Following the Color Line Part 9

... We have not been wholly lacking in our effort to help. There are a few schools and churches supported by Southern whites for the Negroes. Here and there a man like George Williams Walker, of the aristocracy of South Carolina, and a woman like Miss Belle H.

Bennett, of the blue blood of Kentucky, goes as teacher to the Negro youth, and seeks in a Christly spirit of fraternity to bring them to a higher plane of civil and moral manhood, but the number like them can almost be counted on fingers of both hands.

Our Southern churches have spent probably a hundred times as much money since the Civil War in an effort to evangelise the people of China, j.a.pan, India, South America, Africa, Mexico, and Cuba, as they have spent to give the Gospel to the Negroes at our doors. It is often true that opportunity is overlooked because it lies at our feet.

_Concerning the Vagrant Negro_

Before I get away from observations of the low-cla.s.s Negro, I must speak of the subject of vagrancy. Many white men have told me with impatience of the great number of idle or partly idle Negroes--idle while every industry and most of the farming districts of Georgia are crying for more labour.

And from my observation in Atlanta, I should say that there were good many idle or partly idle Negroes--even after the riot, which served, I understand, to drive many of them away. Five days before the riot of last September, a committee of the city council visited some forty saloons one afternoon, and by actual count found 2,455 Negroes (and 152 white men) drinking at the bars or lounging around the doorways. In some of these saloons--conducted by white men and permitted to exist by the city authorities--pictures of nude white women were displayed as an added attraction. Has this anything to do with Negro crimes against white women?

After the riot these conditions in Atlanta were much improved and in January, 1908, all the saloons were closed.

Increased Negro idleness is the result, in large measure, of the marvellous and rapid changes in Southern conditions. The South has been and is to-day dependent on a single labour supply--the Negro. Now Negroes, though recruited by a high birth rate, have not been increasing in any degree as rapidly as the demand for labour incident to the development of every sort of industry, railroads, lumbering, mines, to say nothing of the increased farm area and the added requirements of growing cities. With this enormous increased demand for labour the Negro supply has, relatively, been decreasing. Many have gone North and West, many have bought farms of their own, thousands, by education, have became professional men, teachers, preachers, and even merchants and bankers--always draining away the best and most industrious men of the race and reducing by so much the available supply of common labour. In short, those Negroes who were capable have been going the same way as the unskilled Irishman and German in the North--upward through the door of education--but, unlike the North, there have been no other labourers coming in to take their places.

What has been the result? Naturally a fierce contest between agriculture and industry for the limited and dwindling supply of the only labour they had.

_Negro Monopoly on Labour_

So they bid against one another--it was as though the Negro had a monopoly on labour--and within the last few years day wages for Negro workers have jumped from fifty or sixty cents to $1.25 and $1.50, often more--a pure matter of compet.i.tion. A similar advance has affected all sorts of servant labour--cooks, waiters, maids, porters.

High wages, scarcity of labour, and the consequent loss of opportunity for taking advantage of the prevailing prosperity would, in any community, South or North, whether the labour was white or black, produce a spirit of impatience and annoyance on the part of the employing cla.s.s. I found it evident enough last summer in Kansas where the farmers were unable to get workers to save their crops; and the servant problem is not more provoking, certainly, in the South than in the North and West. Indeed, it is the labour problem more than any other one cause, that has held the South back and is holding it back to-day.

But the South has an added cause of annoyance. Higher wages, instead of producing more and better labour, as they would naturally be expected to do, have actually served to reduce the supply. This may, at first, seem paradoxical: but it is easily explainable and it lies deep down beneath many of the perplexities which surround the race problem.

Most Negroes, as I have said, were (and still are, of course) farm-dwellers, and farm-dwellers in the hitherto wasteful Southern way.

Their living is easy to get and very simple. In that warm climate they need few clothes; a shack for a home. Their living standards are low; they have not learned to save; there has not been time since slavery for them to attain the sense of responsibility which would encourage them to get ahead. And moreover they have been and are to-day largely under the discipline of white land owners.

What was the effect, then, of a rapid advance in wages? The poorer cla.s.s of Negroes, naturally indolent and happy-go-lucky, found that they could make as much money in two or three days as they had formerly earned in a whole week. It was enough to live on as well as they had ever lived: why, then, work more than two days a week? It was the logic of a child, but it was the logic used. Everywhere I went in the South I heard the same story: high wages coupled with the difficulty of getting anything like continuous work from this cla.s.s of coloured men.

On the other hand the better and more industrious Negroes, who would work continuously--and there are unnumbered thousands of them, as faithful as any workers--occasionally saved their surplus, bought little farms or businesses of their own and began to live on a better scale. One of the first things they did after getting their footing was to take their wives and daughters out of the white man's kitchen, and to send their children from the cotton fields (where the white man needed them) to the school-house where the tendency (exactly as with white children) was to educate them away from farm employment. With the development of ambition and a higher standard of living, the Negro follows the steps of the rising Irishman or Italian: he has a better home, he wants his wife to take care of it, and he insists upon the education of his children.

In this way higher wages have tended to cut down the already limited supply of labour, producing annoyance, placing greater obstacles in the way of that material development of which the Southerner is so justly proud. And this, not at all unnaturally, has given rise on the one hand to complaints against the lazy Negro who will work only two days in the week that he may loaf the other five; and on the other hand it has found expression in blind and bitter hostility to the education which enables the better sort of Negro to rise above the unskilled employment and the domestic service of which the South is so keenly in need. It is human nature to blame men, not conditions. Here is unlimited work to do: here is the Negro who has been for centuries and is to-day depended upon to do it; it is not done. The natural result is to throw the blame wholly upon the Negro, and not upon the deep economic conditions and tendencies which have actually caused the scarcity of labour.

_Immigrants to Take the Negroes' Places_

But within the last year or two thinking men in the South have begun to see this particular root of the difficulty and a great new movement looking to the encouragement of immigration from foreign countries has been started. In November, 1906, the first s.h.i.+pload of immigrants ever brought from Europe directly to a South Carolina port were landed at Charleston with great ceremony and rejoicing. If a steady stream of immigrants can be secured and if they can be employed on satisfactory terms with the Negro it will go far toward relieving race tension in the South.

Of course idleness leads to crime, and one of the present efforts in the South is toward a more rigid enforcement of laws against vagrancy. In this the white people have the sympathy of the leading Negroes. I was struck with one pa.s.sage in the discussion at the last Workers' Conference at Tuskegee. William E. Holmes, president of a coloured college at Macon, Georgia, was speaking. Some one interrupted him:

"I would like to ask if you think the Negro is any more disposed to become a loafer or vagrant than any other people under the same conditions?"

"Well," said Mr. Holmes, taking a deep breath, "we cannot afford to do what other races do. We haven't a single, solitary man or woman among us we can afford to support as an idler. It may be that other races have made so much progress that they can afford to support loafers. But we are not yet in that condition. Some of us have the impression that the world owes us a living. That is a misfortune. I must confess that I have become convinced that at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers than any other race of people on this continent."

These frank remarks did not meet with the entire approval of the members of the conference, but the discussion seemed to indicate that there was a great deal more of truth in them than the leaders and teachers of the Negro are disposed to admit.

_The Worthless Negro_

I tried to see as much as I could of this "worthless Negro," who is about the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking cotton. He has lost his white friends--his "white folks," as he calls them--and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he dares to be. Many such Negroes are supported by their wives or by women with whom they live--for morality and the home virtues among this cla.s.s are unknown. A woman who works as a cook in a white family will often take enough from the kitchen to feed a worthless vagabond of a man and keep him in idleness--or worse. A Negro song exactly expresses this state of beat.i.tude:

"I doan has to work so ha'd I's got a gal in a white man's ya'd; Ebery night 'bout half pas' eight I goes 'round to the white man's gate: She brings me b.u.t.ter and she brings me la'd-- I doan has to work so ha'd!"

This worthless Negro, without training or education, grown up from the neglected children I have already spoken of, evident in his idleness around saloons and depots--this Negro provokes the just wrath of the people, and gives a bad name to the entire Negro race. In numbers he is, of course, small, compared with the 8,000,000 Negroes in the South, who perform the enormous bulk of hard manual labour upon which rests Southern prosperity.

_How the Working Negro Lives_

Above this low stratum of criminal or semi-criminal Negroes is a middle cla.s.s, comprising the great body of the race--the workers. They are crowded into straggling settlements like Darktown and Jackson Row, a few owning their homes, but the majority renting precariously, earning good wages, harmless for the most part, but often falling into petty crime.

Poverty here, however, lacks the tragic note that it strikes in the crowded sections of Northern cities. The temperament of the Negro is irrepressibly cheerful, he overflows from his small home and sings and laughs in his streets; no matter how ragged or forlorn he may be good humour sits upon his countenance, and his squalour is not unpicturesque. A banjo, a mullet supper from time to time, an exciting revival, give him real joys. Most of the families of this middle cla.s.s, some of whom are deserted wives with children, have their "white folks" for whom they do was.h.i.+ng, cooking, gardening, or other service, and all have church connections, so that they have a real place in the social fabric and a certain code of self-respect.

I tried to see all I could of this phase of life. I visited many of the poorer Negro homes and I was often received in squalid rooms with a dignity of politeness which would have done credit to a society woman. For the Negro, naturally, is a sort of Frenchman. And if I can sum up the many visits I made in a single conclusion I should say, I think, that I was chiefly impressed by the tragic punishment meted out to ignorance and weakness by our complex society. I would find a home of one or two rooms meanly furnished, but having in one corner a glittering cottage organ, or on the mantel shelf a glorified gilt clock; crayon portraits, inexpressibly crude and ugly, but framed gorgeously, are not uncommon--the first uncertain, primitive (not unpitiful) reachings out after some of the graces of a broader life. Many of these things are bought from agents and the prices paid are extortionate. Often a Negro family will pay monthly for a year or so on some showy clock or chromo or music-box or decorated mirror--paying the value of it a dozen times over, only to have it seized when through sickness, or lack of foresight, they fail to meet a single note. Installment houses prey upon them, p.a.w.nbrokers suck their blood, and they are infinitely the victims of patent medicines. It is rare, indeed, that I entered a Negro cabin, even the poorest, without seeing one or more bottles of some abominable cure-all. The amount yearly expended by Negroes for patent medicines, which are glaringly advertised in all Southern newspapers, must be enormous--millions of dollars. I had an interesting side light on conditions one day while walking in one of the most fas.h.i.+onable residence districts of Atlanta. I saw a magnificent gray-stone residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion, who was a resident of the city:

"That's a fine home."

"Yes; stop a minute," he said, "I want to tell you about that. The anti-kink man lives there."

"Anti-kink?" I asked in surprise.

"Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here.

He made his money by selling to Negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks out of their wool. They're simply crazy on that subject."

"Does it work?"

"You haven't seen any straight-haired Negroes, have you?" he asked.

Ignorance carries a big burden and climbs a rocky road!

_Old Mammies and Nurses_

The ma.s.s of coloured people still maintain, as I have said, a more or less intimate connection with white families--frequently a very beautiful and sympathetic relations.h.i.+p like that of the old mammies or nurses. To one who has heard so much of racial hatred as I have since I have been down here, a little incident that I observed the other day comes with a charm hardly describable. I saw a carriage stop in front of a home. The expected daughter had arrived--a very pretty girl indeed. She stepped out eagerly.

Her father was halfway down to the gate; but ahead of him was a very old Negro woman in the cleanest of clean starched dresses.

"Honey," she said eagerly.

"Mammy!" exclaimed the girl, and the two rushed into each other's arms, clasping and kissing--the white girl and the old black woman.

I thought to myself: "There's no Negro problem there: that's just plain human love!"

_"Master" Superseded by "Boss"_

Often I have heard Negroes refer to "my white folks" and similarly the white man still speaks of "my Negroes." The old term of slavery, the use of the word "master," has wholly disappeared, and in its place has arisen, not without significance, the round term "Boss," or sometimes "Cap," or "Cap'n." To this the white man responds with the first name of the Negro, "Jim" or "Susie"--or if the Negro is old or especially respected: "Uncle Jim" or "Aunt Susan."

To an unfamiliar Northerner one of the very interesting and somewhat amusing phases of conditions down here is the panic fear displayed over the use of the word "Mr." or "Mrs." No Negro is ever called Mr. or Mrs. by a white man; that would indicate social equality. A Southern white man told me with humour of his difficulties:

"Now I admire Booker Was.h.i.+ngton. I regard him as a great man, and yet I couldn't call him Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton. We were all in a quandary until a doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! we all call him 'Dr.'