RACE SEPARATION

Strong and passionate dislike and apprehension such as is set forth in the last chapter is certain to show itself in custom and law set up by that portion of the community which has the power of legislation. The commonest measures of this kind are discriminations between Whites and Negroes, especially in the use of public conveniences. In some cases the white people shut out Negroes altogether. There are perhaps half a dozen towns in the South in which none but Negroes live; there are scores in which the Negroes are not allowed to settle or stay. Two counties in North Carolina (Mitchell and Watauga) undertake to exclude Negroes; and people who attempt to go through there with a black driver are confronted by such signs as “Nigger, keep out of this county!” If that is not sufficient, a native comes swinging across the fields and remarks: “I don’t want to have any trouble, and I don’t suppose it makes any difference to you, but if that nigger goes two miles farther, he’ll be shot. We don’t allow any niggers in this county.” Such exclusions are not unknown in other states. In the town of Syracuse, Ohio, for generations no Negro has ever been allowed to stay overnight; and the founder of a little city in Oklahoma heard his buildings blown up at night because he had ventured to domicile colored servants there. In the two Northern settlements of Fitzgerald, Ga., and Cullman, Ala., the attempt was made to keep Negroes out altogether.

In addition to these artificial separations, there is a redistribution of the population going on all the while. Few of the owners of good plantations any longer live on them, and the outlying Whites move into town, or into counties where Negroes are fewer. The places thus vacated are taken up through rent or purchase by colored people; so that we have the striking phenomenon that black counties are getting blacker and white counties whiter. Thus in Pulaski County, Ga., in thirty years the Negroes doubled and the Whites increased only about twenty per cent. The same thing is true inside the cities and towns; most of them have well-marked negro quarters, near or alongside which none but the lowest Whites like to live. In Richmond, on one of the main streets, it is tacitly understood that the Negroes take the north sidewalk and the Whites the south sidewalk. Probably no place is now quite so strict in the matter as Morristown, Tenn., was twenty-five years ago, when white women first came to teach the Negroes; they were literally thrown off the sidewalks into the gutter because that was the only place where “niggers or nigger-lovers” were allowed to walk.

The principle of race separation extends from civil into religious matters. Before the Civil War Negroes were often acceptable and honored members of white churches, and there are still some cases where old members continue this relation, but they could now hardly sit in the same pews. There are also difficulties in attempts to unite separate black and white churches into one general denomination. The Protestant Episcopal Church is much perplexed over a proposition for separate negro bishops, inferior to the regular bishops. However, not a twentieth of the Negroes to-day are members of churches which are in organic relation to white churches; they have their own presbyteries, and conferences, and synods; set their own doctrines and moral standards, and (if the white man is right in thinking the race inferior) they will necessarily develop an inferior Christianity.

The discriminations so far mentioned have to do with unwritten practices; with customs which differ from community to community; there is another long series upon the statute books. In 1865, in the so-called Vagrant Laws, special provision was made for the relations of colored people; four states allowed colored children to be “apprenticed,” which practically meant a mild slavery; in South Carolina “servants,” as the Negroes were called in the statute, were forbidden to leave their master’s place without consent; Mississippi forbade people to rent land to Negroes outside the towns; South Carolina established a special court for the trial of negro offenses; several states forbade blacks to practice any trade or business without a license. These laws, which competent Southerners now think to have been a serious mistake, seemed to Congress evidence of a purpose to restore a milder form of slavery, and they were swept away by the Reconstruction governments. Nevertheless, in all the Southern states, constitutions or statutes forbid the intermarriage of Whites and Negroes; and either during Reconstruction or since, all the Southern states have provided for separate public schools for Negroes; and several states prohibit the education of Whites and blacks in the same private school.

The most striking discrimination is the separate accommodations on railroads and steamboats, which has entirely grown up since the Civil War. In slavery times few Negroes traveled except as the obvious servants of white people; but in 1865 legislation began for separate cars or compartments, and of the former slaveholding states, only two, Missouri and Delaware, are now without laws on that subject. The term “Jim Crow” commonly applied to these laws goes back to an old negro song and dance, and was first used in Massachusetts, where, in 1841, the races were thus separated. The Civil Rights Act of Congress of 1875 forbade such distinctions, but was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Several state and federal cases have given opportunity for the courts to decide that if there is a division between the two races, the accommodations must be equal. Hence, most Southern trains have a separate Jim Crow car, with a smoking compartment. The Pullman Car Company, perhaps because its business is chiefly interstate, has hesitated to make distinctions, and commonly will sell a berth to anybody who will show a railroad ticket good on the appropriate train; but in some states there are now demands for separate colored Pullmans, or for colored compartments, or for excluding Negroes altogether. But nobody who knows the Pullman Car Company will for a moment expect that it will do anything because patrons desire it. The discrimination in many states extends to the stations. For instance, in the beautiful new Spanish Mission building at Mobile, there are separate waiting rooms, separate ticket windows, and two exits—one for Whites and one for colored people. In Greensboro, N. C., the waiting room, a large and lofty hall, is simply bisected by a brass railing.

Similar laws apply to steamboats, though here it is not so easy to shut off part of the passengers from the general facilities of the boat. Even in the Boston steamers running to Southern ports there are separate dining rooms, toilet rooms and smoking rooms for colored passengers. Eight Southern states separate street-car passengers; sometimes they have a separate compartment for Negroes—more often, a little movable sign is shifted up and down the car to divide the races. Elsewhere, Whites sit at one end and Negroes at the other, and fill up till they meet. In most of these laws there is an exception, allowing colored nurses with white children and colored attendants of feeble or sick people to enter the white car; and it has been thought necessary to provide that railroad employees, white or black, may circulate through the train.

In restaurants and hotels the distinction is still sharper, for except those which are kept only for the accommodations of Negroes, there is no provision for tables for colored people in any form outside of the railroad eating houses. It is hence practically impossible for any colored person to get accommodation in a Southern hotel.

These discriminations on travel have never been desired by the railroad companies, inasmuch as they involve trouble and expense, and are a check on the Negro’s love for riding on trains and boats, which is an important factor in the passenger receipts. It is everywhere disliked by the Negroes, both because they do not, in fact, have accommodations as good as those of the Whites, and because it is intended to be a mark of their inferiority. The low-class white man who, in 1902, acted as ticket agent, baggage man and division superintendent and conductor on the three-mile branch road connecting Tuskegee with the main line remarked affably: “Been to see the nigger school, I suppose? That’s all right, Booker Washington’s all right. Oh, yes, he’s a good man, he often rides on this train. Not in this part of the car, you know, but over there in the Jim Crow. Oh, yes, I often set down and talk to Booker Washington. Not on the same seat of course. Jest near by.”

Besides these shackles of custom or of law, the Negro is in general excluded in the South from every position which might be construed to give him authority over white people. The civil service of the federal government is on a different footing; ever since war times there have always been some negro federal officials, collectors of internal revenue, collectors of ports, postmasters, and the like; but there is a determined effort in the South to get rid of them. At Lake City, S. C., in 1898, part of the family of Baker, the negro postmaster, was massacred as a hint that his presence was not desired. The people of Indianola, Miss., in 1903, practically served notice on a colored postmistress that she could not be allowed to officiate any longer; whereupon President Roosevelt directed the closing of the Indianola office. When in 1902 Dr. Crum was appointed collector of Charleston, there was an uproar in South Carolina and throughout the South. That episode involved some painful and some comical things; for instance, a white lady who bears one of the most honored names in American history, and who sorely needed the employment, was practically compelled by public sentiment to resign a clerkship in the customhouse when Dr. Crum came in; and the people who protested against his appointment, on the ground that he was unfit, had previously helped to select him as a commissioner in the Charleston Exposition.

In all these controversies the issue was double; first, that the white people thought it an indignity to transact any public business with a Negro representing the United States; and second, that it would somehow bring about race equality to admit that a Negro was competent to hold any important office. The President was furiously censured because he did not take into account the preferences of the Southern people, by which, of course, was meant the Southern white people; that in South Carolina there are more African citizens than Caucasian seemed to them quite beside the question.

For minor offices the lines are not so strictly drawn; there are a few colored policemen in Charleston, and perhaps other Southern cities; Negro towns like Mound Bayou, Miss., have their own set of officials; and there are some small county offices which a few Negroes are allowed to hold. Nearly two thousand are employed in some capacity in the federal departments at Washington; about two thousand more under the District government; and a thousand more elsewhere, mostly in the South. These are chiefly in the postal service; there are some negro letter carriers in all the Southern cities, and in Mobile there are no others. They get these appointments, and likewise places as railway mail clerks on competitive examination—an especially hard twist to the doctrine of race equality; for what is the world coming to if a nigger gets more marks on an examination than a white man? For the feeling that the Negro in authority is overbearing and presumptuous there is some ground, but the attitude of the South is substantially expressed in the common phrase, “This is a white man’s government,” and is closely allied with the bogy of African domination, which is trotted out from time to time to arouse the jaded energies of race prejudice.

One of the most unaccountable things in this whole controversy is the evident apprehension of a large section in the South that unless something immediate and positive is done, the Negro will get control of some of the Southern states, notwithstanding such protests as the following: “And even where they represent a majority,—where do they rule? or where have they ruled for these twenty years? The South, with all its millions of negroes, has to-day not a single negro congressman, not a negro governor or senator. A few obscure justices of the peace, a few negro mayors in small villages of negro people, and—if we omit the few federal appointees—we have written the total of all the negro officials in our Southern States. Every possibility of negro domination vanishes to a more shadowy and more distant point with every year.” As will be shown a little later, the Negro’s vote is no longer a factor in most of the Southern states, and he shows no disposition to take over the responsibility for Southern government. The cry of negro domination has been more unfortunate for the Whites than for the blacks because it has thrown the Southern states out of their adjustment in national parties; in the state election of 1908 for Governor of Georgia, the issue was between Clark Howells, who was much against the Negro, and the successful candidate, Hoke Smith, who is mighty against the Negro; but neither Howells nor Smith brought out of the controversy any reputation that dazzled the Democratic Convention of 1908.

No party founded on negro votes or organized to protect negro rights any longer exists in the South. In Alabama there are still “black-and-tan Republicans”—that is, an organization of Negroes and Whites, and one of the most rabid Negro haters in the South is a dignitary in that organization and helped to choose delegates for the Republican national convention of 1908. Throughout the South there are also what are called the “Lilywhite Republicans”—that is, people who are trying to build up their party by disclaiming any partnership with the Negro or special interest in his welfare. Neither of these factions makes head against the overpowering “White Man’s party,” which is also the Democratic party; hence every state in the Lower South can be depended upon to vote for any candidate propounded by the national Democratic convention; hence the section has little influence in the selection of a candidate, who yet would not have a ghost of a chance without their votes. The net result of the scare cry of negro domination is that the Whites are in some states dominated by the loudest and most violent section of their own race.

Behind this whole question of politics and of office holding stands the more serious question whether a race which, whatever its average character, contains at least two million intelligent and progressive individuals, shall be wholly shut out from public employment. It is on this question that President Roosevelt made his famous declaration: “I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color.... It is a good thing from every standpoint to let the colored man know that if he shows in marked degree the qualities of good citizenship—the qualities which in a white man we feel are entitled to reward—then he will not be cut off from all hope of similar reward.”

The discrimination between the Negro and the White has nowhere been so bitterly contested as with regard to suffrage, inasmuch as the right of the Negro to vote on equal terms with the white man is distinctly set forth in the Fifteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution, and as during Reconstruction the Negro had full suffrage in all the Southern states. Without going into the history of the negro vote, it may be worth while to notice that at the time of the Revolution, Negroes who had the property qualification could vote in all the thirteen colonies except two; that they never lost that franchise in Massachusetts and some other Northern communities, and that as late as 1835 about a thousand of them had the ballot in North Carolina. Then in Reconstruction times the suffrage was given to all the Negroes in the country; a process of which one of the most bitter enemies of the race to-day says: “To give the negro the right of suffrage and place him on terms of absolute equality with the white man, was the capital crime of the ages against the white man’s civilization.” In reality the North bestowed the suffrage on the Negro because its own experience seemed to have proved that the ballot was an instrument of civilization—for all the foreign immigrants had grown up to it.

Southerners are never weary of describing the enormities of the governments based on negro suffrage; as a matter of fact, however, nobody North or South knows what would have been the result of negro suffrage, for in no state longer than eight years, and in some states only about three years, did they actually cast votes that determined the choice of state officers, or any considerable number of local officers. Their habit of voting for “the regular candidate,” without regard to his fitness or character, was not peculiar to the race or to the section. Disfranchisement began with the Ku Klux in 1870, and in most states the larger part of the Negroes at once lost their ballots because driven away from the polls by violence or terror. The only community in which they were disfranchised by statute, together with the Whites, was the District of Columbia. Then came the era of fraud, the use of tissue ballots and falsified electoral returns, and confusing systems of ballot boxes; then, in 1890, began a process of disfranchising them by state constitutional amendments which provided qualifications especially difficult for Negroes to meet: for instance, special indulgence was given to men who served in the Confederate army, or whose fathers or grandfathers were entitled to vote before the war. This movement has already involved six states, and is likely to run through every former slaveholding state.

Even the comparatively small number of Negroes who can meet the requirements of tax, education, or property find trouble in registering, or in voting. In Mississippi, where there were nearly 200,000 colored voters, there are now 16,000; in Alabama about 5,000 are registered out of 100,000 men of voting age. Sometimes they are simply refused registration, like the highly educated Negro in Alabama, who was received by the official with the remark: “Nigger, get out of here; this ain’t our day for registering niggers!” In Beaufort County, S. C., where, under the difficult provisions of the law, there are about seven hundred negro voters and about five hundred Whites, somehow the white election officials always return a majority for their friends; and in the presidential election of 1908 the hundred thousand negro men of voting age in South Carolina were credited with only twenty-five hundred votes for Theodore Roosevelt.

It has puzzled the leaders of the conventions to disfranchise the greater part of the Negroes without including “some of our own people,” and yet without technically infringing upon the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits the withdrawal of the suffrage on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; but they have been successful. As a Senator from North Carolina put it: “The disfranchising amendment would disfranchise ignorant negroes and not disfranchise any white man. No white man in North Carolina has been disfranchised as a result of this amendment.”

It is impossible not to feel a sympathy with the desire of the South to be free from an ignorant and illiterate electorate; there is not a Northern state in which, if the conditions were the same, the effort would not be made to restrict the suffrage; but that is a long way from the Southern principle of ousting the bad, low, and illiterate Negro, while leaving the illiterate, low, and bad White; and then, in the last resort, shutting out also the good, educated, and capable Negro. For there is not a state in the Lower South where the colored vote would be faithfully counted if it had a balance of power between two white parties; and Senator Tillman’s great fear at present is that the blacks will make the effort to come up to these complicated requirements, and then must be disenfranchised again. Have the Southern people confidence in their own race superiority, when for their protection from negro domination and from the great evil of amalgamation they feel it necessary to take such precautions against the least dangerous, most enterprising, and best members of the negro race? Nevertheless, the practical disenfranchisement of the Negroes has brought about a political peace, and there is little to show that the Negroes resent their exclusion.

Whatever the divergences of feeling in the South on the negro question, it is safe to say that the Whites are a unit on the two premises that amalgamation must be resisted, and that the Negro must not have political power. All these feelings are buttressed against a passionate objection to race-mixture, which is all the stronger because so much of it is going on; it branches out into the withdrawal of the suffrage, not because the South is in any danger of negro political domination, but because most Whites think no member of an inferior race ought to vote; it includes many restrictions on personal relations which seem like precautions where there is no danger.

Upon these main issues Northerners may share some of the sentiments of the South, but none of the terrors. If the Negro is inferior, it does not need so many acts of the legislature to prove it; if amalgamation is going on, it is due to the white race, can be checked by the white race, and by no one else; if the Negro is unintelligent, he will never, under present conditions, get enough votes to affect elections; if he does acquire the necessary property and education, he thereby shows that he does not share in the inferiority of his race. The South thinks about the Negro too much, talks about him too much, abuses him too much. In the nature of things there is no reason why the superior and the inferior race may not live side by side indefinitely. Is the Negro powerful enough to force his standards and share his disabilities with the superior white man? Is it not as the Chinese sage says: “The superior man is correctly firm, and not firm merely ... what the superior man seeks is in himself.”

So far as can be judged, the average frame of mind in the South includes much injustice, and unwillingness to permit the negro race to develop up to the measure of its limitations. Here the experience of the North counts, for it has many elements of population which at present are inferior to the average. If there is a low Italian quarter in a city, or a Slav quarter, or a Negro quarter, the aim of the Northern community is to give those people the best chance that they can appropriate. Woe to the city which permits permanent centers of crime and degradation! By schools, by reformatory legislation, by philanthropic societies, by juvenile courts, by missions, by that great blessing, the care of neglected children, they try to bring up the standard. This is done for the welfare of the community, it is what business men call a dollars and cents proposition. If a man or child has three fourths of the average abilities, the North tries to bring him to the full use of his seventy-five per cent; if he stands at 150 on the scale of 100, it aims to give him the opportunity to use his superior qualities.

This is just the point of view of the Southern leaders who are fighting for justice and common sense toward the Negro: men like the late Chancellor Hill, of the University of Georgia, like President Alderman, of the University of Virginia, like Rev. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Montgomery; their gospel is that, notwithstanding his limitations, the Negro is on the average capable of higher things than he is doing, and that the gifted members of the race can render still larger services to their own color and to the community. That is what Dr. S. C. Mitchell, of Richmond College, meant when he said: “Friend, go up higher!” a phrase which part of the Southern press has unwarrantably seized upon as a declaration of social equality.

Every friend of the South must hope that that enlightened view will permeate the community; but, as a matter of fact, a very considerable number of people of power in the South, legislators, professional men, journalists, ministers, governors, either take the ground that the Negro is so hopelessly low that it is a waste of effort to try to raise him; or that education and uplift will make him less useful to the White, and therefore he shall not have it; or that you cannot give to the black man a better chance without bringing danger upon the white man. Contrary to the experience of mankind, to present upward movement in what has been a very low white element in the South, and to the considerable progress made by the average Negro since slavery days, such people hold that intelligence and education do nothing for the actual improvement of the colored race. Since the Negro is low, they would keep him low; since they think him dangerous, they wish to leave him dangerous; their policy is to make the worst of a bad situation instead of trying to improve it.

No Northern mind can appreciate the point of view of some men who certainly have a considerable following in the South. Here, for instance, is Thomas Dixon, Jr., arguing with all his might that the Negro is barely human, but that if he is not checked he will become such an economic competitor of the white man that he will have to be massacred. He protests against Booker T. Washington’s attempt to raise the Negro, because he thinks it will be successful. Part, at least, of the customary and statutory discriminations against the Negro which have already been described are simply an expression of this supposed necessity of keeping the Negro down, lest he should rise too far. All such terrors involve the humiliating admission that the Negro can rise, and that he will rise if he has the opportunity.