Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem

The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of language be called “white men’s countries.”^[47] In the British West Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.

But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the European, and not always very vividly realized even by the Northern American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal observation and through the medium of books. The details of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.

Numbers and Vitality of the Negro

In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers, distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.

It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one million in the North and West.^[48]

Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they were multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied that by 1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from Maryland to Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself, and appears to have been based on defective enumeration in the census of 1870, which made the rate of negro increase between 1870 and 1880 seem quite inordinate. Now speculation has gone to the other extreme, and prophesies the not very distant extinction of the negro. This view is set forth with uncompromising emphasis by Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):

When I find this forecast cited with approval by Dr. E. A. Alderman of the University of Virginia, it acquires some authority in my eyes; but still it seems far from convincing. It leaves out of account one probability and one certainty. The probability is that what may be called the Hampton-Tuskegee movement—industrial education and moral discipline—will in time so leaven the mass of the negro race as to make it fitter to compete with white labour, and abler to resist the destructive influences on which Mr. Bruce dwells with such gusto. I call this a probability, not a certainty, for it is hard to tell as yet whether the Hampton-Tuskegee spirit is really leavening the mass, or only playing upon the surface. The industrial college at Hampton is barely forty years old; Mr. Booker Washington’s great institute at Tuskegee came into being less than thirty years ago; and the minor offshoots of the movement are, of course, still younger. They have not had time to give any just measure of their influence in promoting the self-respect and the efficiency of the negro race. But there is no doubt whatever that they are doing a remarkable and (from the negro point of view) a beneficent work; the only doubt being as to whether the work is or is not proceeding fast enough to overtake and counteract the forces that make for degradation.^[49]

This, I say, is doubtful; but what is scarcely doubtful is that the South, for its own sake, cannot suffer Mr. Bruce’s prophecy to fulfil itself. The gist of the forecast is, briefly, this: the rural negro, who is admittedly prolific, and whose children survive in fair proportions, will gradually be driven into the towns, where all possible influences are leagued against his moral and physical well-being, and where the rate of negro mortality, both infant and adult, is always very high and often appalling. Thus, according to Mr. Bruce, the “Afro-American” is being inexorably hounded into the jaws of death, and must in due time perish from off the face of the earth. But what is to be the state of the South while this amiable prophecy is working itself out? If the towns are the jaws of death to the negro, what are they to the white man and his children? Putting all question of humanity aside, can any sane civic policy permit negroes to crowd in their thousands into city slums, and there to die like flies in conditions “even more unwholesome and squalid” than those which at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro mortality so high? Simply because the black folk are less able than the whites to resist the poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as well as physical. But bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one race than to the other, inevitably takes its toll of both. Hear what a Southern health officer has to say on this point:

What can be more certain than this? And is it to be conceived that the South will deliberately refrain from looking to its physical and moral sewerage until the negro shall have been killed off?^[50]

It is not to be conceived, and it is not what is happening. Better sanitary conditions are everywhere being secured, though the movement is slow in the cities of the South. In the North a great improvement has already been effected. In a report on “The Health and Physique of the Negro American” (Atlanta University Publications, No. XI., 1906) we read—

If there is any permanence and any efficacy in the “wave of prohibition” that is passing over the South, it must certainly cause a great reduction in negro mortality; and it surely cannot be long before means are found to check the vending of noxious drugs. Unless, in short, the civilization of the South is to stand still while the negro dies off, there seems to be little likelihood of his fulfilling Mr. Bruce’s prognostic. This great and beautiful region cannot possibly find its salvation in making itself a hell for the negro.

When I quoted to Mr. Booker Washington Mr. Bruce’s death-sentence on his people, he was moved to one of his rare laughs. In Mr. Washington’s opinion, which may very well prove to be correct, the natural increase of the negro in the South about keeps pace with that of the white man. The white race, however, is being largely recruited by immigration, so that its numerical preponderance is doubtless increasing. It would appear, then, that, unless conditions very greatly alter, there is little chance of the black race out-breeding and submerging the white, but equally little chance of the black race being obliging enough to die out. “Conservative” statisticians estimate that at the close of this century there will be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five million negroes in America.^[51]

Taking the Southern States at large, then, we find that one person out of every three is wholly or partly of African blood. It is sometimes maintained that really pure-bred negroes are very rare; but this seems to be a mistake. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a man of mixed origin and not likely to underestimate the number of his own class, thinks that in two-thirds of the negroes of the United States there are no “recognizable traces” of white blood. He adds that white blood doubtless exists in many who show no trace of it; but for practical purposes this speculation may be disregarded. I think we may take it as pretty certain that if, in the South, one person out of every three is of African descent, one person out of every four is either actually or virtually a full-blooded negro. But it must not be supposed that the distribution of the races is by any means even. Some districts, such as the mountainous regions of Tennessee and West Virginia, contain hardly any negroes; while in other districts, not a few, the blacks largely outnumber the whites. These are, no doubt, the districts in which the pure-bred black most abounds.

Is there a “Negro Problem”?

Having ascertained, approximately, the numerical relations of the two races, we are now in a position to consider the problem or problems involved. And first we are confronted with the question, “Is there any real problem at all?”

Some people deny it, or at all events maintain that the problem is created solely by the almost insane arrogance and inhumanity of the Southern white man. This view lingers in the North, among the inheritors of the old abolitionist sentiment. In England, it has been roundly expressed by Mr. H. G. Wells, and somewhat more considerately by even so high an authority as Sir Sydney Olivier. I need scarcely say that it is a very popular view among the negroes in the South itself.

For a typical (though moderate) American utterance of this opinion the following may suffice. It is a passage from “Race Questions and Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of Harvard (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906):

The attitude of the South, then, in the conception of Professor Royce, is no more rational than that of a woman who shrieks, jumps on a chair, and gathers her skirts about her ankles, because a mouse happens to run across the floor. I should have thought that the wiser tendency of modern science was to divine something more than a “caprice” in so deep-rooted an instinct as the dread even of mice. As for the dread of snakes, it was surely by a slip of the pen that Professor Royce adduced it.

Not at all dissimilar is the judgment of Mr. H. G. Wells. Hearing a great deal of loose, illogical, inconclusive talk on the colour question, and having himself taken a “mighty liking” to these “gentle, human, dark-skinned people” as he saw them in a Chicago music-hall and elsewhere, Mr. Wells formed the opinion that there was no reason at all in the Southern frame of mind. His conclusion is that “these emotions are a cult;” and by a cult he evidently means a contagious, fanatical folly.

Now, Mr. Wells is a man for whose essential wisdom I have a very high respect. If I were bound to acknowledge myself the disciple of any living thinker, I should have small hesitation in selecting him as my guide and philosopher. But his chapter on “The Tragedy of Colour” in “The Future in America” is tinged with what I cannot but take to be a dogmatic impatience of all distinctions and difficulties of race. Before writing it, he might, I think, have asked himself whether the theory of sheer race-monomania was not, perhaps, a rather too simple way of accounting for “emotions” felt with absolute unanimity (in a greater or less degree) by some twenty million Southern white people. The arguments he heard might be weak, ill-informed, inconclusive; the conduct in which the emotions expressed themselves might often be indefensible and abhorrent; and yet there might lie at the root of the emotions something very different from sheer unreason. I think Mr. Wells should have been chary of “indicting a nation” without more careful reflection and a closer scrutiny of evidence.

Sir Sydney Olivier, on the other hand, speaks with the authority of one who has spent many years in close contact with negroes, having been a successful administrator of large communities in which they greatly preponderate. It is impossible to suspect him of hastiness or of à priori doctrinairism. What, then, is his view? In his “White Capital and Coloured Labour” (1907), he tells us that both in visiting the United States and in discussing race questions with American visitors to Jamaica, “he found himself, as a British West Indian, unable to entirely account for an attitude of mind which impressed him as superstitious, if not hysterical, and as indicating misapprehensions of premises very ominous for the United States of the future.” He proceeds:

And again, in another part of his book:

I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of a man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply studied; but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one of Southern unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however unwise in much of her talk and her action, the South is in the main animated by a just and far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That there has been an infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in the South alone, no one nowadays denies. But I believe that the problem, far from being unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly difficult that nothing but an almost superhuman wisdom, energy, and courage will ever effectually deal with it.

Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.

White Man’s Land or Brown Man’s Land?

No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the importation of the African into America was an egregious blunder as well as a monstrous crime. Without him the South would perhaps have developed more slowly during the eighteenth century; but she would have escaped the arrest of development which sums up her history during the nineteenth century. She would have escaped the war by which she strove, with misguided heroism, to perpetuate that arrest of development. She would have escaped the “horrors” of that Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory like a nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in the past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her wealth, is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much more truly may he be said to have created her poverty.^[52]

This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts of Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in America is not the result of a natural movement, an inevitable expansion, a migration springing from economic necessity or from deep impulses of folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of what may almost be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman cupidity in the slave-dealers and economic short-sightedness in the slave-owners.

The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance, would certainly not be a more desirable place of residence if one-fourth of her population were transmuted into the semblance of Dahomeyans, even supposing that the metamorphosis involved no moral or intellectual change for the worse. A monochrome civilization is on the face of it preferable to such a piebald civilization as at present exists in the Southern States.

Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and the West Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to overlook. The West Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white man’s land”; or, if it was ever possible that they should become one, the chance was lost at the very outset of their history. They are once for all black men’s lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and exploiting them. It would be much more reasonable for the black to chafe under the dominance of the white, than for the white to resent the presence of the black. But the case in the Southern States is absolutely different. They were explored, settled, organized by white men; by white men their liberties were vindicated. They are fitted by their climate and resources to be not only a white man’s land, but one of the greatest white men’s lands in the world. The black man came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen) tool for their development. When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims a third part of the heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and exceedingly moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which, after all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern white man would be more than human if he accepted the part with perfect equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no right to assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his case are even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is the essence and foundation of life: in the United States he is a regrettable accident.

Four Possibilities: I. Extinction.

It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions of this piebald community which a violent interference with the normal course of race-distribution has established in the Southern States.

The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather, conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.

(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly unsatisfactory condition, until the negro gradually dies out.

(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic elevation of the black race, may gradually enable them to live side by side in mutual tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but without clashing.

(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean might conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by “miscegenation.”

(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by deportation or otherwise, and established in a community or communities of its own.

The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have already examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only add here that there is one way in which it might conceivably be brought about—a way too horrible to be contemplated, yet not wholly beyond the bounds of possibility. The recurrence of such an outbreak as the Atlanta riot of 1906 might lead to very terrible consequences. On that occasion the white mob found the negroes unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically unopposed. But the lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar onslaught would, in many places, find them armed and capable of a certain amount of resistance. In that case one dares not think what might happen. Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense of intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary, infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or any other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part of the race, be violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to lose that natural buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race, as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic Negerhetze? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr. P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he anticipated.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the brink of such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are present which might one day bring it to pass.^[53] Sir Sydney Olivier is quite right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners towards the negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the class that is handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises have been written to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a “beast,” and, on scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape than a man. These works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their insanity is by no means peculiar to their individual authors. The word “extermination” is gravely spoken by men who are not therefore held to be maniacs or even monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, is “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk”; and where such a condition prevails, the possibility of sudden disaster is never far off. To recognize the possibility is not to bring it nearer, but rather to indicate the urgent need of measures that shall place it infinitely remote.

Four Possibilities: II. The Atlanta Compromise.

We pass now to the second eventuality—the gradual smoothing away of friction, so that the two races may live side by side, never blending and yet never jarring. This is the conception set forth in Mr. Booker Washington’s celebrated “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, wherein he said, “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Is this a possible—I will not say ideal, for that it manifestly is not—but a possible working arrangement?

One thing is evident at the outset—namely, that the fourteen years that have elapsed since Mr. Washington uttered this aspiration have brought its fulfilment no nearer. Both negro education and white education have advanced in the interim; the “respectable” and well-to-do class of negroes has considerably increased; but the feeling between the races is worse rather than better. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page used to say, “Northerners espouse the cause of the negro as a race, but dislike negroes individually; while Southerners do not dislike negroes individually, but oppose them as a race.”^[54] Ten years ago there was a large element of truth in this saying; but it becomes less and less true with every year that passes. The old-time kindliness of feeling between the ex-owner and the ex-slave is rapidly becoming a mere tradition. No common memories or sentiments hold together the new generations of the two races; they are growing up in unmitigated mutual antipathy. At best, indeed, the Southern kindliness of feeling towards the individual negro subsisted only so long as he “knew his place” and kept it; and the very process of education and elevation on which Mr. Washington relies renders the negro ever less willing to keep the place the Southern white man assigns him. In the North, too, while the dislike of the individual has greatly increased, the theoretic fondness for the race has very perceptibly cooled. Altogether, the tendency of events since 1895 has not been at all in the direction of the Atlanta Compromise. The Atlanta riot of eleven years later was a grimly ironic comment on Mr. Washington’s speech.

This merely means, it may be said, that education has as yet produced no sensible effect upon the inveterate and inhuman prejudice of the South. Nevertheless, time and patience may justify Mr. Washington’s optimism. There is no saying, indeed, what a great deal of time and a great deal of patience may not effect. Meanwhile, let us see what is really involved in the idea of the Atlanta Compromise.

We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the negro race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general efficiency. Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly civilizable, if not indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level he has yet attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within normal limits; for the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered so by ignorance, poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal system. The next fifty years, if present influences continue to work unimpeded, may see a very large increase in the class of law-abiding, property-holding negroes, and possibly a considerable improvement even in the condition of the black proletariat. But supposing that, by the exercise of infinite patience for fifty or a hundred years, a condition something like that indicated in the Atlanta formula were ultimately attained, would it be desirable? and could it be permanent?

The assumed improvement of conditions would, of course, imply a steady increase in the numbers of the black race; so that, even with the aid of immigration, the white race would probably not greatly add to its numerical superiority. Let us suppose that at the end of fifty years the coloured people were not as one in three, but as one in four, and that this ratio remained pretty constant. Here, then, we should have a nation within a nation, unassimilated and (by hypothesis) unassimilable, occupying one-fourth of the whole field of existence, and performing no function that could not, in their absence, be at least as well performed by assimilable people, whose presence would be a strength to the community.^[55] The black nation would be a hampering, extraneous element in the body politic, like a bullet encysted in the human frame. It may lie there for years without setting up inflammation or gangrene, and causing no more than occasional twinges of pain; but it certainly cannot contribute to the health, efficiency, or comfort of the organism. Is it wonderful that the Atlanta Compromise, supposing it realized in all conceivable perfection, should excite little enthusiasm in the white South?

But to imagine it realized in perfection is to imagine an impossibility—almost a contradiction in terms. We are, on the one hand, to suppose the negro ambitious, progressive, prosperous, and, on the other hand, to imagine him humbly acquiescent in his status as a social pariah. The thing is out of the question; such saintlike humility has long ceased to form any part of the moral equipment of the American negro. The bullet could never be thoroughly encysted; it would always irritate, rankle, fester. Mr. Washington’s formula in renouncing social equality is judiciously vague as to political rights. But one thing is certain—neither Mr. Washington nor any other negro leader really contemplates their surrender. It is quite inconceivable that the nation within a nation should acquiesce in disfranchisement; and the question of the negro vote will always be a disturbing factor in Southern political life. Either he must be jockeyed out of it by devices abhorrent to democratic principle and more or less subversive of political morality; or, if he be honestly suffered to cast his ballot, he will block the healthy divergence of political opinion in the South, since, in any party conflict, he would hold the balance between the two sides, and thus become the dominant power in the State. This will always be a danger so long as the unassimilated negro is forced, by his separateness, to think and act first as a negro and only in the second place as an American. Even if the Atlanta Compromise were otherwise realizable, the friction at this point would always continue acute.

The Crux of the Problem.

The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise were possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to be prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is unwholesome and demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of what Mr. Ray Stannard Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It seems hard, no doubt, that marriage should be impossible between a white man and a girl in whose complexion, perhaps, an eighth or sixteenth part of negro blood is entirely imperceptible; but such cases are romantic exceptions, and do not constitute a serious factor in the problem. Negroes, at any rate, will tell you proudly that the young men and women of their race, however light-skinned, hold it no hardship that their choice of mates should be restricted to their own people. Whatever be the truth as to these marginal relations, they are not the essence of the matter. The essence is simply this: the youth and manhood of the white South is subjected to an altogether unfair and unwholesome ordeal by the constant presence of a multitude of physically well-developed women, among whom, in the lower levels, there is no strong tradition of chastity, and to whom the penalties of incontinence are very slight. To say, as many Southerners will, that there is no such thing as virtue among negro women is stupidly libellous; but it is impossible to doubt that the average standard of sexual conduct among the lower orders of the black and brown population is anything but high. And this is not a state of things that can be radically amended in one generation or in two. The completest realization of the Atlanta Compromise that is conceivable within, say, a century, would still leave the white male exposed, from boyhood upward, to a stimulation of his animal instincts which, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, cannot be otherwise than unwholesome.

We are here at the very heart of the problem. All other relations are adjustable, at a certain sacrifice; but not this one. If the two races are to live together without open and lawful intermingling, it must be at the cost of incessant demoralization to both. “Miscegenation,” in the sense of permanent concubinage and the rearing of hybrid families, may be held in check by the strong social sentiment against it,^[56] but nothing can hold in check the still more degrading casual commerce between the white man (and youth) and the coloured woman. It is probably this fact, quite as much as the hideous proclivities of the criminal negro male, that hardens the heart of the white woman against the black race. Nor is the unwholesomeness of the condition measured by the actual amount of laxity to which it leads. Temptation may in myriads of cases be resisted; but this order of temptation ought not to be in the air.^[57] It cannot be good for any race of men to be surrounded by strongly-accentuated Sex, which, for ulterior reasons, whereof the mere animal nature takes little account, is placed under a tabu.

I venture to say that no one—not even Mr. Washington himself—really believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the problem. The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to speak), never doubt that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of racial intermixture. They see that so long as constant physical propinquity endures, the colour barrier between the sexes is factitious, and in great measure unreal, and they believe that at last the race-pride of the white man will be worn down, and he will accept the inevitable amalgamation.^[58] The ultimate forces at war in the South are the instinctive, half-conscious desire of the black race to engraft itself on the white stock,^[59] and the no less instinctive horror of the white stock at such a surrender of its racial integrity. This horror is all the more acute—all the more morbid, if you will—because the white race is conscious of its own frailty, and knows that it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against perfidious nature. It is a hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it is true, that much of the injustice and cruelty to which the negro is subjected in the South is a revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the negro’s part, as for an uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part of the whites.^[60] It is because the black race inevitably appeals to one order of low instincts in the white, that it suffers from the sympathetic stimulation of another order of low instincts.

Four Possibilities: III. Amalgamation.

This brings us, of course, to the third of the conceivabilities above enumerated—the legalization of marriage between the two races. To the white South, nothing is more inconceivable: to the critics of the white South, nothing is more simple. Which of them is in the right?

It is significant that none of these outside critics puts the slightest faith in the Atlanta Compromise. They see quite clearly that the two races cannot live together and yet apart. Their solution is the obvious one of free intermixture, and they cannot understand why the South should be so inveterately opposed to it. Why make such a fuss, they say, over such a simple matter?

And then comes a long array of arguments to minimize, in general, the significance of race, and, in particular, the gap between the white race and the black. Racial purity is a vain imagination; there is no such thing, at any rate among European peoples; and if it existed it would only be a limitation and a misfortune to the people afflicted with it. Most of all is the Anglo-Saxon race ridiculed as a historic fallacy. The South, which boasts itself almost the last stronghold of pure Anglo-Saxondom,^[61] is told that the pure Anglo-Saxon is a myth and a superstition. As to the negro, we are assured that we were all negroes once, or something very much to that effect. At any rate, it is asserted that the Mediterranean races, with whom Western civilization originated, were in great part of negro origin. Skull-measurement and brain-weight are called in to prove—whatever the particular disputant wants to prove. Special qualities are claimed for the negro—such as a rich imagination, an innate courtesy, and a strong musical faculty; and it is argued that these are the very things of which the (so-called) Anglo-Saxon race stands most in need. Great play is made with the quasi-scientific modern Rousseauism which avers that our barbarian ancestors were better men than we, and thence argues that there is little or no real gap between the savage of to-day and the civilized man. Weismannism is pressed into the service to show that, as the aptitudes and tendencies that we sum up in the word civilization are acquired and therefore (it is argued) untransmissible, the white child can have profited nothing by its ancestors’ centuries of upward struggle from barbarism, while the black child cannot be in any way handicapped by his descent through untold ages of savagery. We are even assured that civilization has sprung from and must be maintained by “the commingling of all with all, the general ‘panmixture,’ the universal ‘half-breed.’”^[62]

Fortunately it is quite unnecessary that I should plunge into the mazes of ethnological controversy. It is sufficient for my present purpose to note that controversy, and very lively controversy, exists. The practical equality of the two races is so far from being a point on which all authorities are agreed, that it may rather be called a paradox which charms a certain order of mind by reason of its very audacity. So, too, with the opinion that, whether the African race be or be not inferior, it possesses qualities that the European stock needs, and ought to accept with gratitude. Whether true or false, this is, at present at any rate, a quite undemonstrated speculation. Even Sir Sydney Olivier, who maintains in general that a man of mixed race is “potentially a more competent vehicle of humanity,” advances no proof of the benefits of the particular mixture in question which can for a moment be expected to carry conviction to the Southern white man. The South, then, is urged by the amalgamation theorists to embark upon, or submit to, what is at best a great experiment. It is to quell its higher instincts (for so it regards them, rightly or wrongly) and commit what it feels in the marrow of its bones to be a degrading race-abnegation, in deference to a half-scientific, half-humanitarian opinion, held by certain theorists outside its own boundaries, to the effect that, after all, there is no great difference between black and white, and that the complexion of the future will certainly be a uniform yellow. Can any one blame the South for answering: “No, thank you! If you in England or in New England are tired of being white men, and sigh for the blessings of an African blend, we can send you several million negroes, of both sexes, who will no doubt be happy, on suitable terms, to intermarry with your sons and daughters. For our part, we are content with our complexion as it is. We see no reason to believe that the African slave trade was the means adopted by a beneficent Providence for the ultimate improvement of our Anglo-Saxon stock; nor, on the other hand, can we accept it as a just punishment for the sins of our fathers that our race, as a race, should be merged and obliterated in indiscriminate hybridism.”

I do not pretend, of course, that the fixed antipathy of the South to the very idea of amalgamation is a purely rational one. Who is so foolish as to look for pure reason in aught that concerns the obscure fundamentals of life? What I am trying to show is that, whatever irrational elements may mingle with it, the Southern sentiment has a solid and sufficient nucleus of reason. The advantages of fusion, as between such antipodal races as the white European and the black African, are, to say the least of it, unproved; and a race may be forgiven, surely, which declines to try on its own body, so to speak, so problematic and so irremediable an experiment. For, once made, this experiment cannot be unmade. The South must choose between definitely renouncing its position as a “white man’s land” or struggling to maintain it. What wonder if it feels that it has no choice in the matter?

The Races not Equal.

I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the advantages of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my position, I must confess that my personal belief goes much further, and that the disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved beyond all reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the essential and innate inferiority of the negro race, because my argument did not demand it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to me as evident as it is inevitable. However fallacious may be the boundaries between this and that European race, the boundary between the European and the African is real, and not to be argued away. The European is the fruit of untold generations of upward struggle, the African of untold generations of immobility. At the very dawn of history, the ancestors of the white American had advanced to a point beyond that which the ancestors of the Afro-American had attained when they were shipped across the Atlantic from fifty to two hundred years ago. That the negro race has some very amiable qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has brought with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the white savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the black savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of taking on a certain measure of civilization. But all this does not practically lessen the huge historic gap between the two races. Even if we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man in intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him a few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever it may become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro race here and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of its “previous condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and fundamentally, because of its recent condition of savagery. Therefore, the white race, in accepting amalgamation, would be derogating from its birthright and climbing down the scale of humanity.

Our theorists are, on the whole, too much inclined to confound instinct with prejudice. It is absurd to class as pure prejudice the white man’s preference for the colour and facial contour of his race. This is no place for an analysis of our sense of beauty; but to maintain offhand that it is an unmeaning product of sheer habit, with no biological justification, is simply to shirk the problem and postpone analysis to dogma. Does any one really believe that the genius of Cæsar and Napoleon, of Milton and Goethe, had nothing to do with their facial angle, and could have found an equally convenient habitation behind thick lips and under woolly skulls? The negro himself (as distinct from the mulatto rhetorician) takes his stand on no such paradox. Whoever may doubt the superiority of the white race, it is not he; and it is a racial, not merely a social or economic superiority to which he does instinctive homage. It does not enter his head to champion his own racial ideal, to set up an African Venus in rivalry to the Hellenic, and claim a new Judgment of Paris between them. If wishing could change the Ethiopian’s skin there would be never a negro in America.^[63] The black race, out of its poverty, spends thousands of dollars annually on “anti-kink” lotions, vainly supposed to straighten the African wool.^[64] The brown belle tones her complexion with pearl powder; and many a black mother takes pride in the brown skin of her offspring, though it proclaims their illegitimacy. There can be no reasonable doubt that amalgamation, in the negro’s eyes, means an enormous gain to his race. It means ennoblement, transfiguration. It is quite natural that he should not too curiously inquire whether the gain to him would involve a corresponding loss to the white man. That is the white man’s business, not his. The one thing his instinct tells him is that, if he can break down the white man’s resistance and make the Southern States a brown or yellow man’s land, he will have achieved a splendid racial triumph.

The Case for the Mulatto.

It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain would not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would bring to the white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need, the result of the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the qualities and powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience justified this speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in South America, in the West Indies, in the Southern States themselves. The mulatto exists and has existed for generations, not in hundreds or thousands, but in millions; in what respect has he proved himself superior to the pure Spaniard, or Portuguese, or Anglo-Saxon? Does South American history bear testimony to his political competence? Have his achievements in science, in art, in literature, in music, been superior to those of the un-Africanized peoples? Or, waiving the question of superiority, has he even, in these domains, produced meritorious work in any fair proportion to his numbers? I do not say that it is impossible to make a sort of case for him, by the ransacking of records and the employment of a very indefinite standard of values. But I do most emphatically say that no conspicuous and undeniable advantage has resulted from the blending of bloods, such as can or ought to counteract the instinctive repugnance of the South.

In a work entitled “Twentieth Century Negro Literature,”^[65] published in 1901, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, a mulatto journalist, quotes Byron’s lines:—