IXOf the Sons of Master and ManLife treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart.
MRS. BROWNING.
The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of
men is to have new exemplification during the new century.
Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European
civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples. Whatever
we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it
certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to
look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and
debauchery,--this has again and again been the result of
carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the
sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether
satisfy the conscience of the modern world to be told compla-
cently that all this has been right and proper, the fated
triumph of strength over weakness, of righteousness over
evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly be sooth-
ing if one could readily believe all this; and yet there are too
many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily explained
away. We feel and know that there are many delicate differ-
ences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely,
which explain much of history and social development. At
the same time, too, we know that these considerations have
never adequately explained or excused the triumph of brute
force and cunning over weakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth
century to see that in the future competition of races the
survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the
beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for
future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong,
and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence
and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled
daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of the
phenomena of race-contact,--to a study frank and fair, and
not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we
have in the South as fine a field for such a study as the world
affords,--a field, to be sure, which the average American
scientist deems somewhat beneath his dignity, and which the
average man who is not a scientist knows all about, but
nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous
race complications with which God seems about to punish
this nation must increasingly claim our sober attention, study,
and thought, we must ask, what are the actual relations of
whites and blacks in the South? and we must be answered,
not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished
tale.
In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their
relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action and
communication: there is, first, the physical proximity of home
and dwelling-places, the way in which neighborhoods group
themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly,
and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations,
--the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a
living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production
of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the cooperation
in social control, in group government, in laying and paying
the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and
commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and
conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all,
the gradual formation for each community of that curious
tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely allied with
this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life,
in travel, in theatres, in house gatherings, in marrying and
giving in marriage. Finally, there are the varying forms of
religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent en-
deavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in
the same communities are brought into contact with each
other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my
point of view, how the black race in the South meet and
mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday life.
First, as to physical dwelling. It is usually possible to draw
in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on
the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the
other Negroes. The winding and intricacy of the geographical
color-line varies, of course, in different communities. I know
some towns where a straight line drawn through the middle of
the main street separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine-
tenths of the blacks. In other towns the older settlement of
whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks; in still
other cases little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung
up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities each street has
its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors
meet in close proximity. Even in the country something of
this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course
in the larger phenomena of the Black Belt.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that
natural clustering by social grades common to all communi-
ties. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white
residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white
slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One
thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the
best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close
proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town
and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of
each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the
past, when, through the close contact of master and house-
servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both
races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time
the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was
removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can
easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his
father's parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great
city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new
picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of
the Negroes that the Southern white people do not have the
black man's best interests at heart has been intensified in later
years by this continual daily contact of the better class of
blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.
Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are
on ground made familiar by study, much discussion, and no
little philanthropic effort. And yet with all this there are many
essential elements in the cooperation of Negroes and whites
for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not
thoroughly understood. The average American can easily con-
ceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of
making efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving
them the requisite technical skill and the help of invested
capital. The problem, however, is by no means as simple as
this, from the obvious fact that these workingmen have been
trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the
advantages and defects of such training; they are willing and
good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful. If
now the economic development of the South is to be pushed
to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have
a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition
with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a
training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant
democratic laborer. What the black laborer needs is careful
personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in
their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and
honesty. Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial
differences to prove the necessity of such group training after
the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred
and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, care-
lessness, and stealing. After Emancipation, it was the plain
duty of some one to assume this group leadership and training
of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose
duty it was--whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government
whose edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose
duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that
these workingmen were not left alone and unguided, without
capital, without land, without skill, without economic organi-
zation, without even the bald protection of law, order, and
decency,--left in a great land, not to settle down to slow and
careful internal development, but destined to be thrown al-
most immediately into relentless and sharp competition with
the best of modern workingmen under an economic system
where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often
utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.
For we must never forget that the economic system of the
South to-day which has succeeded the old regime is not the
same system as that of the old industrial North, of England,
or of France, with their trade-unions, their restrictive laws,
their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their
long experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the
early nineteenth century, before the factory acts,--the En-
gland that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of
Carlyle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of
Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their
own petulance, has never returned to them. Rather it has
passed to those men who have come to take charge of the
industrial exploitation of the New South,--the sons of poor
whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty
and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into
the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and
black, have fallen; and this to their sorrow. For the laborers
as such, there is in these new captains of industry neither love
nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question
of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is
bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelli-
gent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain themselves
against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The results
among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But
among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a
race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among
the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the
worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before,
by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from
slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to
learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the
new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to
the whites.
Left by the best elements of the South with little protection
or oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim
of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community.
The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of the
South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of
Negroes, but is also the result of cunningly devised laws as to
mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by
conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until
escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime.
I have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest
Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate
times, and then in the face of law and decency the enterpris-
ing American who sold it to him pocketed the money and
deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land
at thirty cents a day. I have seen a black farmer fall in debt to
a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and
strip it of every single marketable article,--mules, ploughs,
stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,
--and all this without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the
law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a
single responsible person any account or reckoning. And such
proceedings can happen, and will happen, in any community
where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and
race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-
brotherhood. So long as the best elements of a community do
not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the
weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed
upon by these swindlers and rascals.
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the
hindrance of all advance in the black South, or the absence of
a class of black landlords and mechanics who, in spite of
disadvantages, are accumulating property and making good
citizens. But it does mean that this class is not nearly so large
as a fairer economic system might easily make it, that those
who survive in the competition are handicapped so as to
accomplish much less than they deserve to, and that, above
all, the personnel of the successful class is left to chance and
accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable
methods of selection. As a remedy for this, there is but one
possible procedure. We must accept some of the race preju-
dice in the South as a fact,--deplorable in its intensity,
unfortunate in results, and dangerous for the future, but nev-
ertheless a hard fact which only time can efface. We cannot
hope, then, in this generation, or for several generations, that
the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that close
sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which
their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leader-
ship, such social teaching and example, must come from the
blacks themselves. For some time men doubted as to whether
the Negro could develop such leaders; but to-day no one
seriously disputes the capability of individual Negroes to
assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civiliza-
tion, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their
fellows. If this is true, then here is the path out of the
economic situation, and here is the imperative demand for
trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence,--men of
skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men, black
captains of industry, and missionaries of culture; men who
thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization, and
can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them
by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the
inspiration of common blood and ideals. But if such men are
to be effective they must have some power,--they must be
backed by the best public opinion of these communities, and
able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the
experience of the world has taught are indispensable to hu-
man progress.
Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern
world is the power of the ballot; and this brings me to a
consideration of the third form of contact between whites and
blacks in the South,--political activity.
In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage
can be traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions
of government. In the fifties we were near enough the echoes
of the French Revolution to believe pretty thoroughly in
universal suffrage. We argued, as we thought then rather
logically, that no social class was so good, so true, and so
disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny
of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their
own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently
that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,--with the
right to have a voice in the policy of the state,--that the
greatest good to the greatest number could be attained. To be
sure, there were objections to these arguments, but we thought
we had answered them tersely and convincingly; if some one
complained of the ignorance of voters, we answered, "Edu-
cate them." If another complained of their venality, we
replied, "Disfranchise them or put them in jail." And, fi-
nally, to the men who feared demagogues and the natural
perversity of some human beings we insisted that time and
bitter experience would teach the most hardheaded. It was at
this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the South was
raised. Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free.
How were they to be protected from those who did not
believe in their freedom and were determined to thwart it?
Not by force, said the North; not by government guardian-
ship, said the South; then by the ballot, the sole and legiti-
mate defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of the
Nation. No one thought, at the time, that the ex-slaves could
use the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did
think that the possession of so great power by a great class in
the nation would compel their fellows to educate this class to
its intelligent use.
Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable
period of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever
follows in the wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became
the political scandals that reputable men began to leave poli-
tics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable.
Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with
their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who
regarded public office as a private perquisite. In this state of
mind it became easy to wink at the suppression of the Negro
vote in the South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to
leave politics entirely alone. The decent and reputable citi-
zens of the North who neglected their own civic duties grew
hilarious over the exaggerated importance with which the
Negro regarded the franchise. Thus it easily happened that
more and more the better class of Negroes followed the
advice from abroad and the pressure from home, and took no
further interest in politics, leaving to the careless and the
venal of their race the exercise of their rights as voters. The
black vote that still remained was not trained and educated,
but further debauched by open and unblushing bribery, or
force and fraud; until the Negro voter was thoroughly inocu-
lated with the idea that politics was a method of private gain
by disreputable means.
And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the
fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this conti-
nent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic
training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a
solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and
to the peril of his children's children,--in this day, when we
are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we
going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to
tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of
human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to
give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest?
I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge
the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have
pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in
the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and
frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the
disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man from
politics.
Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the
main question of the industrial and intellectual development
of the Negro? Can we establish a mass of black laborers and
artisans and landholders in the South who, by law and public
opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under
which they live and work? Can the modern organization of
industry, assuming as it does free democratic government and
the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel re-
spect for their welfare,--can this system be carried out in the
South when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public
councils and powerless in its own defence? To-day the black
man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much
he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended; as to
who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to
who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made. It is
pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to
get law-makers in some States even to listen to the respectful
presentation of the black man's side of a current controversy.
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law
and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of
humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who
have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have
absolutely no motive for treating the black people with cour-
tesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is
tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would
rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one
escape.
I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and
shortcomings of the Negro people; I should be the last to
withhold sympathy from the white South in its efforts to solve
its intricate social problems. I freely acknowledged that it is
possible, and sometimes best, that a partially undeveloped
people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better
neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start
and fight the world's battles alone. I have already pointed out
how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance
the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit
that if the representatives of the best white Southern public
opinion were the ruling and guiding powers in the South
to-day the conditions indicated would be fairly well fulfilled.
But the point I have insisted upon and now emphasize again,
is that the best opinion of the South to-day is not the ruling
opinion. That to leave the Negro helpless and without a ballot
to-day is to leave him not to the guidance of the best, but
rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that
this is no truer of the South than of the North,--of the North
than of Europe: in any land, in any country under modern
free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised
people, be they white, black, or blue, at the political mercy
of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful fellows, is a
temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and
seldom will withstand.
Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is
closely connected with the question of Negro crime. There
can be no doubt that crime among Negroes has sensibly
increased in the last thirty years, and that there has appeared
in the slums of great cities a distinct criminal class among the
blacks. In explaining this unfortunate development, we must
note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation
was to increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the police
system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves.
As to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict
slave system there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But
when these variously constituted human particles are sud-
denly thrown broadcast on the sea of life, some swim, some
sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or down by
the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. So great an
economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63
meant a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents
and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades.
Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the
ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like
a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould. The
appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal was a phenome-
non to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should not
occasion surprise.
Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on
careful and delicate dealing with these criminals. Their of-
fences at first were those of laziness, carelessness, and im-
pulse, rather than of malignity or ungoverned viciousness.
Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but
reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full proof of guilt.
For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South
had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its
police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and
tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a mem-
ber of that police. Thus grew up a double system of justice,
which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the
practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the
black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimi-
nation. For, as I have said, the police system of the South
was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not
simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and
the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free
Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to
use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks. It
was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color,
that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge. Thus
Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of in-
justice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them
as martyrs and victims.
When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of
petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway rob-
bery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect
on both sides the color-line: the Negroes refused to believe
the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white
juries, so that the greatest deterrent to crime, the public
opinion of one's own social caste, was lost, and the criminal
was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged. On the
other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt
or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of
passion beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is
bound to increase crime, and has increased it. To natural
viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of
revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of
both races and make peaceful attention to economic de-
velopment often impossible.
But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime
is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of
the young from being trained to crime. And here again the
peculiar conditions of the South have prevented proper pre-
cautions. I have seen twelve-year-old boys working in chains
on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front of the
schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and
this indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children
makes the chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauch-
ery. The struggle for reformatories, which has gone on in
Virginia, Georgia, and other States, is the one encouraging
sign of the awakening of some communities to the suicidal
results of this policy.
It is the public schools, however, which can be made,
outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent
self-respecting citizens. We have been so hotly engaged re-
cently in discussing trade-schools and the higher education
that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the
South has almost dropped from view. Of every five dollars
spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white
schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even
then the white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad
and cries for reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the
blacks? I am becoming more and more convinced, as I look
upon the system of common-school training in the South, that
the national government must soon step in and aid popular
education in some way. To-day it has been only by the most
strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South
that the Negro's share of the school fund has not been cut
down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and that move-
ment not only is not dead, but in many communities is
gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nation
expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe
economic competition, without political rights, and with ludi-
crously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it
expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the
dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who
are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country
will come to its senses?
I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, eco-
nomic, and political relations of the Negroes and whites in
the South, as I have conceived them, including, for the
reasons set forth, crime and education. But after all that has
been said on these more tangible matters of human contact,
there still remains a part essential to a proper description of
the South which it is difficult to describe or fix in terms easily
understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the
land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little
actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation
it is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and
yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life
taken as a whole. What is thus true of all communities is
peculiarly true of the South, where, outside of written history
and outside of printed law, there has been going on for a
generation as deep a storm and stress of human souls, as
intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of spirit,
as ever a people experienced. Within and without the sombre
veil of color vast social forces have been at work,--efforts
for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and
despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life,
and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which
have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of
change and excitement and unrest.
The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the mil-
lions of black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so
fatefully bound up with that of the nation. And yet the casual
observer visiting the South sees at first little of this. He notes
the growing frequency of dark faces as he rides along,--but
otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun shines, and this little
world seems as happy and contented as other worlds he has
visited. Indeed, on the question of questions--the Negro
problem--he hears so little that there almost seems to be a
conspiracy of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it,
and then usually in a far-fetched academic way, and indeed
almost every one seems to forget and ignore the darker half of
the land, until the astonished visitor is inclined to ask if after
all there IS any problem here. But if he lingers long enough
there comes the awakening: perhaps in a sudden whirl of
passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity; more
likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at
first noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the
shadows of the color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes
and whites; then he is suddenly aware that he cannot discover
a single dark face; or again at the close of a day's wandering
he may find himself in some strange assembly, where all
faces are tinged brown or black, and where he has the vague,
uncomfortable feeling of the stranger. He realizes at last that
silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two
great streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they
approach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness,
--then they divide and flow wide apart. It is done quietly; no
mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the swift arm of the law
and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as when
the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested
for talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between
these two worlds, despite much physical contact and daily
intermingling, there is almost no community of intellectual
life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings
of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with
the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and directly
after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic
servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of
intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, be-
tween the races. They lived in the same home, shared in the
family life, often attended the same church, and talked and
conversed with each other. But the increasing civilization of
the Negro since then has naturally meant the development of
higher classes: there are increasing numbers of ministers,
teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent
farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and
leaders of the blacks. Between them, however, and the best
element of the whites, there is little or no intellectual com-
merce. They go to separate churches, they live in separate
sections, they are strictly separated in all public gatherings,
they travel separately, and they are beginning to read dif-
ferent papers and books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts,
and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on
terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes who
might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the
doings of the black world from afar with no great regard
for accuracy; and so on, throughout the category of means for
intellectual communication,--schools, conferences, efforts for
social betterment, and the like,--it is usually true that the
very representatives of the two races, who for mutual benefit
and the welfare of the land ought to be in complete under-
standing and sympathy, are so far strangers that one side
thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other
thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover,
in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intoler-
ance of criticism is for obvious historical reasons so strong as
in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct.
The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by
the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philan-
thropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship
between the two has dropped still-born because some busy-
body has forced the color-question to the front and brought
the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators.
It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to
the social contact between the races. Nothing has come to
replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters
and house servants which the radical and more uncompromis-
ing drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused
almost completely to disappear. In a world where it means so
much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look
frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood;
in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means
more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,
--one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter
absence of such social amenities between estranged races,
whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars.
Here there can be none of that social going down to the
people,--the opening of heart and hand of the best to the
worst, in generous acknowledgment of a common humanity
and a common destiny. On the other hand, in matters of
simple almsgiving, where there can be no question of social
contact, and in the succor of the aged and sick, the South, as
if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is gener-
ous to a fault. The black beggar is never turned away without
a good deal more than a crust, and a call for help for the
unfortunate meets quick response. I remember, one cold win-
ter, in Atlanta, when I refrained from contributing to a public
relief fund lest Negroes should be discriminated against, I
afterward inquired of a friend: "Were any black people re-
ceiving aid?" "Why," said he, "they were all black."
And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem.
Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving,
but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who
would scorn charity. And here is a land where, in the higher
walks of life, in all the higher striving for the good and noble
and true, the color-line comes to separate natural friends and
coworkers; while at the bottom of the social group, in the
saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, that same line
wavers and disappears.
I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations
between the sons of master and man in the South. I have not
glossed over matters for policy's sake, for I fear we have
already gone too far in that sort of thing. On the other hand, I
have sincerely sought to let no unfair exaggerations creep in.
I do not doubt that in some Southern communities conditions
are better than those I have indicated; while I am no less
certain that in other communities they are far worse.
Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to
interest and perplex the best conscience of the South. Deeply
religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the
whites, they feel acutely the false position in which the Negro
problems place them. Such an essentially honest-hearted and
generous people cannot cite the caste-levelling precepts of
Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men,
without coming to feel more and more with each generation
that the present drawing of the color-line is a flat contradic-
tion to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as they
come to this point, the present social condition of the Negro
stands as a menace and a portent before even the most
open-minded: if there were nothing to charge against the
Negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they
argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what
can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?
can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possi-
ble fellowship with such persons and survive? and shall we let
a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or
the hope of our children? The argument so put is of great
strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of
thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of
our masses is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate
historical cause for this, and unmistakable evidence that no
small number have, in spite of tremendous disadvantages,
risen to the level of American civilization. And when, by
proscription and prejudice, these same Negroes are classed
with and treated like the lowest of their people, simply because
they are Negroes, such a policy not only discourages thrift
and intelligence among black men, but puts a direct premium
on the very things you complain of,--inefficiency and crime.
Draw lines of crime, of incompetency, of vice, as tightly and
uncompromisingly as you will, for these things must be
proscribed; but a color-line not only does not accomplish this
purpose, but thwarts it.
In the face of two such arguments, the future of the South
depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing
views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other's
position,--for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does
at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for
the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet
done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice
that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in the same
despised class.
It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-
prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for
the white South to reply that their social condition is the main
cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and
effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired
effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great
extent. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary ten-
dencies and unreasoning drawing of the color-line indefinitely
without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition
of the Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination.
Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the
color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice
and right triumph,
"That mind and soul according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster."
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