The Southern South

The point of view of the South was revealed in 1903 when President Roosevelt invited Booker Washington 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 Washington 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,” and from that day to this the invitation has been received as an affront and an injury to the Whites in the South. We are told of the terrible consequences; how a black boy refused any longer to call the sixteen-year-old son of his employer “Mister”; how the Negro from that time on has felt himself a person of consequence. It does not appear that the President’s example was followed by any Southern governor; or that any Negro invited himself to dinner with a white person. To the Northern mind the incident was simply a recognition, by the acknowledged leader of all Americans, of the acknowledged leader of black Americans. The Southern mind somehow cannot distinguish between sitting at the same table with a man and making him your children’s guardian. The whole argument comes down to the level of the phrase used so constantly when the question of setting the slaves free was before the country: “Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger?”

What the phrase “social equality” really means is that if anything is done to raise the negro race it will demand to be raised all the way. But demand is a long way short of reality. Northerners have their social prejudices and preferences; yet they are not afraid that an Arab or a Syrian immigrant is going to burst their doors and compel them at the muzzle of the rifle to like him, invite him, make him their intimate; nobody can establish social equality by law or public sentiment. Everybody should sympathize with the desire of the South to keep unimpaired the standards of civilization; but the friendliest Northerner cannot understand why a Southern business man feels such a danger that he writes of social equality: “Right or wrong, the Southern people will never tolerate it, and will go through the horrors of another reconstruction before they will permit it to be. Before they will submit to it, they will kill every negro in the Southern states.”

This ceaseless dwelling on a danger which no thoughtful man thinks impending leads to attacks of popular hysteria in the South. A few months ago in the town of Madison, Ga., it was reported: “Last night great excitement prevailed in Madison caused by the appearance on the electric-light poles in the city of a yellow flag about two feet long, with the word ‘Surrender’ printed in large letters in the center of it. Women became hysterical and thought it was the sign of a negro uprising. Extra police was installed and it was thought of calling out the military company. At the height of the excitement, it was learned that the signs had been posted as an advertisement by a firm here. Cases have been made against the members of the firm.”

The real point with regard to social equality is not that the Negro is inferior, but that his inferiority must be made evident at every turn. You may ride beside a negro driver on the front seat of a carriage, because any passerby sees that he is doing your bidding; but you must not sit on the back seat with a Negro who might be a fellow-passenger; you may stop at a Negro’s house, if there is absolutely no other place to stay, sit at his table, eat of his food, but he must stand while you sit; else, as one of the richest Negroes in the South said, “the neighbors would burn our house over our heads.” The whole South is full of evidence, not so much that the Whites think the Negroes inferior, as that they think it necessary to fix upon him some public evidence of inferiority, lest mistakes be made. It was against such confusion of the character and the color that Governor Andrew protested when he said: “I have never despised a man because he was poor, or because he was ignorant, or because he was black.”

CHAPTER XIII

Strong and passionate dislike and apprehension such as is set forth in the last chapter is certain to show itself in custom and law set up by that portion of the community which has the power of legislation. The commonest measures of this kind are discriminations between Whites and Negroes, especially in the use of public conveniences. In some cases the white people shut out Negroes altogether. There are perhaps half a dozen towns in the South in which none but Negroes live; there are scores in which the Negroes are not allowed to settle or stay. Two counties in North Carolina (Mitchell and Watauga) undertake to exclude Negroes; and people who attempt to go through there with a black driver are confronted by such signs as “Nigger, keep out of this county!” If that is not sufficient, a native comes swinging across the fields and remarks: “I don’t want to have any trouble, and I don’t suppose it makes any difference to you, but if that nigger goes two miles farther, he’ll be shot. We don’t allow any niggers in this county.” Such exclusions are not unknown in other states. In the town of Syracuse, Ohio, for generations no Negro has ever been allowed to stay overnight; and the founder of a little city in Oklahoma heard his buildings blown up at night because he had ventured to domicile colored servants there. In the two Northern settlements of Fitzgerald, Ga., and Cullman, Ala., the attempt was made to keep Negroes out altogether.

In addition to these artificial separations, there is a redistribution of the population going on all the while. Few of the owners of good plantations any longer live on them, and the outlying Whites move into town, or into counties where Negroes are fewer. The places thus vacated are taken up through rent or purchase by colored people; so that we have the striking phenomenon that black counties are getting blacker and white counties whiter. Thus in Pulaski County, Ga., in thirty years the Negroes doubled and the Whites increased only about twenty per cent. The same thing is true inside the cities and towns; most of them have well-marked negro quarters, near or alongside which none but the lowest Whites like to live. In Richmond, on one of the main streets, it is tacitly understood that the Negroes take the north sidewalk and the Whites the south sidewalk. Probably no place is now quite so strict in the matter as Morristown, Tenn., was twenty-five years ago, when white women first came to teach the Negroes; they were literally thrown off the sidewalks into the gutter because that was the only place where “niggers or nigger-lovers” were allowed to walk.

The principle of race separation extends from civil into religious matters. Before the Civil War Negroes were often acceptable and honored members of white churches, and there are still some cases where old members continue this relation, but they could now hardly sit in the same pews. There are also difficulties in attempts to unite separate black and white churches into one general denomination. The Protestant Episcopal Church is much perplexed over a proposition for separate negro bishops, inferior to the regular bishops. However, not a twentieth of the Negroes to-day are members of churches which are in organic relation to white churches; they have their own presbyteries, and conferences, and synods; set their own doctrines and moral standards, and (if the white man is right in thinking the race inferior) they will necessarily develop an inferior Christianity.

The discriminations so far mentioned have to do with unwritten practices; with customs which differ from community to community; there is another long series upon the statute books. In 1865, in the so-called Vagrant Laws, special provision was made for the relations of colored people; four states allowed colored children to be “apprenticed,” which practically meant a mild slavery; in South Carolina “servants,” as the Negroes were called in the statute, were forbidden to leave their master’s place without consent; Mississippi forbade people to rent land to Negroes outside the towns; South Carolina established a special court for the trial of negro offenses; several states forbade blacks to practice any trade or business without a license. These laws, which competent Southerners now think to have been a serious mistake, seemed to Congress evidence of a purpose to restore a milder form of slavery, and they were swept away by the Reconstruction governments. Nevertheless, in all the Southern states, constitutions or statutes forbid the intermarriage of Whites and Negroes; and either during Reconstruction or since, all the Southern states have provided for separate public schools for Negroes; and several states prohibit the education of Whites and blacks in the same private school.

The most striking discrimination is the separate accommodations on railroads and steamboats, which has entirely grown up since the Civil War. In slavery times few Negroes traveled except as the obvious servants of white people; but in 1865 legislation began for separate cars or compartments, and of the former slaveholding states, only two, Missouri and Delaware, are now without laws on that subject. The term “Jim Crow” commonly applied to these laws goes back to an old negro song and dance, and was first used in Massachusetts, where, in 1841, the races were thus separated. The Civil Rights Act of Congress of 1875 forbade such distinctions, but was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Several state and federal cases have given opportunity for the courts to decide that if there is a division between the two races, the accommodations must be equal. Hence, most Southern trains have a separate Jim Crow car, with a smoking compartment. The Pullman Car Company, perhaps because its business is chiefly interstate, has hesitated to make distinctions, and commonly will sell a berth to anybody who will show a railroad ticket good on the appropriate train; but in some states there are now demands for separate colored Pullmans, or for colored compartments, or for excluding Negroes altogether. But nobody who knows the Pullman Car Company will for a moment expect that it will do anything because patrons desire it. The discrimination in many states extends to the stations. For instance, in the beautiful new Spanish Mission building at Mobile, there are separate waiting rooms, separate ticket windows, and two exits—one for Whites and one for colored people. In Greensboro, N. C., the waiting room, a large and lofty hall, is simply bisected by a brass railing.

Similar laws apply to steamboats, though here it is not so easy to shut off part of the passengers from the general facilities of the boat. Even in the Boston steamers running to Southern ports there are separate dining rooms, toilet rooms and smoking rooms for colored passengers. Eight Southern states separate street-car passengers; sometimes they have a separate compartment for Negroes—more often, a little movable sign is shifted up and down the car to divide the races. Elsewhere, Whites sit at one end and Negroes at the other, and fill up till they meet. In most of these laws there is an exception, allowing colored nurses with white children and colored attendants of feeble or sick people to enter the white car; and it has been thought necessary to provide that railroad employees, white or black, may circulate through the train.

In restaurants and hotels the distinction is still sharper, for except those which are kept only for the accommodations of Negroes, there is no provision for tables for colored people in any form outside of the railroad eating houses. It is hence practically impossible for any colored person to get accommodation in a Southern hotel.

These discriminations on travel have never been desired by the railroad companies, inasmuch as they involve trouble and expense, and are a check on the Negro’s love for riding on trains and boats, which is an important factor in the passenger receipts. It is everywhere disliked by the Negroes, both because they do not, in fact, have accommodations as good as those of the Whites, and because it is intended to be a mark of their inferiority. The low-class white man who, in 1902, acted as ticket agent, baggage man and division superintendent and conductor on the three-mile branch road connecting Tuskegee with the main line remarked affably: “Been to see the nigger school, I suppose? That’s all right, Booker Washington’s all right. Oh, yes, he’s a good man, he often rides on this train. Not in this part of the car, you know, but over there in the Jim Crow. Oh, yes, I often set down and talk to Booker Washington. Not on the same seat of course. Jest near by.”

Besides these shackles of custom or of law, the Negro is in general excluded in the South from every position which might be construed to give him authority over white people. The civil service of the federal government is on a different footing; ever since war times there have always been some negro federal officials, collectors of internal revenue, collectors of ports, postmasters, and the like; but there is a determined effort in the South to get rid of them. At Lake City, S. C., in 1898, part of the family of Baker, the negro postmaster, was massacred as a hint that his presence was not desired. The people of Indianola, Miss., in 1903, practically served notice on a colored postmistress that she could not be allowed to officiate any longer; whereupon President Roosevelt directed the closing of the Indianola office. When in 1902 Dr. Crum was appointed collector of Charleston, there was an uproar in South Carolina and throughout the South. That episode involved some painful and some comical things; for instance, a white lady who bears one of the most honored names in American history, and who sorely needed the employment, was practically compelled by public sentiment to resign a clerkship in the customhouse when Dr. Crum came in; and the people who protested against his appointment, on the ground that he was unfit, had previously helped to select him as a commissioner in the Charleston Exposition.

In all these controversies the issue was double; first, that the white people thought it an indignity to transact any public business with a Negro representing the United States; and second, that it would somehow bring about race equality to admit that a Negro was competent to hold any important office. The President was furiously censured because he did not take into account the preferences of the Southern people, by which, of course, was meant the Southern white people; that in South Carolina there are more African citizens than Caucasian seemed to them quite beside the question.

For minor offices the lines are not so strictly drawn; there are a few colored policemen in Charleston, and perhaps other Southern cities; Negro towns like Mound Bayou, Miss., have their own set of officials; and there are some small county offices which a few Negroes are allowed to hold. Nearly two thousand are employed in some capacity in the federal departments at Washington; about two thousand more under the District government; and a thousand more elsewhere, mostly in the South. These are chiefly in the postal service; there are some negro letter carriers in all the Southern cities, and in Mobile there are no others. They get these appointments, and likewise places as railway mail clerks on competitive examination—an especially hard twist to the doctrine of race equality; for what is the world coming to if a nigger gets more marks on an examination than a white man? For the feeling that the Negro in authority is overbearing and presumptuous there is some ground, but the attitude of the South is substantially expressed in the common phrase, “This is a white man’s government,” and is closely allied with the bogy of African domination, which is trotted out from time to time to arouse the jaded energies of race prejudice.

One of the most unaccountable things in this whole controversy is the evident apprehension of a large section in the South that unless something immediate and positive is done, the Negro will get control of some of the Southern states, notwithstanding such protests as the following: “And even where they represent a majority,—where do they rule? or where have they ruled for these twenty years? The South, with all its millions of negroes, has to-day not a single negro congressman, not a negro governor or senator. A few obscure justices of the peace, a few negro mayors in small villages of negro people, and—if we omit the few federal appointees—we have written the total of all the negro officials in our Southern States. Every possibility of negro domination vanishes to a more shadowy and more distant point with every year.” As will be shown a little later, the Negro’s vote is no longer a factor in most of the Southern states, and he shows no disposition to take over the responsibility for Southern government. The cry of negro domination has been more unfortunate for the Whites than for the blacks because it has thrown the Southern states out of their adjustment in national parties; in the state election of 1908 for Governor of Georgia, the issue was between Clark Howells, who was much against the Negro, and the successful candidate, Hoke Smith, who is mighty against the Negro; but neither Howells nor Smith brought out of the controversy any reputation that dazzled the Democratic Convention of 1908.

No party founded on negro votes or organized to protect negro rights any longer exists in the South. In Alabama there are still “black-and-tan Republicans”—that is, an organization of Negroes and Whites, and one of the most rabid Negro haters in the South is a dignitary in that organization and helped to choose delegates for the Republican national convention of 1908. Throughout the South there are also what are called the “Lilywhite Republicans”—that is, people who are trying to build up their party by disclaiming any partnership with the Negro or special interest in his welfare. Neither of these factions makes head against the overpowering “White Man’s party,” which is also the Democratic party; hence every state in the Lower South can be depended upon to vote for any candidate propounded by the national Democratic convention; hence the section has little influence in the selection of a candidate, who yet would not have a ghost of a chance without their votes. The net result of the scare cry of negro domination is that the Whites are in some states dominated by the loudest and most violent section of their own race.

Behind this whole question of politics and of office holding stands the more serious question whether a race which, whatever its average character, contains at least two million intelligent and progressive individuals, shall be wholly shut out from public employment. It is on this question that President Roosevelt made his famous declaration: “I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color.... It is a good thing from every standpoint to let the colored man know that if he shows in marked degree the qualities of good citizenship—the qualities which in a white man we feel are entitled to reward—then he will not be cut off from all hope of similar reward.”

The discrimination between the Negro and the White has nowhere been so bitterly contested as with regard to suffrage, inasmuch as the right of the Negro to vote on equal terms with the white man is distinctly set forth in the Fifteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution, and as during Reconstruction the Negro had full suffrage in all the Southern states. Without going into the history of the negro vote, it may be worth while to notice that at the time of the Revolution, Negroes who had the property qualification could vote in all the thirteen colonies except two; that they never lost that franchise in Massachusetts and some other Northern communities, and that as late as 1835 about a thousand of them had the ballot in North Carolina. Then in Reconstruction times the suffrage was given to all the Negroes in the country; a process of which one of the most bitter enemies of the race to-day says: “To give the negro the right of suffrage and place him on terms of absolute equality with the white man, was the capital crime of the ages against the white man’s civilization.” In reality the North bestowed the suffrage on the Negro because its own experience seemed to have proved that the ballot was an instrument of civilization—for all the foreign immigrants had grown up to it.

Southerners are never weary of describing the enormities of the governments based on negro suffrage; as a matter of fact, however, nobody North or South knows what would have been the result of negro suffrage, for in no state longer than eight years, and in some states only about three years, did they actually cast votes that determined the choice of state officers, or any considerable number of local officers. Their habit of voting for “the regular candidate,” without regard to his fitness or character, was not peculiar to the race or to the section. Disfranchisement began with the Ku Klux in 1870, and in most states the larger part of the Negroes at once lost their ballots because driven away from the polls by violence or terror. The only community in which they were disfranchised by statute, together with the Whites, was the District of Columbia. Then came the era of fraud, the use of tissue ballots and falsified electoral returns, and confusing systems of ballot boxes; then, in 1890, began a process of disfranchising them by state constitutional amendments which provided qualifications especially difficult for Negroes to meet: for instance, special indulgence was given to men who served in the Confederate army, or whose fathers or grandfathers were entitled to vote before the war. This movement has already involved six states, and is likely to run through every former slaveholding state.

Even the comparatively small number of Negroes who can meet the requirements of tax, education, or property find trouble in registering, or in voting. In Mississippi, where there were nearly 200,000 colored voters, there are now 16,000; in Alabama about 5,000 are registered out of 100,000 men of voting age. Sometimes they are simply refused registration, like the highly educated Negro in Alabama, who was received by the official with the remark: “Nigger, get out of here; this ain’t our day for registering niggers!” In Beaufort County, S. C., where, under the difficult provisions of the law, there are about seven hundred negro voters and about five hundred Whites, somehow the white election officials always return a majority for their friends; and in the presidential election of 1908 the hundred thousand negro men of voting age in South Carolina were credited with only twenty-five hundred votes for Theodore Roosevelt.

It has puzzled the leaders of the conventions to disfranchise the greater part of the Negroes without including “some of our own people,” and yet without technically infringing upon the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits the withdrawal of the suffrage on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; but they have been successful. As a Senator from North Carolina put it: “The disfranchising amendment would disfranchise ignorant negroes and not disfranchise any white man. No white man in North Carolina has been disfranchised as a result of this amendment.”

It is impossible not to feel a sympathy with the desire of the South to be free from an ignorant and illiterate electorate; there is not a Northern state in which, if the conditions were the same, the effort would not be made to restrict the suffrage; but that is a long way from the Southern principle of ousting the bad, low, and illiterate Negro, while leaving the illiterate, low, and bad White; and then, in the last resort, shutting out also the good, educated, and capable Negro. For there is not a state in the Lower South where the colored vote would be faithfully counted if it had a balance of power between two white parties; and Senator Tillman’s great fear at present is that the blacks will make the effort to come up to these complicated requirements, and then must be disenfranchised again. Have the Southern people confidence in their own race superiority, when for their protection from negro domination and from the great evil of amalgamation they feel it necessary to take such precautions against the least dangerous, most enterprising, and best members of the negro race? Nevertheless, the practical disenfranchisement of the Negroes has brought about a political peace, and there is little to show that the Negroes resent their exclusion.

Whatever the divergences of feeling in the South on the negro question, it is safe to say that the Whites are a unit on the two premises that amalgamation must be resisted, and that the Negro must not have political power. All these feelings are buttressed against a passionate objection to race-mixture, which is all the stronger because so much of it is going on; it branches out into the withdrawal of the suffrage, not because the South is in any danger of negro political domination, but because most Whites think no member of an inferior race ought to vote; it includes many restrictions on personal relations which seem like precautions where there is no danger.

Upon these main issues Northerners may share some of the sentiments of the South, but none of the terrors. If the Negro is inferior, it does not need so many acts of the legislature to prove it; if amalgamation is going on, it is due to the white race, can be checked by the white race, and by no one else; if the Negro is unintelligent, he will never, under present conditions, get enough votes to affect elections; if he does acquire the necessary property and education, he thereby shows that he does not share in the inferiority of his race. The South thinks about the Negro too much, talks about him too much, abuses him too much. In the nature of things there is no reason why the superior and the inferior race may not live side by side indefinitely. Is the Negro powerful enough to force his standards and share his disabilities with the superior white man? Is it not as the Chinese sage says: “The superior man is correctly firm, and not firm merely ... what the superior man seeks is in himself.”

So far as can be judged, the average frame of mind in the South includes much injustice, and unwillingness to permit the negro race to develop up to the measure of its limitations. Here the experience of the North counts, for it has many elements of population which at present are inferior to the average. If there is a low Italian quarter in a city, or a Slav quarter, or a Negro quarter, the aim of the Northern community is to give those people the best chance that they can appropriate. Woe to the city which permits permanent centers of crime and degradation! By schools, by reformatory legislation, by philanthropic societies, by juvenile courts, by missions, by that great blessing, the care of neglected children, they try to bring up the standard. This is done for the welfare of the community, it is what business men call a dollars and cents proposition. If a man or child has three fourths of the average abilities, the North tries to bring him to the full use of his seventy-five per cent; if he stands at 150 on the scale of 100, it aims to give him the opportunity to use his superior qualities.

This is just the point of view of the Southern leaders who are fighting for justice and common sense toward the Negro: men like the late Chancellor Hill, of the University of Georgia, like President Alderman, of the University of Virginia, like Rev. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Montgomery; their gospel is that, notwithstanding his limitations, the Negro is on the average capable of higher things than he is doing, and that the gifted members of the race can render still larger services to their own color and to the community. That is what Dr. S. C. Mitchell, of Richmond College, meant when he said: “Friend, go up higher!” a phrase which part of the Southern press has unwarrantably seized upon as a declaration of social equality.

Every friend of the South must hope that that enlightened view will permeate the community; but, as a matter of fact, a very considerable number of people of power in the South, legislators, professional men, journalists, ministers, governors, either take the ground that the Negro is so hopelessly low that it is a waste of effort to try to raise him; or that education and uplift will make him less useful to the White, and therefore he shall not have it; or that you cannot give to the black man a better chance without bringing danger upon the white man. Contrary to the experience of mankind, to present upward movement in what has been a very low white element in the South, and to the considerable progress made by the average Negro since slavery days, such people hold that intelligence and education do nothing for the actual improvement of the colored race. Since the Negro is low, they would keep him low; since they think him dangerous, they wish to leave him dangerous; their policy is to make the worst of a bad situation instead of trying to improve it.

No Northern mind can appreciate the point of view of some men who certainly have a considerable following in the South. Here, for instance, is Thomas Dixon, Jr., arguing with all his might that the Negro is barely human, but that if he is not checked he will become such an economic competitor of the white man that he will have to be massacred. He protests against Booker T. Washington’s attempt to raise the Negro, because he thinks it will be successful. Part, at least, of the customary and statutory discriminations against the Negro which have already been described are simply an expression of this supposed necessity of keeping the Negro down, lest he should rise too far. All such terrors involve the humiliating admission that the Negro can rise, and that he will rise if he has the opportunity.

CHAPTER XIV

“For instance, only yesterday,” said he, “I went to a nigger woman’s house where they had bought two skirt patterns. When I knocked at the door, a little girl came, and she says: ‘Mammy ain’t to home,’ says she, but I walked right in, and there was a bigger girl, who says, ‘Mamma has gone down street,’ but I says, ‘I know better than that, you —— nigger!’ And I pushed right into the kitchen, and there she was behind the door, and I walked right up to her, and I says, ‘Do you think I’ll allow you to teach that innocent child to lie, you —— nigger? I’ll show you,’ says I; and I hit her a couple of good ones right in the face. She come back at me with a kind of an undercut right under the jaw. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to hit her on the head, but I landed a solid one in the middle of her nose; and I made those women go and get those skirts and give them up before I left the place.”

Once entered on these agreeable reminiscences, he went on in language the tenor of which is fortified by a memorandum made at the time. “But that isn’t a circumstance to what happened three weeks ago last Tuesday. There’s a nigger in this town that bought a cravenette coat from us for thirteen dollars and a half. It costs us about nine dollars, but he only paid instalments of four and a half, and then, for about six months, he dodged me; but my brother and I saw him on the street, and I jumped out of the buggy before he could run away, and says I, ‘I want you to pay for that coat.’ He had it on. He says, ‘I hain’t got any money.’ Says it sarcastic-like. Well, of course I wouldn’t take any lip from a nigger like that, and I sailed right in. I hit him between the eyes, and he up with a shovel and lambasted me with the flat of it right between the shoulder-blades, but I could have got away with him all right if his wife hadn’t have come up with a piece of board and caught me on the side; my brother jumped right out of the buggy, and he hit her square and knocked her down, and we had a regular mix-up. We got the coat, and when we came away, we left the man lying senseless on the ground.” “But don’t those people ever get out warrants against you?” “Warrants against me, I guess not! I lay in bed five days, and when I got up, my brother and I swore out warrants against the nigger and his wife. We brought them up in court and the judge fined them forty-seven dollars, and he says to me, ‘All the fault I find with you is that you didn’t kill the double adjective nigger. He’s the worst nigger in town!’”

With all allowances for the lies visibly admixed in this unpleasant tale, it undoubtedly lifts the cover off a kind of thing that goes on every day between the superior and the inferior races. On the one side stand the negro customers, shiftless, extravagant, slinking away from their debts, yet doubtless afterward puffed with pride to be able to boast that they had a knock-down fight with a white man and were not shot; the other actor in this drama of race hatred could not even claim to be a Poor White; he was the son of a traveling man, had some education, was successful above the average, and until he began to talk about himself might for a few minutes have passed as a gentleman; yet to save a loss of less than five dollars, and to assert his superiority of race, he was perfectly willing to put himself on the level of the lowest Negro, and to engage in fisticuffs with a woman.

It is not to be supposed that this thoroughgoing blackguard is a spokesman for the whole South, or that every local court inflicts a heavy penalty upon black people for the crime of having been thrashed by a white man. The story simply illustrates a feeling toward the Negroes which is widespread and potent among a considerable class of Whites; and it bears witness also to a disposition to settle difficulties between members of the two races by the logic of hard fists. It is a lurid example of race antagonism.

No section of the Union has a monopoly of violence or injustice. Men as coarse and brutal as the man encountered in South Carolina could probably be found in every Northern city. Homicides are no novelty in any state in the Union, and it is as serious for a Northern crowd to put a man to death because somebody calls him “Scab” as for an equally tigerish Southern mob to burn a Negro because he has killed a white man. The annals of strikes are almost as full of ferocity as the annals of lynching, and it would be hard to find anything worse than the murder, in 1907, of some watchmen in New York City who were thrown down a building by striking workmen, who were allowed by the police to leave the building, and were never brought to justice.

Nevertheless, there is in the North a strong impression that crime is on a different footing in the South; that assaults, affrays, and homicides are more frequent; that the South has a larger crime record than seems reconcilable with its numerous churches, its moral standards, and its fairly good state and city governments. Light may be thrown on the problem of race relations by inquiring whether the South is as much shocked by certain kinds of crime and violence as the North, whether a criminal is as likely to be tried and convicted, whether the superior race, by its practice in such matters, is setting before the inferior race a high standard of conduct.

Statistics indicate that in desperate crimes against the person, and especially in murder, the South far surpasses other civilized countries, and other parts of the United States. In London, with a population of 6,500,000, there were in a year 24 homicides; 4 of the criminals committed suicide, and the 20 others were brought to justice. In New York City, with about two thirds the population of London, there were 331 homicides with only 61 indictments and 46 convictions. In the state of South Carolina, with a population about one third that of New York City, there were 222 homicides in a year, and not a single execution of a white man.

Popular phrases and the press in the South habitually put a gloss upon many of these crimes by calling them “duels”; but a careful study of newspaper cuttings shows that the old-fashioned affairs of honor with seconds and exactly similar weapons, measured distance, and the word to fire, have almost disappeared. Nearly all the affrays in which the murdered man is conscious of his danger are simply street fights, in which each man lodges in the body of the other as many shots as he can before he himself sinks down wounded. It can hardly be considered an affair of honor when Mr. John D. Twiggs, of Albany, Ga., walks through the streets with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, looking for Mr. J. B. Palmer, who has gone home to arm himself.

Even this uneven kind of warfare is less frequent than the outright assassination of one white man by another. Where was Southern chivalry when Gonzales, the editor of the Columbia State, was in 1902 killed in the open street before he could draw his pistol, by Lieutenant-Governor Tillman of South Carolina, about whom the editor had been telling unpleasant truths? Where do you find the high-toned Southern gentleman when a man walks up to a total stranger, seizes him, and with the remark, “You are the man who wanted to fight me last night,” plunges his knife into the victim’s back. The newspapers are full of the shooting of men through windows, of their disappearance on lonely roads, of the terror that walketh by night, and the pestilence that waiteth at noonday.

Then there are the numerous murders of friend by friend, on all kinds of frivolous occasions; a man trespasses on another man’s land, goes to apologize, and is shot; another makes a joke which his friend does not appreciate, and there is nothing for it but pistols. The feeling that a man must assert his dignity at the end of a revolver was revealed in New Orleans in 1908 when Inspector Whittaker, head of the police, with five of his men, walked into the office of the New Orleans World, which had criticised his enforcement of the liquor laws, struck the editor in the face and several times shot at him. After he had taken such pains to vindicate the majesty of the law, it seems a hardship that his superiors compelled the Inspector to resign. There is hardly a part of the civilized world where homicide is so common as in the South, and the crime is quite as frequent in the cities as in the back country. Pitched battles by white men with policemen and with sheriffs are not uncommon; and sometimes three or four bodies are picked up after such a fight.

In many ways this unhappy state of things is a survival of frontier practices which once were common in the Northwest as well as in the South, but which have nearly disappeared there as civilization has advanced; but in the South there is a special element of lawlessness through the Negroes. One of the few advantages of slavery was that every slaveholder was police officer and judge and jury on his own plantation; petty offenses were punished by the overseer without further ceremony, serious crimes were easily dealt with, and the escape of the criminal was nearly impossible.

Freedom, with its opportunity of moving about, with its greatly enlarged area of disputes among the blacks, and between Whites and Negroes, has combined with the influence of the press in popularizing crime, and perhaps with an innate African savagery, to make the black criminal a terrible scourge in the South. To begin with the less serious offenses, there is no doubt that the Negro has a very imperfect realization of property rights, partly because of the training of slavery. The vague feeling that whatever belonged to the plantation was for the enjoyment of those who lived on the plantation is deliciously expressed by Paul Dunbar:

Folks ain’t got no right to censuah othah folks about dey habits;
Him dat giv’ de squir’ls de bushtails made de bobtails fu’ de rabbits.
Him dat built de gread big mountains hollered out de little valleys,
Him dat made de streets an’ driveways wasn’t ’shamed to make de alleys.

We is all constructed diff’ent, d’ ain’t no two of us de same;
We cain’t he’p ouah likes an’ dislikes, ef we’se bad we ain’t to blame.
If we’se good, we needn’t show off, ’case you bet it ain’t ouah doin’
We gits into su’ttain channels dat we jes’ cain’t he’p pu’suin’.

But we all fits into places dat no othah ones could fill,
An’ we does the things we has to, big er little, good er ill.
John cain’t tek de place o’ Henry, Su an’ Sally ain’t alike;
Bass ain’t nuthin’ like a suckah, chub ain’t nuthin’ like a pike.

When you come to think about it, how it’s all planned out, it’s splendid.
Nuthin’s done er evah happens, ’dout hit’s somefin’ dat’s intended;
Don’t keer whut you does, you has to, an’ hit sholy beats de dickens,—
Viney, go put on de kittle, I got one o’ mastah’s chickens.

Not so genial is the usual relation of Negro with Negro; both in town and city there is an amount of crude and savage violence of which the outside world knows little, and in which women freely engage. Jealousy is a frequent cause of fights and murders; and whisky is so potent an excitant that many competent observers assert that whisky and cocaine are at the bottom of almost all serious negro crimes. Practically every negro man carries a revolver and many of them bear knives or razors; hence, once engaged in a fracas, nobody knows what will happen. A woman describing a trouble in which a man shot her brother was chiefly aggrieved because “Two ladies jumped on me and one lady bit me.” There is constant negro violence against the Whites, and they occasionally engage in pitched battles with white gangs.

Here, as in so many other respects, even well-informed people run to exaggeration. Thus President Winston, of the North Carolina Agricultural College, declares in public that the Negroes are the most criminal element in the population, and are more criminal in freedom than in slavery (both of which propositions are indisputable); that “the negro is increasing in criminality with fearful rapidity”; that “the negroes who can read and write are more criminal than the illiterate”; that they are nearly three times as criminal in the Northeast as in the South; that they are more criminal than the white class, and that “more than seven tenths of the negro criminals are under thirty years of age.” This statement, like almost all the discussions of criminal statistics, ignores the important point that as communities improve, acts formerly not covered by the law become statutory crimes; and hence that the more civilized a state the more likely it is that criminals will be convicted, and the larger will be the apparent proportion of criminals. In Connecticut are enumerated 68 white juvenile delinquents to 100,000 people, in Georgia only four, but the Georgia boys are not seventeen times as good as their brothers in the Northern state. It further overlooks the fact that most criminals of all races are under thirty years of age, for crime is the accompaniment of youth with white men as with Negroes.

To say that the Negroes furnish more than their proportion of criminals is no more than to say that the lowest element in the population has the lowest and most criminal members. The excessive criminality of the Negroes, which is marked in all the states of the Union, is of course a mark of their average inferiority, and a measure of the difficulty of bringing them up to a high standard; and the proportion is often exaggerated. In South Carolina where the Negroes are three fifths of the population they furnish only four fifths of the convicts. As for the assertion that the educated Negroes are specially criminal, the statement is contradicted by the records of the large institutions of negro education, and by the experience of thousands of people. Education does not necessarily make virtue, but it is a safeguard. As a matter of fact, white Southerners in general know little of the lives or motives of thousands of the immense noncriminal class of Negroes, with whom they have no personal relations; but are wide awake to the iniquities of the educated men who fall into crime.

The experience of two centuries shows that the Negroes are not drawn to crimes requiring previous organization and preparation; no slave insurrection has ever been a success within the boundaries of the United States; and blacks are rarely found in gangs of bandits. The incendiarism of which there is now so much complaint is probably the expression of individual vengeance. The Negroes, according to the testimony of those nearest to them, are inveterate gamblers, and many affrays result from consequent quarrels, so that murders may be most frequent where there is the best employment and largest wages and greatest prosperity among the thrifty. Murder, manslaughter, and attempts to kill make up three quarters of the recorded crimes of the blacks in the Mississippi Delta. Murders of Negroes by Negroes are very common and many of the criminals escape altogether.

Negro crime is much fomented by the low drinking-shops in the city and in country, by the lack of home influence on growing boys and girls, by the brutalizing of young people who are sent to prison with hardened criminals, and in general, by close contact with the lowest element of the white race, which leads to crimes on both sides. It is a striking fact that where the Africans are most numerous there is the least complaint of crime. The so-called race riots are usually rows between a few bad Negroes and the officers of the law, or a group of aggrieved Whites. Fights with policemen and sheriffs are frequent, and desperate men not infrequently barricade themselves in houses, and sell their lives as dearly as they can. Quarrels over the settlement of accounts are not uncommon, and the Negro who feels himself cheated sometimes takes his revenge at the end of a gun. As weapons are ordinarily sold without the slightest check, to men of both races and of every age, there is never any lack of the means to kill.

Occasionally a cry is raised that proof has been found of the existence of “Before Day Clubs”—that is, of organizations of Negroes for purposes of violence. The thing is possible and difficult to disprove, but a sequence of crimes through such an organization seems alien to the Negro’s habits, and is at least unlikely. The serious charges that the blacks habitually protect any negro criminal who comes to them will be considered farther on.

The negro crime about which Southern newspapers print most, Southern writers say most, and which more than anything else aggravates race hatred, is violence to white women. The crime is a dreadful one, made worse by the spreading abroad of details, but it has such a fateful relation to the whole Southern problem that something must here be said, less on the thing itself than on some of the common misunderstandings and misstatements which cluster about it.

Statistics are unfortunately too available, inasmuch as for twenty years the number of such crimes has been nearly balanced by the number of lynchings for that offense, which have been tabulated from year to year by the Chicago Tribune, and have been thoroughly analyzed by Professor Cutler in his recent book “Lynch Law.” From 1882 to 1903 these statistics show an average of thirty-two lynchings per year for violence or attempted violence to white women, though of late they have been reduced to under twenty. This includes some cases of innocent men, probably balanced by assailants who escaped. These figures completely dispose of the allegation that the crime is very frequent. Contrary to common belief in the North, some such cases are tried before regular courts; and in Missouri the Governor in 1908 very properly refused to pardon a Negro under a sentence of death for that crime. Adding in these cases, and the half dozen which perhaps escaped the newspaper reporter, at the utmost there are not over fifty authenticated instances of this crime in the whole South in a twelvemonth. Among something like 3,000,000 adult negro males the ratio of the crime to those who might commit it is about 1 to 600,000; and out of 6,000,000 white women, not over fifty become victims, or 1 in 120,000. For this degree of danger to white women ten million human beings are supposed to be sodden with crime and actuated by malice, and the whole South from end to end is filled with terror.

The allegation frequently made that these crimes are committed by highly educated Negroes, graduates of Hampton and Tuskegee, is absolutely without foundation. Most of them are by men of the lowest type, some undoubtedly maniacs. Most of these occurrences take place where the Whites and Negroes are most closely brought into juxtaposition, sometimes where they are both working in the fields. Hence they are of rare occurrence where the Whites are fewest and the Negroes most numerous. In many places in the Black Belt, white people have no fear of leaving their families, because sure that their negro neighbors would give their lives, if necessary, for the protection of the white women. The Northern white teachers, who are accused of arousing in the Negro’s mind the belief that he is the equal of the Whites, have never in a single instance been attacked; and in communities where the Negroes are literally fifty to one, have not the slightest fear of going about alone at any necessary hour of day or night.

These statements are not intended to minimize the dreadful effects of a crime which brings such wretchedness upon the innocent. The two worst enemies of the white woman in the South are “The Black Brute,” whom the Southern press is never tired of describing in unrepeatable terms, and the white buzzard journalist who spreads her name and her dreadful story abroad to become the seed of another like crime. Where is the Southern chivalry and respect for white women when every such crime is sought out and flashed abroad, in all the details obtainable, and the victim is doomed to a second wrong in the lifelong feeling that she is known and branded throughout the land?

A general and well-grounded complaint is that any fugitive, no matter what his reason for flight, even though he is guilty of rape, is fed and sent on his way by his own people, a practice which goes back to slavery days when there were many strays whose only offense was a love of liberty. “The worst feature,” says an observer, “is that other negroes help to conceal them and their crimes. They seem to have entered into a racial agreement that they must help each one of their race to escape the penalties of the white man’s law by resorting to every artifice of untruthfulness and concealment.” Judge Cann, of Georgia, charges that “as a race, negroes shelter, conceal and protect the criminals of their race; that they produce riots by attacking officers of the law while in the discharge of their duty; that they openly show sympathy with the negro criminal; that they conspire against the enforcement of law; that they have made first a hero, and then a martyr, of a legally convicted and executed murderer.”

Like all such general statements, these allegations go too far. In the first place, it is not altogether a sentiment of race solidarity. Negroes have been known to give similar shelter to white vagabonds and criminals. In the second place, black criminals are frequently apprehended through blacks, and large numbers are brought into court, tried and convicted, entirely on negro testimony. Something has been done in the way of negro Law and Order Associations, which pledge themselves to give up criminals. Still, it is discomposing to know that when a search was making for a particularly odious fellow in Monroe, La., who had for a year or two made himself the nuisance of the neighborhood by looking into windows, his father and brothers, who must have known his practices, unhesitatingly signed such a law-and-order pledge. The Brownsville incident of 1907 also, with the apparent determination of scores of men not to “split” on some ruffians and murderers among them, produced a painful feeling throughout the country. In few respects could the Negroes do so much good for themselves as by helping in the detection of the crime of their own people.

If Negroes are violent to Whites and among themselves, they follow an example daily and hourly set them by the members of the Superior Race. In the first place, the Negro listens habitually to rough and humiliating language. You get a new view of race relations when a planter in his store on Saturday night calls up for you one after another three specimen Negroes. “This man Chocolate,” he says, “is a full-blooded nigger, the real thing.” “Chocolate” says nothing, shrugs his shoulders, and looks as he feels, literally like the devil. The next is introduced as “One of your mixed ones—How did that come about, hey!” and the mulatto, who has been the official whipper on the plantation, grins at the superior man’s joke. The third is called up and presented as “The Preacher, very fond of the sisters.” This is a fair sample of what constantly takes place wherever there is a rough, coarse white man among Negroes.

The office of the whipper is usually performed by the master himself, if he is one of those numerous employers who believe in that method. As one such put it: “I follow up a hand and tell him to do what he ought? If he won’t, I just get off and whip him.” “Suppose he summons you before a magistrate?” “I lick him again before the magistrate and send him home.” Other planters have given up whipping and charge a fine against the Negro’s account. Of course such fellows would rather be whipped than prosecuted, and think that the riders (that is, the overseers), if they once take it out of them in a thrashing, will harbor no further malice. In some states, as North Carolina, whipping is unusual; in others it is frequent.

Another race trouble is the driving out of blacks who make themselves disliked by the Whites. A Negro passes an examination for post office clerk, but is warned that if he tries to take the place he will be shot. A colored editor, whose paper is much less offensive than any of the white journals in his neighborhood in bad language and incitement to crime, is thought well treated because he leaves the state alive. A Negro who is too conspicuous, who builds a house thought to be above his station, who drives two horses in his buggy, may be warned to leave the place; and if he refuses to sacrifice his little property, may be shot. A black doctor may be warned out of the county because there are enough white doctors. The South is not the only community where people that are obnoxious are hustled out of town, and Southern Whites sometimes receive the same unofficial “ticket of leave”; but it makes bad blood when irresponsible people, often in no way superior in character to the Negroes whom they assail, uproot their neighbors.

Then comes the long list of homicides of Negroes by Whites. Ever since Ku Klux times there have been occasional instances of “whitecapping”—that is, of bodies of disguised men riding through the country, pulling people out of their houses and whipping them. Such practices are not confined to the South and are condoned sometimes in the North. Down on Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts a few years ago a jury absolutely refused to convict the perpetrators of a similar outrage on a white man; while in Alabama, in 1898, five Whites were sentenced for twenty years each for killing a Negro in that sort of way. Still convictions of white men for killing Negroes are very unusual. Since practically every adult negro man has a gun about him, the theory of the White is that if you get into a quarrel and the Negro makes any movement with his hands, you must shoot him forthwith. To this purport is the testimony of a Mississippi planter who reproved a hand for severely whipping his child; the black replied that it was his business and nobody should stop it; the white man said he would stop it; whereupon the Negro drew, but was met by a bullet in his forehead; and, explained the planter, “A steel bullet will go through a nigger’s skull.” Take another case: An assistant manager on an estate in the Delta of Mississippi tried to take a pistol away from a new hand and felt himself safe because the man had his hands in his pockets; but the Negro fired through the pocket, instantly killed the white man, and decamped. It afterwards was shown that he had previously killed another white man.

The responsibility is not always on the Negro’s side. There are many disputes over labor contracts, in which the Negro justly believes that the white man has cheated him, and his attempt to audit is stopped by a quarrel in which the black is killed. Even boys under twelve years of age have been known to shoot Negroes over trivial disputes, and a young lady in Washington recently shot and killed a black boy who was stealing fruit. The Negroes complain of harsh treatment by the police. For instance, a good-looking, very black young man is glad to get out of Savannah and among the white people on the Sea Islands. “They like the colored people better; even if they do get drunk and are fierce, they treat them better. In Savannah the other day I saw a man going back to his vessel, and a policeman asked him where he was going. He answered up rough like,—I wouldn’t do that, I’d go down on my hands and knees to ’em rather than have any trouble with em,—and the policeman broke his club over his head, arrested him, and they sent him to the chain gang. I don’t want to be arrested; I never have been arrested in my life.” That the police are often in the wrong is shown by such instances as the recent acquittal of a Negro by direction of an Alabama judge; he had shot a policeman who was arresting him without reason, and the judge who heard the case justified him.

Perhaps, comparing city with city, the North is as disorderly as the South, but the rural South is a much more desperate region than the farming lands of the North, as is shown by the statistics of homicide and similar crimes. In Florida in 1899, with a population of 528,000, there were about 40 murders and 200 assaults with attempt to murder. In Alabama in 1895-96 there were about 350 homicides. In one twelvemonth some years ago there were 6 murders in Vermont, 96 in Massachusetts, 461 in Alabama, and over 1,000 in Texas. Judge Thomas, of Montgomery, has shown that the homicides in the United States per million of population are 129 against 10 per million in England; and when the sections are contrasted, New England has about 47 per million, against 223 per million in the South.

It is not easy to compare the criminal spirit in the North and the South by the records of the courts or the statistics of convictions; acts which are penitentiary offenses in one state may be misdemeanors, or no crime at all, in another. A very recent tabulation, made from statistics of 1905, shows in the Lower South 16,000 prisoners against 13,000 in a group of Northwestern states having the same total population; and in the whole South, 27,000 prisoners against 24,000 in a group aggregating the same number of people in the North and West. Of the Southern prisoners, about two thirds are Negroes, the proportion of criminals to the total numbers of the African race being decidedly less than in the North. The only safe generalization from those statistics is therefore that the Southern courts send more people to jail, white and black, than the Northern. Statistics throw little light on the question of relative crime.

A comparison is, however, possible between the ordinary course of justice in the South and in the North. The most notorious defect in the South is the conduct of murder trials, as shown by the evidence of Southern jurists. Says one, “Unreasoning and promiscuous danger stalks in any community where life is held cheap by even a few, and where the laws are enforced by privilege or race. In such a community there is no sufficient defense against a mob, or even a drunken fool.” If one credited all the editorials in Southern newspapers, he would believe that “a man who kills a man in this community is in much less danger of legal punishment than one who steals a suit of clothes”; and experienced lawyers tell you that they never knew of a white man being convicted for homicide.

These statements are exaggerations, for the records of pardons show that a certain number of white men have reached the penitentiary for that offense and leave it by the side door. The reason for the failure of justice in numerous cases is, first of all, the technicalities of the courts, which are probably not very different in that particular from those of the North; and, secondly, the unwillingness of juries to convict. It must be accepted as an axiom that the average plain man in the South feels that if A kills B the presumption is that he has some good reason. Counsel for such cases habitually appeal to the emotions of the jury, and ask what they would have done under like circumstances. Even conviction may not be uncomforable; take the case of a young White in Florida, who killed a policeman, was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, was then hired out as a convict by his uncle at fifteen dollars a month, and paraded the streets at his pleasure.

A general impression in the North is that the Southern courts are very severe with colored men; and (if he has not already been lynched) it is true that they are likely to pass heavy sentence on a Negro who has killed a white man, and juries are often merciless; but there are many cases where blacks are lightly treated on the express ground that they have had less opportunity to know what is right and wrong. In Brookhaven, Miss., a very rough region, in a year three white men have been heavily sentenced for killing Negroes; while many cases could be cited where a Negro was acquitted or let off with a light penalty for a like offense.

When it comes to less serious crimes, the Negro enjoys a special protection whenever he can call in a respectable white man to vouch for him as in general straightforward; the Court is then likely to impose a light sentence. Even in serious cases a man is sometimes acquitted or lightly treated at the request of his master, so that he may return to work. That is what the planter meant who boasted: “I never sent a nigger to jail in my life; and I have taken more niggers out of jail than any planter in Alabama.” That is, he never gave information against one of his own hands, but inflicted such small penalties as he saw fit; and he would pay the fine for his men who came before the courts, or even secure their pardon, so as to get them on his plantation. That principle sometimes goes terribly deep. In the case of a Negro who whipped his child to death, the natural inquiry was, “What did they do with him?” To which the nonchalant answer was, “Oh, nothing, he was a good cotton hand.”

The great majority of negro convicts are sentenced for petty crimes, stealing, vagrancy, and the like, and for rather short terms; but the name for this punishment, “the chain gang,” points to a system practically unknown in the North. There are literal chain gangs, with real shackles and balls, working in the streets of cities, white and black together; and large bodies of convicts are worked in the open, stockaded, and perhaps literally chained at night. Right here comes in one of the worst features of the Southern convict system. The men on the chain gang are perhaps employed on city or county work, and if their terms expire too fast, the authorities will run out of labor; hence, the Negroes believe, perhaps rightly, that judges and juries are convinced of their guilt just in proportion to the falling off of the number of men in confinement; and that if necessary, innocent people will be arrested for that purpose. That is probably one reason why Negroes feel so little shame at having been in prison. “Did you know I was in the barracks last night?” is a remark that you may hear at any railroad station in Georgia.

The whole subject is complicated with vagrant laws. For instance, in Savannah Negroes not at work, or without reasonable excuse for idleness, shall be arrested; and in Alabama if arrested as a vagrant the burden of proof is on the black to show that he is at work. It is a mistake to suppose that colored tramps are common in the South; but irresponsible men, loitering about a city and sponging on the working Negroes, are frequent, and furnish many serious criminals.

On the whole, one would rather not be a negro convict in a Southern state, or even a white convict, for many state and county prisons are simply left-over examples of the worst side of slavery. A Northern expert in such matters in Atlanta a few years ago, in a public address, congratulated the people on the new jail which he had just visited. At least it looked like the most improved of modern jails, for it had large airy cells provided with running water, and the only defect in it was that it was intended for the state mules and was far better than any provision made there for human prisoners.

The first trouble with the Southern convict system is that it still retains the notion, from which other communities began to diverge nearly a century ago, that the prisoner is the slave of the state, existing only for the convenience and profit of those whom he serves. In the second place, it has been difficult to find indoor employment for the men, and most of them are worked out of doors, a life which with proper precautions is undoubtedly happier and healthier than that inside. In the third place, whipping is still an ordinary penalty, and very frequently applied. Furthermore, a number of states in the Lower South have been in the habit of letting out convicts, and that is still done in several states, as Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. They used to be rented to cotton growers, and a planter could get as few as two convicts or even one, over whom he had something approaching the power of life and death. This was a virtual chattel slavery, which long ago ought to have been disallowed by the Supreme Court of the United States, as contrary to the Thirteenth Amendment. If still retained on a state or county plantation, the convicts are in the power of wardens whose interest it is to drive the men unmercifully. Governor Vardaman in a public message in 1908 thought it necessary to say that “Some of the most atrocious and conscienceless crimes that have been perpetrated in this State are chargeable to the county contractor. I have known the poor convict driven to exhaustion or whipped to death to gratify the greed or anger of the conscienceless driver or contractor. The tears and blood of hundreds of these unfortunate people cry out for this reform.”

The Governor suggests that white men suffer under this system, and there have been recent cases where vagrant Whites were sold on the auction block for a period of months. It might perhaps be argued that the South is always more stern in its judicial punishments than the North, inasmuch as five years on a convict farm in Mississippi is worse than being decently hanged in Massachusetts. The modern and humane methods of reform, of separating the youthful first-term man from the others, of specially treating juvenile crime, are little known in the South. When a twelve-year-old black boy is sent to the chain gang by a white judge, the community suffers. With regard to all those penal institutions one might share the feelings of the good Northern lady, when told that her grandson had been sentenced to the penitentiary for ten years: “What did they do that for? why, he won’t be contented there three weeks!”

This sympathy with the criminal the governors of the Southern states appear to feel, as is shown by some astonishing statistics. When Governor Vardaman went out of office January 1, 1908, he pardoned 8 white men and 18 Negroes, most of them convicted of murder or manslaughter, and 11 of them life men. A Memphis paper has tabulated the state pardons for a period of twelve months, and if the results are accurate, they show 1 in Wisconsin, 22 in Massachusetts, 81 in Georgia, 168 in Alabama, and over 400 in Arkansas. Just how the Negroes get sufficient political influence to secure pardons is one of the serious questions in Southern jurisprudence. For these lavish pardons the Whites are wholly responsible, for from them spring all the governors and pardoning boards.

The same responsibility rests on the Whites for the inefficiency of criminal justice and for the mediæval prison system. The North might fairly plead that its efforts to reform its judicial and punitive system are resisted by the lower elements of society, which have such power through choosing prosecutors and judges and legislators, in framing laws and constitutions, that the better elements cannot have things their own way. Not so in the South, where the Superior Race has absolute control of the making of law and the administering of justice, and the treatment of prisoners. Every judge in the South, except a few little justices of the peace, is a white man. Negroes, although still eligible to jury service, are rarely impaneled, even for the trial of a Negro. Negro testimony is received with due caution; hardly any court will accept the testimony of one black against one white man. For failures in the administration of justice, for unwillingness to try men for homicide, for technicalities in procedure, for hesitancy of juries, the Superior Race is wholly responsible. The system is bad simply because the white people who are in control of the Southern state governments are willing that it should be bad. With all the machinery of legislation, and of the courts in its possession, the white race still resorts to forms of violence which sometimes strike an innocent man, and always brutalize the community, and lead to a contempt for the ordinary forms of justice. The place for the white people to begin a real repression of crime is by punishing their criminals without enslaving them.