Following the Color Line Part 16

I have endeavoured thus to give a picture of both sides of conditions in the black belt exactly as I saw them. I can now do no better in further illumination of the conditions I have described than by looking at them through the eyes and experiences of two exceptionally able white men of the South, both leaders in their respective walks of life, neither of them politicians and both, incidentally, planters.

At Jackson, Miss., I met Major R. W. Millsaps, a leading citizen of the state. He comes of a family with the best Southern traditions behind it; he was born in Mississippi, graduated before the war at Harvard College, and although his father, a slave owner, had opposed secession, the son fought four years in the Confederate army, rising to the rank of Major. He came out of the war, as he says, "with no earthly possessions but a jacket and a pair of pants, with a hole in them." But he was young and energetic; he began hauling cotton from Jackson to Natchez when cotton was worth almost its weight in gold. He received $10 a bale for doing it and made $4,000 in three months. He is now the president of one of the leading banks in Mississippi, interested in many important Southern enterprises, and the founder of Millsaps College at Jackson: a modest, useful, Christian gentleman.

_An Experiment in Trusting Negroes_

Near Greenville, Miss., Major Millsaps owns a plantation of 500 acres, occupied by 20 tenants, some 75 people in all. It is in one of the richest agricultural sections--the Mississippi bottoms--in the United States. Up to 1890 he had a white overseer and he was constantly in trouble of one kind or another with his tenants. When the price of cotton dropped, he decided to dispense with the overseer entirely and try a rather daring experiment. In short, he planned to trust the Negroes. He got them together and said:

"I am going to try you. I'm going to give you every possible opportunity; if you don't make out, I will go back to the overseer system."

In the sixteen years since then no white man has been on that plantation except as a visitor. The land was rented direct to the Negroes on terms that would give both landlord and tenant a reasonable profit.

"Did it work?" I asked.

"I have never lost one cent," said Major Millsaps, "no Negro has ever failed to pay up and you couldn't drive them off the place. When other farmers complain of shortage of labour and tenants, I never have had any trouble."

Every Negro on the place owns his own mules and waggons and is out of debt. Nearly every family has bought or is buying a home in the little town of Leland, nearby, some of which are comfortably furnished. They are all prosperous and contented.

"How do you do it?" I asked.

"The secret," he said, "is to treat the Negro well and give him a chance.

I have found that a Negro, like a white man, is most responsive to good treatment. Even a dog responds to kindness! The trouble is that most planters want to make too much money out of the Negro; they charge him too much rent; they make too large profits on the supplies they furnish. I know merchants who expect a return of 50 per cent. on supplies alone. The best Negroes I have known are those who are educated; Negroes need more education of the right kind--not less--and it will repay us well if we give it to them. It makes better, not worse, workers."

I asked him about the servant problem.

"We never have any trouble," he said. "I apply the same rule to servants as to the farmers. Treat them well, don't talk insultingly of their people before them, don't expect them to do too much work. I believe in treating a Negro with respect. That doesn't mean to make equals of them. You people in the North don't make social equals of your white servants."

_Jefferson Davis's Way with Negroes_

Then he told a striking story of Jefferson Davis.

"I got a lesson in the treatment of Negroes when I was a young man returning South from Harvard. I stopped in Was.h.i.+ngton and called on Jefferson Davis, then United States Senator from Mississippi. We walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. Many Negroes bowed to Mr. Davis and he returned the bow. He was a very polite man. I finally said to him that I thought he must have a good many friends among the Negroes. He replied:

"'I can't allow any Negro to outdo me in courtesy.'"

_Plain Words from a White Man_

A few days later on my way North I met at Clarksdale, Miss., Walter Clark, one of the well-known citizens of the state and President of the Mississippi Cotton a.s.sociation. In the interests of his organisation he has been speaking in different parts of the state on court-days and at fairs. And the burden of his talks has been, not only organisation by the farmers, but a more intelligent and progressive treatment of Negro labour.

Recognising the instability of the ordinary Negro, the crime he commits, the great difficulties which the best-intentioned Southern planters have to meet, Mr. Clark yet tells his Southern audiences some vigorous truths.

He said in a recent speech:

"Every dollar I own those Negroes made for me. Our ancestors chased them down and brought them here. They are just what we make them. By our own greed and extravagance we have spoiled a good many of them. It has been popular here--now happily growing less so--to exploit the Negro by high store-prices and by encouraging him to get into debt. It has often made him hopeless. We have a low element of white people who are largely responsible for the Negro's condition. They sell him whiskey and cocaine; they corrupt Negro women. A white man who shoots c.r.a.ps with Negroes or who consorts with Negro women is worse than the meanest Negro that ever lived."

At Coffeeville, where Mr. Clark talked somewhat to this effect, an old man who sat in front suddenly jumped up and said: "That's the truth! Bully for you; bully for you!"

In his talk with me, Mr. Clark said other significant things:

"Our people have treated the Negroes as helpless children all their days.

The Negro has not been encouraged to develop even the capacities he has.

He must be made to use his own brains, not ours; put him on his responsibility and he will become more efficient. A Negro came to me not long ago complaining that the farmer for whom he worked would not give him an itemised account of his charges at the store. I met the planter and asked him about it. He said to me:

"'The black n.i.g.g.e.r! What does he know about it? He can't read it.'

"'But he is ent.i.tled to it, isn't he?' I asked him--and the Negro got it.

"The credit system has been the ruin of many Negroes. It keeps them in hopeless debt and it encourages the planter to exploit them. That's the truth. My plan is to put the Negro on a strict cash basis; give him an idea of what money is by letting him use it. Three years ago I started it on my plantation. A Negro would come to me and say: 'Boss, I want a pair of shoes.' 'All right,' I'd say. 'I'll pay you spot cash every night and you can buy your own shoes.' In the same way I made up my mind that we must stop paying Negroes' fines when they got into trouble. I know planters who expect regularly every Monday to come into court and pay out about so many Negroes. It encourages the Negroes to do things they would not think of doing if they knew they would be regularly punished. I've quit paying fines; my Negroes, if they get into trouble, have got to recognise their own responsibility for it and take what follows. That's the only way to make men of them.

"What we need in the South is intelligent labour, more efficient labour. I believe in the education of the Negro. Industrial training is needed, not only for the Negro, but for the whites as well. The white people down here have simply got to take the Negro and make a man of him; in the long run it will make him more valuable to us."

_PART TWO_

THE NEGRO IN THE NORTH

CHAPTER VI

FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE NORTH

Having followed the colour line in the South, it is of extraordinary interest and significance to learn how the Negro fares in the North. Is he treated better or worse? Is Boston a more favourable location for him than Atlanta or New Orleans? A comparison of the "Southern att.i.tude" and the "Northern att.i.tude" throws a flood of light upon the Negro as a national problem in this country.

Most of the perplexing questions in the North pertain to the city, but in the South the great problems are still agricultural. In the South the ma.s.ses of Negroes live on the land; they are a part of the cotton, sugar, lumber and turpentine industries; but in the North the Negro is essentially a problem of the great cities. He has taken his place in the babel of the tenements; already he occupies extensive neighbourhoods like the San Juan Hill district in New York and Bucktown in Indianapolis, and, by virtue of an increasing volume of immigration from the South, he is overflowing his boundaries in all directions, expanding more rapidly, perhaps, than any other single element of urban population. In every important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists, which must, in a few years, a.s.sume serious proportions.

Country districts and the smaller cities in the North for the most part have no Negro question. A few Negroes are found in almost all localities, but an examination of the statistics of rural counties and of the lesser cities shows that the Negro population is diminis.h.i.+ng in some localities, increasing slightly in others. In distinctly agricultural districts in the North the census exhibits an actual falling off of Negro population of 10 per cent. between 1880 and 1900. Ca.s.s County in Michigan, which has a famous Negro agricultural colony--one of the few in the North--shows a distinct loss in population. From 1,837 inhabitants in 1880 it dropped to 1,568 in 1900. A few Negro farmers have done well in the North (at Wilberforce, Ohio, I met two or three who had fine large farms and were prosperous), but the rural population is so small as to be negligible.

_Negroes of Small Northern Towns_

Most of the Negroes in the smaller towns and cities of the North are of the stock which came by way of the underground railroad just before the Civil War or during the period of philanthropic enthusiasm which followed it. They have come to fit naturally into the life of the communities where they live, and no one thinks especially of their colour. There is, indeed, no more a problem with the Negro than with the Greek or Italian. In one community (Lansing, Mich.) with which I have been long familiar, the Negroes are mostly mulattoes and their numbers have remained practically stationary for thirty years, while the white population has increased rapidly. At present there are only about 500 Negroes in a city of 25,000 people.

As a whole the coloured people of Lansing are peaceful and industrious, a natural part of the wage-working population. Individuals have become highly prosperous and are much respected. A few of the younger generation are idle and worthless.

So far as comfortable conditions of life are concerned, where there is little friction or discrimination and a good opportunity for earning a respectable livelihood, I have found no places anywhere which seemed so favourable to Negroes as these smaller towns and cities in the North and West where the coloured population is not increasing. But the moment there is new immigration from the South the conditions cease to be Utopian--as I shall show.

The great cities of the North present a wholly different aspect; the increases of population there are not short of extraordinary. In 1880 Chicago had only 6,480 coloured people; at present (1908) it has about 45,000, an increase of some 600 per cent. The census of 1900 gives the Negro population of New York as 60,666. It is now (1908) probably not less than 80,000. Between 1890 and 1900 the Negroes of Philadelphia increased by 59 per cent., while the Caucasians added only 22 per cent., and the growth since 1900 has been even more rapid, the coloured population now exceeding 80,000.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A NEGRO CABIN WITH EVIDENCES OF ABUNDANCE]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OFF FOR THE COTTON FIELDS]