The Southern South

This point of view involves a notion of the purpose of education and the reasons for public schools so different from that which animates the North that it is hard to deal with the question impartially. Massachusetts makes the largest expenditure per capita of its population in the whole Union, almost the largest expenditure per pupil, and certainly the largest aggregate expenditure, except the more populous states of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio; Massachusetts spends on schools two fifths as much every year as all the fifteen former slaveholding states put together. In that state people think that school taxes are not money spent but money saved: that they get back every cent of their $17,000,000 a year, several times over, in the increased efficiency of the people, in the diminution of crime, in the addition to the happiness of life. Schooling is insurance, schooling is the savings bank that can’t break, schooling is that sane kind of poor relief which prevents poverty. The last thing which any Massachusetts community thinks of reducing is school expenditure!

Furthermore, no principle is so ingrained in the Northern mind as that since education is for the public benefit, every taxpayer must contribute in proportion to his property. The rich corporations in New York or Pittsburg, childless old couples, bachelor owners of great tracts of real estate, wealthy bondholders educating their children in private schools, never dream of disputing the school tax on the ground that they, as individuals, make no demands on the school fund.

Still less would it enter the mind of any Northern community to divide itself into social classes, each of which should maintain its own schools. Such a proposition would go near to bring about a revolution. First of all, the non-taxpayer is a taxpayer; it is the pons asinorum of finance that the poor are more heavily taxed in proportion to their means than any other class of the community, through indirect taxes and the enhanced rents of the real estate which they occupy. As a matter of fact, all the taxes eventually paid by the Negroes in the South probably amount only to a third or a half of the three millions or so spent upon their schools. What of that? Are the Southern states the only communities in the country in which a comparatively small part of the population pays most of the taxes; it is altogether probable that in Boston or New York the payers of nine tenths of the taxes do not furnish one tenth of the school children. Who educates the Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Syrian children of those cities? The well-to-do part of the community, and it does it uncomplainingly, with its eyes open, gladly. The South likewise is educating the Negroes principally for the advantage of the white race, for the efficiency of the whole region in which the Whites have the greatest stake, and from which they derive the greater benefit, material and moral.

One of the most obstinate Southern conventional beliefs, widely held, constantly asserted, and diametrically contrary to the facts, is that the Negroes have been spoiled by classical education which has totally unfitted them for ordinary life. Thus even Murphy holds that “We have been giving the Negro an educational system which is but ill adapted even to ourselves. It has been too academic, too much unrelated to practical life, for the children of the Caucasian.” The intelligent man on the cars will tell you that the negro college graduates with their Greek and Latin are spoiling the whole race. Never was there such an advertisement of the vigor of college education; since the official statistics show that the actual number of Negroes studying Greek and Latin in 1906, both in the secondary and higher schools (except the public schools), was 1,077 men and 641 women, a total of 1,718 persons. With some possible additions from those in high schools, and higher institutions, the total number of colored people who are now taking any kind of collegiate training is not above 3,000, of whom only 180 took degrees in 1906; there are also 4,500 normal students, of whom 1,270 graduated. Of professional students there were in all (1906) about 1,900 Negroes, a third of whom were in theology and another third in medicine. Of negro colleges and technical schools and private academies, 127 are enumerated, ranging all the way from the Arkadelphia Baptist Academy with 50 students, up to Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute with 1,621 students; but in all such colleges those ranked as taking a college course are comparatively few.

These figures throw light on the further conventional belief that it is the Northern endowed colleges that have made the trouble in the colored race, through efforts to teach the colored youth that they were the equals of the Whites. By far the greater number of Negroes who are really getting training above the secondary grade in the South are in the state-sustained institutions—many of them, of course, still of low grade; and full credit should be given to the South for developing this type of negro education, of which the North knows little. State Agricultural, Normal or Industrial colleges are to be found in every former slaveholding state, except Arkansas and Tennessee, and together include more than 5,000 students.

The attacks, chiefly from Southern Whites, upon negro college education have of late been transformed into a controversy as to the relative importance of academic and industrial training. The schools of the Tuskegee type furnished manual work to their students apparently not in the first instance because it was thought to be educative, but because they had to earn part of their living. This is apparently the main source of the bitter hostility of Dixon to the work of Tuskegee. The form his criticism takes is that Booker Washington, instead of teaching the Negro to be a good workman, is training him to take independent responsibility; that if he is a good workman he will compete with the Whites, and if he is a good leader he will aim to make the Negroes a force in the community. This line of objection to education of the black is really based upon the belief that they are a race capable of education, that the Negro is not a clod, but may be improved by the systematic efforts of superior men; he has in him the potentiality of vital force.

Meanwhile throughout the country has been running a current in favor of a more practical education than that furnished by the ordinary schools, and the result has been the Technical, Manual Training, and Commercial schools scattered throughout the Northern states. The controversy is not at all confined to questions of negro education. The Southern white people have been well inclined toward the new type of education for Negroes, although on the whole much preferring the academic type for their own children.

A hot discussion has raged as to which of the two systems is most necessary to the Negro. The champions of the academic side dwell upon the right of the Negro to the same type of education as the white man. In many white minds lies a lurking feeling that academic negro training leads to discontent with present conditions; and that industrial training is more likely to bring about contentment with the things that are. In fact, both types are most necessary. The fifty millions poured into the South by Northern generosity would have been worth while if they had done no more than maintain a Hampton which could train a Booker Washington. His ideas of thrift, attention to business, building decent houses, putting money into banks, are ideals specially needed by the negro race; but they also need the DuBois ideal of a share in the world’s accumulated learning; of the development of their minds; of preparation to educate their fellows. That a supply must be kept up of people acquainted with the humanities, having some knowledge of literature, able to express themselves cogently, competent to train the succeeding generations, is as true for the negro race as for any other; if it is a low race it has the greater need for high training for its best members.

The two difficulties with manual training for either Whites or Negroes are, first, that it may be simply practice in handicrafts, without intimate knowledge of tools or processes, possessing no more educative value than the apprenticeship of a carpenter or a blacksmith. The other danger is that the manual part will be dilettante; and anyone who has ever visited any large industrial school for Whites realizes how hard it is to keep students busy with things that actually tell. The weekly hours available for shop work where there are large classes are too few to induce skill. Hence manual training may be simply a means of keeping young men and women in elevating associations for a series of years, without much positive education. The success of Hampton and Tuskegee and like institutions is due to a judicious mixture of book learning and hand learning, backed up by the personality of the founders, General Armstrong in Virginia and Booker Washington in Alabama, and of their successors and aids.

Against both industrial and academic training many people in the South feel a strong prejudice, because they believe that both tend to produce leaders who may dangerously organize the fellows of their race. A favorite form of slander has been to charge that the graduates of colleges furnish the criminals, and practically the worst criminals, of the negro race. Never was there a more senseless or a more persistent delusion. The total number of male graduates of all the Southern colleges during the last forty years is not above two thousand, besides perhaps five hundred graduates of Northern colleges who have found their way into the South. Many of those institutions have kept track of their graduates and are able to assert that the cases of serious crime among them are remarkably few, no more in proportion probably than among the graduates of Southern and Northern colleges for Whites. The moral effect of the colleges among Negroes is in the same direction as among Whites; the students include the more determined of the race or the children of the more determined. The negro college students are still only about one in one thousand of the children and young people of the race. The total number of living graduates of negro colleges or other institutions of college grade are not one in two thousand of the Negroes in the South.

It is true that even that number find it hard to establish themselves in professions or callings which can reward them for the sacrifices and efforts of their education. The negro doctors and lawyers have almost no white practice and not the best of negro practice, but there is an opening for thousands of Negroes in the development of the education of their people. The thousandth of the race in secondary schools and the two thousandth or more in colleges are enough to prove that a large number of individuals in the race are capable of and ought to have the advantages of higher training.

The denial to the Negroes of public secondary education at the expense of the state practically means that most of them will not have it at all. It is denied on the ground that it unfits boys and girls for life—exactly the argument which has been unsuccessfully brought against schools of that grade in the Northern states. It is denied on the ground that beyond twelve years of age most of the Negroes are stationary and cannot profit by a secondary education, a conclusion which does not seem justified by the experience of the few high schools and the numerous private and benevolent schools. Still more serious, the denial of secondary education means that the Negroes are deprived of the most obvious means of training for teachers of their own race.

In the last analysis most of the objections to negro education come down to the assertion that it puts the race above the calling whereunto God hath appointed it. The argument goes back to the unconscious presumption that the Negro was created to work the white man’s field, and that even a little knowledge makes him ambitious to do something else.

One thing is certain: that no community can afford to neglect the academic side of education. The schools are to many people the only and the final appeal to the higher side of life, the only touch with the world’s stock of great thoughts. The accusation is brought against the best Northern city schools that they are not practical, because they deal too much with literature and history and science. The negro child, like the white child, needs to have its mind aroused to the large things in the world; needs the education of thinking, as well as of learning; as DuBois puts it: “To seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.”

On the side of the Negro there are other complaints. One is that his education has not had a fair trial; that the dominant South which lays and expends the taxes has not dealt with the Negro on an equal footing with white children; that the per capita expenditure on the black children in school is probably not more than a third that for white children; that the negro schools have often been exploited by white politicians who have put in their own favorites as teachers; that even where the best intentions prevail, the schools are manned by incompetent teachers; nowhere do the rural colored people enjoy an education to the degree and with the kind of teachers and appliances common in the country districts of the North; the race can hardly be spoiled by education, for it has never had it, not for a single year. Only about a third of the negro children are at school on a given school day. Few of their rural schools hold more than five months, many not more than three, some not at all; and in from sixty to one hundred days in the year, irregularly placed, with teachers on the average not competent for the exceedingly elementary work that they do, the wonder is that children ever go a second day or acquire the rudiments of learning; yet many of them learn to read fluently, to write a good hand, and to do simple arithmetical problems. A race must have some intellectual quickness to pick up anything out of such a poor system. The arguments in favor of negro education have so far been convincing to every Southern community, since negro common schools are maintained and considerable amounts are spent for secondary and higher education.

The arguments against negro education destroy each other; they assume both that the Negro is too little and too much affected by the education that he receives. On one side we are told that he is incapable of anything more than the rudiments; on the other side, that education is a potent force making the Negro dangerous to the world. The incompetent can never be made dangerous by training into competence. Education cannot change the race weaknesses of the Negro; but it can give a better chance to the best endowed.

CHAPTER XXIV

(1) The South as a whole, on any basis of material advancement, is below the average of other parts of the Union and of several foreign countries; it is poor where it ought to be rich; it needs economic regeneration.

(2) Measured by intellectual standards also the white South is below the other sections of the Union; the high standing of its leaders does not bring up the average of the more numerous elements. Any radical improvement, therefore, must include the uplift of the lower stratum of Whites.

(3) The South is divided between two races, one of which is distinctly inferior to the other, not only in what it now does, but in the potentialities of the future.

(4) The lower race is so far behind, and so likely to lag indefinitely, that it is necessary for the welfare of the community that the two be kept separate; and this stern edict applies not only to the pure African race, but also to the two millions of mixed bloods, many of whom in aptitude and habits of thought are practically white men.

(5) Both these races are improving, the Whites in great numbers and rapidly; fewer of the Negroes proportionally, and more slowly.

(6) The criminality of both races, and especially the violent criminality of the Negroes, brings into the controversy an element of personal rage and fear.

(7) Partly by superior abilities, partly by an inherited tradition, partly for the defense of the community, the white race dominates in every department of social, industrial, and political life; it owns most of the property; makes the laws for the black man; furnishes for him the machinery of government and of justice; and inexorably excludes him from both the social and political advantages of the community.

(8) This race division interferes with the American principle of equality—that is, the equal right of every man, woman, and child to do the best thing that his abilities and training allow, the inferior doing the best in his stratum, the superior the better best of his class.

(9) The two races do not live together harmoniously. The Whites fear some kind of negro domination—the Negroes resent the complete control by the Whites; actual collisions are rare, but there is a latent race hostility.

(10) The white people, though they assume sole responsibility for whatever adjustment is made, know little of the private life of the best Negroes, and exercise small direct influence on the lower race. Hence the ordinary agencies of uplift—the church, the school, and contact with superior minds—are not brought into operation.

(11) The main reason for this want of touch with the Negroes is an apprehension that any common understanding will assist a social equality which might lead to miscegenation.

The Southern problem, therefore, to state it in a sentence, is how twenty million Whites and ten million Negroes in the Southern states shall make up a community in which one race shall hold most of the property, and all the government, and the other race shall remain content and industrious; in which one gets most of the good things of life and the other does most of the disagreeable work; in which the superior members of the inferior race shall accept all its disadvantages; in which one race shall always be at the top and the other forever at the bottom; yet in which there shall be peace and good will.

To these conditions, discouraging, hard, implacable to innocent people, out of accord with the usual American principles, any effective remedy must nevertheless adjust itself. Practically all Southern people agree that the question is alarming, but they are at odds among themselves as to the remedy; and they may be roughly divided into the intolerant, the discouraged, and the moderate.

(I) Examples of passionate violence are plenty, and Professor J. W. Garner, a Southerner, suggests some reasons for their abundance: “Next to the difficulties arising mainly from the changed industrial conditions in the South and their resulting effect upon the character of the black race, the most serious obstacle in the way of maintaining harmonious relations between the two races is the persistent, ill-timed, and often intemperate agitation of the race question by a certain class of politicians lately sprung up in the South, whose chief stock in trade is the race issue. Their method consists in working upon the sympathies of a certain class of whites by appealing to their passions and prejudices, by dwelling upon the brutality and savagery of the negro, by conjuring up imaginary dangers of negro supremacy, by exaggerating real dangers and in every conceivable way exalting the negro problem, as a political issue, to a position out of all proportion to its real importance.”

The truth of this statement may be illustrated from the published conclusions of some writers and speakers who are representative of the most radical type of Southern feeling. For instance, Hoke Smith, Governor of Georgia in 1908, has declared that “the development made by the Negro in the South came through the institution of slavery, from the control of an inferior race by a superior race. I believe that control was absolutely necessary for the development which the Negro made. The continuation of control is, in a measure, necessary to retain for the great mass of Negroes the progress made by them while in slavery.”

(II) Hoke Smith is far from representing the general or the average view in the South. Some of the best spirits there who feel the responsibility of their race are at their wit’s end over the whole question and see no way out of the difficulty. Thus a lawyer of Birmingham, Ala., writes: “If my heart did not go out for the Negro, as a human being, or I cared less for my God and an earnest wish to walk in His ways, I would kill the Negro or die trying. God must intend that TIME shall work out His ways and not the men of my generation, for after a longer life than most, and all of it spent with and among the Negroes, I give it up.... Credit the Southern people with preserving the Negro, with teaching him Christ, with good will.... Education will do some good—perhaps more than I believe, but I verily believe that we must have the Negro all born again before we can teach him what to do.”

(III) Of the more hopeful group of reflective men in the South there are many spokesmen, who suggest various sorts of remedies not always in accord.

Ex-Congressman William H. Fleming, of Georgia, puts it that “We do not know what shifting phases this vexing race problem may assume, but we may rest in the conviction that its ultimate solution must be reached along the lines of honesty and justice. Let us not in cowardice or want of faith needlessly sacrifice our higher ideals of private and public life. Race differences may necessitate social distinction. But race differences cannot repeal the moral law.... The foundation of the moral law is justice. Let us solve the negro problem by giving the negro justice and applying to him the recognized principles of the moral law. This does not require social equality. It does not require that we should surrender into his inexperienced and incompetent hands the reins of political government. But it does require that we recognize his fundamental rights as a man.”

Senator John Sharp Williams, of Mississippi, protests against “Indiscriminate cursing of the whole negro race, good and bad alike included.... Above all, remember this: it is not the educated negro who commits unspeakable crime; he knows the certain result. It is the brute whose avenues of information are totally cut off.”

Leroy Percy, of Greenville, Miss., pleads for protection of the black man: “Daily, in recognition of the weakness of human nature, the prayer goes up from millions to a higher power: ‘Deliver me from temptation—temptation which I cannot face and overcome I pray Thee to deliver me from.’ There is no greater temptation known to man than the hourly, daily, yearly dealing with ignorant, trusting people.... So justice, self-interest, the duty which we owe to ourselves and those who follow us, all demand that we should not permit to go unchallenged, should not acquiesce in the viciously erroneous idea that the negro should be kept in helpless ignorance.”

From this summary of general views it is evident that even the most moderate white men pleading for the rights of their black neighbors practically all tacitly accept certain postulates as to any possible remedies, which they believe to be quite beyond discussion and which may be analyzed as follows:

(I) The first is the dominance of the white race, which will not surrender any of the present privileges. As Page puts it: “The absolute and unchangeable superiority of the white race—a superiority, it appears to him, not due to any mere adventitious circumstances, such as superior educational and other advantages during some centuries, but an inherent and essential superiority, based on superior intellect, virtue, and constancy. He does not believe that the Negro is the equal of the White, or ever could be the equal.” That means that the low Negro is inferior to the low White, the average Negro to the average White, and the superior Negro, however high his plane, moral and intellectual, is also to be put into a position of permanent inferiority to the higher Whites. Because inferior morally and mentally, he is held also in political inferiority. The South does not intend that even intelligent and educated Negroes shall have a share in making or administering the laws.

(II) Partly from a sense of its own superiority, partly from a disdain of a formerly servile race, chiefly from a well-founded belief that amalgamation would be a great misfortune for the community, the South is determined that there shall be no legalized admixture of the races. That miscegenation is still going on in an unknown degree heightens the determination that it shall at least be put under the ban of law; the very danger makes the South more determined that the races shall be kept separate.

(III) The dominant white Southerners are further absolutely determined that any settlement of the question shall come from their volition; and that means that the Southern Negro is not expected to exercise anything more than a mild academic influence. The character of the Negroes, their thriftlessness or industry, their crime or virtue, their stupidity or their intelligence, may deflect the white mind one way or another; their preferences, outside the iron fence which the South has erected round the question, will receive some attention; but they will have to accept what the white people assign to them.

(IV) The South is as yet little awakened to the idea that the status of the lower Whites is a part of the whole race problem. Inasmuch as the Poor White is emerging from seclusion and poverty, people do not sufficiently realize that he needs education, intellectual and moral; that his passions, his animal instincts, his violence stand in the way of the uplift of both races.

(V) The North is expected by the South not to act by legislation or any other active method in behalf of the Negro. The Southerners in general consider the Fifteenth, or suffrage Amendment, to be an affront, which they avoid by shifty clauses in their constitutions and would repeal if they could. Some Southerners resent even inquiry about the South, and apparently remember how their fathers received visiting abolitionists.

(VI) It would, however, be a great injustice to the immense number of broad-minded people in the South to leave the impression that nobody down there welcomes investigation or reads criticisms. Upon the negro question in general there are two different and opposing Southern points of view. The one-sided and arrogant statements of the Vardamans, the Dixons, the Graveses, and the Tillmans have no right to call themselves the voice of the South, in the face of the appeals to common justice and American principles of fair play that flow from the pens of the Bassetts, the Murphys, the Mitchells, the Flemings, and the Percys. It is a happy omen that the South is divided upon its own question; for it means that the taboo has been taken off discussion; that Southern men may honestly differ on the question of the rights and the character of the Negro.

On the one side is a numerous class of Whites, some coarse and ignorant, others of power and vitality, including many small farmers and managers of plantations, and also a large element in the towns, who are not much interested in the uplift of the Whites and do not wish well to the Negro, but are full of a blind hostility to the negro race and take the ground that this is a white man’s government, and accept the Negro only as a tool for their use.

On the other side stand a great part of the high-bred, well-educated and masterful element; the people who count in the church, the club and university, the pulpit and the bench; people who have a material interest and genuine public spirit in providing for the future of their own commonwealth. In general the best people in the South, the most highly trained, most public-spirited, most religious, wealthiest, and most responsible people wish well to the Negro. The plantation owner, the manufacturer, the railroad manager, want efficient laborers; the minister wants God-fearing people; the judge wants law-abiding men; the educator wants good schools; they all want to raise the community, the bottom as well as the top. How far is the superior class in the South to control the action of legislatures and the movement of public sentiment, and the behavior of those of a ruder cast? Which of these two classes speaks for the South?

CHAPTER XXV

First of all, can the Southern race question be solved by any action of the North? The Reconstruction amendments with the clause authorizing Congress to enforce them by “appropriate legislation” seem intended to give the federal government power to protect the Negro against either state legislation or individual action; but the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights decision of 1883 held that the action of Congress under those amendments was confined to meeting positive official action by state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment provides for a special penalty in case of deprivation of political rights, by reducing the representation in Congress of the states which limit their suffrage. Any such legislation must be general in terms and would therefore apply to the Northern states in which there are educational or tax qualifications. Beyond that difficulty is the remembered ill effect of Reconstruction laws, and the conviction in the North that the negro problem is not one simply of race hostility and definition of rights—that the Negroes are in many ways a menace. To take the matter a second time out of the hands of the people on the ground, even though they are not solving their own problems, would mean a storm in Congress, a weight on the administration, possibly a contest with the Supreme Court, which no responsible Northern public man likes to contemplate.

Through the control of Congress over federal elections there is another opportunity to interfere in behalf of the Negro, but the federal laws put on the statute book in Reconstruction times were repealed in 1894; and nobody now proposes to renew them. By the recent experience of the nation in the Philippines, Porto Rico, and Cuba, a lesson has been taught of the difficulty of handling non-European races. The nation begins to doubt the elevating power of self-government. For whatever reason, there is no evidence of any intention in the North to make the Negro the ward of the nation. The writer is one of those who believe that any general federal legislation would revive friction between the sections, would sharpen the race feeling in the South, and in the end could accomplish little for the uplift of the Negro; even federal aid to education could hardly be so managed as to keep up the feeling of white responsibility from which alone proper education of the Negro can be expected.

Is there any likelihood of a private propaganda in behalf of the Negro like that of the abolitionists? A considerable class of Northern people have a warm sense of resentment at what they think the injustice and cruelty of the superior race, especially in the withdrawal of the suffrage by state constitutional amendments; and there is a lively interest in the education of Negroes and in work among the Poor Whites. A propaganda, with societies, public meetings, journals, and a literature is, however, no longer possible—the North has too much on its own hands in curing the political diseases of its cities, in absorbing the foreigners; like Congress, it recognizes that the South is sincere, even if somewhat exaggerated, in its nervousness about the Negroes. The most that can be expected of Northern individuals in the way of bettering Southern conditions is attempts like that of this volume to get into the real nature of the problems and to offer good advice.

Notwithstanding the horror felt toward amalgamation, from time to time in unexpected Southern quarters reappears the suggestion that it is impossible for the two races to live alongside each other separate, and that the logical and unavoidable outcome is fusion; that the relentless force of juxtaposition is too much for law or prejudice or race instinct. Over and over again one is told that nowhere in history is there an example of two races living side by side indefinitely without uniting. This is not historically true; Mohammedans and Hindoos (originally of the same race) have lived separate hundreds of years in India; Boers and Kaffirs have been side by side for near a century; the English colonists and the American Indians were little intermixed. Amalgamation could only be accomplished by a change in white sentiment about as probable as the Mormonization of the Northern Whites; and if it were possible, it would lead to a new and worse race question, the rivalry of a mixed race occupying the whole South against a white race in the rest of the country, which would make all present troubles seem a pleasant interlude. Amalgamation as a remedy welcomed by the Southern Whites is unthinkable; as a remedy against their convictions, brought about by time, it is highly unlikely.

At the other extremity is the idea, now more than a century old, that the way to get rid of the race question is to remove one of the races altogether. This notion of curing the patient by sending him to a hospital for incurables goes back to 1775. Jefferson favored it; the Colonization Society organized it in 1816, and in the forty years from 1820 to 1860 succeeded in sending about ten thousand Negroes to Liberia. Abraham Lincoln favored it. It is often suggested nowadays. This plan, if it could be carried out, would so completely relieve the immediate difficulties that it deserves the most careful consideration.

The first objection at the outset is ten million objections—namely, the Negroes themselves, who have never taken kindly to expatriation, for the simple reason that it is flying to evils that they know not of. The second difficulty is to find a place to receive the exiles. Experiments in the West Indies, in Central America, and in Africa have all been failures. No European country or colonies will welcome people sent away on the ground that they are inimical to white civilization; and the settlements of American Negroes in savage Africa have been entire failures. As has been shown above, Liberia, after nearly ninety years of existence, has no influence on the back country; its trade is scanty, its health is depleted, and its conditions are in every way less favorable to physical and moral well-being than those of the United States.

Then follows the financial difficulty; to be sure a correspondent of a Georgia newspaper suggests: “Let the government appropriate $20,000,000 for five successive years each for deportation, judiciously forcing off first the ages from eighteen to forty-five, as far as can be done without too violent a separation of dependent ages, and five years will substantially settle the exodus. All separations can be reunited in a few years and not a negro’s heart broken.” But a single hundred millions would be only a drop in the bucket. To bring over the ten million foreigners now in the United States, and get them started in a country abounding in work and opportunities, has probably averaged a cost of a hundred dollars a head, or one thousand millions. The thing must be done completely, if at all; for from the point of view of its advocates, to expatriate a part of the race would be like cutting out a portion of a cancer; and where are you going to find, say, a thousand million dollars to carry away ten million people upon the proceeds of whose continued labor in America you must depend for the Southern share of the money?

In the next place, would a world which still has tears for the Acadians deported from Nova Scotia in 1755, which is aroused by the banishment of political suspects to Siberia, be impressed with the high civilization of a nation which would send ten million people to their death in a continent where as yet neither Briton, Frenchman, Portuguese, or German has ever been able to establish any considerable colony of European emigrants? If the superior race, with all its resources, prudence, and medical skill cannot live in Africa, what would become of ten million Negroes deported on the plea that they were not capable of participating in the white man’s civilization? Though descended from Africans there is no reason to suppose that they have transmitted immunity from the deadly tropical diseases.

Again, there is not a state, city, or county populous with Negroes in the South which would not resent, and if need be resist, the sudden taking away of its laborers. Whenever the question is brought to an issue, the Southern people admit that, with all the race difficulties, the Negro does raise the cotton and drive the mule; and without him the white man must take the hoe and the reins. As John Sharp Williams puts it: “The white people of the South do not want to hasten the departure of the good negroes; ... whenever you suggest that he leave the Southern darky replies in Scriptural phrase, ‘Ask me not to leave thee.’ They are here, and they are going to remain here so long as there is a cotton field in sight.” The people who preach expatriation, deportation, elimination, or whatever they choose to call it, are not the people who employ the Negro or wish him well, or would be pleased to see him succeed in any hemisphere.

A milder suggestion is that the essential Negro be slowly and quietly replaced by somebody else. What somebody else? Shall it be Northerners? Senator Williams, of Mississippi, says: “I would like to see established a great land company with a capital of about a million dollars, to buy lands in the cotton States and sell them out to home-seeking immigrants on a ten years’ instalment plan.” In 1907 the Southern press was convinced that a great flow of immigration had set in from the North, but in reality outside of Florida and Texas nearly all colonies of Northerners have been unsuccessful, though there is a slow stream of people, partly from the Northwest, who take up farms in the South and mix with the Southern white population. These people are prone to be dissatisfied with the schools; they are in despair over the wretched domestic service; the women are filled with terror by the lynchings and by the frequent cause of them; the newcomers dislike the Negroes more than the Southern-born people dislike them, and cannot be depended upon to remain a permanent part of the population. In any case, they do not replace the negro laborer for wages.

The only hope of a substitute population of plantation hands is in the foreign immigrants, who have been described in a previous chapter, and of whom, up to 1909, the South seems to have expected a brisk influx. The federal government even set out to build immigrant stations in Charleston and Savannah. But in 1907 all the Southern ports (excepting Baltimore) together received only 21,000 out of 1,300,000. To-day the whole scheme is a failure and there is no prospect of importing large numbers of foreigners to work for wages. A member of Congress from Mississippi recently declared from his seat in the House that there was a conspiracy of federal and Italian officials to prevent Italians from coming into his state.

The first reason for the failure of the promising plan is the many undoubted cases, and the more rumored and reported instances, of peonage of white men. In the second place the Italians, who have been chiefly relied upon, have no intention of spending their lives and bringing up their children as plantation laborers; they work so well and are so profitable to both the plantation owners and themselves that after a few years they save money enough to do something that they like better, and that is the end of their service on other people’s land. The experience of South Carolina in 1906, detailed in the chapter on Immigration, seems conclusively to prove that most foreigners prefer the North because they think they are better treated there.

The fundamental difficulty with the whole plan of immigration is that a great many people in the South believe that the average foreigner is an undesirable member of the community. They have no familiarity with that grinding-down process by which even unpromising races are transformed into Americans. They read of the “Black Hand,” which is not very different from some forms of the old Ku Klux Klan; of the Vendetta, which can be paralleled in the Southern mountains; and they show little willingness to receive even the better foreign elements on equal terms. It is a fair question whether if the Italians, for example, should come to have a majority of votes in Louisiana they would ever be permitted to elect and inaugurate a governor out of their own number; whether the phrase “White man’s government” does not apply as much against the “Dago” as against the Negro.

If the Negroes cannot be replaced, is it not possible to segregate them into districts of their own? For forty years a process has been going on by which the black counties grow blacker and the white counties become whiter; Negroes move into the counties where there is most work and therefore the greatest number of laborers, and the Whites gradually move out of the districts in which the Negroes are very numerous. Could not that process be carried still farther? Some people in despair predict that the Whites will eventually find their way into the West and Northwest, leaving the fruitful South to the Negro. Although there is a steady drift of white people out of the Southern states, it is of the same kind as the movement from New England and the Middle states to the West, and the Whites have not the slightest intention of abandoning their section; buildings go up, mills appear, skyscrapers intensify the city, and in every Southern state the Whites grow richer and more powerful.

The desired result might be brought about if the Negroes would move to other parts of the Union, and much is made of the present drift into the Northern cities, but the conditions of life are not favorable to them there, and their number is only kept up by new immigrations. Booker Washington advises the Negro to stay in the South because “The fact that at the North the Negro is confined to almost one line of employment often tends to discourage and demoralize the strongest who go from the South, and to make them an easy prey to temptation.” Many of the keenest observers in the South desire that the Negroes should spread through the country, partly to relieve the pressure in the South, and partly in the conviction that it would furnish an object lesson to the Northern people of the disadvantage of the presence of Negroes. Whatever the number of emigrant Negroes out of the South, the number left there goes on steadily increasing from decade to decade; and whenever they show a disposition to leave in large numbers, the Southerners oppose and resist, because they see no hope of supplying their place with any other than more negro laborers.

Could the two races divide the land into districts? Such a separation is favored both by Bishop Turner, a negro leader, and by John Temple Graves, of Atlanta, a negro hater, and there are a few examples of such separate communities. Many white counties and a few white towns will not admit Negroes; and in perhaps half a dozen colored villages no white man lives. Here is perhaps an opportunity for considerably reducing race friction, for there is no reason to suppose that such separate towns go backward in civilization; and they give opportunities for negro business and professional men, which are important for the encouragement of the best members of the race. The most serious practical objection is, however, that such towns take away laborers, actual or potential, from the white plantations; and the industrial cotton system depends on keeping those Negroes on other people’s land.

A broader proposition is phrased by Reed in the “Brother’s War”—“Let us give the negro his own State in our union.... We are rich enough and have land enough to give the negro this State, which is due from us. His especial need is to exercise political and civil privileges, in his own community, all the way up from the town meeting to congress.” Possibly this remedy might have been applied forty years ago, but it is now absolutely unworkable. When Reed suggests that the Negro be allowed to take over some state and carry it on as a negro community, the instant question is, which state? Louisiana will not allow her laborers to go en masse to Texas; and Texas would drive them back with shotguns from the border if they tried to move. The blackest states have the least disposition to become blacker, the lighter states are just as determined to remain light; and since there is no longer any great area of good land not taken up by anybody, colonization of the Negro within the limits of the United States is impossible.

Could the desired result of keeping Whites and Negroes from too confining a contact be reached by a less drastic method? A favorite suggestion eloquently championed by Grady is “race separation,” which he defined to mean: “That the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the South. As near as may be, these paths should be made equal—but separate they must be now and always. This means separate schools, separate churches, separate accommodation everywhere—but equal accommodation where the same money is charged, or where the State provides for the citizen.” That is, in every city Negroes are to occupy separate quarters, go to separate schools, ride in separate sections of the street cars, use separate sidewalks, buy in separate stores, have separate churches, places of amusement, social organizations, banks, and insurance companies. This system, which in many directions has already been carried out, rests upon a conviction of the Negro’s ability to maintain an economic and intellectual life of his own, without danger to the white race. It has the great disadvantage of cutting off the third of the population which most needs uplift from the influences which bear for progress. It still further diminishes that association of the superior with the inferior race, that kindly interest of employer in employee, that infiltration of culture and moral principles which is the mightiest influence among the white people.

Furthermore, where is the black man to acquire the skill to carry on his own enterprises, to build cotton gins and oil mills, to stock stores, to found banks, if he is to be separated from the white man? Where is he to buy his goods? Here the whole system breaks down; the drummer is no respecter of persons, and not only is willing to sell to a solvent Negro, but is likely to insist that the negro merchant shall not give all his orders to a colored wholesaler. Then what is to be done with the hundreds of thousands of landowners, tenants, croppers, and wage hands, who depend on advances from the Whites? There is no such thing as commercial segregation; as in other directions, when any remedy is proposed which means the cutting off of negro labor, or of the profits derived from negro custom, the South invariably draws back.

On the other hand, race separation would give greater opportunities to the Negroes and reduce the contact with the lower class of the Whites, out of which comes most of the race violence in the South. It is substantially the method applied in Northern cities, though nowhere to any such degree as in the South. It is a method which, with all its hardship to Negroes of the higher class, comes nearest being a modus vivendi between the races.

As for white communities without Negroes, there are many such in the mountain regions, and an unsuccessful effort was made in the town of Fitzgerald, Ga., by Northern immigrants to keep the Negroes out of it, but in such places who will do the odd jobs and perform the necessary rough labor? How shall houses be built, drays be driven and dirt shoveled, if there are no Negroes?

Try which way you may, there seems no method consonant with the interests of the South and the principles of humanity by which Negroes can be set apart from the white people. It was not the choice of their ancestors to change their horizon; nor were the Africans now in the United States consulted as to their neighbors; but they were born on American soil; they have shared in the toil of conquering the continent; they have their homes, their interests, and their traditions; they have never known any life except in dependence on and close relations with the Whites. However happier the South and the whole country might be were there no race question, there seems no possibility of avoiding it by taking away all race contact.

A method of supposed relief widely applied, frequently invoked, and strenuously defended, is to terrorize the Negro. And the North is not free from that spirit. As Mr. Dooley philosophizes: “He’ll ayther have to go to th’ north an’ be a subjick race, or stay in th’ south an’ be an objick lesson. ’Tis a har-rd time he’ll have, anyhow.... I’m not so much throubled about th’ naygur whin he lives among his opprissors as I am whin he falls into th’ hands iv his liberators. Whin he’s in th’ South he can make up his mind to be lynched soon or late an’ give his attintion to his other pleasures iv composin’ rag-time music on a banjo, an’ wurrukin’ f’r th’ man that used to own him an’ now on’y owes him his wages. But ’tis the divvle’s own hardship ... to be pursooed by a mob iv abolitionists till he’s dhriven to seek police protection.” Still the Northern police do give protection against assaults on the Negro which Southern police sometimes refuse. Lawlessness is the plague of the South. Attention has already been called to the negro crime against person and life, the shocking frequency of white crime, the weakness and timidity of the courts, and the resort to lynching as an alleged protest against lawlessness. The number of homicides and mob murders is not so serious as the continual appeals to violence by editors and public men who are accepted as leaders by a large minority and sometimes a majority of the white people. Thus John Temple Graves calls for “a firm, stern, and resolute attitude of organization and readiness on the part of the dominant race.... Is this black man from savage Africa to keep on perpetually disturbing the sections of our common country? Is this running sore to be nursed and treated and anodyned and salved and held forever to our breasts?” Southern newspapers abound in fierce and exciting headlines: “The Burly Black Brute Foiled!” “A Ham Colored Nigger in the Hen House!” “The Only Place for You is Behind a Mule,” and so on—what somebody has called “The wholesale assassination of negro character.” Senator Tillman in a public lecture has said: “On one occasion we killed seven niggers; I don’t know how many I killed personally, but I shot to kill and I know I got my share.” And in another speech, in November, 1907, in Chicago, the same man, who has repeatedly been elected to the Senate from a once proud state, said: “No matter what the people in the North may say or do, the white race in the South will never be dominated by the Negro, and I want to tell you now that if some state should ever make an attempt to ‘save South Carolina,’ we will show them in their fanaticism that we will make it red before we make it black.”

Observe that this ferocity is not directed against the Negro simply because he does ill, but equally if he does well. Thus a correspondent in Georgia writes: “Let me tell you one thing,—every time you people of the North countenance in any way, shape or form any form of social equality, you lay up trouble, not for yourselves, or for us so much, but for the negro. 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 we will submit to it, we will kill every negro in the Southern states. This is not idle boasting or fire-eating threats, but the cold, hard facts stated in all calmness.” Could hate, jealousy, and meanness reach a higher pitch than in the following declaration of Thomas Dixon, Jr., sent broadcast through the country in the Saturday Evening Post two years ago? “Does any sane man believe that when the Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man, this ‘arrogant,’ ‘rapacious,’ and ‘intolerant’ race will allow the Negro to master his industrial system, take the bread from his mouth, crowd him to the wall and place a mortgage on his house? Competition is war—the most fierce and brutal of all its forms. Could fatuity reach a sublimer height than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and see this performance? What will he do when put to the test? He will do exactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread—kill him!” Could blind race hostility go farther than in the Atlanta Riots of 1907, for which not one murderer has ever been subjected to any punishment?

These violent utterances come almost wholly from the Superior Race. The Negroes have their grievances; but any intemperate publication toward the white race would almost certainly lead to a lynching. An instance has actually occurred where a Negro was driven out of a community, and glad to escape with his life, because he had in his newspaper said with regard to a woman of his own race whose character had been assailed, that she was as virtuous as any white woman. Doubtless some of the cruel and incendiary language that has been quoted is intended for home consumption; it is supposed to be a striking way of saying to the Negroes that they ought to behave better; and alongside every one of these vindictive utterances could be placed a message of hope and encouragement from Southern white men to the blacks. These expressions of white ferocity in condemnation of negro ferocity are overbalanced by such strong words as those of Senator Williams: “It cannot be escaped by the extermination of either race by the other. That thought is absolutely horrible to a good man, a believer in the divine philosophy of Jesus Christ, who taught mutual helpfulness, and not mutual hatred to mankind.” Nevertheless, it remains true that a large number of Southern people who are in places of influence and authority advise that the race problem be settled by terrorizing the Negro.

The commonest form of terror is lynching, a deliberate attempt to keep the race down by occasionally killing Negroes, sometimes because they are dreadful criminals, frequently because they are bad, or loose-tongued, or influential, or are acquiring property, or otherwise irritate the Whites. A saucy speech by a Negro to a white man may be followed by swift, relentless, and tormenting death. In every case of passionate conflict between two races the higher loses most, because it has most to lose; and lynch law as a remedy for the lawlessness of the blacks has the disadvantage of occasionally exposing innocent white men to the uncontrollable passion of other white men, of filling the mind with scenes of horror and cruelty, of lowering the standard of the whole white race.

This subject is inextricably connected with the crimes by Negroes, for which lynching is held to be an appropriate punishment. The statistics collected by Mr. Cutler, and stated in a previous chapter, show in the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903 a record of 1,997 lynchings in the South; of the Negroes lynched, 707 were charged with violence to women and 783 with murder. These figures absolutely disprove the habitual statements in the South that lynching is common to all sections of the Union; that it is almost always caused by rape; and that rape is a crime confined to Negroes. The details of some of these cases would show that the mob not infrequently gets an innocent person; that it is liable to be carried away into the most horrible excesses of burning and torture; that a lynching is really a kind of orgy in which not only the criminal class among the Whites, but people who are ordinarily swayed by reason simply let go of themselves and indulge the primeval brutishness of human nature. Said Confucius: “The Master said, ‘I hate the manner in which purple takes away the luster of vermilion. I hate the way in which the songs of Ch’ing confound the music of Gna. I hate those who with their sharp mouths overthrow kingdoms and families.’”

Professor Smith, of Tulane University, is spokesman for thousands of respectable and educated men when he says: “Atrocious as such forms of rudimentary justice undoubtedly are, and severely reprehensible, to be condemned always and without any reserve, it cannot be denied that they have a certain rough and horrible virtue. Great is the insult they wreak on the majesty of the law and brutalizing must be their effect upon human nature, yet they do strike a salutary terror into hearts which the slow and uncertain steps of the courts could hardly daunt. In witness stands the fact that lynch-lightning seldom strikes twice in the same district or community. Such frightful incidents tend to repeat themselves at wide intervals, both of time and place.”

They tend to repeat themselves immediately; it is not an accident that Mississippi, in a large part of which the Negroes are renowned for their freedom from the crime so much reprehended, nevertheless, has more lynchings than any other state; it is because Mississippi has the lynching habit. Strange that in a community like the South, so intelligent, so proud of the superiority and the supremacy of the white race, the deeds of fifty abandoned black men each year should throw millions of Whites into a frenzy of excitement; and that for the crime of those fifty, ten million innocent people are held responsible. Lynching is no remedy for race troubles, and never has been; it intensifies the race feeling a hundredfold; it is a standing indictment of the white people who possess all the machinery of government, yet cannot prevent the fury of their own race. “Surely,” says President Roosevelt, “no patriot can fail to see the fearful brutalization and debasement which the indulgence of such a spirit and such practices inevitably portend.... The nation, like the individual, cannot commit a crime with impunity. If we are guilty of lawlessness and brutal violence, whether our guilt consists in active participation therein or in mere connivance and encouragement, we shall assuredly suffer later on because of what we have done. The corner stone of this republic, as of all free governments, is respect for and obedience to the law.” That the South can get on without lynchings is shown by the gradual diminution in the number of instances. In 1901 there were 135, in 1906 only 45, and in this good result the protests of the good people in the South have been aided by the criticism of the North. Murders of Whites by Negroes are probably just as frequent, but they are more likely to go to the courts.

Some things can still be done to reduce the crime of the individual without increasing the crime of the mob. John Temple Graves has suggested for the Negro that: “Upon conviction of his crime he would cross a ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and disappear into a prison of darkness and mystery, from which he would never emerge, and in which he would meet a fate known to no man save the Government and the excutioners of the law—that the very darkness and mystery of this punishment would strike more terror to the soul of superstitious criminals than all the vengeance of modern legal retribution.”

A kindred suggestion is that a special court of Whites shall be set up to deal with certain aggravated crimes, outside of the technicalities of the ordinary criminal law. If the Negroes would deliver up those of their own number whom they suppose to have committed such crimes, they would relieve themselves of the odium of protecting the worst criminals. The Whites are right in insisting on a stronger feeling of race responsibility, but where is their own sense of race responsibility when the Salisbury lynchers, the Atlanta murderers and the scoundrel Turner, who practically kidnapped and then tortured to death a Negro woman, are protected by public sentiment? Extraordinary remedies are not necessary if the white people will make their own courts and sheriffs do their duty, by speedy trials, followed by swift and orderly punishment; and most of all by disgracing and driving out of society men who take upon themselves the hangman’s office without the hangman’s plea of maintaining the majesty of law.

Lynching is part of the same spirit as that which inspires peonage, the meanest of all crimes in the calendar; for to steal a poor Negro’s labor is to rob a cripple of his crutches; to knock down the child for his penny; it is the fleecing of the most defenseless by the most powerful. One of the remedies for the ills of the South is that the white people shall sternly set themselves against the crime of peonage, which exists in every state of the Lower South, either with or without the color of law; and which secures the most expensive labor that the South can possibly employ, since it alarms and discourages a thousand for every man whose forced labor is thus stolen.

The terrible thing about all the suggestions of violence and hatred as a remedy is that they react upon the white race, which has most to lose in property and in character. “There are certain things,” said Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, in a public proclamation, “that must be done for the control of the negro which need not be done for the government of the white man. In spite of the provisions of the federal constitution the men who are called upon to deal with this great problem must do that which is necessary to be done, even though it may have the appearance at times of going somewhat without the law.... If the people of the respective communities of this state will only come together and resolve to convert every negro into a laborer and self-supporter, even though it be necessary to make him a laborer upon the county’s or the state’s property, they will serve their communities and their state well.” No idea is more futile than that you can drive people with whips into the Kingdom of Heaven; that you can teach an inferior race to observe laws by yourself breaking them; that you can put one half the community outside the law, while claiming American liberty for the other half. Though the negro race has little to urge in public, it feels the degradation and the hurt. Violence solves no problems; it does not even postpone the evil day. The race problem must be solved by applying to Negroes the same kind of law and justice that the experience of the Anglo-Saxon has found necessary for its own protection.