MORAL REMEDIES

The regeneration of a race, as of mankind, is something that must proceed from within and work outward. Hence the most obvious remedy for race troubles is that both races should come up to a higher plane of living. What has been the progress of the Negro in that direction; what is the likelihood of further advance? The chance of the blacks is less than it would be if the white race had a larger part in it. The Negro is insensibly affected by the spirit of the community in which he lives. He knows that though ruffians threaten him with revolvers or with malignant looks that have a longer range, there are also broad-minded and large-hearted white men who bid him rise; but he is almost cut off from the machinery of civilization set in motion by his white neighbor; he cannot use or draw books from the public library; he practically cannot attend any churches, lectures, or concerts, except those provided directly for him. On the plantation he hardly sees a white face, except those of the managers and their families. He has little opportunity to talk with white men; none for that interchange of thought which is so much promoted by sitting round the same table. He can attend no colleges or schools with white students. In the common schools and in many institutions above, he meets only negro teachers. He is far more cut off from the personal touch and influence of white men and women of high quality than he was in slavery times.

Within his own race he experiences the influences of some notable minds, and, with few exceptions, the men recognized by the Negroes as their chief leaders counsel moderation and preach uplift. Many of the lesser leaders are deficient in character, and a large fraction of the ministers of the gospel do not, by their lives or conversation, enforce the lessons which they teach from the pulpit; they also have not the advantage of training by white teachers. In the process of separation of races, the negro mind has gone far toward losing touch with the white mind. The best friends of the race are grieved and humiliated from time to time to find that they had expected something which the Negroes did not recognize as due from them—service, loyalty, gratitude. Thousands of people believe that the Negro makes it the object of his life to cheat a white man. Thousands of Negroes feel that they are not bound by promises or contracts made to their own hurt.

Since the white race is not in such friendly relations with the Negro as to impress upon him the causes of white superiority, some Southern writers would like to see a sort of benevolent state socialism applied to the Negro, such as laws under which the coming and going of the blacks should be regulated, their implements secured, and labor distributed where it was needed. Like many other suggestions, this remedy would cure the Negro’s shiftlessness by taking away his self-control, and would apply to the lazy black man a rÉgime which would be abhorrent if employed upon the lazy white man.

Where the Whites appreciate and aid the Negroes, the color line cuts them off from making the distinctions which are the rewards of the energetic and successful in other communities. The negro poet, the essayist, and the educator have no fellowship with those neighbors who could appreciate their genius. So far as the South can prevent it, the most energetic and successful negro business man can hope for no public office. The machinery for uplifting the Negro through white influence is no longer in operation. The inferior race is thrown back upon members of the inferior race for its moral stimulus; and then is reproached because it does not form higher ideals and advance more rapidly. The successful Negro exercising a good influence among his fellows cannot be admitted to the white man’s club, cannot be made the intimate of men of kindred aims. As Senator Williams says: “When we find a good negro we must encourage him to stay good and to grow better. We are doing too little of that. The old adage, ‘Give a dog a bad name and you have made a bad dog,’ is a good one. Indiscriminate cursing of the whole negro race, good and bad alike included, is an exemplification of the adage. I have frequently thought how hard it was for a good negro, especially during campaign times, to stay good or to grow better when he could not come within sound of a white speaker’s voice without hearing his whole race indiscriminately reviled without mention of him as an exception, even in the neighborhood where he was known to be one.”

One of the strongest civilizing forces both North and South has been the Church, through which has been spread abroad not only the incitements to life on a high plane, but the intellectual stimulus of the preacher’s voice, of the association of keen men, of Bible study. The Negro has the outward sign of this influence, the force of which is recognized by all candid people; but his clergy are not, as a class, moral leaders, and here, as in so many other directions, he is deprived of the leadership of the Whites. For similar populations in the North there is an apparatus of missions, and the schools and colleges planted by Northerners in the South are almost all substantially missionary movements; but the South dislikes them and makes almost no effort to rival them. The Christian church, which is the bearer of civilization to Africa, China, the American Indians, leaves the Negroes in great part to christianize themselves if they can.

The white man has another opportunity of helping upward his dark neighbor through his control of legislatures and courts. Garner would solve the problem—“not by denying him the advantages of education, but by curbing his criminal instincts through a more rigid enforcement of the law. The laws against carrying concealed weapons, against gambling, and against vagrancy should, if necessary, be increased in severity and enforced with a vigilance and certainty which will root out gambling, force the idle vagrant to work, and send the pistol carrier to prison. The abolition of the saloon and the extirpation of the ‘blind tiger’ and the cocaine dive would remove the most potent external causes of negro criminality.... Conditions could be materially improved by the establishment of a more adequate police surveillance and control and the introduction of a more effective police protection, for it is a well-known fact that in most Southern communities this protection is notoriously insufficient. It is also well worth considering whether some reasonable and effective measures might not be taken to prevent the movement of the negroes to the towns and cities and their segregation in particular localities.” Says an Alabamian lawyer: “A different and milder set of laws ought to be enacted for him than for the white man.... His best friends in the South are among our ‘gentlemen.’ The low White has no use for him. He hates the Negro and the Negro hates him.” From the federal government, as has been shown above, no effective legislation can be expected; but may not something be done by special state action?

Many observers are alive to the possibility of removing temptations which are thought to be specially alluring to the Negro. The ill-disposed country black is a rover, a night-hawk, and has his own kinds of good times, including a supply of whisky; the bad town Negro finds his pleasures right at hand, and is frequently abetted in them by the white man. To be sure, low drinking houses, gambling houses and worse places, flourish among all races in New York, and are no more likely to be exterminated in New Orleans than in the Northern city for such considerations. John Sharp Williams would resort to “some sort of common-sense remedies of the negro question upon the criminal side, principally in the nature of preventives. In the first place, they suggest the rigid enforcement of vagrant laws by new laws whenever, in justice and right, they need strengthening. In the second place, they suggest a closing of all low dives and brothels where the vagrant, tramp, and idle negroes consort and where their imaginations—they being peculiarly a race of imagination and emotion—are inflamed by whisky, cocaine, and lewd pictures. It must be remembered that that which would not inflame the imagination of a white man will have that effect upon the tropical, emotional nature of the darky.... We ought, like Canada and Cape Colony, to have mounted rural police or constabulary, whose duty it would be to patrol the country districts day and night.” The cry in the Southern newspapers against negro dives generally ignores the fact that many of them are carried on by white people, and others are partially supported by white custom. At the bottom of humanity race distinctions disappear, and you could find, if you searched for it, in many Southern towns, beneath the lowest negro deep a lower white deep. The difficulty with Southern legislation is that it is more hostile to negro dives than to white dives.

A more promising legislative remedy is an efficient vagrant law, by which the hopelessly idle, the sponges on the industry of their race, should receive the dread punishment of work. Northern states which are unable to find statutes and magistrates strict enough to put an end to the intolerable white tramp nuisance, have little cause to criticise the Southern loafers, of whom the Whites are found in quite as large a proportion as the Negroes. Several states already have vagrant laws, but they are applied chiefly to Negroes, often very inequitably, and play into the iniquitous system by which sheriffs make money in proportion to the number of prisoners that they arrest and keep in jail. The Birmingham Age Herald says that to abolish imprisonment for nonpayment of criminal costs is “as much out of our reach as is a flight to Mars.... We must build jails to suit the operations of the collectors of fees. There is no help for it.”

Suggestions that there be a kind of negro court for the less serious negro crimes, have been made by Thomas Nelson Page and others; and Negroes could probably administer as good local justice as some of their dominant race. In the island of St. Helena, for instance, where seven thousand people for a long time had no local court, a white magistrate was sent over who sat day after day drunk on the bench, finally shot a man (the second homicide on that island in forty years), and was put on his trial, but still held his judicial office. Perhaps a special negro court for petty crimes would increase the sense of responsibility; but it collides with the present system of selling petty criminals to the planters.

Something could be done by an efficient system of rural police such as is needed all over the country, North and South. In Georgia and South Carolina bills have lately been pending for a state mounted police which would be a sort of revival of the volunteer patrols of slavery times. The suggestion is fought hard, however, on the ground that white men might be obliged to give an account of themselves as well as Negroes.

The only thoroughgoing legislative measure which seems likely to help the Negro is prohibition, which is now sweeping through the Lower South. It is a region which suffers from hard drinking, and there has long been a strong sentiment against the traffic; but the tumultuous success of prohibition laws in communities like Alabama and Mississippi is due in great part to the conviction of employers of labor in cotton mills, in ironworks, in the timber industry, and on the land, that they are losing money because their laborers are made irregular by drunkenness. That objection applies as much to the selling of liquor to Whites as to Negroes; but the drinking white men have an influence over prosecuting officers that the Negroes cannot command; and it looks as though the result would be a kind of prohibition which shuts off the stream from the dusky man’s throat while leaving it running for the white man. If the South succeeds in keeping liquor away from the Negro in the Southern cities, it will show more determination than exists in any Northern center of population.

In general, legislation is not a remedy for the race question, because breaches of the law come from both sides; and nobody is skillful enough to draft a bill which will, if righteously applied, apply only to criminal and dissolute Negroes. The cutting down of drinking shops, the arrest of the drones, a rural police, enforcement of the liquor laws, will help in the South because it will bring about a feeling of responsibility in both races—but race hostility is not caused by laws, is not curable by laws, and relies upon defying laws.

Perhaps the most striking failure of the Whites to exercise an influence over the Negroes is through the negro schools. They are, to be sure, carried on under laws made by white men, administered by state and county white officials, but there the relation ends. Even from the point of view of an unsympathetic superior race, the schools are badly supervised; and when it comes to the teachers, the lower race is thrown back upon teachers of the lower race. In the North the raw children from the alien families are Americanized by their fellows in the public schools, under the influence of teachers taken from the class of the population which has most opportunity for training. Not so in the South, where the blind are expected to lead the blind, where negro teachers trained by Negroes are expected to inculcate the principles of white civilization.

The refusal of the South to permit white people, and especially white women, to teach the Negroes, is a plant of recent growth. In slavery times the white mistresses and their daughters habitually taught the household servants their duties and set before them a standard of morals. Beyond that, they were often proud of teaching capable slaves to read and write. On every theory of the relation of the races this transmittal of civilization was not only allowable, but a sacred duty. Nowadays the mistresses have the smallest control over or influence upon their domestic servants; and, with few exceptions, the South absolutely refuses to improve the low estate of the Negroes by permitting the white young people to teach them.

The arguments against putting white teachers into negro schools are altogether weak. The first is that it is unsafe for white women, but the Northern women who have been for years among Negroes as teachers have no fear nor cause for fear; and the influence of a pure and refined white woman would tend to diminish some of the worst crimes of the black race. It is urged, however, that even men could not teach Negroes, first, because the Negroes would not trust their girls to them; secondly, because it would cut off the field or negro employment; thirdly, because a white man does not wish to teach Negroes; and, finally, because none but inferior men would seek such employment.

Surely the poor little black children are not likely under any circumstances to suppose that they are the equals of the members of the proud families that held their fathers in slavery! The white people sorely need the employment; the Negroes still more need the example and admonition of trained and high-minded people. The relation is not unknown. In the public schools of Charleston, for forty years, the negro children have been taught by white ladies, and as well taught as the white children. In Alabama, and even in Virginia, public schools were for a time taught by Whites, and you hear of sporadic cases elsewhere, as in a district of Louisiana, where the mother of the chairman of the school board was a teacher, and she was so incapable that no white school would have her on any terms, so they compromised by giving her a negro school. With these small exceptions, a relation between the races, through which none of the dreaded evils of race equality could come about, was rejected; and that is the main reason why the negro schools have been poor and continue inferior. The Southern woman is not below the Northern in a sense of duty; the Southern schoolmarm is the equal of her Yankee sister in refinement and in pluck; and the Southern woman was the only class of people in the South who could at the same time have taught the pickaninnies to read, and the older people to recognize that the Whites were their best friends.

Of all the remedies suggested, education is the most direct and the most practical because it has so far been neglected; education is needed for the safety of the race. As Leroy Percy, the successful planter, puts it: “You cannot send these men out to fight the battle of life helplessly ignorant. In slavery, he was the slave of one, and around him was thrown the protecting care of the master. In freedom you cannot, through the helplessness of ignorance, make him the slave of every white man with no master’s protection to shield him”; and he adds, “The education of the Negro, to the extent indicated, is necessary for the preservation of the character and moral integrity of the white men of the South.” Professor Garner roundly declares that “Governor Vardaman’s contention that education increases the criminality of the negro is nothing but bold assertion and has never been supported by adequate proof.”

Education is just as much needed to break windows into dark minds, to open up whatever of the spiritual the Negro can take to himself. It is the one remedy in which the North can take direct part, and never was there more need of maintaining the schools in the South, supported chiefly by Northern contributions; for they have the opportunity to teach those lessons of cleanliness of body and mind, of respect for authority, of thrift, personal honesty, of human relations, which the public schools are less fitted to inculcate. Many of these schools have white teachers, all have white friends; they interfere in no way with the education furnished by the South; they teach no lessons harmful to the Negro or the white man; they perform a function which the Whites in the South offer to their own race by endowed schools and colleges, and which they do not attempt to provide for the Negroes. Education is not a cure-all, education is only the bottom step of a long flight of stairs; but neither race nor individual can mount without that step.

Throughout this book it has been steadily kept in mind that there are two races in the South between which the Southern problem is divided; and that there can be no progress without both races taking part. Here is the most difficult part of the whole matter: the two races, so closely associated, are nevertheless drifting away from each other. Time was when men like Wade Hampton, of South Carolina, and Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, expected that Whites and Negroes would coÖperate in political parties; time was when former slaveholders joined with former slaves in a confident attempt to bring the Negroes up higher. Those voices of encouragement still are heard, but there is in them a note of weariness. Almost everybody in the South would be pleased if the Negroes (of course without prejudice to the white domination) would rise or rise faster. It would mean also much to the white race if the cook always came in the morning, and the outside man never got drunk, and the cotton hand would raise a bale to the acre, and the school child would learn to read about how to keep his place toward the white man.

Every thinking man in the South knows that he is worse off because the Negro is not better off. That is the reason of the rising dissatisfaction, wrath and resentment in the minds of many Whites. They feel that the Negro has no sense of responsibility to the community; they accuse him of sullenness, of a lack of interest in his employment and his employer. Just what the Negro thinks in return is hard to guess. “Brer Rabbit, ’e ain’t sayin’ nuffin”; but it is plain that the races are less friendly to each other, understand each other less, are less regardful of each other’s interests, than at any time since freedom was fairly completed. We have the unhappy condition that while both races are doing tolerably well, and likely to do better, race relations are not improving.

In other parts of the country where there are such rivalries, efforts are made to come to an understanding. Each side has some knowledge of the arguments of the other; they appeal to the same press; the leaders sooner or later are brought together in legislatures or in a social way, and gradually come to understand each other’s difficulties. Some efforts have been made in the South to study this question in association. The Negroes have now several organizations which bring people together for discussion. The Agricultural and Industrial Fairs which they are beginning to carry on are one such influence. The negro schools of the Calhoun and Talladega type do something; the large annual conferences organized by Atlanta, Tuskegee, and Hampton, with their subsequent publications, are a kind of clearing house of opinions on the conditions of the Negro and of sound advice. A few years ago the attempt was made in the so-called Niagara Movement to organize the Negroes in defense of their political rights.

On the side of the Whites there has been the Ogden Movement, for the improvement of the Southern white education, part of the outcome of which has been the formation of the General Education Board and Southern Education Board. The South Atlantic Quarterly, published at Trinity College, North Carolina, encourages a free exchange of views on Southern conditions; and though the Manufacturers’ Record lays the responsibility for the Atlanta riots upon the Southern white people who have been urging moderation in the South, the Southern educational movement goes on steadily, and seems to be gaining ground.

An effort was made after the riots to bring about a Southern commission of three white men from each state, to discuss plans for keeping up the race integrity of the Whites, including the Negro to stay on the soil, educating both races, and reforming the courts, but it was allowed to fail. Some Southern newspapers bitterly attacked it on the ground that no discussion was necessary; that everybody knew all the facts that were cogent, and that any such discussion of the negro problem would be likely to bring down criticism from “doctrinaires, theorists and self-constituted proprietors of the universe in the North.” To the Northern mind this seems one of the most alarming things about the whole matter. The labor question in the Northeast, the land question in the Northwest, are openly discussed man to man, and newspaper to newspaper. Nobody thinks that the conditions in the South are agreeable; everybody would like to see some betterment; and the refusal to discuss it simply makes the crisis worse.This opposition is still stronger against any form of joint discussion between representatives of the white and negro races. The real objection seems to be that it would be a recognition that the Negro had a right to some share in adjusting his own future, and that what he thinks about the question ought to have weight with the white people. This is another of the cruel things about the whole situation. The whole South is acquainted with the negro criminal and the shiftless dweller on the borders of the cities; almost no white people are acquainted by personal observation with the houses, with the work, and still less with the character and aims of the best element of the Negroes. For this reason, Northern investigators have a certain advantage in that they may freely read the statements of both sides, supplement them out of personal experience and conversation, and try to strike a balance. There are plenty of reasonable people in both races, each of whom knows his own side better than anybody else can possibly know it; hence mutual discussion, common understanding, some kind of programme toward which public sentiment might be directed, would seem an obvious remedy, and is upheld by such men as Thomas Nelson Page; yet it is a remedy which is never tried.

All the suggestions that have been discussed above may be roughly classified into remedies of push and remedies of pull, and this classification corresponds to the points of view of the two dominant classes of Southern Whites. In studying the books, the articles and the fugitive utterances on this subject, in talking with men who see the thing at first hand, in noting the complaints of the Negroes and the Whites alike, it is plain that there is in the South a strong negro-hating element, larger than people like to admit, which appeals to drastic statutes, to unequal judicial punishments, to violence outside of the law; in a word, to “keeping the nigger down.” Alongside it the thinking class of Southern people (which appears to be gaining ground) seeks the elevation of both races, and especially of that one which needs it most. Meanwhile the Negro sits moodily by, waiting for the superior race to decide whether he shall be sent to the calaboose or to school.

The Southern problem is thus brought down in its last analysis to the simple question whether the two races can permanently live apart and yet together. That depends, in the first place, on the capacity of the Negro to improve far enough to take away the reproach now heaped upon him; and in the second place in the willingness of the Whites to accept the deficiencies of the negro character as a part of the natural conditions of the land, like the sterility of parts of the Southern soil, and to leave him the opportunity to make the most of himself.

The three fundamental duties of the white man, according to Judge Hammond, of Atlanta, are to see “that his own best interest lies in the cultivation of friendly relations with the negro.... To treat the negro with absolute fairness and justice ... advising him and counseling him about the important affairs of his everyday life.” These duties lie upon the white man because, as Thomas Nelson Page states it: “Unless the whites lift the Negroes up, the Negroes will drag them down.”

Nobody, white or black, North or South, is able to point out any single positive means by which the two races are both to have their full development and yet to live in peace. Every positive and quick-acting remedy when examined is found invalid. Violence of language or of behavior of both sides does nothing whatever to remove the real difficulties. The agencies of uplift are slow and uncertain and nobody can positively predict that they will do the work. The South, with all its magnificent resources, is far behind the other sections of the Union, both in wealth and productive power. It can only take its proper place in the Union by raising the average character and energy of its people—of all its people—for it cannot be done by improving either race while the other remains stationary.

In a word, the remedy is patience. Dark as things look in the South, it is subject to mighty forces. In many ways the strongest influence for peace and concord in the South is simply self-interest. The most intelligent and thoughtful men in the South see clearly that unless the people can be made to improve, the section will always lag behind. Side by side with this force is the spirit of humanity, of practical Christianity, which forbids that millions of people shall be cut off from the agencies of evangelization. The South is behind no other part of the country in a sense of the greatness of moral forces.

From every point of view, the obvious thing for the South is to make the best of its condition and not the worst, to give opportunities of uplift to all those who can appropriate them, to raise the negro race to as high a point as it is capable of occupying. This is a long, hard process, full of disappointment and perhaps of bitterness. The problem is not soluble in the sense that anyone can foresee a wholly peaceful and contented community divided into two camps; but the races can live alongside, and coÖperate, though one be superior to the other. That superiority only throws the greater responsibility on the upper race. Nobody has ever given better advice to the South than Senator John Sharp Williams—“In the face of this great problem it would be well that wise men think more, that good men pray more, and that all men talk less and curse less.” In that spirit the problem will be solved, because it will be manfully confronted.