Following the Color Line Part 43

A large part of the South still believes that the Negro was created to serve the white man, and for no other purpose. This is especially the belief in the conservative country districts.

"If these Negroes become doctors and merchants or buy their own farms," a Southern woman said to me as a clinching argument against Negro education, "what shall we do for servants?"

Another reason for the feeling in the South against the Negro is that the South has never had any other labouring cla.s.s of people (to speak of) with which to compare the Negro. All the employers have been white; most of the workers have been black. The North, on the other hand, has had a constant procession of ignorant working people of various sorts. The North is familiar with the progress of alien people, wherein the workingman of to-day becomes the employer of to-morrow--which has not happened in the South.

_Confusion of Labour and Race Problems_

An ill.u.s.tration of the confusion between the race problem and the labour problem is presented in certain Southern neighbourhoods by the influx of European immigrants. Because the Italian does the work of the Negro, a tendency exists to treat him like a Negro. In Louisiana on the sugar plantations Italian white women sometimes work under Negro foremen and no objection is made. A movement is actually under way in Mississippi to keep the children of Italian immigrants out of the white schools. In not a few instances white workmen have been held in peonage like Negroes; several such cases are now pending in the courts. Here is a dispatch showing how new Italian immigrants were treated in one part of Mississippi--only the Italians, unlike the Negroes, have an active government behind them:

MOBILE, ALA., October 3.--The Italian Government has taken notice of the situation at Sumrall, Miss., where the native whites are endeavouring to keep Italian children out of the schools and where a leader of the Italians was taken to the woods and whipped.

The Italian Consul at New Orleans, Count G. Morroni, reached Mobile this afternoon and began an investigation of the situation. He to-day heard the story of Frank Seaglioni, the leader of the Italian colony at Sumrall, who was a few days ago decoyed from his home at night with a bogus message from New Orleans and unmercifully whipped by a mob of white men.

A decided tendency also exists to charge up to the Negro, because he is a Negro, all the crimes which are commonly committed by any ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken people. Only last summer we had in New York what the newspaper reporters called a "crime wave." The crime in that case was what is designated in the South as the "usual crime" (offences against women) for which Negroes are lynched. But in New York not a Negro was implicated.

I was struck while in Philadelphia by a presentment of a grand jury in Judge Kinsey's court upon the subject of a "crime wave" which read thus:

In closing our duties as jurymen, we wish to call to the attention of this court the large proportion of cases presented to us for action wherein the offences were charged to either persons of foreign birth or those of the coloured race, and we feel that some measures should be taken to the end that our city should be relieved of both the burden of the undesirable alien and the irresponsible coloured person.

Here, it will be seen, the "undesirable alien" and "irresponsible coloured person" are cla.s.sed together, although it is significant of the greater prejudice against the coloured man that the newspaper report of the action of the grand jury should be headed "Negro Crime Abnormal," without referring to the alien at all. When I inquired at the prosecutor's office about the presentiment, I was told:

"Oh, the dagoes are just as bad as the Negroes."

And both are bad, not because they are Negroes or Italians, but because they are ignorant, neglected, poverty-stricken.

Thus in the dust and confusion of the vast readjustments now going on in the South, the discomfort of which both races feel but neither quite understands, we have the white man blindly blaming the Negro and the Negro blindly hating the white. When they both understand that many of the troubles they are having are only the common gall-spots of the new industrial harness there will be a better living together.

I do not wish to imply, of course, that an industrial age or the wage system furnishes an ideal condition for race relations.h.i.+ps; for in the North the Negro's struggle for survival in the compet.i.tive field is accompanied, as I have shown elsewhere, by the severest suffering. The condition of Negroes in Indianapolis, New York, and Philadelphia is in some ways worse than it is anywhere in the South. But, say what we will, the wage system is one step upward from the old feudalism. The Negro is treated less like a slave and more like a man in the North. It is for this reason that Negroes, no matter what their difficulties of making a living in the North, rarely wish to go back to the South. And as the South develops industrially it will approximate more nearly to Northern conditions. In Southern cities to-day, because of industrial development, the Negro is treated more like a man than he is in the country; and this is one reason why Negroes crowd into the cities and can rarely be persuaded to go back into the country--unless they can own their own land.

But the South is rapidly shaking off the remnants of the old feudalism.

Development of mines and forests, the extension of manufacturing, the introduction of European immigrants, the inflow of white Northerners, better schools, more railroads and telephones, are all helping to bring the South up to the economic standard of the North. There will be a further break-up of baronial tenant farming, the plantation store will disappear, the ruinous credit system will be abolished, and there will be a widespread appearance of independent farm-owners, both white and black.

This will all tend to remove the personal and sentimental att.i.tude of the old Southern life; the Negro will of necessity be judged more and more as a man, not as a slave or dependent. In short, the country, South and North, will become economically more h.o.m.ogeneous.

But even when the South reaches the industrial development of the North the Negro problem will not be solved; it is certainly not solved in New York or Philadelphia, where industrial development has reached its highest form. The prejudice in those cities, as I have shown, has been growing more intense as Negro population increased. What, then, will happen?

_Two Elements in Every Race Problem_

Two elements appear in every race problem: the first, race prejudice--the repulsion of the unlike; second, economic or compet.i.tive jealousy. Both operate, for example, in the case of the Irishman or Italian, but with the Negro and Chinaman race prejudice is greater because the difference is greater. The difficulty of the Negro in this country is the colour of his skin, the symbol of his difference. In China the difficulty of the white trader is his whiteness, his difference. Race lines, in short, are drawn by white men, not because the other race is inferior (the j.a.panese and Chinese are in many ways our superiors), nor because of criminality (certain cla.s.ses of foreigners are more criminal in our large cities than the Negroes), nor because of laziness, but because of discernible physical differences--black skin, almond eyes, pigtails, hook noses, a peculiar bodily odour, or small stature. That dislike of a different people is more or less instinctive in all men.

A tendency has existed on the part of Northern students who have no first-hand knowledge of the ma.s.ses of Negroes to underestimate the force of race repulsion; on the other hand, the Southern student who is confronted with the Negroes themselves is likely to overestimate racial repulsion and underestimate economic compet.i.tion as a cause of the difficulty. The profoundest question, indeed, is to decide how much of the so-called problem is due to race repulsion and how much to economic compet.i.tion.

This leads us to the most sinister phase of the race problem. As I have shown, we have the two elements of conflict: instinctive race repulsion and compet.i.tive jealousy. What is easier for the race in power, the white race in this country (the yellow race in Asia) than to play upon race instinct in order to serve selfish ends? How shrewdly the labour union, whether in San Francisco or Atlanta, seizes upon that race hatred to keep the black or yellow man out of the union and thereby control all the work for its members! Race prejudice played upon becomes a tool in clinching the power of the labour monopoly.

How the politician in the South excites race hatred in order that he may be elected to office! Vardaman governed because he could make men hate one another more bitterly than his opponent. The Rev. Thomas Dixon has appealed in his books and plays to the same pa.s.sion.

In several places in this country Negroes have been driven out by mobs--not because they were criminal, or because they were bad citizens, but because they were going into the grocery and drug business, they were becoming doctors, dentists, and the like, and taking away the trade of their white compet.i.tors. So the stores and restaurants of highly efficient j.a.panese were wrecked in San Francisco.

What is easier or cruder to use as a weapon for crus.h.i.+ng a rival than the instinctive dislike of man for man? And that usage is not peculiar to the white man. In Africa the black man wastes no time with the different-looking white man; he kills him, if he dares, on the spot. And how ably the Chinaman has employed the instinctive hatred of his countrymen for "foreign devils" in order to fight American trade and traders! We hate the Chinaman and drive him out, and he hates us and drives us out.

_Chief Danger of Race Prejudice_

And this is one of the dangers of the race problem in this country--the fostering of such an instinct to make money or to get political office.

Such a basis of personal prosperty is all the more dangerous because the white man is in undisputed power in this country; the Negro has no great navy behind him; he is like a child in the house of a harsh parent. All that stands between him and destruction is the ethical sense of the white man. Will the white man's sense of justice and virtue be robust enough to cause him to withhold the hand of unlimited power? Will he see, as Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton says, that if he keeps the Negro in the gutter he must stay there with him? The white man and his civilisation, not alone the Negro, will rise or fall by that ethical test.

The Negro, on his part, as I have shown repeatedly in former chapters, employs the same methods as the white man, for Negro nature is not different from human nature. He argues: "The white man hates you; hate him. Trade with Negro storekeepers; employ Negro doctors; don't go to white dentists and lawyers."

Out of this condition proceed two tendencies. The first is the natural result of mutual fear and suspicion, and that is, a rapid flying apart of the races. All through my former chapters I have been showing how the Negroes are being segregated. So are the Chinese segregated, and the blacks in South Africa, and certain cla.s.ses in India. Parts of the South are growing blacker. Negroes crowd into "coloured quarters" in the cities. More and more they are becoming a people wholly apart--separate in their churches, separate in their schools, separate in cars, conveyances, hotels, restaurants, with separate professional men. In short, we discover tendencies in this country toward the development of a caste system.

Now, one of the most striking facts in our recent history is the progress of the former slave. And this finds its world parallel in the progress of people whom the vainglorious Anglo-Saxon once despised: the j.a.panese, Chinese, and East Indians. In forty years the Negro has advanced a distance that would have been surprising in almost any race. In the bare accomplishments--area of land owned, crops raised, professional men supported, business enterprises conducted, books and poetry written, music composed, pictures painted--the slaves of forty years ago have made the most astonis.h.i.+ng progress. This leads to the second tendency, which proceeds slowly out of the growing conviction that hatred and suspicion and fear as motives in either national or individual progress will not work; that there must be some other way for different people to work side by side in peace and justice. And thus we discover a tendency toward a friendly living together under the new relations.h.i.+p, in which the Negro is not a slave or a dependent, but a man and a citizen. Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton preaches the gospel of this new life. And gradually as race prejudice becomes inconvenient, threatens financial adversity, ruffles the smooth current of comfortable daily existence, the impulse grows to set it aside.

Men don't keep on fighting when it is no longer profitable to fight.

And thus, side by side, these two impulses exist--the one pointing toward the development of a hard caste system which would ultimately petrify our civilisation as it has petrified that of India; and the other looking to a reasonable, kindly, and honourable working together of the races.

_What Are the Remedies for the Evil Conditions?_

So much for conditions; what of remedies?

I have heard the most extraordinary remedies proposed. Serious men actually talk of the deportation of the entire Negro population to Africa, not stopping to inquire whether we have any right to deport them, or calculating the economic revolution and bankruptcy which the deportation of the entire labouring cla.s.s would cause in the South, without stopping to think that even if we could find a spot in the world for 10,000,000 Negroes, and they all wanted to go, that all the s.h.i.+ps flying the American flag, if constantly employed, could probably not transport the natural increase of the Negro population, let alone the 10,000,000 present inhabitants. I have heard talk of segregation in reservations, like the Indians--segregation out of existence! I have even heard unspeakable talk of the wholesale extinction of the race by preventing the breeding of children! All quack remedies and based upon hatred, not upon justice.

There is no sudden or cut-and-dried solution of the Negro problem, or of any other problem. Men are forever demanding formulae which will enable them to progress without effort. They seek to do quickly by medication what can only be accomplished by deliberate hygiene. A problem that has been growing for two hundred and fifty years in America, and for thousands of years before that in Africa, warping the very lives of the people concerned, changing their currents of thought as well as their conduct, cannot be solved in forty years. Why expect it?

And yet there are definite things that can be done which, while working no immediate miracles, will set our faces to the light and keep us trudging toward the true goal.

Down at the bottom--it will seem trite, but it is eternally true--the cause of the race "problem" and most other social problems is simply lack of understanding and sympathy between man and man. And the remedy is equally simple--a gradual subst.i.tution of understanding and sympathy for blind repulsion and hatred.

Consider, for example, the Atlanta riot. Increasing misunderstanding and hatred caused a dreadful explosion and bloodshed. What happened? Instantly the wisest white men in Atlanta invited the wisest coloured men to meet them. They got together: general explanations followed. They found that there had been error on both sides; they found that there were reasonable human beings on both sides. One of the leading white men said: "I did not know there were any such broad-minded Negroes in the South." In other words, they tried to understand and sympathise with one another. Over and over again men will be found hating Negroes, or Chinamen, or "dagoes," and yet liking some individual Negro, or Chinaman, or "dago." When they get acquainted they see that the Negro or Chinaman is a human being like themselves, full of faults, but not devoid of good qualities.

As a fundamental proposition, then, it will be found that the solution of the Negro problem lies in treating the Negro more and more as a human being like ourselves. Treating the Negro as a human being, we must judge him, not by his colour, or by any other outward symbol, but upon his worth as a man. Nothing that fails of that full honesty and fairness of judgment in the smallest particular will suffice. We disgrace and injure ourselves more than we do the Negro when we are not willing to admit virtue or learning or power in another human being because his face happens to be yellow or black.

Of the soundness of this fundamental standard of judgment there can be no doubt; the difficulty lies in applying it practically to society as it is to-day. In the suggestions which I offer here I am trying to do two things: to outline the present programme, and to keep open a clear view to the future goal.

_Shall the Negro Vote?_

Let us approach, then, without fear the first of the three groups of problems--political, industrial, and social--which confront us.

Shall the Negro vote?

Thousands of Negroes in this country are fully as well equipped, fully as patriotic, as the average white citizen. Moreover, they are as much concerned in the real welfare of the country. The principle that our forefathers fought for, "taxation only with representation," is as true to-day as it ever was.

On the other hand, the vast majority of Negroes (and many foreigners and "poor whites") are still densely ignorant, and have little or no appreciation of the duties of citizens.h.i.+p. It seems right that they should be required to wait before being allowed to vote until they are prepared.

A wise parent hedges his son about with restrictions; he does not authorise his signature at the bank or allow him to run a locomotive; and until he is twenty-one years old he is disfranchised and has no part in the government. But the parent restricts his son because it seems the wisest course for him, for the family, and for the state that he should grow to manhood before he is burdened with grave responsibilities. So the state limits suffrage; and rightly limits it, so long as it accompanies that limitation with a determined policy of education. But the suffrage law is so executed in the South to-day as to keep many capable Negroes from the exercise of their rights, to prevent recognition of honest merit, and it is executed unjustly as between white men and coloured. It is no condonement of the Southern position to say that the North also disfranchises a large part of the Negro vote by bribery, which it does; it is only saying that the North is also wrong.

As for the agitation for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Federal Const.i.tution, which gives the right of suffrage to the coloured man, it must be met by every lover of justice and democracy with a face of adamant. If there were only one Negro in the country capable of citizens.h.i.+p, the way for him must, at least, be kept open. No doubt full suffrage was given to the ma.s.s of Negroes before they were prepared for it, while yet they were slaves in everything except bodily shackles, and the result during the Reconstruction period was disastrous. But the principle of a free franchise--fortunately, as I believe, for this country--has been forever established. If the white man is not willing to meet the Negro in any contest whatsoever without plugging the dice, then he is not the superior but the inferior of the Negro.