch as they have complete control of the state and local governments, of the military, of public education, of business on a large scale, and of society; but the Negroes are one third of the population, furnish much more than half the laborers for hire, have schools, property, and aspirations; hence whatever term is used, “Southern Problem,” “Race Problem,” or “Negro Problem,” it refers to the antagonism between those two races. How keen is the Southern consciousness of this peculiar condition may be learned from some of the Southern critics:

Thomas Nelson Page thus states it: “A race with an historic and a glorious past, in a high state of civilization, stands confronted by a race of their former slaves, invested with every civil and political right which they themselves possess, and supported by an outside public sentiment, which if not inimical to the dominant race is at least unsympathetic. The two races ... are suspicious of each other; their interests are in some essential particulars conflicting, and in others may easily be made so; ... the former dominant race is unalterably assertive of the imperative necessity that it shall govern the inferior race and not be governed by it.” Less drastic is the statement of Judge William H. Thomas: “The white man and the negro together make up the citizenship of our Southern country, and any effort to deal with either ignoring the other will diminish the chances of ultimate success. That religion and sentiment, the fixed ideals and prejudices, if you please, of the South are substantial facts that cannot be ignored and must always be reckoned with.” Murphy speaks of the “problem presented by the undeveloped forces of the stronger race. These must largely constitute the determining factor, even in the problem presented by the negro; for the negro question is not primarily a question of the negro among negroes, but a question of the negro surrounded by another and a stronger people.”

To all these attempts to state the case the Northerner is tempted to reply that the South has no monopoly of race problems; that he too has prejudices and repulsions and race jealousies resembling those of the South; and that since he sees them melting away around him, those of his Southern brethren will also disappear of themselves. That is all true, yet much less than all the truth. In the South every white man is determined that there shall be two races forever. Nobody ever stated the Southern point of view on this subject better than the late Henry Grady: “This problem is to carry on within her body politic two separate races, equal in civil and political rights, and nearly equal in numbers. She must carry these races in peace; for discord means ruin. She must carry them separately; for assimilation means debasement. She must carry them in equal justice; for to this she is pledged in honor and in gratitude. She must carry them even unto the end; for in human probability she will never be quit of either.”

“The South” in Grady’s mouth really means the white South, for it is not in the purpose of any Southern man or woman of influence to permit the Negro to take part in deciding race issues. Furthermore, to the settlement of these difficult problems the South along with a genuine humanity, a desire to act in all things within justice and Christianity, brings habits of mind which have been discussed in an earlier chapter, and which make especially difficult moderate public statements on the race question. As in slavery times the simple assertion that there is a race question seems to some people an offensive attempt to bring ruin on the South: there is still something of the feeling candidly set forth by the old war-time Southern school geography: “The Yankees are an intelligent people upon all subjects except slavery. On that question they are mad.”

Especially delicate and hazardous is any investigation of the most intimate race relation which in the nature of things is better understood in the South than in the North. The sexual relation between Whites and Negroes is in such contradiction to much of the indictment against the negro race, and is so abhorrent even to that section of the white race that practices it, that there is no easy or pleasant way of alluding to it. Actual race mixture is proven by the presence in the South of two million mulattoes; it is no new thing, for it has been going on steadily ever since the African appeared in the United States, though there are people who insist that there was little or no amalgamation until Northern soldiers came down during the war and remained in garrison during Reconstruction. Every intelligent traveler in the ante-bellum period, every candid observer, is a witness to the contrary. Since the earliest settlements there have continuously been, and still exist, two different forms of illicit relations between the races—concubinage and general irregularity. Whence came the hundreds of thousands of mulattoes in slavery days? Of course the child of a mulatto will be normally light, and of the two million mulattoes now in the country, very likely three fourths are the children of mulattoes. But what are the other five hundred thousand? To that fateful question a reply can be made only on the testimony of Southern Whites now living down there, and not likely to paint the picture blacker than it is. Here are some striking instances of negro concubinage; and the judgment of competent men is that hundreds of like incidents could be collected:

Case I.—A white business man in a small city of State A has lived twenty years with a mulatto woman. They have eight children, two of whom are successful business men, one of them a banker. The white man says that the woman has always been faithful to him, and though under the laws of the state he cannot marry her, he looks upon her as his wife and does what he can for the children.

Case II.—A judge of State B has recently sentenced two different white men for cohabitation, though many Whites remonstrated and told him that there was no use in singling out for punishment a few cases among so many.

Case III.—In State C a retiring judge suggests that cohabitation be made a hanging offense for the White, as the only way of stopping it.

Case IV.—In State D one of the leading citizens of a town is known by all his friends to be living with a black mistress.

As to irregular relations, in one state a judge renowned for his uprightness proposes that a blacklist be kept and published containing the names of men known by their neighbors to visit negro women. A recent governor of Georgia says that “Bad white men are destroying the homes of Negroes and becoming the fathers of a mongrel people whom nobody will own.” A newspaper editor says that he knows Negroes of property and character who want to move out of the South so as to get their daughters away from danger. There is no Southern city in which there are not negro places of the worst resort frequented by white men. Heads of negro schools report that the girls are constantly subject to solicitation by the clerks of stores where they go to buy goods. The presumption in the mind of an average respectable Southern man when he sees a light-colored child is that some white man in the neighborhood is responsible.

Whether the evil is decreasing is a question on which Southerners are divided. The number of white prostitutes has much increased since slavery days, when there were very few of them; and the general improvement of the community, the spread of religious and secular instruction, ought to have an effect. But the real difficulty is that, although it is thought disgraceful for a white man to live with a colored mistress, it does not seem to destroy his practice of a profession, or his career as a business man. There seems to be lack of efficient public sentiment.

If these statements of fact are true, and every one of them goes back to a responsible Southern source, there is something in the white race which in kind, if not in degree, corresponds to the negro immorality which is the most serious defect of his character. It is not an answer to say that the cities and even some of the open country in the North are honeycombed with sexual corruption. That is true, and some Southerner might do a service by revealing the real condition of a part of Northern society. Perhaps to live with a colored mistress to the end of one’s life is, from a moral standpoint, less profligate than for a Pittsburg business man of wealth and responsibility to drive his good and faithful wife out of the house because she is almost as old as he is, and marry a pretty young actress. The mere ceremony of marriage no more obliterates the offense than would in the minds of the Southerner the marriage of the white man with his concubine; and everybody who associates with such a man thereby condones the offense.

The point is, however, not only that miscegenation in the South is evil, but that it is the most glaring contradiction of the supposed infallible principles of race separation and social inequality. There are two million deplorable reasons in the South for believing that there is no divinely implanted race instinct against miscegenation; that while a Southern author is writing that “the idea of the race is far more sacred than that of the family. It is, in fact, the most sacred thing on earth,” his neighbors, and possibly his acquaintances, by their acts are disproving the argument. The North is often accused of putting into the heads of Southern Negroes misleading and dangerous notions of social equality, but what influence can be so potent in that direction as the well-founded conviction of negro women that they are desired to be the nearest of companions to white men?

There is, of course, a universal prohibition in the South against marriage of the two races, and these statutes express the wish of the community; they put such practices to the ban; they make possible the rare cases of prosecution, which commonly break down for lack of testimony. Nevertheless the law does not persuade the negro women that there can be any great moral wrong in what so many of the white race practice. The active members of the negro race are in general too busy about other things to discuss the question of amalgamation which there is no prospect of legalizing; but it lies deep in the heart of the race that the prohibition of marriage is for the restraint of the Whites rather than of the Negroes; that it does not make colored families any safer; and that if there were no legal prohibition many of these irregular unions would become marriages.

One of the curious by-currents of this discussion is the preposterous conviction of many Southern writers that, inasmuch as these relations are between white men and negro women, there is no “pollution of the Anglo-Saxon blood;” thus Thomas Dixon, Jr., insists that the present racial mixture “has no social significance ... the racial integrity remains intact. The right to choose one’s mate is the foundation of racial life and civilization. The South must guard with flaming sword every avenue of approach to this holy of holies.”

On the other hand, and just as powerful, is the absolute determination of the Whites never to admit the mulattoes within their own circle. The usual legal phrase “person of color” includes commonly everybody who has as much as an eighth of negro blood, and in two states anyone who has a visible trace. But social usage goes far beyond this limit, and no person supposed to have the slightest admixture of negro blood would be admitted to any social function in any Southern city. In 1905 there was a dramatic trial in North Carolina brought about by the exclusion from a public school of six girls, descendants from one Jeffrey Graham, who lived a hundred years ago and was suspected of having negro blood. The Graham family alleged that they had a Portuguese ancestor, and brought into court a dark-skinned Portuguese to show how the mistake might have arisen; and eventually the court declared them members of the superior race.

The reason for the intense Southern feeling on race equality is to a large extent the belief that friendly intercourse with the Negro on anything but well-understood terms of the superior talking to the inferior is likely to lead to an amalgamation, which may involve a large part of the white race. The evils of the present system are manifest. The most reckless and low-minded Whites are preying on what ought to be one of the best parts of the negro race. Thousands of children come into the world with an ineffaceable mark of bastardy; the greater part of such children are absolutely neglected by their fathers; the decent negro men feel furious at the danger to their families or the frailness of their sisters. Both races have their own moral blemishes, and it is a double and treble misfortune that there should be inter-racial mixtures on such degrading terms.

As for a remedy, nobody seems able to suggest anything that has so far worked. A recent writer soberly suggests that a way out is to make a pariah of the mulatto, including that part of the mulattoes who are born of mulatto or negro parents; they are to be shut from the schools, excluded from all missionary efforts, made a race apart; and that action he thinks would be a moral lesson to the full-blooded Africans! Another method is that of the anti-miscegenation league of Vicksburg, Miss., which aims to make public the names of offenders and to prosecute them. A better remedy would be the systematic application of the existing laws of the state, with at least as much zeal as is given to the enforcement of the Jim Crow laws. In the last resort there is no remedy except such an awakening of public sentiment as will drive out of the ranks of respectable men and women those who practice these vices. Such a sentiment exists in the churches, the philanthropic societies, and an army of straightforward sensible men and women. The evil is probably somewhat abating; but till it is far reduced how can anybody in the South argue that education and material improvement of the Negro are what most powerfully tends to social equality? Just so far as the negro man and the negro woman are, by a better station in life, by aroused self-respect and race pride, led to protect themselves, so far will this evil be diminished.

The subject cannot be left without taking ground upon the underlying issue. All the faults of the Southern men who are practical amalgamators add weight to the bottom contention of the South that a mixture of the races, now or in the future, would be calamitous. That belief rests upon the conviction that the negro race, on the average, is below the white race; that it can never be expected to contribute anything like its proportion of the strength of the community; and hence to fuse the races means slight or no elevation for the Negro, and a great decline for the white race. With that belief the writer coincides. The union of the two races means a decline in the rate of civilization; and the fact that so much of it is going on is not a reason for legalizing it, but for sternly suppressing it. If amalgamation is dangerous and would pull down the standard of that higher part of the community which must always be dominant, then such steps must be taken in all justice, in all humanity, with all effort to raise both races, as are necessary to prevent amalgamation.

While thus in one way fully recognized as a human being and of like blood with the Whites, upon the other side the Negro is set aside by a race prejudice which in many respects is fiercer and more unyielding than in the days of slavery. One of the few compensations for slavery was the not infrequent personal friendship between the master and the slave; they were sometimes nursed at the same tawny breast; and played together as children; Jonas Field, of Lady’s Island, to this day remembers with pride how after the war, when he became free, his old master, whose body servant he had been, took him to his house, presented him to his daughters, and bade them always remember that Jonas Field had been one of the family, and was to be treated with the respect of a father. The influence of the white mistress on those few slaves who were near to her is one of the brightest things in slavery. She visited the negro cabins, counseled the mothers, cared for the sick, and by life and conversation tried to build up their character. It is almost the universal testimony that such relations are disappearing; rare is the white foot that steps within the Negro’s cabin. John Sharp Williams, of Mississippi, says: “More and more every year the negro’s life—moral, intellectual, and industrial—is isolated from the white man’s life, and therefore from his influence. There was a kindlier and more confidential relationship ... when I was a boy than between my children and the present generation of negroes.”

It is a singular fact that the feeling of race antagonism has sprung up comparatively recently; to this day there are remnants of the old clan idea of the great plantations. Thousands of Negroes choose some White as a friend and sponsor, and in case of difficulty ask him for advice, for a voucher of character, or for money, and are seldom disappointed. The lower stratum of the Whites, which is thrown into close juxtaposition with Negroes, finds no difficulty in a kind of rude companionship, provided it is not too much noticed. The sentimental and sometimes artificial love for the old colored “mammy” is a disappearing bond between the races, for though the white children are cared for almost everywhere by negro girls, there seems little affection between the nurse and her charge.

Some Southern authorities assert that race hatred was fomented toward the end of Reconstruction. Says “Nicholas Worth”: “Men whose faithful servants were negroes, negroes who had shined their shoes in the morning and cooked their breakfasts and dressed their children and groomed their horses and driven them to their offices, negroes who were the faithful servants and constant attendants on their families,—such men spent the day declaring the imminent danger of negro ‘equality’ and ‘domination.’” The same genial writer goes on to describe the gloom at the supposed flood of African despotism; they said: “Our liberties were in peril; our very blood would be polluted; dark night would close over us,—us, degenerate sons of glorious sires,—if we did not rise in righteous might and stem the barbaric flood.” Though in all the states the Negroes were swept out of political power by 1876, to this day they are popularly supposed to be planning some kind of domination over the Whites. This made-up race issue is not yet extinct. Nobody knows the inner spirit of a certain section of the South better than Thomas E. Watson, of Georgia, who has recently said: “The politicians keep the negro question alive in the South to perpetuate their hold on public office. The negro question is the joy of their lives. It is their very existence. They fatten on it. With one shout of ‘nigger!’ they can run the native Democrats into their holes at any hour of the day.”

How does this feeling strike the Negro? Let an intelligent man, Johnson, in his “Light Ahead for the Negro,” speak for himself. He complains that the newspapers use inflammatory headlines and urge lynchings—“a wholesale assassination of Negro character”; that it is made a social crime to employ Negroes as clerks in a white store; that the cultured Southern people spread abroad the imputation that the Negro as a race is worthless; that the news agents are prejudiced against the Negro and give misleading accounts of difficulties with the Whites; that people thought to be friendly are hounded out of their positions; that there is a desire to expatriate the negroes from the country of their fathers. Kelly Miller, a professor in Howard University, Washington, objects to using physical dissimilarity as a mark of inferiority, and thinks “that the feeling against the negro is of the nature of inspirited animosity rather than natural antipathy”; and that “the dominant South is determined to foster artificial hatred between the races.”

Race prejudice has always existed since the races have lived together; but, whether because taught to the boys of the Reconstruction epoch, or whether because the Negroes have made slower progress than was hoped, it is sharper now than in the whole history of the question. Is it founded on an innate race repulsion? Does the white man necessarily fear and dislike the Negro? The white child does not, nor the lowest stratum of Whites, who are nearest the Negro intellectually and morally. John Sharp Williams says: “If I were to call our race feeling anything etymologically, I would call it a ‘post-judice’ and not a ‘pre-judice.’ I notice that nobody has our race feeling or any race feeling indeed until after knowledge. It is a conviction born of experience.”

Right here the champions of the Negro discern a joint in the armor; thus, DuBois: “Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the ‘higher’ against the ‘lower’ races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows down and meekly does obeisance.” Is not this the crux of the whole matter? Is it prejudice against a low race, or a black race? To say that the white Southerner looks down upon and despises every black Southerner would not be fair, for there is still much personal liking between members of the two races, and the South is right in claiming that it has a warmer feeling for individual Negroes than Northern people. Said a Southern judge once: “If my old black mammy comes into the house, she hugs and kisses my little girl. But if she should sit down in the parlor, I should have to knock her down.” That is, he liked the mammy, but the nigger must be taught to keep her place.

The phrase commonly used to describe this feeling is, “The danger of social equality.” Here is one of the mysteries of the subject which the Northern mind cannot penetrate. Southern society, so proud, so exclusive, so efficient in protecting itself from the undesired, is in terror lest it should be found admitting the fearful curse of social equality; and there are plenty of Southern writers who insist that the Negro shall be deprived of the use of public conveniences, of education, of a livelihood, lest he, the weak, the despised, force social equality upon the white race. What is social equality if not a mutual feeling in a community that each member is welcome to the social intercourse of the other? How is the Negro to attain social equality so long as the white man refuses to invite him or to be invited with him? It sounds like a joke!

The point of view of the South was revealed in 1903 when President Roosevelt invited Booker Washington to his table. The South rang from end to end with invective and alarm; the governor of a Southern state publicly insulted the President and his family; a boy in Washington wrote a scurrilous denunciation on the school blackboard; the Charleston News and Courier rolled the incident under its tongue like a sweet morsel; a Georgia judge said: “The invitation is a blow aimed not only at the South, but at the whole white race, and should be resented, and the President should be regarded and treated on the same plane with negroes,” and from that day to this the invitation has been received as an affront and an injury to the Whites in the South. We are told of the terrible consequences; how a black boy refused any longer to call the sixteen-year-old son of his employer “Mister”; how the Negro from that time on has felt himself a person of consequence. It does not appear that the President’s example was followed by any Southern governor; or that any Negro invited himself to dinner with a white person. To the Northern mind the incident was simply a recognition, by the acknowledged leader of all Americans, of the acknowledged leader of black Americans. The Southern mind somehow cannot distinguish between sitting at the same table with a man and making him your children’s guardian. The whole argument comes down to the level of the phrase used so constantly when the question of setting the slaves free was before the country: “Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger?”

What the phrase “social equality” really means is that if anything is done to raise the negro race it will demand to be raised all the way. But demand is a long way short of reality. Northerners have their social prejudices and preferences; yet they are not afraid that an Arab or a Syrian immigrant is going to burst their doors and compel them at the muzzle of the rifle to like him, invite him, make him their intimate; nobody can establish social equality by law or public sentiment. Everybody should sympathize with the desire of the South to keep unimpaired the standards of civilization; but the friendliest Northerner cannot understand why a Southern business man feels such a danger that he writes of social equality: “Right or wrong, the Southern people will never tolerate it, and will go through the horrors of another reconstruction before they will permit it to be. Before they will submit to it, they will kill every negro in the Southern states.”

This ceaseless dwelling on a danger which no thoughtful man thinks impending leads to attacks of popular hysteria in the South. A few months ago in the town of Madison, Ga., it was reported: “Last night great excitement prevailed in Madison caused by the appearance on the electric-light poles in the city of a yellow flag about two feet long, with the word ‘Surrender’ printed in large letters in the center of it. Women became hysterical and thought it was the sign of a negro uprising. Extra police was installed and it was thought of calling out the military company. At the height of the excitement, it was learned that the signs had been posted as an advertisement by a firm here. Cases have been made against the members of the firm.”

The real point with regard to social equality is not that the Negro is inferior, but that his inferiority must be made evident at every turn. You may ride beside a negro driver on the front seat of a carriage, because any passerby sees that he is doing your bidding; but you must not sit on the back seat with a Negro who might be a fellow-passenger; you may stop at a Negro’s house, if there is absolutely no other place to stay, sit at his table, eat of his food, but he must stand while you sit; else, as one of the richest Negroes in the South said, “the neighbors would burn our house over our heads.” The whole South is full of evidence, not so much that the Whites think the Negroes inferior, as that they think it necessary to fix upon him some public evidence of inferiority, lest mistakes be made. It was against such confusion of the character and the color that Governor Andrew protested when he said: “I have never despised a man because he was poor, or because he was ignorant, or because he was black.”