The Southern South Part 7

Keeping in mind the fact that with all his patience the slave in the best days of slavery was still a low and vicious type in whom his slavehood strengthened native propensities to lying, theft, and l.u.s.t, it is undeniable that the greater part of the race has made great advances; even John Temple Graves, a harmful enemy of the Negro, admits that "The leaders of no race in history have ever shown greater wisdom, good temper and conservative discretion than distinguishes the two or three men who stand at the head of the negro race in America to-day." Under slavery no such success or influence was possible; there could be no negro orators, or reformers, or leaders in the South.

An invariable answer to the plea that the character of the negro leaders is a proof of the capacity for uplift is that they are substantially white men. At the same moment the critics deny to those substantially white men the privileges of actual white men. But may not "substantially white men"

have an uplifting influence such as indubitably white men had in earlier times? Most candid white observers, however hostile to the race, admit that somewhere from a tenth to a fourth of all the Negroes are doing well and moving upward; and this applies to the Negro on the land as well as in cities. In many scattered areas in the South, groups of plantation Negroes have bought land and are saving money. Here are a few examples taken from the writer's notebook:

At Calhoun, Ala., may be found nearly a hundred Negroes who have bought or are buying their own farms, and have made $60,000 of savings to do it. A negro woman on one of those farms said of her new house: "We don't need no rider (overseer) now, dis house is our rider. It will send us into the field, it will make us work, and it will make us plan. We's got to plan.

When Ise out in the pit I has to stop to look up at dis house, and den Ise so pleased I don't know how I am working." Near Nixburg, Ala., is another settlement started by a Negro, Rev. John Leonard, soon after the war, which is called thereabouts "n.i.g.g.e.rdom," because the blacks have acquired the best tract of land in the region, have put up the best schoolhouse in the county, and as a neighbor said of them: "They have got to the place now where they're no more service to the Whites. They want to work for themselves." At Kowaliga, Ala., is the Benson settlement, where a Negro has bought his former master's plantation, largely extended it, has built a dam and mill, owns three thousand acres of land with many tenants, and is one of the few large planters of that section who combines cattle raising with cotton. He gave land and a.s.sistance to a good school with commodious buildings, carried on entirely by Negroes (including Tuskegee graduates); is building what is probably the best planter's house in the county, and has plenty of outside investments. At Mound Bayou, Miss., is another purely negro settlement, with a population of about two thousand, among whom not a single white man lives. Under the guidance of two brothers named Montgomery, they bought their land direct from the railroad company, claim to own 130,000 acres, and have paid for considerable parts of it; maintain their own stores, carry on a little bank, and elect a negro munic.i.p.al government. The results show as much capacity for managing their own affairs as the neighboring white towns.

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

These specific examples prove beyond question that Africans can advance.

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

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

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

The only real measure of uplift is character, but character cannot be reduced to statistical tables. The acc.u.mulation of property, especially by a race nearly pauperized when it first acquired the right to hold property, can be traced and throws much light on the important question whether the Negroes are rising or falling. It is difficult to separate out the contribution which the Negro makes to the wealth of the South, and to estimate his own savings, because the only available census figures on this subject deal with the three cla.s.ses of owners, renters, and croppers of land; and do not, and probably cannot, make a separate account of negro wage hands on the plantations, and workmen and jobbers of every description. As nearly as can be judged, more than half the cotton comes off plantations tilled by negro laborers, or tenants; and for the rest, a notable portion is raised by independent negro farmers, chiefly on the hills--some on the lowlands. The wage hands and the town Negroes have, in general, little to show for their work at the end of the year. They receive or are credited with wages, live on them, and they are gone.

Negroes are extravagant, tempted by peddlers and instalment-goods men, and fond of spending for candy, tobacco, and liquor. There are few savings banks in the South, and the failure of the Freedman's Bank in Reconstruction times was a terrible blow to the long process of building up habits of thrift. It seems to be the conviction of the best friends of the Negro in the South that the great majority of the day laborers have made little or no advance in habits of saving during the last forty years, although most of them have more to show in the way of clothing and furniture than their fathers had.

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

No figures can be found for the city real estate holdings of Negroes, but in 1900 there were 188,000 so-called farms owned by Negroes, subject, of course, like white property, to mortgages for part of the purchase money, or for debts afterward incurred. In addition, 560,000 negro families were working plots of land, as croppers and renters, and received either a share or the whole of the crop that they made. These people altogether were working 23,000,000 acres, an average of about 30 acres to a family; and produced $256,000,000 worth of products. These 750,000 "farmers"

represent something over 3,000,000 individuals, which figures to an annual output of $80 per head; and it is difficult to see how that value could possibly be produced if the Negroes were not there. The families of the day laborers count up to at least 3,000,000 more; and their product was probably somewhere near as large as that of the renters and croppers, although the share of the planter is rather greater. It would seem reasonable to a.s.sert that $500,000,000 of the $1,200,000,000 of farm products in the South was raised by negro labor; and that by their work in the cities and towns they probably add another $200,000,000 to the annual product.

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII

RACE a.s.sOCIATION

In the preceding chapters the effort has been made to a.n.a.lyze 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 a.s.sertive 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 citizens.h.i.+p 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 const.i.tute 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. n.o.body 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 a.s.similation means debas.e.m.e.nt. She must carry them in equal justice; for to this she is pledged in honor and in grat.i.tude. 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 a.s.sertion 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 s.e.xual 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 n.o.body 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 prost.i.tutes 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sociates 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.dy; 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, n.o.body 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p ... 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 companions.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sert that race hatred was fomented toward the end of Reconstruction. Says "Nicholas Worth": "Men whose faithful servants were negroes, negroes who had s.h.i.+ned 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. n.o.body 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 'n.i.g.g.e.r!'

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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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, Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 n.o.body 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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,"