MATERIAL AND POLITICAL REMEDIES

The methods of dealing with the race question discussed in the last chapter all go back to the idea that the Negro can be improved only by some process distasteful to him. Race separation he dislikes, expatriation he shudders at, and violence brings on him more evils than it removes, to say nothing of the effect on the Whites. The world has tried many experiments of civilizing people by the police, and they are all failures, from the Russian Empire to the West Side of New York, especially since both the Cossacks and the metropolitan police have faults of their own. In the South and in Russia alike there is doubtless a feeling that the people at the bottom of the scale are things below the common standard, that force is necessary because they will not listen to reason.

None of the forcible remedies meets the most obvious difficulty in the South—that the present condition of the lower race is not a foundation for great wealth and high prosperity. If the Negro has reached his pitch, if he is to remain at his present average of morals and industry and productivity, the South may well be in despair, for it is far below that of the low Southern White, and farther below that of the Northwestern farmer. The condition of the black is a menace to society—if it must stay at the present level.In the chapter on “Is the Negro Rising?” some reasons are given for believing that the status of the race has much improved in the last forty years and is still gaining. Upon this critical point numbers of both races testify. Kelly Miller says of the achievements of his people: “Within forty years of only partial opportunity, while playing as it were in the backyard of civilization, the American negro has cut down his illiteracy by over fifty per cent; has produced a professional class some fifty thousand strong, including ministers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, editors, authors, architects, engineers and all higher lines of listed pursuits in which white men are engaged; some three thousand negroes have taken collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from the best institutions in the North and West established for the most favored white youth; ... negro inventors have taken out some four hundred patents as a contribution to the mechanical genius of America; there are scores of negroes who, for conceded ability and achievements, take respectable rank in the company of distinguished Americans.”

This opinion is not confined to members of the negro race; even so cordial an enemy of the Negro as John Temple Graves 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”; and elsewhere he declares that there are two good Negroes for every bad Negro, a proportion which does not obtain in every race. Thomas Nelson Page is of opinion that, “Unquestionably, a certain proportion of the Negro race has risen notably since the era of emancipation,” and John Sharp Williams commits himself to the statement that “Fully ninety per cent of the negro race is behaving itself as well as could be expected; it is at work in the fields, on the railroads, and in the sawmills, and does not, for the most part, know that there is a fifteenth amendment.” A cloud of witnesses confirm the belief that a fourth to a fifth of all the Negroes in the South are somewhat improving and slowly saving. Some of them have hearkened to the advice of an English writer: “Try to realize two things: first, that you are living in a commercial republic; a country whose standard, in all things, is material; second, that you are the greatest economic power in this country.”

The possibility of a general industrial uplift depends upon several factors which are not easy to fix. It is a question whether the lower four fifths of the negro race has anything like the potentiality of the upper fraction, for it is made up mostly of plantation Negroes, who have certainly advanced a long way from slavery times, are better clothed, better fed, better housed, better treated, but are still a long way below most of the Whites in their own section. The most appalling thing about the negro problem is, this mass of people on the land who are doing well in the sense that they work, make cotton, yield profits, help to make the community prosperous, but who are ignorant, stupid, and have no horizon outside the cotton field and the cornfield. In spirit they still hark back to Whittier’s plantation song,

De yam will grow, de cotton blow,
We’ll hab de rice an’ corn;
O nebber you fear if nebber you hear
De driver blow his horn.

Is there anything stirring in the minds of that great, good-natured, inert and unthinking mass which will bring them up where the reproach now heaped upon them shall fade away? Still more, if they try to arise, will the Whites permit them? That is no idle question, for rising means that some of them will seek other pursuits, and the white people have already given notice that certain avenues of labor are closed to them. Contrary to many assertions confidently made, the Negroes are not as a race crowded out of the skilled trades in the South; but the trades union is bound to appear and the effort will be to shut negro mechanics out of the unions altogether, as has been done in some Northern places. The Negro as he rises to higher possibilities may find those possibilities withdrawn. Listen to the philosophy of Thomas Dixon, Jr., a Christian minister: “If the Negro is made master of the industries of the South he will become the master of the South. Sooner than allow him to take the bread from their mouths, the white men will kill him here, as they do North, when the struggle for bread becomes as tragic.... Make the Negro a scientific and successful farmer, and let him plant his feet deep in your soil, and it will mean a race war.... The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, or the leopard his spots. Those who think it possible will always tell you that the place to work this miracle is in the South. Exactly. If a man really believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a Negro in marriage. That is the test.” This is nothing more nor less than the negro preacher’s exhortation to his congregation: “My dear hearers, dar is two roads a-lyin’ straight before you, and a-branchin’ off de one from de odder at the nex’ corners; one of ’em leads to perdition, and de odder to everlastin’ damnation. Oh, my friends, which will you choose?” If the Negro will not rise, argues Dixon, he gives nothing to the community, away with him! If he does rise, he may take work that otherwise some white man might do, lynch him!

The real argument of competition works just the other way. The inferior Negro is not likely to take the bread out of the mouth of the superior white man; but, when relieved from the abnormal conditions of slavery and of Reconstruction, he may still be able to hold his own in the struggle for existence. Emancipation threw upon the Negro the responsibility for his own keeping. The most that he can ask is a fair field without artificial hindrances or limitations; and in such a field a race on the average inferior may nevertheless find tasks in which it excels, and may maintain its race life unimpaired. Kelly Miller says: “You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, I was born with an iron hoe in my hand”; and the world needs the hoe hand just as much as the silversmith.

It would appear that for the uplift of the Negro something is needed on the white side: remembrance of the foundations of American liberty, of the workings of Christianity, of the economic truth that you are not made poor because your neighbor gets on in the world. The curse of the South is that its people do not more genuinely realize that the more active, industrious, and thrifty a people become, the more their neighbors receive out of the enlarged contribution to the community. If the Negroes were all as intelligent as Roscoe Conkling Bruce, as forehanded as Benson of Kowaliga, as lyric as Paul Dunbar, the Whites in the South might get rich out of the trade of the Negro, and some of them see it so. For instance, President Winston, of the Agricultural College of North Carolina: “Greater industrial efficiency would prove an everlasting bond between the races in the South. It is the real key to the problem. Let the Negro make himself indispensable as a workman, and he may rely upon the friendship and affection of the whites.... Public sentiment in the South still welcomes the Negro to every field of labor that he is capable of performing. The whole field of industry is open to him. The Southern whites are not troubled by his efficiency but by his inefficiency.” Meantime the really industrious Negroes, of whom there are a couple of million or more, follow the advice of Paul Dunbar:

I’ve a humble little motto
That is homely, though it’s true,—
Keep a-pluggin’ away.
It’s a thing when I’ve an object
That I always try to do,—
Keep a-pluggin’ away.
When you’ve rising storms to quell,
When opposing waters swell,
It will never fail to tell,—
Keep a-pluggin’ away.

The self-interest of the planter in the efficiency of his labor does not necessarily lead him to see the highest interests either of the negro race or of the South, under the present industrial system, which makes a plantation a workshop rather than a farm. The ownership of rich cotton lands only means wealth if you can find negro laborers and keep them at work. One of the most powerful uplifting agencies in all agricultural countries is the desire to own land, and one of the most frequent texts of Booker Washington is that now is the time for the Negro to acquire land, for it will never again be so cheap; but where is the land to be found? Although ownership has almost completely changed since the Civil War, good lands are aggregating more and more into large tracts. The white farmer finds it difficult to hold his own against the capitalist and the syndicate, and even the thrifty black is beset by special difficulties.

In the first place, the rural Negro has, unless by his saving from sawmill and turpentine work, little opportunity to make money with which to buy a farm, except from the farm itself: hence he buys on time, pays a heavy interest charge, and is at every disadvantage. In the second place, few planters are willing to break up their land into small tracts; to do so takes away their livelihood, their only opportunity of making available their knowledge of cotton planting and of dealing with cotton hands. Some of them are absolutely opposed to letting the Negroes have land. Mr. Bell, of Alabama, one of the largest landowners in the South, is credited with saying that he “has no use for a Nigger that pays out.” That is to say, he prefer his hands to be unprogressive and in debt. Perhaps the South fails to realize that the wealth of the Western, Middle, and New England states comes from encouraging people to do the best they know how. The more industrious the people are, the more business there is of every kind and for everybody. The South would be happier and more prosperous if it could accept the Western system of moderate-sized detached farms, on each of which there is an intelligent owner or tenant.

The large number of negro landowners (though many of them perhaps are mortgaged) and the evident prosperity of those communities in which the greatest number of them hold their land, seems to show that landowning is a motive that ought to be strongly set before them. The old notion of Reconstruction times that the federal government ought to furnish “forty acres and a mule” was not so far wrong; it would have been perfectly possible for the nation to acquire land in large tracts, to subdivide it, and give or sell it at nominal rates, so as to offer every thrifty Negro the chance of proprietorship; but that opportunity, if it ever existed, has long gone by, and the Negro must depend upon himself if he wishes to buy land.

The present system is not only industrial; it tends to make a peasant out of the Negro, and peasant is a term of reproach in the United States, though in France, Germany, and Italy there are rich peasants as well as poor ones, peasants who employ labor as well as those who have nothing but their hands. The American objection to a peasant system is its fixity; the peasant is an hereditary laborer on the land, usually the land of another; he leaves it to other people to carry on the state, to elevate the community. Nevertheless, it is simply the truth that under the present system of tenancy employment and day wages, nearly half of the negro race in the South is in effect a peasantry. Perhaps that is their fate. Perhaps the Alabama lawyer’s doctrine, so comfortable for the white man, is to prevail: “It’s a question who will do the dirty work. In this country the white man won’t: the Negro must. There’s got to be a mudsill somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won’t stay where they belong; and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it makes the others discontented.”

The question of who is to do the crude, disagreeable and dirty work, has solved itself in the North which has had one stratum after another of immigrants who were willing to take it, each shoving his predecessor higher up in the scale of employment; but no foreigners will come into the South in order to relieve the Negro of hewing of wood and drawing of water. It looks as though the majority of the race would be compelled to accept some condition on the land, without a share in the government and without much prospect of getting into other kinds of life. The prospect is discouraging in itself, and it readily shades into restraint, subjection, and peonage—the worst of remedies for a race low in origin, which has just emerged from a debasing servitude, and which needs all the stimulus of ambition and opportunity.

The South has proved its capacity for organizing and directing ignorant labor, but a peasant system has more dangers for the upper than the lower class. The gentlemen of eighteenth-century France, with all their high breeding, did not understand the people under them and were hated of their peasants; the Pashas of Egypt were degraded by their mastery over thousands of fellahin; the Russian boyars have so alienated the peasants that they have almost rent the empire in twain. To accept a peasant system would be a confession that the South must remain in the lower stage of economic progress which goes with such a system. The duty and the privilege of the South is still to seek the way of enlightment; to make the Negro a better laborer instead of crystallizing him into a race of dependents.

Material progress is necessary for the Negro and equally for the Poor White, not simply that he may be better clad and have better health, but because it brings with it other influences which go to elevate mankind. You cannot make good citizens and virtuous people out of a dirty, ill-fed family in a one-room house; the remedy of intellectual and moral uplift is as important as the material side. Thrift works both ways: the man who buys good clothes for his children wants to send them to Sunday school; the poor children in Sunday school beg their fathers to give them good clothes. Such intellectual and moral agencies are at work, though here again some white leaders object to them. For instance, John Temple Graves asks: “Will the negro, with his increasing education and his surely and steadily advancing worth and merit, be content to accept, in peace and humility, anything less than his full and equal share in the government of which he is a part?” Here is one of the stumbling blocks in the way of the progress of the race.

For thrift and saving habits the South has always lacked one of the approved aids; it has few savings banks, few ordinary banks which attract the deposits of Negroes, and few steady investments in small denominations. For this reason the proposed Postal Savings Banks would be a boon to the South, and would help toward the purchase of land and other property. The Negroes’ own fraternal orders and stock companies furnish some opportunities for savings. Regulation of drinking and gambling places will also make saving likelier among the laborers. That difficulties and conflicts of interest would rise between Whites and Negroes was foreseen at the time of Reconstruction, and it was honestly supposed by the thinking people of the North that the ballot would at the same time protect the black against white aggression, and would educate him into the sense of such responsibility that there would not be negro aggression. Giving the negro suffrage, however, while at the same time through the Reconstruction state constitutions disfranchising his former master, brought about a condition of unstable equilibrium, and the strongest, best organized, and most determined race of course prevailed. For some years after the restoration of white supremacy in the Southern states, colored men were still allowed to vote in districts like the Sea Islands of South Carolina, and the Delta of Mississippi, where they were predominant, but since 1885 there has not been any genuine negro suffrage in any state of the South, in the sense that Negroes were assured that their votes could be cast and would be counted even if they made a difference in the result. The last remnant of a successful combination of negro voters with a minority of the Whites was in the North Carolina election of 1896.

By the series of constitutional amendments begun in 1890, and since spread through the South, a property or intelligence qualification has practically been established for Negroes while not applying to poor or illiterate Whites. In the Northern states race difficulties, so far as they take form in politics, are settled by the usual course of elections; in the South it is the unalterable intention of the Whites that the Negroes shall not participate in choosing officials or in making laws either for white men or for themselves.

Furthermore, the South is bitterly opposed to the holding of offices by Negroes except the small local appointments. Though Negroes are one third in number in the South, and more than one half the population in two states, they have not a single state administrative official, member of legislature, or judge. The opposition to negro office holding extends to federal appointments, although a considerable number of places, some of them important, are still held by Negroes. They obtain appointments as railway mail clerks and letter carriers by competitive examination, and a few of them are selected for collectorships of internal revenue and of customs, on the basis that the Negroes are part of the community and entitled to some recognition. To exclude them altogether from the public service, as they have been almost excluded from the suffrage, may somewhat diminish race friction, but it is a mark of inferiority which the whole negro race resents.