Should the Color Line Go?
By Robert Watson Winston
The tendency to hide the facts about the negro problem—No real freedom for colored people in the South—Migration of the negroes to a country of their own is the solution suggested
“Reprinted by special permission from Current History Magazine, a monthly periodical published by The New York Times Co.” Born at Windsor, North Carolina, Mr. Winston is a leading lawyer of his native State. He was graduated from the University of North Carolina and received the degree of LL. D. from Wake Forest College. He was a Judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina from 1889 to 1895, when he resigned. He is a well-known orator and also an authority on Southern problems.
By what authority do I speak on this vexed subject of race relationship in the South? For more than two centuries my people have lived in the South, and I myself am a Southern man. My father was a Whig, a thorough-going Union man, and opposed to secession. He followed Mr. Webster and not Mr. Calhoun. In 1861, when one year of age, I became the owner by will of a three-fourths interest in five negro slaves. I sucked the breast of a negro woman, listened to the wonderful tales of my father’s slaves, rode “horse” on their backs, swam and fished with them, and ate their ash cake in the cabin. The negro, I think, is my friend; I know I am his. Thus I ought to be impartial.
Why do we of the South refuse to admit the facts, and when some blunt fellow, like the late Senator Tillman, blurts out the truth, why do we straightway fall to denying and disclaiming? On the other hand, why do few people outside the South seem to understand or care what consequences will follow the destruction of the caste system upheld by a color line so rigidly drawn?
A certain inexorable race law should be kept in mind if one would understand the magnitude of the issue involved: No two homogeneous races will long continue to exist side by side in the same country on terms of perfect equality without race-blending. One is prone to think of miscegenation as a thing foreign to the United States, and yet ethnologists generally declare that such blending between whites and blacks will take place, and that the Southern States will eventually become mulatto. Shortly after the close of the Civil War miscegenation societies were organized and leading abolitionists, Theodore Tilton and Wendell Phillip among others, advocated mixed marriages. About this time also the North British Review, in a calm statement, concluded that not only England and Europe, but Africa, would be represented in the new race which was growing up in the New World.
A few years ago Colonel Roosevelt, in letters to The Outlook, told of the rising tide of color in Central America—the fusing of whites and blacks into a mulatto civilization; how a prosperous negro would marry an impecunious white woman, how the male offspring would repeat the process, so that, after two or three generations, they would become a white family. And similar conditions exist today in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Portugal and the French colonies, where marriages between whites and blacks are well nigh universal.
Schults in “Race or Mongrel” declares that “if conditions that now exist continue nothing need be done with the negro; the problem will solve itself. The immigration of Southern mongrels is ingrafting more and more negro blood in our veins.” To the same effect is Hoffman’s “Racial Traits and Tendencies”: “The process is now rapidly going on and the black race will be absorbed; a condition which, though unpopular, is not unwelcome to many thinkers.” Document 188 of the Carnegie Foundation has valuable data showing universal race-blending in Jamaica and Bermuda. Sir Sidney Olivier, Governor of Jamaica, advocates the blending of whites and blacks “as a buffer to prevent race conflict.” In Volume 79 of the Popular Science Monthly he takes the ground that “we must make our account for a legitimate and honorable interblending between whites and blacks, and must look upon it not as an evil but as an advantage,” adding that “the black race is everywhere eager to mix with the white race.”
Viscount Bryce asserts that “the Brazilian lower classes intermarry freely with the black people, the Brazilian middle classes intermarry with mulattoes and quadroons”; and intimates that three-fourths white is white enough for Brazilians and Portuguese. The Journal of Heredity, October, 1916, contains a statement by Maynard W. Metcalf that the union of the races is inevitable; and to the same effect speak the Literary Digest of October, 1917, and the Century Magazine of March, 1903. In the “Future of Evolution” race-blending in the South is taken for granted; the Mercure de France for August, 1922, finds much hope for France from an infusion of African blood, declaring that the French people betray no antipathy to the color of the men from Algeria, Morocco or Tunis; and that all are “welded into lasting French cement,” a condition vouched for by our soldiers returning from France.
Robert Watson Winston (White)
Formerly Judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina
Reuter in “The Mulatto in the United States” implies that race-blending will take place if the color line and race segregation are not maintained: “Where no color line has been formally drawn against them they have tended to ally themselves with the superior race—during the process of reduction to a mongrel unity; it is biracial adjustment that keeps them apart.” One writer has asserted that all religions come from the black race; that extreme white and extreme black are departures, and that Adam, as his name signifies, was made of red earth.
We must conclude, therefore, that eventually the two races in America will blend if they be placed on social and political equality, and if they are in fact homogeneous.
Are Southern whites and blacks socially and politically equal? Are they homogeneous? And now we touch the first sore spot. We of the South generally maintain that the negro is a free man, and that the law bears on white and black alike, when we must know that this is not the fact. Is a man free who cannot vote, hold office or serve on the jury; is he free when he must ride in second-class coaches, sit in the gallery at public places, occupy rear seats of electric cars and flee for his life when suspected of being a dangerous character? Is a race free which has been battered into submission by whippings and lynchings, and which has no part in governmental affairs? Can man or race be free with a spirit in chains? And does it lie in the mouth of the white man to charge that the negro is but a race of bootblacks, when we have confined him to the task of blacking our boots?
Facing the Facts
We are not now considering whether these things should or should not be; we are merely asserting that in the “Black Belt” they are. And they are for a definite, a fixed purpose. As in slavery days it was necessary in order to perpetuate the institution to make it a crime to teach a slave to read or write, in other words to elevate him so that he could realize his condition of slavery, so in the far South today in order to maintain the present servile condition of the negro it is necessary to put him under foot and to keep him under foot. Whippings, lynchings, burnings—these represent the color line in crimson; and the color line, as a recent writer points out, is but evidence “of an attempt based on intuitive choice to preserve those distinctive values which a racial group has come to regard as of the highest moment to itself.” The great industrial awakening in the South is made possible by this supposedly permanent settlement of the race issue, for the color line properly enforced need not interfere with business—at all.
Are the two races homogeneous? They are, undoubtedly. Some time about 1812 on the border line of two great Southern States there lived a Presbyterian preacher named John Chavis, “admired for his noble qualities as a gentleman, revered for his fervent piety as a Christian, respected for his eminent ability as a teacher and preacher.” He had been a student at Princeton under Dr. Witherspoon. Opening a classical school in an aristocratic Southern community, he was patronized by the best people and became the preceptor of future Senators, Governors, and financiers; this man was a negro, a free negro—“without any white blood in his veins.” About five feet seven inches in height, he was robust and corpulent, having a round, clean shaven face expressive of great benevolence. The pupils boarded in his home, and in their home he was a welcome guest. Because of the Nat Turner insurrection in 1832 he and other free negroes were forbidden by law to preach, and from that time until his death he was supported by a Southern Presbytery. This is an isolated case to be sure, but it is portentous.
Are not two races homogeneous which have lived together in peace for a hundred years, speaking the same language, worshipping the same God, having similar church affiliations, impelled by similar superstitions and prejudices, the weaker race imitating the stronger in customs, manners, and modes of thought? Anyway, if the races are not homogeneous, how comes it that there are so many mulattoes in the South? In 1910 one-fifth of the negro population was mulatto.
We are about to uncover another skeleton in the closet: sexual relations once existed in the South between white men and mulatto women, a condition which persisted until some time after the Civil War. During the period of slavery and up to about 1876 sexual relations between the races was frequent. Neither comment nor sense of shame was entailed by what went on among white youths and colored girls. Nor was it uncommon at that time for white men to keep negro women and to rear children. Many a colored woman was proud to be the plaything of the white man, whose passion she gratified without restraint or responsibility. Public sentiment did not condemn the practice. Before 1876 there was no public sentiment on the subject, neither was there race consciousness nor conflict; and the unhappy offspring could rise no higher than the color of the mother. Once a negro, always a negro.
Changes in Sexual Relations
After about 1876 sexual intercourse between the races gradually decreased, and today has practically stopped. The law sustained by public sentiment condemns the practice, which has become a badge of shame. One would naturally expect the census table to reflect this change in race relationship, and it does. In 1910, in a group of 100 negroes, as we have seen, 20, or one in five, were mulattoes, whereas in 1920 the proportion was one in six, or 16 mulattoes in a group of 100 negroes. But bloody revolutions, much legislation forbidding race intercourse of any kind, innumerable race riots, lynchings and burnings in the “Black Belt,” together with the white womanhood of the South—all these were required to separate the two homogeneous races.
The Roosevelt letters made a lasting impression on the South. These letters describing the process of race-blending showed how the crossing of white and mulatto produced a quadroon; the crossing of quadroon with white person produced an octoroon; the crossing of octoroon with white person produced a person called “passing for white”; and the crossing of “passing for white” with pure white produced “fixed white,” and after “fixed white” there was no further reversion to black color.
The total population of the United States is about 106,000,000, of which 10,500,000 are negroes. It is interesting to note that of these 10,500,000 negroes about 8,333,000 reside in Southern territory. That is to say, in the fourteen South Atlantic, East South Central and West South Central States (omitting West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky), there are 8,333,000 blacks and 19,000,000 whites. On the other hand, in Northern territory there are 71,000,000 whites and 1,500,000 blacks. In other words, in the thirty-two Northeastern, Middle Atlantic, East North Central, West North Central, Mountain and Pacific States the white population is 71,000,000, while the negro population is 1,500,000.
If it were possible at the present time to blend the races, Southern people would have more than one-third colored blood in their veins and less than two-thirds white blood, and Northern people would have about 3 per cent colored blood and 97 per cent white. Moreover, if amalgamation were to take place now, the whole of South Carolina and Mississippi and half of Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Louisiana would grade about 50 per cent negro blood and 50 per cent white. The North, on the other hand, would grade about 3 per cent colored blood and 97 per cent white, a mixture well within the rule of “fixed white”; whereas the Southern mixture would not reach the grade of “passing for white,” the offspring of such persons being subject to the law of reversion to color.
It is not possible to place Southern whites and blacks on terms of social and political equality as soon as the blacks are fitted for citizenship, as many philanthropic organizations are now insisting, because the Southern white man is tenacious of his rights and on this subject is regardless of consequences. With him a white man’s government means a white man’s government. If Congress should pass a Force Bill and undertake to put it into operation, the Irish upheaval would be a mild affair in comparison with conditions in the Southern States. Either the white man would exterminate the negro, or the negro would exterminate the white man. The white man will brook no peer. It is not a question of whether the negro is a good citizen or a bad citizen; it is deeper than this; it has to do with race integrity, race autonomy.
So long as the negro “behaves himself” in the South he is safe. But once let him cross the dead line of race separation and endeavor to assert his manhood rights and he becomes a menace to the existing order of things, after the manner of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. With hat in hand, the Southern negro is more than safe, he is happy—if he is that kind of negro. For his sake and in memory of the old-time “darkey” schools, hospitals and orphanages have been set on foot. Nothing, indeed, is too good for him. A tender, patient relationship exists between this unambitious, likable creature and the white people of the South. This white man’s negro gets all that he is entitled to and often more in the courts, as a domestic on the farm, with trowel or hammer. The white man who undertakes to impose on a white man’s negro has his hands full. Many years’ experience as a Circuit Judge enables me to declare that in the Court House I never witnessed an act of injustice to such a negro—who does not desire rights, social or political, and could not be induced to leave “his ol’ white folks.”
But what of that increasing number of negroes who are not the white man’s negroes, and what of the widening gulf between races? Has the situation improved since the return of negro soldiers in khaki from France, where the black man from Algeria was a favorite of the Parisian drawing rooms, a recipient of the voluptuous white woman’s favors? Did Siki’s victory over Carpentier give a new turn to the race question, as The Boston Herald asserts? Is it true, as literature of “new negro” type declares, that race war and revolution must presently follow if conditions continue and race segregation be insisted upon? Perhaps not. But so The Crisis is teaching and so one reads in “The Souls of the Black Folks,” “The Voice of the Negro,” “Dark Water,” “The Black Dispatch,” and like publications. The negro Leckey thinks that “race separation and distinctions are a spiritual lynching and that the negro must feel that he is a cursed, knee-bending slave, bound and shackled by laws and customs made for slaves.” And the “new negro’s” call to battle, how clear it is. Let us hear it:
Why is the negro not right? Self determination is of God, not of man. But the black race must not underrate the task. They are lined up against descendants of men who fought a four years’ war against the world without salt, shoes or powder, and whose courage and endurance no man questions. Men of the South place race integrity above politics, property, religion, or life itself. The South alone among nations is today making a fight against a universal ethnological law of race-blending. The mistake is in not boldly admitting the facts, flinging defiance to the future, spurning representation based on negro population in the electoral college.
The Solution
This, then, is the line-up. Can actual warfare be avoided? I think that it can. There is nothing strange or alarming about the situation. The negro desires to be free and he is right. The white man claims that the South is his to rule and control, and he, too, is right. But a head-on collision need not come from every paradox. While man has busied himself in the endeavor to solve matters, in the wrong way, the God of nations seems to have taken a hand, pointing the way of escape, even as He pointed it out to Abraham and Lot in the land of Bethel: “And Abraham said unto Lot, let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee. Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me.” Even so today is God moving the black man to separate himself from the Southern white man, and, by the thousands, are negroes leaving the South.
Let the census tables again speak. The white population of the United States in the last four decades has increased 100 per cent, while the negro population in the same period has increased but 40 per cent. In the far South during the decade 1910-1920 the negro population either stood still or diminished. Alabama and Mississippi having 8,000 and 75,000 fewer negroes respectively in 1920 than in 1910. The way out, therefore, is to change our mental attitude on this subject and vitalize every legitimate movement for negro migration North, East and West. Let those States welcoming the negroes to equal rights make known the fact, opening wide their doors, and negroes will continue to leave the South as they are now doing, in great numbers, thus relieving race friction. Undoubtedly the Southern States should cooperate in the movement, instantly repealing such laws as impose fine and imprisonment on emigration agents and giving up negro labor for the general welfare. (The only good of the Ku Klux is to frighten negroes from Southern States to other sections—and this is unintentional.)
Organizations and associations for race betterment, heretofore assuming that the race issue must be settled in the South and not elsewhere, have given little attention to negro migrations, which have been haphazard affairs conducted along business and not along racial lines. With intelligent and sympathetic direction negro migration will be greatly accelerated; and then, but not till then, the “Solid South” with all its embarrassing consequences will cease to be.
But I go further. Were I a negro, facing the future, concerned about children and children’s children, I would cease to fight against white prejudice, but raising the banner of “Pan-Africa,” I would herald that “Unity of the Colored Races, sensed by far-seeing negroes,” as Dr. Burghardt Du Bois phrases it, until my last breath. And why shall not the National Government sponsor negro exodus, making ready a suitable home for the race? President Lincoln recommended colonization “in some place or places of suitable climate”; President Grant recommended to Congress colonization on the Island of Santo Domingo. Why may not French Guinea and Sierra Leone be added to Liberia, creating an ample fatherland for such Afro-Americans as choose to go?
But has not colonization in Liberia failed? By no means; it has never been given a trial. In the ’70s a ship with about one thousand negro emigrants sailed from Savannah for Liberia. Standing amid 10,000 of his race and raising his black face heavenward, Bishop Turner prayed that God would safely speed the little craft to a land where the color of a man’s skin was not a crime. Ten thousand negro voices sobbed “Amen”; an aged colored woman shouted for very joy. What has been America’s attitude to such heroic incidents? Either indifference or disapproval and ridicule. Our colonization societies have ceased to function, and we give no further thought to Liberia, being content that the negro shall remain in the South, “a people within a people.”
Shall we not, I earnestly ask, speedily revive the old colonization society, send another Goethals with means and equipment and make Liberia as healthy as Panama—and above all, shall we not tell the truth about Liberia? Plucky little republic, at our request, she jumped into the great war and lost shipping and commerce; her towns were shelled by German gunboats, and yet the United States is haggling about making a loan of $5,000,000, promised by President Wilson and recommended by President Harding.
During the present year a British commission after nine months’ travel reported to its Government that in the three essentials—climate, productivity and health (with proper attention)—Africa is the most favored of continents, that it possesses marvelous flora, wonderful water-power, fertile soil, extensive mineral deposits, abundant hardwood.
In the face of discouragement, 100,000 civilized negroes, of whom about 12,000 are American Christian immigrants and their descendants, now reside on the Liberian littoral; and Monrovia, its capital, has a population of 6,000 souls. A railroad running from Monrovia 150 miles up the St. Paul River, across waterfalls and into the hinterland, would open up a garden spot, with lowlands superior to our far South, with uplands equal in climate and elevation to our North Atlantic States.
As soon as we but make a co-operative start toward negro migration and colonization and cease the vain attempt to pour two gallons of water into a one-gallon vessel—to bestow citizenship upon the negro in the South—his condition will improve. What satisfaction does not get from reading documents like “The Negroes’ Progress in Fifty Years”? Of what avail are houses, land or education, forsooth, to one in a state of bondage? Better ignorance and poverty for him. Shall the promise be kept to the ear and broken to the hope? I cannot agree with Mecklen, in “Democracy and Race Conflict,” that the race question is essentially insoluble. The negroes are tractable and, looking upon themselves as a “peculiar people,” will follow such course as their leaders may map out for the “race”; a course which should be thought out, it must again be insisted, not along the impossible, makeshift lines of racial equality in the South, but in the quite opposite direction and in terms of hundreds of years. While permanent plans are under way, every energy should be exerted to educate and fit the negro for a new, a saner life under ampler skies. America may not justify herself at the Final Assize until she lives up to the truth that the white man is right, that the negro is also right, and that of these two contradictions neither is wrong.