Project Gutenberg's The Negro Problem, by Booker T. Washington, et al.
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Title: The Negro Problem
Author: Booker T. Washington, et al.
Release Date: February 14, 2005 [EBook #15041]
Language: English
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THE
NEGRO PROBLEM
CONTENTS
I Industrial Education for the Negro
_Booker T. Washington_ 7
II The Talented Tenth
_W.E. Burghardt DuBois_ 31
III The Disfranchisement of the Negro
_ Charles W. Chesnutt_ 77
IV The Negro and the Law
_Wilford H. Smith_ 125
V The Characteristics of the Negro People
_H.T. Kealing_ 161
VI Representative American Negroes
_Paul Laurence Dunbar_ 187
VII The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day
_T. Thomas Fortune_ 211
[_Transcriber's Note: Variant spellings have been left in the text. Obvious
typos have been corrected and indicated with a footnote._]
_Industrial Education for the Negro_
By BOOKER T. WASHINGTON,
Principal of Tuskegee Institute
The necessity for the race's learning the difference between being
worked and working. He would not confine the Negro to industrial life,
but believes that the very best service which any one can render to what
is called the "higher education" is to teach the present generation to
work and save. This will create the wealth from which alone can come
leisure and the opportunity for higher education.
One of the most fundamental and far-reaching deeds that has been
accomplished during the last quarter of a century has been that by which
the Negro has been helped to find himself and to learn the secrets of
civilization--to learn that there are a few simple, cardinal principles
upon which a race must start its upward course, unless it would fail, and
its last estate be worse than its first.
It has been necessary for the Negro to learn the difference between being
worked and working--to learn that being worked meant degradation, while
working means civilization; that all forms of labor are honorable, and all
forms of idleness disgraceful. It has been necessary for him to learn that
all races that have got upon their feet have done so largely by laying an
economic foundation, and, in general, by beginning in a proper cultivation
and ownership of the soil.
Forty years ago my race emerged from slavery into freedom. If, in too many
cases, the Negro race began development at the wrong end, it was largely
because neither white nor black properly understood the case. Nor is it
any wonder that this was so, for never before in the history of the world
had just such a problem been presented as that of the two races at the
coming of freedom in this country.
For two hundred and fifty years, I believe the way for the redemption of
the Negro was being prepared through industrial development. Through all
those years the Southern white man did business with the Negro in a way
that no one else has done business with him. In most cases if a Southern
white man wanted a house built he consulted a Negro mechanic about the
plan and about the actual building of the structure. If he wanted a suit
of clothes made he went to a Negro tailor, and for shoes he went to a
shoemaker of the same race. In a certain way every slave plantation in the
South was an industrial school. On these plantations young colored men and
women were constantly being trained not only as farmers but as carpenters,
blacksmiths, wheelwrights, brick masons, engineers, cooks, laundresses,
sewing women and housekeepers.
I do not mean in any way to apologize for the curse of slavery, which was
a curse to both races, but in what I say about industrial training in
slavery I am simply stating facts. This training was crude, and was given
for selfish purposes. It did not answer the highest ends, because there
was an absence of mental training in connection with the training of the
hand. To a large degree, though, this business contact with the Southern
white man, and the industrial training on the plantations, left the Negro
at the close of the war in possession of nearly all the common and skilled
labor in the South. The industries that gave the South its power,
prominence and wealth prior to the Civil War were mainly the raising of
cotton, sugar cane, rice and tobacco. Before the way could be prepared for
the proper growing and marketing of these crops forests had to be cleared,
houses to be built, public roads and railroads constructed. In all these
works the Negro did most of the heavy work. In the planting, cultivating
and marketing of the crops not only was the Negro the chief dependence,
but in the manufacture of tobacco he became a skilled and proficient
workman, and in this, up to the present time, in the South, holds the lead
in the large tobacco manufactories.
In most of the industries, though, what happened? For nearly twenty years
after the war, except in a few instances, the value of the industrial
training given by the plantations was overlooked. Negro men and women were
educated in literature, in mathematics and in the sciences, with little
thought of what had been taking place during the preceding two hundred and
fifty years, except, perhaps, as something to be escaped, to be got as
far away from as possible. As a generation began to pass, those who had
been trained as mechanics in slavery began to disappear by death, and
gradually it began to be realized that there were few to take their
places. There were young men educated in foreign tongues, but few in
carpentry or in mechanical or architectural drawing. Many were trained in
Latin, but few as engineers and blacksmiths. Too many were taken from the
farm and educated, but educated in everything but farming. For this reason
they had no interest in farming and did not return to it. And yet
eighty-five per cent. of the Negro population of the Southern states lives
and for a considerable time will continue to live in the country
districts. The charge is often brought against the members of my race--and
too often justly, I confess--that they are found leaving the country
districts and flocking into the great cities where temptations are more
frequent and harder to resist, and where the Negro people too often become
demoralized. Think, though, how frequently it is the case that from the
first day that a pupil begins to go to school his books teach him much
about the cities of the world and city life, and almost nothing about the
country. How natural it is, then, that when he has the ordering of his
life he wants to live it in the city.
Only a short time before his death the late Mr. C.P. Huntington, to whose
memory a magnificent library has just been given by his widow to the
Hampton Institute for Negroes, in Virginia, said in a public address some
words which seem to me so wise that I want to quote them here:
"Our schools teach everybody a little of almost everything, but, in my
opinion, they teach very few children just what they ought to know in
order to make their way successfully in life. They do not put into their
hands the tools they are best fitted to use, and hence so many failures.
Many a mother and sister have worked and slaved, living upon scanty food,
in order to give a son and brother a "liberal education," and in doing
this have built up a barrier between the boy and the work he was fitted to
do. Let me say to you that all honest work is honorable work. If the labor
is manual, and seems common, you will have all the more chance to be
thinking of other things, or of work that is higher and brings better pay,
and to work out in your minds better and higher duties and
responsibilities for yourselves, and for thinking of ways by which you can
help others as well as yourselves, and bring them up to your own higher
level."
Some years ago, when we decided to make tailoring a part of our training
at the Tuskegee Institute, I was amazed to find that it was almost
impossible to find in the whole country an educated colored man who could
teach the making of clothing. We could find numbers of them who could
teach astronomy, theology, Latin or grammar, but almost none who could
instruct in the making of clothing, something that has to be used by every
one of us every day in the year. How often have I been discouraged as I
have gone through the South, and into the homes of the people of my race,
and have found women who could converse intelligently upon abstruse
subjects, and yet could not tell how to improve the condition of the
poorly cooked and still more poorly served bread and meat which they and
their families were eating three times a day. It is discouraging to find a
girl who can tell you the geographical location of any country on the
globe and who does not know where to place the dishes upon a common dinner
table. It is discouraging to find a woman who knows much about theoretical
chemistry, and who cannot properly wash and iron a shirt.
In what I say here I would not by any means have it understood that I
would limit or circumscribe the mental development of the Negro-student.
No race can be lifted until its mind is awakened and strengthened. By the
side of industrial training should always go mental and moral training,
but the pushing of mere abstract knowledge into the head means little. We
want more than the mere performance of mental gymnastics. Our knowledge
must be harnessed to the things of real life. I would encourage the Negro
to secure all the mental strength, all the mental culture--whether gleaned
from science, mathematics, history, language or literature that his
circumstances will allow, but I believe most earnestly that for years to
come the education of the people of my race should be so directed that the
greatest proportion of the mental strength of the masses will be brought
to bear upon the every-day practical things of life, upon something that
is needed to be done, and something which they will be permitted to do in
the community in which they reside. And just the same with the
professional class which the race needs and must have, I would say give
the men and women of that class, too, the training which will best fit
them to perform in the most successful manner the service which the race
demands.
I would not confine the race to industrial life, not even to agriculture,
for example, although I believe that by far the greater part of the Negro
race is best off in the country districts and must and should continue to
live there, but I would teach the race that in industry the foundation
must be laid--that the very best service which any one can render to what
is called the higher education is to teach the present generation to
provide a material or industrial foundation. On such a foundation as this
will grow habits of thrift, a love of work, economy, ownership of
property, bank accounts. Out of it in the future will grow practical
education, professional education, positions of public responsibility. Out
of it will grow moral and religious strength. Out of it will grow wealth
from which alone can come leisure and the opportunity for the enjoyment of
literature and the fine arts.
In the words of the late beloved Frederick Douglass: "Every blow of the
sledge hammer wielded by a sable arm is a powerful blow in support of our
cause. Every colored mechanic is by virtue of circumstances an elevator of
his race. Every house built by a black man is a strong tower against the
allied hosts of prejudice. It is impossible for us to attach too much
importance to this aspect of the subject. Without industrial development
there can be no wealth; without wealth there can be no leisure; without
leisure no opportunity for thoughtful reflection and the cultivation of
the higher arts."
I would set no limits to the attainments of the Negro in arts, in letters
or statesmanship, but I believe the surest way to reach those ends is by
laying the foundation in the little things of life that lie immediately
about one's door. I plead for industrial education and development for the
Negro not because I want to cramp him, but because I want to free him. I
want to see him enter the all-powerful business and commercial world.
It was such combined mental, moral and industrial education which the late
General Armstrong set out to give at the Hampton Institute when he
established that school thirty years ago. The Hampton Institute has
continued along the lines laid down by its great founder, and now each
year an increasing number of similar schools are being established in the
South, for the people of both races.
Early in the history of the Tuskegee Institute we began to combine
industrial training with mental and moral culture. Our first efforts were
in the direction of agriculture, and we began teaching this with no
appliances except one hoe and a blind mule. From this small beginning we
have grown until now the Institute owns two thousand acres of land, eight
hundred of which are cultivated each year by the young men of the school.
We began teaching wheelwrighting and blacksmithing in a small way to the
men, and laundry work, cooking and sewing and housekeeping to the young
women. The fourteen hundred and over young men and women who attended the
school during the last school year received instruction--in addition to
academic and religious training--in thirty-three trades and industries,
including carpentry, blacksmithing, printing, wheelwrighting
harnessmaking, painting, machinery, founding, shoemaking, brickmasonry and
brickmaking, plastering, sawmilling, tinsmithing, tailoring, mechanical
and architectural drawing, electrical and steam engineering, canning,
sewing, dressmaking, millinery, cooking, laundering, housekeeping,
mattress making, basketry, nursing, agriculture, dairying and stock
raising, horticulture.
Not only do the students receive instruction in these trades, but they do
actual work, by means of which more than half of them pay some part or all
of their expenses while remaining at the school. Of the sixty buildings
belonging to the school all but four were almost wholly erected by the
students as a part of their industrial education. Even the bricks which go
into the walls are made by students in the school's brick yard, in which,
last year, they manufactured two million bricks.
When we first began this work at Tuskegee, and the idea got spread among
the people of my race that the students who came to the Tuskegee school
were to be taught industries in connection with their academic studies,
were, in other words, to be taught to work, I received a great many verbal
messages and letters from parents informing me that they wanted their
children taught books, but not how to work. This protest went on for three
or four years, but I am glad to be able to say now that our people have
very generally been educated to a point where they see their own needs and
conditions so clearly that it has been several years since we have had a
single protest from parents against the teaching of industries, and there
is now a positive enthusiasm for it. In fact, public sentiment among the
students at Tuskegee is now so strong for industrial training that it
would hardly permit a student to remain on the grounds who was unwilling
to labor.
It seems to me that too often mere book education leaves the Negro young
man or woman in a weak position. For example, I have seen a Negro girl
taught by her mother to help her in doing laundry work at home. Later,
when this same girl was graduated from the public schools or a high school
and returned home she finds herself educated out of sympathy with laundry
work, and yet not able to find anything to do which seems in keeping with
the cost and character of her education. Under these circumstances we
cannot be surprised if she does not fulfill the expectations made for her.
What should have been done for her, it seems to me, was to give her along
with her academic education thorough training in the latest and best
methods of laundry work, so that she could have put so much skill and
intelligence into it that the work would have been lifted out from the
plane of drudgery[A]. The home which she would then have been able to
found by the results of her work would have enabled her to help her
children to take a still more responsible position in life.
Almost from the first Tuskegee has kept in mind--and this I think should
be the policy of all industrial schools--fitting students for occupations
which would be open to them in their home communities. Some years ago we
noted the fact that there was beginning to be a demand in the South for
men to operate dairies in a skillful, modern manner. We opened a dairy
department in connection with the school, where a number of young men
could have instruction in the latest and most scientific methods of dairy
work. At present we have calls--mainly from Southern white men--for twice
as many dairymen as we are able to supply. What is equally satisfactory,
the reports which come to us indicate that our young men are giving the
highest satisfaction and are fast changing and improving the dairy product
in the communities into which they go. I use the dairy here as an example.
What I have said of this is equally true of many of the other industries
which we teach. Aside from the economic value of this work I cannot but
believe, and my observation confirms me in my belief, that as we continue
to place Negro men and women of intelligence, religion, modesty,
conscience and skill in every community in the South, who will prove by
actual results their value to the community, I cannot but believe, I say,
that this will constitute a solution to many of the present political and
social difficulties.
Many seem to think that industrial education is meant to make the Negro
work as he worked in the days of slavery. This is far from my conception
of industrial education. If this training is worth anything to the Negro,
it consists in teaching him how not to work, but how to make the forces of
nature--air, steam, water, horse-power and electricity--work for him. If
it has any value it is in lifting labor up out of toil and drudgery into
the plane of the dignified and the beautiful. The Negro in the South works
and works hard; but too often his ignorance and lack of skill causes him
to do his work in the most costly and shiftless manner, and this keeps him
near the bottom of the ladder in the economic world.
I have not emphasized particularly in these pages the great need of
training the Negro in agriculture, but I believe that this branch of
industrial education does need very great emphasis. In this connection I
want to quote some words which Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Montgomery,
Alabama, has recently written upon this subject:
"We must incorporate into our public school system a larger recognition of
the practical and industrial elements in educational training. Ours is an
agricultural population. The school must be brought more closely to the
soil. The teaching of history, for example, is all very well, but nobody
can really know anything of history unless he has been taught to see
things grow--has so seen things not only with the outward eye, but with
the eyes of his intelligence and conscience. The actual things of the
present are more important, however, than the institutions of the past.
Even to young children can be shown the simpler conditions and processes
of growth--how corn is put into the ground--how cotton and potatoes
should be planted--how to choose the soil best adapted to a particular
plant, how to improve that soil, how to care for the plant while it grows,
how to get the most value out of it, how to use the elements of waste for
the fertilization of other crops; how, through the alternation of crops,
the land may be made to increase the annual value of its products--these
things, upon their elementary side are absolutely vital to the worth and
success of hundreds of thousands of these people of the Negro race, and
yet our whole educational system has practically ignored them.
* * * * *
"Such work will mean not only an education in agriculture, but an
education through agriculture and education, through natural symbols and
practical forms, which will educate as deeply, as broadly and as truly as
any other system which the world has known. Such changes will bring far
larger results than the mere improvement of our Negroes. They will give
us an agricultural class, a class of tenants or small land owners, trained
not away from the soil, but in relation to the soil and in intelligent
dependence upon its resources."
I close, then, as I began, by saying that as a slave the Negro was worked,
and that as a freeman he must learn to work. There is still doubt in many
quarters as to the ability of the Negro unguided, unsupported, to hew his
own path and put into visible, tangible, indisputable form, products and
signs of civilization. This doubt cannot be much affected by abstract
arguments, no matter how delicately and convincingly woven together.
Patiently, quietly, doggedly, persistently, through summer and winter,
sunshine and shadow, by self-sacrifice, by foresight, by honesty and
industry, we must re-enforce argument with results. One farm bought, one
house built, one home sweetly and intelligently kept, one man who is the
largest tax payer or has the largest bank account, one school or church
maintained, one factory running successfully, one truck garden profitably
cultivated, one patient cured by a Negro doctor, one sermon well
preached, one office well filled, one life cleanly lived--these will tell
more in our favor than all the abstract eloquence that can be summoned to
plead our cause. Our pathway must be up through the soil, up through
swamps, up through forests, up through the streams, the rocks, up through
commerce, education and religion!
[Footnote A: In the original, this was 'drudggery'.]
_The Talented Tenth_
By PROF. W.E. BURGHARDT DuBOIS
A strong plea for the higher education of the Negro, which those who are
interested in the future of the freedmen cannot afford to ignore. Prof.
DuBois produces ample evidence to prove conclusively the truth of his
statement that "to attempt to establish any sort of a system of common
and industrial school training, without _first_ providing for the higher
training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the
winds."
[Illustration: W.E. BURGHARDT DuBOIS.]
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional
men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal
with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this
race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of
the Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a
difficult and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational
experts, but its object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the
object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily
men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess
artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make
manhood the object of the work of the schools--intelligence, broad
sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of
men to it--this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must
underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill
of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man
mistake the means of living for the object of life.
* * * * *
If this be true--and who can deny it--three tasks lay before me; first to
show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among
American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly, to show how
these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly, to show their
relation to the Negro problem.
* * * * *
You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has
been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and
elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded
their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but
the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of
natural internal leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the
first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for
natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In colonial days came
Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe striving against the bars of prejudice;
and Benjamin Banneker, the almanac maker, voiced their longings when he
said to Thomas Jefferson, "I freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am
of the African race, and in colour which is natural to them, of the
deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the
Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that I now confess to you that I am not
under that state of tyrannical thraldom and inhuman captivity to which too
many of my brethren are doomed, but that I have abundantly tasted of the
fruition of those blessings which proceed from that free and unequalled
liberty with which you are favored, and which I hope you will willingly
allow, you have mercifully received from the immediate hand of that Being
from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift.
"Suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the arms of the
British crown were exerted with every powerful effort, in order to reduce
you to a state of servitude; look back, I entreat you, on the variety of
dangers to which you were exposed; reflect on that period in which every
human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore
the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a
serious and grateful sense of your miraculous and providential
preservation, you cannot but acknowledge, that the present freedom and
tranquility which you enjoy, you have mercifully received, and that a
peculiar blessing of heaven.
"This, sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a state
of Slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its
condition. It was then that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that
you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy
to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages: 'We hold these
truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'"
Then came Dr. James Derham, who could tell even the learned Dr. Rush
something of medicine, and Lemuel Haynes, to whom Middlebury College gave
an honorary A.M. in 1804. These and others we may call the Revolutionary
group of distinguished Negroes--they were persons of marked ability,
leaders of a Talented Tenth, standing conspicuously among the best of
their time. They strove by word and deed to save the color line from
becoming the line between the bond and free, but all they could do was
nullified by Eli Whitney and the Curse of Gold. So they passed into
forgetfulness.
But their spirit did not wholly die; here and there in the early part of
the century came other exceptional men. Some were natural sons of
unnatural fathers and were given often a liberal training and thus a race
of educated mulattoes sprang up to plead for black men's rights. There was
Ira Aldridge, whom all Europe loved to honor; there was that Voice crying
in the Wilderness, David Walker, and saying:
"I declare it does appear to me as though some nations think God is
asleep, or that he made the Africans for nothing else but to dig their
mines and work their farms, or they cannot believe history, sacred or
profane. I ask every man who has a heart, and is blessed with the
privilege of believing--Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures?
Do you say he is? Then if he gives peace and tranquility to tyrants and
permits them to keep our fathers, our mothers, ourselves and our children
in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to support them and their families,
would he be to us a God of Justice? I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us
and our children in the most abject ignorance and degradation that ever a
people were afflicted with since the world began--I say if God gives you
peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and
our children, who have never given you the least provocation--would He be
to us a God of Justice? If you will allow that we are men, who feel for
each other, does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children,
cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you for the cruelties and murders
with which you have and do continue to afflict us?"
This was the wild voice that first aroused Southern legislators in 1829 to
the terrors of abolitionism.
In 1831 there met that first Negro convention in Philadelphia, at which
the world gaped curiously but which bravely attacked the problems of race
and slavery, crying out against persecution and declaring that "Laws as
cruel in themselves as they were unconstitutional and unjust, have in many
places been enacted against our poor, unfriended and unoffending brethren
(without a shadow of provocation on our part), at whose bare recital the
very savage draws himself up for fear of contagion--looks noble and
prides himself because he bears not the name of Christian." Side by side
this free Negro movement, and the movement for abolition, strove until
they merged into one strong stream. Too little notice has been taken of
the work which the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the great
abolition crusade. From the very day that a Philadelphia colored man
became the first subscriber to Garrison's "Liberator," to the day when
Negro soldiers made the Emancipation Proclamation possible, black leaders
worked shoulder to shoulder with white men in a movement, the success of
which would have been impossible without them. There was Purvis and
Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander
Crummel, and above all, Frederick Douglass--what would the abolition
movement have been without them? They stood as living examples of the
possibilities of the Negro race, their own hard experiences and well
wrought culture said silently more than all the drawn periods of
orators--they were the men who made American slavery impossible. As Maria
Weston Chapman once said, from the school of anti-slavery agitation "a
throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators and accomplished gentlemen of
color have taken their degree! It has equally implanted hopes and
aspirations, noble thoughts, and sublime purposes, in the hearts of both
races. It has prepared the white man for the freedom of the black man, and
it has made the black man scorn the thought of enslavement, as does a
white man, as far as its influence has extended. Strengthen that noble
influence! Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in
slavery some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah, whose strong natures blossomed even
in bondage, like a fine plant beneath a heavy stone. Now, under the
elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society,
the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the
noblest temples."
Where were these black abolitionists trained? Some, like Frederick
Douglass, were self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like
Alexander Crummell and McCune Smith, graduated from famous foreign
universities. Most of them rose up through the colored schools of New York
and Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men like Russworm, of
Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet.
After emancipation came a new group of educated and gifted leaders:
Langston, Bruce and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne. Through political
organization, historical and polemic writing and moral regeneration, these
men strove to uplift their people. It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at
them and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at
the plow and not in the Senate--a foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred
and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling
was in vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred
and fifty years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow,
but unless he have political rights and righteously guarded civic
status, he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything
of rascals, that he now is. This all sane men know even if they dare
not say it.
And so we come to the present--a day of cowardice and vacillation, of
strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced
dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the
Negro people? The "exceptions" of course. And yet so sure as this Talented
Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in
alarm: "These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime--these
are the happy rule." Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation
made them the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched
Negroes who dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous,
crushed dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and
made to flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was
able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk. A
saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires,
continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional
it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the
capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men. Do Americans ever
stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood,
well-educated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no
breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and
usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure
of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is
it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such
aspiration, to nullify such leadership and seek to crush these people back
into the mass out of which by toil and travail, they and their fathers
have raised themselves?
Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly
raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and
character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the
bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top
downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that
are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of
human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that
progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few
already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the
risen down.
How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands
of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and
most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and
universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the
university of the Negro should teach or how it should teach it--I
willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar
curriculum. But this is true: A university is a human invention for the
transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation,
through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no
other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or
nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of
training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and
necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their
bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in
the beginning were the favored sons of the freedmen trained. Out of the
colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase,
Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and
civilization in the black South. Where ought they to have begun to build?
At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth.
Aye! truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge,
down in the very depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice
strike into the lowest soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded
colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the
normal schools went teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered
other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek
and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000
others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the
alphabet to nine millions of men, who to-day hold $300,000,000 of
property. It was a miracle--the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th
century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us
that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of
education is first to gather the children and buy them spelling books and
hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers, if haply they may find
them; or again they would teach men Work, but as for Life--why, what has
Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly.
Was the work of these college founders successful; did it stand the test
of time? Did the college graduates, with all their fine theories of life,
really live? Are they useful men helping to civilize and elevate their
less fortunate fellows? Let us see. Omitting all institutions which have
not actually graduated students from a college course, there are to-day in
the United States thirty-four institutions giving something above high
school training to Negroes and designed especially for this race.
Three of these were established in border States before the War; thirteen
were planted by the Freedmen's Bureau in the years 1864-1869; nine were
established between 1870 and 1880 by various church bodies; five were
established after 1881 by Negro churches, and four are state institutions
supported by United States' agricultural funds. In most cases the college
departments are small adjuncts to high and common school work. As a matter
of fact six institutions--Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Shaw, Wilberforce and
Leland, are the important Negro colleges so far as actual work and number
of students are concerned. In all these institutions, seven hundred and
fifty Negro college students are enrolled. In grade the best of these
colleges are about a year behind the smaller New England colleges and a
typical curriculum is that of Atlanta University. Here students from the
grammar grades, after a three years' high school course, take a college
course of 136 weeks. One-fourth of this time is given to Latin and Greek;
one-fifth, to English and modern languages; one-sixth, to history and
social science; one-seventh, to natural science; one-eighth to
mathematics, and one-eighth to philosophy and pedagogy.
In addition to these students in the South, Negroes have attended Northern
colleges for many years. As early as 1826 one was graduated from Bowdoin
College, and from that time till to-day nearly every year has seen
elsewhere, other such graduates. They have, of course, met much color
prejudice. Fifty years ago very few colleges would admit them at all. Even
to-day no Negro has ever been admitted to Princeton, and at some other
leading institutions they are rather endured than encouraged. Oberlin was
the great pioneer in the work of blotting out the color line in colleges,
and has more Negro graduates by far than any other Northern college.
The total number of Negro college graduates up to 1899, (several of the
graduates of that year not being reported), was as follows:
---------------+---------------+-----------------
|Negro Colleges.| White Colleges.
---------------+---------------+-----------------
Before '76 | 137 | 75
'75-80 | 143 | 22
'80-85 | 250 | 31
'85-90 | 413 | 43
'90-95 | 465 | 66
'96-99 | 475 | 88
Class Unknown | 57 | 64
---------------+---------------+-----------------
Total | 1,914 | 390
---------------+---------------+-----------------
Of these graduates 2,079 were men and 252 were women; 50 per cent. of
Northern-born college men come South to work among the masses of their
people, at a sacrifice which few people realize; nearly 90 per cent. of
the Southern-born graduates instead of seeking that personal freedom and
broader intellectual atmosphere which their training has led them, in some
degree, to conceive, stay and labor and wait in the midst of their black
neighbors and relatives.
The most interesting question, and in many respects the crucial question,
to be asked concerning college-bred Negroes, is: Do they earn a living? It
has been intimated more than once that the higher training of Negroes has
resulted in sending into the world of work, men who could find nothing to
do suitable to their talents. Now and then there comes a rumor of a
colored college man working at menial service, etc. Fortunately, returns
as to occupations of college-bred Negroes, gathered by the Atlanta
conference, are quite full--nearly sixty per cent. of the total number of
graduates.
This enables us to reach fairly certain conclusions as to the occupations
of all college-bred Negroes. Of 1,312 persons reported, there were:
---------------------------------+----------+------------
| Per Cent.|
---------------------------------+----------+------------
Teachers, | 53.4 |************
Clergymen, | 16.8 |******
Physicians, etc., | 6.3 |****
Students, | 5.6 |***
Lawyers, | 4.7 |***
In Govt. Service, | 4.0 |**
In Business, | 3.6 |**
Farmers and Artisans, | 2.7 |*
Editors, Secretaries and Clerks, | 2.4 |*
Miscellaneous. | .5 |*
---------------------------------+----------+------------
Over half are teachers, a sixth are preachers, another sixth are students
and professional men; over 6 per cent. are farmers, artisans and
merchants, and 4 per cent. are in government service. In detail the
occupations are as follows:
_Occupations of College-Bred Men._
Teachers:
Presidents and Deans, 19
Teacher of Music, 7
Professors, Principals and Teachers, 675 Total 701
Clergymen:
Bishop, 1
Chaplains U.S. Army, 2
Missionaries, 9
Presiding Elders, 12
Preachers, 197 Total 221
Physicians,
Doctors of Medicine, 76
Druggists, 4
Dentists, 3 Total 83
Students, 74
Lawyers, 62
Civil Service:
U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary, 1
U.S. Consul, 1
U.S. Deputy Collector, 1
U.S. Gauger, 1
U.S. Postmasters, 2
U.S. Clerks, 44
State Civil Service, 2
City Civil Service, 1 Total 53
Business Men:
Merchants, etc., 30
Managers, 13
Real Estate Dealers, 4 Total 47
Farmers, 26
Clerks and Secretaries:
Secretary of National Societies, 7
Clerks, etc., 15 Total 22
Artisans, 9
Editors, 9
Miscellaneous, 5
These figures illustrate vividly the function of the college-bred Negro.
He is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of
the community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social
movements. It need hardly be argued that the Negro people need social
leadership more than most groups; that they have no traditions to fall
back upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well
defined social classes. All these things must be slowly and painfully
evolved. The preacher was, even before the war, the group leader of the
Negroes, and the church their greatest social institution. Naturally this
preacher was ignorant and often immoral, and the problem of replacing the
older type by better educated men has been a difficult one. Both by direct
work and by direct influence on other preachers, and on congregations, the
college-bred preacher has an opportunity for reformatory work and moral
inspiration, the value of which cannot be overestimated.
It has, however, been in the furnishing of teachers that the Negro college
has found its peculiar function. Few persons realize how vast a work, how
mighty a revolution has been thus accomplished. To furnish five millions
and more of ignorant people with teachers of their own race and blood, in
one generation, was not only a very difficult undertaking, but a very
important one, in that, it placed before the eyes of almost every Negro
child an attainable ideal. It brought the masses of the blacks in contact
with modern civilization, made black men the leaders of their communities
and trainers of the new generation. In this work college-bred Negroes were
first teachers, and then teachers of teachers. And here it is that the
broad culture of college work has been of peculiar value. Knowledge of
life and its wider meaning, has been the point of the Negro's deepest
ignorance, and the sending out of teachers whose training has not been
simply for bread winning, but also for human culture, has been of
inestimable value in the training of these men.
In earlier years the two occupations of preacher and teacher were
practically the only ones open to the black college graduate. Of later
years a larger diversity of life among his people, has opened new avenues
of employment. Nor have these college men been paupers and spendthrifts;
557 college-bred Negroes owned in 1899, $1,342,862.50 worth of real
estate, (assessed value) or $2,411 per family. The real value of the total
accumulations of the whole group is perhaps about $10,000,000, or $5,000 a
piece. Pitiful, is it not, beside the fortunes of oil kings and steel
trusts, but after all is the fortune of the millionaire the only stamp of
true and successful living? Alas! it is, with many, and there's the rub.
The problem of training the Negro is to-day immensely complicated by the
fact that the whole question of the efficiency and appropriateness of our
present systems of education, for any kind of child, is a matter of active
debate, in which final settlement seems still afar off. Consequently it
often happens that persons arguing for or against certain systems of
education for Negroes, have these controversies in mind and miss the real
question at issue. The main question, so far as the Southern Negro is
concerned, is: What under the present circumstance, must a system of
education do in order to raise the Negro as quickly as possible in the
scale of civilization? The answer to this question seems to me clear: It
must strengthen the Negro's character, increase his knowledge and teach
him to earn a living. Now it goes without saying, that it is hard to do
all these things simultaneously or suddenly, and that at the same time it
will not do to give all the attention to one and neglect the others; we
could give black boys trades, but that alone will not civilize a race of
ex-slaves; we might simply increase their knowledge of the world, but this
would not necessarily make them wish to use this knowledge honestly; we
might seek to strengthen character and purpose, but to what end if this
people have nothing to eat or to wear? A system of education is not one
thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter
of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and
without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. If then we
start out to train an ignorant and unskilled people with a heritage of bad
habits, our system of training must set before itself two great aims--the
one dealing with knowledge and character, the other part seeking to give
the child the technical knowledge necessary for him to earn a living under
the present circumstances. These objects are accomplished in part by the
opening of the common schools on the one, and of the industrial schools on
the other. But only in part, for there must also be trained those who are
to teach these schools--men and women of knowledge and culture and
technical skill who understand modern civilization, and have the training
and aptitude to impart it to the children under them. There must be
teachers, and teachers of teachers, and to attempt to establish any sort
of a system of common and industrial school training, without _first_
(and I say _first_ advisedly) without _first_ providing for the higher
training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the
winds. School houses do not teach themselves--piles of brick and mortar
and machinery do not send out _men_. It is the trained, living human soul,
cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the
real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they
be black or white, Greek, Russian or American. Nothing, in these latter
days, has so dampened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational
movements, as the fact that such movements have been accompanied by
ridicule and denouncement and decrying of those very institutions of
higher training which made the Negro public school possible, and make
Negro industrial schools thinkable. It was Fisk, Atlanta, Howard and
Straight, those colleges born of the faith and sacrifice of the
abolitionists, that placed in the black schools of the South the 30,000
teachers and more, which some, who depreciate the work of these higher
schools, are using to teach their own new experiments. If Hampton,
Tuskegee and the hundred other industrial schools prove in the future to
be as successful as they deserve to be, then their success in training
black artisans for the South, will be due primarily to the white colleges
of the North and the black colleges of the South, which trained the
teachers who to-day conduct these institutions. There was a time when the
American people believed pretty devoutly that a log of wood with a boy at
one end and Mark Hopkins at the other, represented the highest ideal of
human training. But in these eager days it would seem that we have changed
all that and think it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills and a hammer
to this outfit, and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark
Hopkins.
I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount necessity of
teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and skillfully; or seem
to depreciate in the slightest degree the important part industrial
schools must play in the accomplishment of these ends, but I _do_ say, and
insist upon it, that it is industrialism drunk with its vision of success,
to imagine that its own work can be accomplished without providing for the
training of broadly cultured men and women to teach its own teachers, and
to teach the teachers of the public schools.
But I have already said that human education is not simply a matter of
schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life--the training
of one's home, of one's daily companions, of one's social class. Now the
black boy of the South moves in a black world--a world with its own
leaders, its own thoughts, its own ideals. In this world he gets by far
the larger part of his life training, and through the eyes of this dark
world he peers into the veiled world beyond. Who guides and determines the
education which he receives in his world? His teachers here are the
group-leaders of the Negro people--the physicians and clergymen, the
trained fathers and mothers, the influential and forceful men about him of
all kinds; here it is, if at all, that the culture of the surrounding
world trickles through and is handed on by the graduates of the higher
schools. Can such culture training of group leaders be neglected? Can we
afford to ignore it? Do you think that if the leaders of thought among
Negroes are not trained and educated thinkers, that they will have no
leaders? On the contrary a hundred half-trained demagogues will still hold
the places they so largely occupy now, and hundreds of vociferous
busy-bodies will multiply. You have no choice; either you must help
furnish this race from within its own ranks with thoughtful men of trained
leadership, or you must suffer the evil consequences of a headless
misguided rabble.
I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black
boys, and for white boys, too. I believe that next to the founding of
Negro colleges the most valuable addition to Negro education since the
war, has been industrial training for black boys. Nevertheless, I insist
that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is
to make carpenters men; there are two means of making the carpenter a man,
each equally important: the first is to give the group and community in
which he works, liberally trained teachers and leaders to teach him and
his family what life means; the second is to give him sufficient
intelligence and technical skill to make him an efficient workman; the
first object demands the Negro college and college-bred men--not a
quantity of such colleges, but a few of excellent quality; not too many
college-bred men, but enough to leaven the lump, to inspire the masses, to
raise the Talented Tenth to leadership; the second object demands a good
system of common schools, well-taught, conveniently located and properly
equipped.
The Sixth Atlanta Conference truly said in 1901:
"We call the attention of the Nation to the fact that less than one
million of the three million Negro children of school age, are at present
regularly attending school, and these attend a session which lasts only a
few months.
"We are to-day deliberately rearing millions of our citizens in ignorance,
and at the same time limiting the rights of citizenship by educational
qualifications. This is unjust. Half the black youth of the land have no
opportunities open to them for learning to read, write and cipher. In the
discussion as to the proper training of Negro children after they leave
the public schools, we have forgotten that they are not yet decently
provided with public schools.
"Propositions are beginning to be made in the South to reduce the already
meagre school facilities of Negroes. We congratulate the South on
resisting, as much as it has, this pressure, and on the many millions it
has spent on Negro education. But it is only fair to point out that Negro
taxes and the Negroes' share of the income from indirect taxes and
endowments have fully repaid this expenditure, so that the Negro public
school system has not in all probability cost the white taxpayers a single
cent since the war.
"This is not fair. Negro schools should be a public burden, since they are
a public benefit. The Negro has a right to demand good common school
training at the hands of the States and the Nation since by their fault he
is not in position to pay for this himself."
What is the chief need for the building up of the Negro public school in
the South? The Negro race in the South needs teachers to-day above all
else. This is the concurrent testimony of all who know the situation. For
the supply of this great demand two things are needed--institutions of
higher education and money for school houses and salaries. It is usually
assumed that a hundred or more institutions for Negro training are to-day
turning out so many teachers and college-bred men that the race is
threatened with an over-supply. This is sheer nonsense. There are to-day
less than 3,000 living Negro college graduates in the United States, and
less than 1,000 Negroes in college. Moreover, in the 164 schools for
Negroes, 95 per cent. of their students are doing elementary and secondary
work, work which should be done in the public schools. Over half the
remaining 2,157 students are taking high school studies. The mass of
so-called "normal" schools for the Negro, are simply doing elementary
common school work, or, at most, high school work, with a little
instruction in methods. The Negro colleges and the post-graduate courses
at other institutions are the only agencies for the broader and more
careful training of teachers. The work of these institutions is hampered
for lack of funds. It is getting increasingly difficult to get funds for
training teachers in the best modern methods, and yet all over the South,
from State Superintendents, county officials, city boards and school
principals comes the wail, "We need TEACHERS!" and teachers must be
trained. As the fairest minded of all white Southerners, Atticus G.
Haygood, once said: "The defects of colored teachers are so great as to
create an urgent necessity for training better ones. Their excellencies
and their successes are sufficient to justify the best hopes of success in
the effort, and to vindicate the judgment of those who make large
investments of money and service, to give to colored students opportunity
for thoroughly preparing themselves for the work of teaching children of
their people."
The truth of this has been strikingly shown in the marked improvement of
white teachers in the South. Twenty years ago the rank and file of white
public school teachers were not as good as the Negro teachers. But they,
by scholarships and good salaries, have been encouraged to thorough normal
and collegiate preparation, while the Negro teachers have been discouraged
by starvation wages and the idea that any training will do for a black
teacher. If carpenters are needed it is well and good to train men as
carpenters. But to train men as carpenters, and then set them to teaching
is wasteful and criminal; and to train men as teachers and then refuse
them living wages, unless they become carpenters, is rank nonsense.
The United States Commissioner of Education says in his report for 1900:
"For comparison between the white and colored enrollment in secondary and
higher education, I have added together the enrollment in high schools and
secondary schools, with the attendance on colleges and universities, not
being sure of the actual grade of work done in the colleges and
universities. The work done in the secondary schools is reported in such
detail in this office, that there can be no doubt of its grade."
He then makes the following comparisons of persons in every million
enrolled in secondary and higher education:
_Whole Country._ _Negroes._
1880 4,362 1,289
1900 10,743 2,061
And he concludes: "While the number in colored high schools and colleges
had increased somewhat faster than the population, it had not kept pace
with the average of the whole country, for it had fallen from 30 per cent.
to 24 per cent. of the average quota. Of all colored pupils, one (1) in
one hundred was engaged in secondary and higher work, and that ratio has
continued substantially for the past twenty years. If the ratio of colored
population in secondary and higher education is to be equal to the average
for the whole country, it must be increased to five times its present
average." And if this be true of the secondary and higher education, it is
safe to say that the Negro has not one-tenth his quota in college studies.
How baseless, therefore, is the charge of too much training! We need Negro
teachers for the Negro common schools, and we need first-class normal
schools and colleges to train them. This is the work of higher Negro
education and it must be done.
Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of
civilization, and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools, the
carpenter, in order to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls for
trade schools. Now trade schools are not nearly such simple things as
people once thought. The original idea was that the "Industrial" school
was to furnish education, practically free, to those willing to work for
it; it was to "do" things--i.e.: become a center of productive industry,
it was to be partially, if not wholly, self-supporting, and it was to
teach trades. Admirable as were some of the ideas underlying this scheme,
the whole thing simply would not work in practice; it was found that if
you were to use time and material to teach trades thoroughly, you could
not at the same time keep the industries on a commercial basis and make
them pay. Many schools started out to do this on a large scale and went
into virtual bankruptcy. Moreover, it was found also that it was possible
to teach a boy a trade mechanically, without giving him the full
educative benefit of the process, and, vice versa, that there was a
distinctive educative value in teaching a boy to use his hands and eyes in
carrying out certain physical processes, even though he did not actually
learn a trade. It has happened, therefore, in the last decade, that a
noticeable change has come over the industrial schools. In the first place
the idea of commercially remunerative industry in a school is being pushed
rapidly to the back-ground. There are still schools with shops and farms
that bring an income, and schools that use student labor partially for the
erection of their buildings and the furnishing of equipment. It is coming
to be seen, however, in the education of the Negro, as clearly as it has
been seen in the education of the youths the world over, that it is the
_boy_ and not the material product, that is the true object of education.
Consequently the object of the industrial school came to be the thorough
training of boys regardless of the cost of the training, so long as it was
thoroughly well done.
Even at this point, however, the difficulties were not surmounted. In the
first place modern industry has taken great strides since the war, and the
teaching of trades is no longer a simple matter. Machinery and long
processes of work have greatly changed the work of the carpenter, the
ironworker and the shoemaker. A really efficient workman must be to-day an
intelligent man who has had good technical training in addition to
thorough common school, and perhaps even higher training. To meet this
situation the industrial schools began a further development; they
established distinct Trade Schools for the thorough training of better
class artisans, and at the same time they sought to preserve for the
purposes of general education, such of the simpler processes of elementary
trade learning as were best suited therefor. In this differentiation of
the Trade School and manual training, the best of the industrial schools
simply followed the plain trend of the present educational epoch. A
prominent educator tells us that, in Sweden, "In the beginning the
economic conception was generally adopted, and everywhere manual training
was looked upon as a means of preparing the children of the common people
to earn their living. But gradually it came to be recognized that manual
training has a more elevated purpose, and one, indeed, more useful in the
deeper meaning of the term. It came to be considered as an educative
process for the complete moral, physical and intellectual development of
the child."
Thus, again, in the manning of trade schools and manual training schools
we are thrown back upon the higher training as its source and chief
support. There was a time when any aged and wornout carpenter could teach
in a trade school. But not so to-day. Indeed the demand for college-bred
men by a school like Tuskegee, ought to make Mr. Booker T. Washington the
firmest friend of higher training. Here he has as helpers the son of a
Negro senator, trained in Greek and the humanities, and graduated at
Harvard; the son of a Negro congressman and lawyer, trained in Latin and
mathematics, and graduated at Oberlin; he has as his wife, a woman who
read Virgil and Homer in the same class room with me; he has as college
chaplain, a classical graduate of Atlanta University; as teacher of
science, a graduate of Fisk; as teacher of history, a graduate of
Smith,--indeed some thirty of his chief teachers are college graduates,
and instead of studying French grammars in the midst of weeds, or buying
pianos for dirty cabins, they are at Mr. Washington's right hand helping
him in a noble work. And yet one of the effects of Mr. Washington's
propaganda has been to throw doubt upon the expediency of such training
for Negroes, as these persons have had.
* * * * *
Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race
transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether you
like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do
not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are the
levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by
the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply
teach work--it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race
must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their
people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men
for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by
its exceptional men.
_The Disfranchisement of the Negro_
By CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
In this paper the author presents a straightforward statement of facts
concerning the disfranchisement of the Negro in the Southern States. Mr.
Chesnutt, who is too well known as a writer to need any introduction to
an American audience, puts the case for the Negro to the American people
very plainly, and spares neither the North nor the South.
[Illustration: CHARLES W. CHESNUTT.]
The right of American citizens of African descent, commonly called
Negroes, to vote upon the same terms as other citizens of the United
States, is plainly declared and firmly fixed by the Constitution. No such
person is called upon to present reasons why he should possess this right:
that question is foreclosed by the Constitution. The object of the
elective franchise is to give representation. So long as the Constitution
retains its present form, any State Constitution, or statute, which seeks,
by juggling the ballot, to deny the colored race fair representation, is a
clear violation of the fundamental law of the land, and a corresponding
injustice to those thus deprived of this right.
For thirty-five years this has been the law. As long as it was measurably
respected, the colored people made rapid strides in education, wealth,
character and self-respect. This the census proves, all statements to the
contrary notwithstanding. A generation has grown to manhood and womanhood
under the great, inspiring freedom conferred by the Constitution and
protected by the right of suffrage--protected in large degree by the mere
naked right, even when its exercise was hindered or denied by unlawful
means. They have developed, in every Southern community, good citizens,
who, if sustained and encouraged by just laws and liberal institutions,
would greatly augment their number with the passing years, and soon wipe
out the reproach of ignorance, unthrift, low morals and social
inefficiency, thrown at them indiscriminately and therefore unjustly, and
made the excuse for the equally undiscriminating contempt of their persons
and their rights. They have reduced their illiteracy nearly 50 per cent.
Excluded from the institutions of higher learning in their own States,
their young men hold their own, and occasionally carry away honors, in
the universities of the North. They have accumulated three hundred million
dollars worth of real and personal property. Individuals among them have
acquired substantial wealth, and several have attained to something like
national distinction in art, letters and educational leadership. They are
numerously represented in the learned professions. Heavily handicapped,
they have made such rapid progress that the suspicion is justified that
their advancement, rather than any stagnation or retrogression, is the
true secret of the virulent Southern hostility to their rights, which has
so influenced Northern opinion that it stands mute, and leaves the colored
people, upon whom the North conferred liberty, to the tender mercies of
those who have always denied their fitness for it.
It may be said, in passing, that the word "Negro," where used in this
paper, is used solely for convenience. By the census of 1890 there were
1,000,000 colored people in the country who were half, or more than half,
white, and logically there must be, as in fact there are, so many who
share the white blood in some degree, as to justify the assertion that the
race problem in the United States concerns the welfare and the status of a
mixed race. Their rights are not one whit the more sacred because of this
fact; but in an argument where injustice is sought to be excused because
of fundamental differences of race, it is well enough to bear in mind that
the race whose rights and liberties are endangered all over this country
by disfranchisement at the South, are the colored people who live in the
United States to-day, and not the low-browed, man-eating savage whom the
Southern white likes to set upon a block and contrast with Shakespeare and
Newton and Washington and Lincoln.
Despite and in defiance of the Federal Constitution, to-day in the six
Southern States of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, South
Carolina and Virginia, containing an aggregate colored population of about
6,000,000, these have been, to all intents and purposes, denied, so far
as the States can effect it, the right to vote. This disfranchisement is
accomplished by various methods, devised with much transparent ingenuity,
the effort being in each instance to violate the spirit of the Federal
Constitution by disfranchising the Negro, while seeming to respect its
letter by avoiding the mention of race or color.
These restrictions fall into three groups. The first comprises a property
qualification--the ownership of $300 worth or more of real or personal
property (Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia and South Carolina); the payment of
a poll tax (Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia); an educational
qualification--the ability to read and write (Alabama, Louisiana, North
Carolina). Thus far, those who believe in a restricted suffrage
everywhere, could perhaps find no reasonable fault with any one of these
qualifications, applied either separately or together.
But the Negro has made such progress that these restrictions alone would
perhaps not deprive him of effective representation. Hence the second
group. This comprises an "understanding" clause--the applicant must be
able "to read, or understand when read to him, any clause in the
Constitution" (Mississippi), or to read and explain, or to understand and
explain when read to him, any section of the Constitution (Virginia); an
employment qualification--the voter must be regularly employed in some
lawful occupation (Alabama); a character qualification--the voter must be
a person of good character and who "understands the duties and obligations
of citizens under a republican (!) form of government" (Alabama).
The qualifications under the first group it will be seen, are capable of
exact demonstration; those under the second group are left to the
discretion and judgment of the registering officer--for in most instances
these are all requirements for registration, which must precede voting.
But the first group, by its own force, and the second group, under
imaginable conditions, might exclude not only the Negro vote, but a large
part of the white vote. Hence, the third group, which comprises: a
military service qualification--any man who went to war, willingly or
unwillingly, in a good cause or a bad, is entitled to register (Ala.,
Va.); a prescriptive qualification, under which are included all male
persons who were entitled to vote on January 1, 1867, at which date the
Negro had not yet been given the right to vote; a hereditary
qualification, (the so-called "grandfather" clause), whereby any son
(Va.), or descendant (Ala.), of a soldier, and (N.C.) the descendant of
any person who had the right to vote on January 1, 1867, inherits that
right. If the voter wish to take advantage of these last provisions, which
are in the nature of exceptions to a general rule, he must register within
a stated time, whereupon he becomes a member of a privileged class of
permanently enrolled voters not subject to any of the other restrictions.
It will be seen that these restrictions are variously combined in the
different States, and it is apparent that if combined to their declared
end, practically every Negro may, under color of law, be denied the right
to vote, and practically every white man accorded that right. The
effectiveness of these provisions to exclude the Negro vote is proved by
the Alabama registration under the new State Constitution. Out of a total,
by the census of 1900, of 181,471 Negro "males of voting age," less than
3,000 are registered; in Montgomery county alone, the seat of the State
capital, where there are 7,000 Negro males of voting age, only 47 have
been allowed to register, while in several counties not one single Negro
is permitted to exercise the franchise.
These methods of disfranchisement have stood such tests as the United
States Courts, including the Supreme Court, have thus far seen fit to
apply, in such cases as have been before them for adjudication. These
include a case based upon the "understanding" clause of the Mississippi
Constitution, in which the Supreme Court held, in effect, that since there
was no ambiguity in the language employed and the Negro was not directly
named, the Court would not go behind the wording of the Constitution to
find a meaning which discriminated against the colored voter; and the
recent case of Jackson vs. Giles, brought by a colored citizen of
Montgomery, Alabama, in which the Supreme Court confesses itself impotent
to provide a remedy for what, by inference, it acknowledges _may_ be a
"great political wrong," carefully avoiding, however, to state that it is
a wrong, although the vital prayer of the petition was for a decision upon
this very point.
Now, what is the effect of this wholesale disfranchisement of colored men,
upon their citizenship. The value of food to the human organism is not
measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its
entire deprivation. Whether a class of citizens should vote, even if not
always wisely--what class does?--may best be determined by considering
their condition when they are without the right to vote.
The colored people are left, in the States where they have been
disfranchised, absolutely without representation, direct or indirect, in
any law-making body, in any court of justice, in any branch of
government--for the feeble remnant of voters left by law is so
inconsiderable as to be without a shadow of power. Constituting one-eighth
of the population of the whole country, two-fifths of the whole Southern
people, and a majority in several States, they are not able, because
disfranchised where most numerous, to send one representative to the
Congress, which, by the decision in the Alabama case, is held by the
Supreme Court to be the only body, outside of the State itself, competent
to give relief from a great political wrong. By former decisions of the
same tribunal, even Congress is impotent to protect their civil rights,
the Fourteenth Amendment having long since, by the consent of the same
Court, been in many respects as completely nullified as the Fifteenth
Amendment is now sought to be. They have no direct representation in any
Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the choice of white men
who might be friendly to their rights. Nor are they able to influence the
election of judges or other public officials, to whom are entrusted the
protection of their lives, their liberties and their property. No judge is
rendered careful, no sheriff diligent, for fear that he may offend a black
constituency; the contrary is most lamentably true; day after day the
catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext,
grows longer and more appalling. The country stands face to face with the
revival of slavery; at the moment of this writing a federal grand jury in
Alabama is uncovering a system of peonage established under cover of law.
Under the Southern program it is sought to exclude colored men from every
grade of the public service; not only from the higher administrative
functions, to which few of them would in any event, for a long time
aspire, but from the lowest as well. A Negro may not be a constable or a
policeman. He is subjected by law to many degrading discriminations. He is
required to be separated from white people on railroads and street cars,
and, by custom, debarred from inns and places of public entertainment. His
equal right to a free public education is constantly threatened and is
nowhere equitably recognized. In Georgia, as has been shown by Dr. DuBois,
where the law provides for a pro rata distribution of the public school
fund between the races, and where the colored school population is 48 per
cent. of the total, the amount of the fund devoted to their schools is
only 20 per cent. In New Orleans, with an immense colored population, many
of whom are persons of means and culture, all colored public schools above
the fifth grade have been abolished.
The Negro is subjected to taxation without representation, which the
forefathers of this Republic made the basis of a bloody revolution.
Flushed with their local success, and encouraged by the timidity of the
Courts and the indifference of public opinion, the Southern whites have
carried their campaign into the national government, with an ominous
degree of success. If they shall have their way, no Negro can fill any
federal office, or occupy, in the public service, any position that is not
menial. This is not an inference, but the openly, passionately avowed
sentiment of the white South. The right to employment in the public
service is an exceedingly valuable one, for which white men have struggled
and fought. A vast army of men are employed in the administration of
public affairs. Many avenues of employment are closed to colored men by
popular prejudice. If their right to public employment is recognized, and
the way to it open through the civil service, or the appointing power, or
the suffrages of the people, it will prove, as it has already, a strong
incentive to effort and a powerful lever for advancement. Its value to the
Negro, like that of the right to vote, may be judged by the eagerness of
the whites to deprive him of it.
Not only is the Negro taxed without representation in the States referred
to, but he pays, through the tariff and internal revenue, a tax to a
National government whose supreme judicial tribunal declares that it
cannot, through the executive arm, enforce its own decrees, and,
therefore, refuses to pass upon a question, squarely before it, involving
a basic right of citizenship. For the decision of the Supreme Court in the
Giles case, if it foreshadows the attitude which the Court will take upon
other cases to the same general end which will soon come before it, is
scarcely less than a reaffirmation of the Dred Scott decision; it
certainly amounts to this--that in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment,
colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States
are bound to respect. To say this much is to say that all the privileges
and immunities which Negroes henceforth enjoy, must be by favor of the
whites; they are not _rights_. The whites have so declared; they proclaim
that the country is theirs, that the Negro should be thankful that he has
so much, when so much more might be withheld from him. He stands upon a
lower footing than any alien; he has no government to which he may look
for protection.
Moreover, the white South sends to Congress, on a basis including the
Negro population, a delegation nearly twice as large as it is justly
entitled to, and one which may always safely be relied upon to oppose in
Congress every measure which seeks to protect the equality, or to enlarge
the rights of colored citizens. The grossness of this injustice is all the
more apparent since the Supreme Court, in the Alabama case referred to,
has declared the legislative and political department of the government to
be the only power which can right a political wrong. Under this decision
still further attacks upon the liberties of the citizen may be confidently
expected. Armed with the Negro's sole weapon of defense, the white South
stands ready to smite down his rights. The ballot was first given to the
Negro to defend him against this very thing. He needs it now far more than
then, and for even stronger reasons. The 9,000,000 free colored people of
to-day have vastly more to defend than the 3,000,000 hapless blacks who
had just emerged from slavery. If there be those who maintain that it was
a mistake to give the Negro the ballot at the time and in the manner in
which it was given, let them take to heart this reflection: that to
deprive him of it to-day, or to so restrict it as to leave him utterly
defenseless against the present relentless attitude of the South toward
his rights, will prove to be a mistake so much greater than the first, as
to be no less than a crime, from which not alone the Southern Negro must
suffer, but for which the nation will as surely pay the penalty as it paid
for the crime of slavery. Contempt for law is death to a republic, and
this one has developed alarming symptoms of the disease.
And now, having thus robbed the Negro of every political and civil
_right_, the white South, in palliation of its course, makes a great show
of magnanimity in leaving him, as the sole remnant of what he acquired
through the Civil War, a very inadequate public school education, which,
by the present program, is to be directed mainly towards making him a
better agricultural laborer. Even this is put forward as a favor, although
the Negro's property is taxed to pay for it, and his labor as well. For it
is a well settled principle of political economy, that land and machinery
of themselves produce nothing, and that labor indirectly pays its fair
proportion of the tax upon the public's wealth. The white South seems to
stand to the Negro at present as one, who, having been reluctantly
compelled to release another from bondage, sees him stumbling forward and
upward, neglected by his friends and scarcely yet conscious of his own
strength; seizes him, binds him, and having bereft him of speech, of sight
and of manhood, "yokes him with the mule" and exclaims, with a show of
virtue which ought to deceive no one: "Behold how good a friend I am of
yours! Have I not left you a stomach and a pair of arms, and will I not
generously permit you to work for me with the one, that you may thereby
gain enough to fill the other? A brain you do not need. We will relieve
you of any responsibility that might seem to demand such an organ."
The argument of peace-loving Northern white men and Negro opportunists
that the political power of the Negro having long ago been suppressed by
unlawful means, his right to vote is a mere paper right, of no real value,
and therefore to be lightly yielded for the sake of a hypothetical
harmony, is fatally short-sighted. It is precisely the attitude and
essentially the argument which would have surrendered to the South in the
sixties, and would have left this country to rot in slavery for another
generation. White men do not thus argue concerning their own rights. They
know too well the value of ideals. Southern white men see too clearly the
latent power of these unexercised rights. If the political power of the
Negro was a nullity because of his ignorance and lack of leadership, why
were they not content to leave it so, with the pleasing assurance that if
it ever became effective, it would be because the Negroes had grown fit
for its exercise? On the contrary, they have not rested until the
possibility of its revival was apparently headed off by new State
Constitutions. Nor are they satisfied with this. There is no doubt that an
effort will be made to secure the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, and
thus forestall the development of the wealthy and educated Negro, whom the
South seems to anticipate as a greater menace than the ignorant ex-slave.
However improbable this repeal may seem, it is not a subject to be lightly
dismissed; for it is within the power of the white people of the nation to
do whatever they wish in the premises--they did it once; they can do it
again. The Negro and his friends should see to it that the white majority
shall never wish to do anything to his hurt. There still stands, before
the Negro-hating whites of the South, the specter of a Supreme Court
which will interpret the Constitution to mean what it says, and what those
who enacted it meant, and what the nation, which ratified it, understood,
and which will find power, in a nation which goes beyond seas to
administer the affairs of distant peoples, to enforce its own fundamental
laws; the specter, too, of an aroused public opinion which will compel
Congress and the Courts to preserve the liberties of the Republic, which
are the liberties of the people. To wilfully neglect the suffrage, to hold
it lightly, is to tamper with a sacred right; to yield it for anything
else whatever is simply suicidal. Dropping the element of race,
disfranchisement is no more than to say to the poor and poorly taught,
that they must relinquish the right to defend themselves against
oppression until they shall have become rich and learned, in competition
with those already thus favored and possessing the ballot in addition.
This is not the philosophy of history. The growth of liberty has been the
constant struggle of the poor against the privileged classes; and the
goal of that struggle has ever been the equality of all men before the
law. The Negro who would yield this right, deserves to be a slave; he has
the servile spirit. The rich and the educated can, by virtue of their
influence, command many votes; can find other means of protection; the
poor man has but one, he should guard it as a sacred treasure. Long ago,
by fair treatment, the white leaders of the South might have bound the
Negro to themselves with hoops of steel. They have not chosen to take this
course, but by assuming from the beginning an attitude hostile to his
rights, have never gained his confidence, and now seek by foul means to
destroy where they have never sought by fair means to control.
I have spoken of the effect of disfranchisement upon the colored race; it
is to the race as a whole, that the argument of the problem is generally
directed. But the unit of society in a republic is the individual, and not
the race, the failure to recognize this fact being the fundamental error
which has beclouded the whole discussion. The effect of disfranchisement
upon the individual is scarcely less disastrous. I do not speak of the
moral effect of injustice upon those who suffer from it; I refer rather to
the practical consequences which may be appreciated by any mind. No
country is free in which the way upward is not open for every man to try,
and for every properly qualified man to attain whatever of good the
community life may offer. Such a condition does not exist, at the South,
even in theory, for any man of color. In no career can such a man compete
with white men upon equal terms. He must not only meet the prejudice of
the individual, not only the united prejudice of the white community; but
lest some one should wish to treat him fairly, he is met at every turn
with some legal prohibition which says, "Thou shalt not," or "Thus far
shalt thou go and no farther." But the Negro race is viable; it adapts
itself readily to circumstances; and being thus adaptable, there is
always the temptation to
"Crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,
Where thrift may follow fawning."
He who can most skilfully balance himself upon the advancing or receding
wave of white opinion concerning his race, is surest of such measure of
prosperity as is permitted to men of dark skins. There are Negro teachers
in the South--the privilege of teaching in their own schools is the one
respectable branch of the public service still left open to them--who, for
a grudging appropriation from a Southern legislature, will decry their own
race, approve their own degradation, and laud their oppressors. Deprived
of the right to vote, and, therefore, of any power to demand what is their
due, they feel impelled to buy the tolerance of the whites at any
sacrifice. If to live is the first duty of man, as perhaps it is the first
instinct, then those who thus stoop to conquer may be right. But is it
needful to stoop so low, and if so, where lies the ultimate
responsibility for this abasement?
I shall say nothing about the moral effect of disfranchisement upon the
white people, or upon the State itself. What slavery made of the Southern
whites is a matter of history. The abolition of slavery gave the South an
opportunity to emerge from barbarism. Present conditions indicate that the
spirit which dominated slavery still curses the fair section over which
that institution spread its blight.
And now, is the situation remediless? If not so, where lies the remedy?
First let us take up those remedies suggested by the men who approve of
disfranchisement, though they may sometimes deplore the method, or regret
the necessity.
Time, we are told, heals all diseases, rights all wrongs, and is the only
cure for this one. It is a cowardly argument. These people are entitled to
their rights to-day, while they are yet alive to enjoy them; and it is
poor statesmanship and worse morals to nurse a present evil and thrust it
forward upon a future generation for correction. The nation can no more
honestly do this than it could thrust back upon a past generation the
responsibility for slavery. It had to meet that responsibility; it ought
to meet this one.
Education has been put forward as the great corrective--preferably
industrial education. The intellect of the whites is to be educated to the
point where they will so appreciate the blessings of liberty and equality,
as of their own motion to enlarge and defend the Negro's rights. The
Negroes, on the other hand, are to be so trained as to make them, not
equal with the whites in any way--God save the mark! this would be
unthinkable!--but so useful to the community that the whites will protect
them rather than to lose their valuable services. Some few enthusiasts go
so far as to maintain that by virtue of education the Negro will, in time,
become strong enough to protect himself against any aggression of the
whites; this, it may be said, is a strictly Northern view.
It is not quite clearly apparent how education alone, in the ordinary
meaning of the word, is to solve, in any appreciable time, the problem of
the relations of Southern white and black people. The need of education of
all kinds for both races is wofully apparent. But men and nations have
been free without being learned, and there have been educated slaves.
Liberty has been known to languish where culture had reached a very high
development. Nations do not first become rich and learned and then free,
but the lesson of history has been that they first become free and then
rich and learned, and oftentimes fall back into slavery again because of
too great wealth, and the resulting luxury and carelessness of civic
virtues. The process of education has been going on rapidly in the
Southern States since the Civil War, and yet, if we take superficial
indications, the rights of the Negroes are at a lower ebb than at any time
during the thirty-five years of their freedom, and the race prejudice more
intense and uncompromising. It is not apparent that educated Southerners
are less rancorous than others in their speech concerning the Negro, or
less hostile in their attitude toward his rights. It is their voice alone
that we have heard in this discussion; and if, as they state, they are
liberal in their views as compared with the more ignorant whites, then God
save the Negro!
I was told, in so many words, two years ago, by the Superintendent of
Public Schools of a Southern city that "there was no place in the modern
world for the Negro, except under the ground." If gentlemen holding such
opinions are to instruct the white youth of the South, would it be at all
surprising if these, later on, should devote a portion of their leisure to
the improvement of civilization by putting under the ground as many of
this superfluous race as possible?
The sole excuse made in the South for the prevalent injustice to the Negro
is the difference in race, and the inequalities and antipathies resulting
therefrom. It has nowhere been declared as a part of the Southern program
that the Negro, when educated, is to be given a fair representation in
government or an equal opportunity in life; the contrary has been
strenuously asserted; education can never make of him anything but a
Negro, and, therefore, essentially inferior, and not to be safely trusted
with any degree of power. A system of education which would tend to soften
the asperities and lessen the inequalities between the races would be of
inestimable value. An education which by a rigid separation of the races
from the kindergarten to the university, fosters this racial antipathy,
and is directed toward emphasizing the superiority of one class and the
inferiority of another, might easily have disastrous, rather than
beneficial results. It would render the oppressing class more powerful to
injure, the oppressed quicker to perceive and keener to resent the injury,
without proportionate power of defense. The same assimilative education
which is given at the North to all children alike, whereby native and
foreign, black and white, are taught side by side in every grade of
instruction, and are compelled by the exigencies of discipline to keep
their prejudices in abeyance, and are given the opportunity to learn and
appreciate one another's good qualities, and to establish friendly
relations which may exist throughout life, is absent from the Southern
system of education, both of the past and as proposed for the future.
Education is in a broad sense a remedy for all social ills; but the
disease we have to deal with now is not only constitutional but acute. A
wise physician does not simply give a tonic for a diseased limb, or a high
fever; the patient might be dead before the constitutional remedy could
become effective. The evils of slavery, its injury to whites and blacks,
and to the body politic, was clearly perceived and acknowledged by the
educated leaders of the South as far back as the Revolutionary War and the
Constitutional Convention, and yet they made no effort to abolish it.
Their remedy was the same--time, education, social and economic
development;--and yet a bloody war was necessary to destroy slavery and
put its spirit temporarily to sleep. When the South and its friends are
ready to propose a system of education which will recognize and teach the
equality of all men before the law, the potency of education alone to
settle the race problem will be more clearly apparent.
At present even good Northern men, who wish to educate the Negroes, feel
impelled to buy this privilege from the none too eager white South, by
conceding away the civil and political rights of those whom they would
benefit. They have, indeed, gone farther than the Southerners themselves
in approving the disfranchisement of the colored race. Most Southern men,
now that they have carried their point and disfranchised the Negro, are
willing to admit, in the language of a recent number of the _Charleston
Evening Post_, that "the attitude of the Southern white man toward the
Negro is incompatible with the fundamental ideas of the republic." It
remained for our Clevelands and Abbotts and Parkhursts to assure them that
their unlawful course was right and justifiable, and for the most
distinguished Negro leader to declare that "every revised Constitution
throughout the Southern States has put a premium upon intelligence,
ownership of property, thrift and character." So does every penitentiary
sentence put a premium upon good conduct; but it is poor consolation to
the one unjustly condemned, to be told that he may shorten his sentence
somewhat by good behavior. Dr. Booker T. Washington, whose language is
quoted above, has, by his eminent services in the cause of education, won
deserved renown. If he has seemed, at times, to those jealous of the best
things for their race, to decry the higher education, it can easily be
borne in mind that his career is bound up in the success of an industrial
school; hence any undue stress which he may put upon that branch of
education may safely be ascribed to the natural zeal of the promoter,
without detracting in any degree from the essential value of his
teachings in favor of manual training, thrift and character-building. But
Mr. Washington's prominence as an educational leader, among a race whose
prominent leaders are so few, has at times forced him, perhaps
reluctantly, to express himself in regard to the political condition of
his people, and here his utterances have not always been so wise nor so
happy. He has declared himself in favor of a restricted suffrage, which at
present means, for his own people, nothing less than complete loss of
representation--indeed it is only in that connection that the question has
been seriously mooted; and he has advised them to go slow in seeking to
enforce their civil and political rights, which, in effect, means silent
submission to injustice. Southern white men may applaud this advice as
wise, because it fits in with their purposes; but Senator McEnery of
Louisiana, in a recent article in the _Independent_, voices the Southern
white opinion of such acquiescence when he says: "What other race would
have submitted so many years to slavery without complaint? _What other
race would have submitted so quietly to disfranchisement?_ These facts
stamp his (the Negro's) inferiority to the white race." The time to
philosophize about the good there is in evil, is not while its correction
is still possible, but, if at all, after all hope of correction is past.
Until then it calls for nothing but rigorous condemnation. To try to read
any good thing into these fraudulent Southern constitutions, or to accept
them as an accomplished fact, is to condone a crime against one's race.
Those who commit crime should bear the odium. It is not a pleasing
spectacle to see the robbed applaud the robber. Silence were better.
It has become fashionable to question the wisdom of the Fifteenth
Amendment. I believe it to have been an act of the highest statesmanship,
based upon the fundamental idea of this Republic, entirely justified by
conditions; experimental in its nature, perhaps, as every new thing must
be, but just in principle; a choice between methods, of which it seemed
to the great statesmen of that epoch the wisest and the best, and
essentially the most just, bearing in mind the interests of the freedmen
and the Nation, as well as the feelings of the Southern whites; never
fairly tried, and therefore, not yet to be justly condemned. Not one of
those who condemn it, has been able, even in the light of subsequent
events, to suggest a better method by which the liberty and civil rights
of the freedmen and their descendants could have been protected. Its
abandonment, as I have shown, leaves this liberty and these rights frankly
without any guaranteed protection. All the education which philanthropy or
the State could offer as a _substitute_ for equality of rights, would be a
poor exchange; there is no defensible reason why they should not go hand
in hand, each encouraging and strengthening the other. The education which
one can demand as a right is likely to do more good than the education for
which one must sue as a favor.
The chief argument against Negro suffrage, the insistently proclaimed
argument, worn threadbare in Congress, on the platform, in the pulpit, in
the press, in poetry, in fiction, in impassioned rhetoric, is the
reconstruction period. And yet the evils of that period were due far more
to the venality and indifference of white men than to the incapacity of
black voters. The revised Southern Constitutions adopted under
reconstruction reveal a higher statesmanship than any which preceded or
have followed them, and prove that the freed voters could as easily have
been led into the paths of civic righteousness as into those of
misgovernment. Certain it is that under reconstruction the civil and
political rights of all men were more secure in those States than they
have ever been since. We will hear less of the evils of reconstruction,
now that the bugaboo has served its purpose by disfranchising the Negro,
it will be laid aside for a time while the nation discusses the political
corruption of great cities; the scandalous conditions in Rhode Island; the
evils attending reconstruction in the Philippines, and the scandals in
the postoffice department--for none of which, by the way, is the Negro
charged with any responsibility, and for none of which is the restriction
of the suffrage a remedy seriously proposed. Rhode Island is indeed the
only Northern State which has a property qualification for the franchise!
There are three tribunals to which the colored people may justly appeal
for the protection of their rights: the United States Courts, Congress and
public opinion. At present all three seem mainly indifferent to any
question of human rights under the Constitution. Indeed, Congress and the
Courts merely follow public opinion, seldom lead it. Congress never enacts
a measure which is believed to oppose public opinion;--your Congressman
keeps his ear to the ground. The high, serene atmosphere of the Courts is
not impervious to its voice; they rarely enforce a law contrary to public
opinion, even the Supreme Court being able, as Charles Sumner once put it,
to find a reason for every decision it may wish to render; or, as
experience has shown, a method to evade any question which it cannot
decently decide in accordance with public opinion. The art of straddling
is not confined to the political arena. The Southern situation has been
well described by a colored editor in Richmond: "When we seek relief at
the hands of Congress, we are informed that our plea involves a legal
question, and we are referred to the Courts. When we appeal to the Courts,
we are gravely told that the question is a political one, and that we must
go to Congress. When Congress enacts remedial legislation, our enemies
take it to the Supreme Court, which promptly declares it
unconstitutional." The Negro might chase his rights round and round this
circle until the end of time, without finding any relief.
Yet the Constitution is clear and unequivocal in its terms, and no Supreme
Court can indefinitely continue to construe it as meaning anything but
what it says. This Court should be bombarded with suits until it makes
some definite pronouncement, one way or the other, on the broad question
of the constitutionality of the disfranchising Constitutions of the
Southern States. The Negro and his friends will then have a clean-cut
issue to take to the forum of public opinion, and a distinct ground upon
which to demand legislation for the enforcement of the Federal
Constitution. The case from Alabama was carried to the Supreme Court
expressly to determine the constitutionality of the Alabama Constitution.
The Court declared itself without jurisdiction, and in the same breath
went into the merits of the case far enough to deny relief, without
passing upon the real issue. Had it said, as it might with absolute
justice and perfect propriety, that the Alabama Constitution is a bold and
impudent violation of the Fifteenth Amendment, the purpose of the lawsuit
would have been accomplished and a righteous cause vastly strengthened.
But public opinion cannot remain permanently indifferent to so vital a
question. The agitation is already on. It is at present largely academic,
but is slowly and resistlessly, forcing itself into politics, which is the
medium through which republics settle such questions. It cannot much
longer be contemptuously or indifferently elbowed aside. The South itself
seems bent upon forcing the question to an issue, as, by its arrogant
assumptions, it brought on the Civil War. From that section, too, there
come now and then, side by side with tales of Southern outrage, excusing
voices, which at the same time are accusing voices; which admit that the
white South is dealing with the Negro unjustly and unwisely; that the
Golden Rule has been forgotten; that the interests of white men alone have
been taken into account, and that their true interests as well are being
sacrificed. There is a silent white South, uneasy in conscience, darkened
in counsel, groping for the light, and willing to do the right. They are
as yet a feeble folk, their voices scarcely audible above the clamor of
the mob. May their convictions ripen into wisdom, and may their numbers
and their courage increase! If the class of Southern white men of whom
Judge Jones of Alabama, is so noble a representative, are supported and
encouraged by a righteous public opinion at the North, they may, in time,
become the dominant white South, and we may then look for wisdom and
justice in the place where, so far as the Negro is concerned, they now
seem well-nigh strangers. But even these gentlemen will do well to bear in
mind that so long as they discriminate in any way against the Negro's
equality of right, so long do they set class against class and open the
door to every sort of discrimination. There can be no middle ground
between justice and injustice, between the citizen and the serf.
It is not likely that the North, upon the sober second thought, will
permit the dearly-bought results of the Civil War to be nullified by any
change in the Constitution. As long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the
_rights_ of colored citizens are ultimately secure. There were would-be
despots in England after the granting of Magna Charta; but it outlived
them all, and the liberties of the English people are secure. There was
slavery in this land after the Declaration of Independence, yet the faces
of those who love liberty have ever turned to that immortal document. So
will the Constitution and its principles outlive the prejudices which
would seek to overthrow it.
What colored men of the South can do to secure their citizenship to-day,
or in the immediate future, is not very clear. Their utterances on
political questions, unless they be to concede away the political rights
of their race, or to soothe the consciences of white men by suggesting
that the problem is insoluble except by some slow remedial process which
will become effectual only in the distant future, are received with scant
respect--could scarcely, indeed, be otherwise received, without a voting
constituency to back them up,--and must be cautiously made, lest they meet
an actively hostile reception. But there are many colored men at the
North, where their civil and political rights in the main are respected.
There every honest man has a vote, which he may freely cast, and which is
reasonably sure to be fairly counted. When this race develops a sufficient
power of combination, under adequate leadership,--and there are signs
already that this time is near at hand,--the Northern vote can be wielded
irresistibly for the defense of the rights of their Southern brethren.
In the meantime the Northern colored men have the right of free speech,
and they should never cease to demand their rights, to clamor for them, to
guard them jealously, and insistently to invoke law and public sentiment
to maintain them. He who would be free must learn to protect his freedom.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. He who would be respected must
respect himself. The best friend of the Negro is he who would rather see,
within the borders of this republic one million free citizens of that
race, equal before the law, than ten million cringing serfs existing by a
contemptuous sufferance. A race that is willing to survive upon any other
terms is scarcely worthy of consideration.
The direct remedy for the disfranchisement of the Negro lies through
political action. One scarcely sees the philosophy of distinguishing
between a civil and a political right. But the Supreme Court has
recognized this distinction and has designated Congress as the power to
right a political wrong. The Fifteenth Amendment gives Congress power to
enforce its provisions. The power would seem to be inherent in government
itself; but anticipating that the enforcement of the Amendment might
involve difficulty, they made the superorogatory declaration. Moreover,
they went further, and passed laws by which they provided for such
enforcement. These the Supreme Court has so far declared insufficient. It
is for Congress to make more laws. It is for colored men and for white men
who are not content to see the blood-bought results of the Civil War
nullified, to urge and direct public opinion to the point where it will
demand stringent legislation to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments. This demand will rest in law, in morals and in true
statesmanship; no difficulties attending it could be worse than the
present ignoble attitude of the Nation toward its own laws and its own
ideals--without courage to enforce them, without conscience to change
them, the United States presents the spectacle of a Nation drifting
aimlessly, so far as this vital, National problem is concerned, upon the
sea of irresolution, toward the maelstrom of anarchy.
The right of Congress, under the Fourteenth Amendment, to reduce Southern
representation can hardly be disputed. But Congress has a simpler and more
direct method to accomplish the same end. It is the sole judge of the
qualifications of its own members, and the sole judge of whether any
member presenting his credentials has met those qualifications. It can
refuse to seat any member who comes from a district where voters have been
disfranchised: it can judge for itself whether this has been done, and
there is no appeal from its decision.
If, when it has passed a law, any Court shall refuse to obey its behests,
it can impeach the judges. If any president refuse to lend the executive
arm of the government to the enforcement of the law, it can impeach the
president. No such extreme measures are likely to be necessary for the
enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments--and the
Thirteenth, which is also threatened--but they are mentioned as showing
that Congress is supreme; and Congress proceeds, the House directly, the
Senate indirectly, from the people and is governed by public opinion. If
the reduction of Southern representation were to be regarded in the light
of a bargain by which the Fifteenth Amendment was surrendered, then it
might prove fatal to liberty. If it be inflicted as a punishment and a
warning, to be followed by more drastic measures if not sufficient, it
would serve a useful purpose. The Fifteenth Amendment declares that the
right to vote _shall not_ be denied or abridged on account of color; and
any measure adopted by Congress should look to that end. Only as the power
to injure the Negro in Congress is reduced thereby, would a reduction of
representation protect the Negro; without other measures it would still
leave him in the hands of the Southern whites, who could safely be
trusted to make him pay for their humiliation.
Finally, there is, somewhere in the Universe a "Power that works for
righteousness," and that leads men to do justice to one another. To this
power, working upon the hearts and consciences of men, the Negro can
always appeal. He has the right upon his side, and in the end the right
will prevail. The Negro will, in time, attain to full manhood and
citizenship throughout the United States. No better guaranty of this is
needed than a comparison of his present with his past. Toward this he must
do his part, as lies within his power and his opportunity. But it will be,
after all, largely a white man's conflict, fought out in the forum of the
public conscience. The Negro, though eager enough when opportunity
offered, had comparatively little to do with the abolition of slavery,
which was a vastly more formidable task than will be the enforcement of
the Fifteenth Amendment.
_The Negro and the Law_
By WILFORD H. SMITH
The law and how it is dodged by enactments infringing upon the rights
guaranteed to the freedmen by constitutional amendment. A powerful plea
for justice for the Negro.
[Illustration: WILFORD H. SMITH.]
The colored people in the United States are indebted to the beneficent
provisions of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution of
the United States, for the establishment of their freedom and citizenship,
and it is to these mainly they must look for the maintenance of their
liberty and the protection of their civil rights. These amendments
followed close upon the Emancipation Proclamation issued January 1st,
1863, by President Lincoln, and his call for volunteers, which was
answered by more than three hundred thousand negro soldiers, who, during
three years of military service, helped the Union arms to victory at
Appomattox. Standing in the shadow of the awful calamity and deep distress
of the civil war, and grateful to God for peace and victory over the
rebellion, the American people, who upheld the Union, rose to the sublime
heights of doing justice to the former slaves, who had grown and
multiplied with the country from the early settlement at Jamestown. It
looked like an effort to pay them back for their years of faithfulness and
unrequited toil, by not only making them free but placing them on equal
footing with themselves in the fundamental law. Certainly, they intended
at least, that they should have as many rights under the Constitution as
are given to white naturalized citizens who come to this country from all
the nations of Europe.
The 13th amendment provides that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have
been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States or any place subject
to their jurisdiction.
The 14th amendment provides in section one, that all persons born or
naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,
are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges
or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State
deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of
law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the law.
The 15th amendment provides that the right of citizens of the United
States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by
any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Chief Justice Waite, in the case of the United States vs. Cruikshank, 92nd
U.S. 542, said:--
"The 14th amendment prohibits a State from denying to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. The equality of the
rights of citizens is a principle of republicanism. Every Republican
government is in duty bound to protect all its citizens in the enjoyment
of this principle if within its power."
The same Chief Justice, in the case of the United States vs. Reese, 92nd
U.S. 214, said:
"The 15th amendment does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone. It
prevents the States or the United States from giving preference in this
particular to one citizen of the United States over another, on account of
race, color or previous condition of servitude. Before its adoption this
could be done. It was as much within the power of a State to exclude
citizens of the United States from voting on account of race and color, as
it was on account of age, property or education. Now it is not."
Notwithstanding the manifest meaning of equality of citizenship contained
in the constitutional amendments, it was found necessary to reinforce them
by a civil rights law, enacted by the Congress of the United States, March
1st, 1875, entitled, "An Act To Protect All Citizens In Their Civil and
Legal Rights." Its preamble and first section are as follows:--Preamble:
"Whereas, it is essential to just government we recognize the equality of
all men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of government in its
dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of
whatever nativity, race, color or persuasion, religious or political, and
it being the appropriate object of legislation to enact great fundamental
principles into law, therefore,
"Be it enacted that all persons within the jurisdiction of the United
States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the
accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of inns, public
conveyances on land or water, theatres and other places of public
amusement, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by
law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless
to any previous condition of servitude."
The Supreme Court of the United States has held this salutary law
unconstitutional and void as applied to the States, but binding in the
District of Columbia, and the Territories over which the government of the
United States has control.--Civil Rights cases 109 U.S. 63. Since the
Supreme Court's ruling, many Northern and Western States have enacted
similar civil rights laws. Equality of citizenship in the United States
suffered a severe blow when the civil rights bill was struck down by the
Supreme Court. The colored people looked upon the decision as unsound, and
prompted by race prejudice. It was clear that the amendments to the
Constitution were adopted to secure not only their freedom, but their
equal civil rights, and by ratifying the amendments the several States
conceded to the Federal government the power and authority of maintaining
not alone their freedom, but their equal civil rights in the United States
as well.
The Federal Supreme Court put a narrow interpretation on the Constitution,
rather than a liberal one in favor of equal rights; in marked contrast to
a recent decision of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New
York in a civil rights case arising under the statute of New York, Burks
vs. Bosso, 81 N.Y. Supp, 384. The New York Supreme Court held this
language: "The liberation of the slaves, and the suppression of the
rebellion, was supplemented by the amendments to the national Constitution
according to the colored people their civil rights and investing them with
citizenship. The amendments indicated a clear purpose to secure equal
rights to the black people with the white race. The legislative intent
must control, and that may be gathered from circumstances inducing the
act. Where that intent has been unvaryingly manifested in one direction,
and that in the prohibition of any discrimination against a large class of
citizens, the courts should not hesitate to keep apace with legislative
purpose. We must remember that the slightest trace of African blood places
a man under the ban of belonging to that race. However respectable and
whatever he may be, he is ostracized socially, and when the policy of the
law is against extending the prohibition of his civil rights, a liberal,
rather than a narrow interpretation should be given to enactments
evidencing the intent to eliminate race discrimination, as far as that
can be accomplished by legislative intervention."
The statutory enactments and recent Constitutions of most of the former
slave-holding States, show that they have never looked with favor upon the
amendments to the national Constitution. They rather regard them as war
measures designed by the North to humiliate and punish the people of those
States lately in rebellion. While in the main they accept the 13th
amendment and concede that the negro should have personal freedom, they
have never been altogether in harmony with the spirit and purposes of the
14th and 15th amendments. There seems to be a distinct and positive fear
on the part of the South that if the negro is given a man's chance, and is
accorded equal civil rights with white men on the juries, on common
carriers, and in public places, that it will in some way lead to his
social equality. This fallacious argument is persisted in, notwithstanding
the well-known fact, that although the Jews are the leaders in the wealth
and commerce of the South, their civil equality has never, except in rare
instances, led to any social intermingling with the Southern whites.
Holding these views the Southern people in 1875, found means to overcome
the Republican majorities in all the re-constructed States, and
practically drove the negroes out of the law-making bodies of all those
States. So that, now in all the Southern States, so far as can be
ascertained, there is not one negro sitting as a representative in any of
the law-making bodies. The next step was to deny them representation on
the grand and petit juries in the State courts, through Jury
Commissioners, who excluded them from the panels.
To be taxed without representation is a serious injustice in a republic
whose foundations are laid upon the principle of "no taxation without
representation." But serious as this phase of the case must appear,
infinitely more serious is the case when we consider the fact that they
are likewise excluded from the grand and petit juries in all the State
courts, with the fewest and rarest exceptions. The courts sit in judgment
upon their lives and liberties, and dispose of their dearest earthly
possessions. They are not entitled to life, liberty or property if the
courts should decide they are not, and yet in this all-important tribunal
they are denied all voice, except as parties and witnesses, and here and
there a negro lawyer is permitted to appear. One vote on the grand jury
might prevent an indictment, and save disgrace and the risk of public
trial; while one vote on the petit jury might save a life or a term of
imprisonment, for an innocent person pursued and persecuted by powerful
enemies.
With no voice in the making of the laws, which they are bound to obey, nor
in their administration by the courts, thus tied and helpless, the negroes
were proscribed by a system of legal enactments intended to wholly nullify
the letter and spirit of the war amendments to the national organic law.
This crusade was begun by enacting a system of Jim-Crow car laws in all
the Southern States, so that now the Jim-Crow cars run from the Gulf of
Mexico into the national capital. They are called, "Separate Car Laws,"
providing for separate but equal accommodations for whites and negroes.
Though fair on their face, they are everywhere known to discriminate
against the colored people in their administration, and were intended to
humiliate and degrade them.
Setting apart separate places for negroes on public carriers, is just as
repugnant to the spirit and intent of the national Constitution, as would
be a law compelling all Jews or all Roman Catholics to occupy compartments
specially set apart for them on account of their religion. If these
statutes were not especially aimed at the negro, an arrangement of
different fares, such as first, second and third classes, would have been
far more just and preferable, and would have enabled the refined and
exclusive of both races to avoid the presence of the coarse and vicious,
by selecting the more expensive fare. Still these laws have been upheld by
the Federal Supreme Court, and pronounced not in conflict with the
amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
City ordinances providing for separate street cars for white and colored
passengers, are in force in Atlanta, New Orleans, and in nearly all the
cities of the South. In all the principal cities of Alabama, a certain
portion of the street cars is set apart and marked for negroes. The
conductors are clothed with the authority of determining to what race the
passenger belongs, and may arrest persons refusing to obey his orders. It
is often a very difficult task to determine to what race some passengers
belong, there being so many dark-white persons that might be mistaken for
negroes, and persons known as negroes who are as fair as any white person.
In the State of Georgia, a negro cannot purchase a berth in a sleeping
car, under any circumstances, no matter where his destination, owing to
the following statute enacted December 20th, 1899: "Sleeping car
companies, and all railroads operating sleeping cars in this State, shall
separate the white and colored races, and shall not permit them to occupy
the same compartment; provided, that nothing in this act shall be
construed to compel sleeping car companies or railroads operating sleeping
cars, to carry persons of color in sleeping or parlor cars; provided also,
that this act shall not apply to colored nurses or servants travelling
with their employers." The violation of this statute is a misdemeanor.
Article 45, section 639 of the statutes of Georgia, 1895, makes it a
misdemeanor to keep or confine white and colored convicts together, or to
chain them together going to and from work. There is also a statute in
Georgia requiring that a separate tax list be kept in every county, of the
property of white and colored persons. Both races generally approve the
laws prohibiting inter-marriages between white and colored persons, which
seem to be uniform throughout the Southern States.
Florida seems to have gone a step further than the rest, and by sections
2612 and 2613, Revised Statutes, 1892, it is made a misdemeanor for a
white man and a colored woman, and vice versa, to sleep under the same
roof at night, occupying the same room. Florida is entitled to credit,
however, for a statute making marriages between white and colored persons
prior to 1866, where they continue to live together, valid and binding to
all intents and purposes.
In addition to this forced separation of the races by law, "from the
cradle to the grave," there is yet a sadder and more deplorable
separation, in the almost universal disposition to leave the negroes
wholly and severely to themselves in their home life and religious life,
by the white Christian people of the South, distinctly manifesting no
concern in their moral and religious development.
In Georgia and the Carolinas, and all the Gulf States (except Texas, where
the farm labor is mostly white) the negroes on the farms are held by a
system of laws which prevents them from leaving the plantations, and
enables the landlord to punish them by fine and imprisonment for any
alleged breach of contract. In the administration of these laws they are
virtually made slaves to the landlord, as long as they are in debt, and it
is wholly in the power of the landlord to forever keep them in debt.
By section 355, of the Criminal Code of South Carolina, 1902, it is made a
misdemeanor to violate a contract to work and labor on a farm, subject to
a fine of not less than five dollars, and more than one hundred dollars,
or imprisonment for not less than ten days, or more than thirty. It is
also made a misdemeanor to employ any farm laborer while under contract
with another, or to persuade or entice a farm laborer to leave his
employer.
The Georgia laws are a little stronger in this respect than the laws of
the other States. By section 121, of the Code of Georgia, 1895, it is
provided, "that if any person shall, by offering higher wages, or in any
other way entice, persuade or decoy, or attempt to entice, persuade or
decoy any farm laborer from his employer, he shall be guilty of a
misdemeanor." Again, by act of December 17th, 1901, the Georgia
Legislature passed a law making it an offense to rent land, or furnish
land to a farm laborer, after he has contracted with another landlord,
without first obtaining the consent of the first landlord.
The presence of large numbers of negroes in the towns and cities of the
South and North can be accounted for by such laws as the above,
administered by ignorant country magistrates, in nearly all cases the
pliant tools of the landlords.
The boldest and most open violation of the negro's rights under the
Federal Constitution, was the enactment of the grand-father clauses, and
understanding clauses in the new Constitutions of Louisiana, Alabama, the
Carolinas, and Virginia, which have had the effect to deprive the great
body of them of the right to vote in those States, for no other reason
than their race and color. Although thus depriving him of his vote, and
all voice in the State governments at the South, in all of them his
property is taxed to pay pensions to Confederate soldiers, who fought to
continue him in slavery. The fact is, the franchise had been practically
taken from the negroes in the South since 1876, by admitted fraudulent
methods and intimidation in elections, but it was not until late years
that this nullification of the amendments was enacted into State
Constitutions.
This brings me to the proposition that it is mainly in the enforcement, or
the administration of the laws, however fair and equal they may appear on
their face, that the constitutional rights of negroes to equal protection
and treatment are denied, not only in the South but in many Northern
States. There are noble exceptions, however, of high-toned honorable
gentlemen on the bench as trial judges, and Supreme Court justices, in the
South, who without regard to consequences have stood for fairness and
justice to the negro in their courts.
With the population of the South distinctly divided into two classes, not
the rich and poor, not the educated and ignorant, not the moral and
immoral, but simply whites and blacks, all negroes being generally
regarded as inferior and not entitled to the same rights as any white
person, it is bound to be a difficult matter to obtain fair and just
results, when there is any sort of conflict between the races. The negro
realizes this, and knows that he is at an immense disadvantage when he is
forced to litigate with a white man in civil matters, and much more so
when he is charged with a crime by a white person.
The juries in the South almost always reject the testimony of any number
of negroes if given in opposition to that of a white witness, and this is
true in many instances, no matter how unreasonable or inconsistent the
testimony of the white witness may be. Jurors in the South have been heard
to admit that they would be socially ostracized if they brought in a
verdict upon colored testimony alone, in opposition to white testimony.
Perhaps it can be best explained how the negro fares in the courts of the
South by giving a few cases showing how justice is administered to him:
A negro boy was brought to the bar for trial before a police magistrate,
in a Southern capital city, charged with assault and battery on a white
boy about the same age, but a little larger. The testimony showed that the
white boy had beat the negro on several previous occasions as he passed on
his way to school, and each time the negro showed no disposition to fight.
On the morning of the charge he attacked the negro and attempted to cut
him with a knife, because the negro's mother had reported to the white
boy's mother the previous assaults, and asked her to chastise him. The
colored boy in trying to keep from being cut was compelled to fight, and
got the advantage and threw the white boy down and blacked his eyes. The
magistrate on this evidence fined the negro twenty-five dollars. The
mother of the negro having once been a servant for the magistrate, found
courage to rise, and said: "Jedge, yo Honer, can I speak?" The magistrate
replied, "Yes, go on." She said, "Well, Jedge, my boy is ben tellin' me
about dis white boy meddlin' him on his way to school, but I would not let
my boy fight, 'cause I 'tole him he couldn't git no jestice in law. But he
had no other way to go to school 'ceptin' gwine dat way; and den jedge,
dis white chile is bigger an my chile and jumped on him fust with a knife
for nothin', befo' my boy tetched him. Jedge I am a po' woman, and washes
fur a livin', and ain't got nobody to help me, and can't raise all dat
money. I think dat white boy's mammy ought to pay half of dis fine." By
this time her voice had become stifled by her tears. The judge turned to
the mother of the white boy and said, "Madam, are you willing to pay half
of this fine?" She answered, "Yes, Your Honor." And the judge changed the
order to a fine of $12.50 each, against both boys.
A celebrated case in point reported in the books is, George Maury vs. The
State of Miss., 68 Miss. 605. I reproduce the court's statement of the
case:--"This is an appeal from the Circuit Court of Kemper County.
Appellant was convicted of murder and sentenced to imprisonment for life.
He appears in this court without counsel. The facts are briefly these:
One, Nicholson, a white man, accompanied by his little son seven years
old, was driving an ox team along a public road; he had occasion to stop
and the oxen were driven by his son; defendant, a negro, also in an ox
wagon, was going along the road in an opposite direction, and met
Nicholson's wagon in charge of the little boy. It was after dark, and when
the wagons met, according to the testimony of Nicholson, the defendant
insultingly demanded of the boy to give the way, and cursed and abused
him. Nicholson, hearing the colloquy, hurried to the scene and a fight
ensued between him and Maury, in which the latter got the advantage,
inflicting severe blows upon Nicholson. This occurred on Thursday, and on
the following Sunday night, Nicholson, in company with eleven or twelve of
his friends, rode to the farm of Maury, and after sending several of their
number to ascertain if he was at home, rode rapidly into his yard and
called for him. Not finding him, they proceeded to search the premises,
and found several colored men shut up in the smoke house, the door of
which some of the searching party had broken open. Maury, the accused, was
not found there, and about that time some one called out, "Here is
George." Some of the party then started in the direction of the cotton
house from which the voice proceeded, when a volley was fired from it, and
two of the searching party were killed, one of whom was the son of the
former owner of the defendant, and the other a brother-in-law of
Nicholson. The members of the raiding party testified that their purpose
in going to the home of the defendant was merely to arrest him. It was,
however, shown that Nicholson, immediately after the fight on Thursday,
informed Cobb, and Cobb between Thursday and Sunday night collected the
men who joined in the raid. No affidavit for the arrest of Maury had been
made, and none of the party had any warrant, or made any announcement to
the defendant or his family, of the object of their visit. The accused who
testified in his own behalf, denied that he was at home at the time of the
shooting, and says he fled before the raiding party arrived. He also
contradicted Nicholson in his account of the difficulty with him, and
denies that he spoke harshly to the child." Chief Justice Campbell, in
delivering the opinion of the court said, "It is inconceivable that the
crime of murder is predicable of the facts disclosed by the evidence in
this case. The time and place and circumstances of the killing forbid any
such conclusion as a verdict of guilty of murder." The judgment of the
trial court was reversed.
This same Chief Justice, in the case of Monroe vs. Mississippi, 71 Miss.
201, where a negro was convicted of rape, makes use of the following
brave and noble language, reversing the case on the ground of the
insufficiency of the evidence: "We might greatly lighten our labors by
deferring in all cases to the verdict approved by the presiding judge as
to the facts, but our duty is to administer justice without respect of
persons, and do equal right to the poor and the rich. Hence the
disposition, which we are not ashamed to confess we have, to guard
jealously the rights of the poor and friendless and despised, and to be
astute as far as we properly may, against injustice, whether proceeding
from wilfulness or indifference."
The country has produced no abler jurist, nor the South no greater man
than Ex-Chief Justice Campbell of Mississippi. If the counsel of such men
as he and Chief Justice Garret of the Court of Civil Appeals of Texas,
could obtain in the South, there would be no problem between the races.
All would be contented because justice would be administered to the whites
and blacks alike.
In the administration of the suffrage sections under the new
Constitutions of the South by the partisan boards of registrars, the same
discrimination against negroes was practiced. Their methods are of more or
less interest. The plan was to exclude all negroes from the electorate
without excluding a single white man. Under the Alabama Constitution, a
soldier in the Civil War, either on the Federal or Confederate side, is
entitled to qualification. When a negro goes up to register as a soldier
he is asked for his discharge. When he presents it he is asked, "How do we
know that you are the man whose name is written in this discharge? Bring
us two white men whom we know and who will swear that you have not found
this paper, and that they know that you were a soldier in the company and
regiment in which you claim to have been." This, of course, could not be
done, and the ex-soldier who risked his life for the Union is denied the
right to vote.
The same Constitution provides that if not a soldier or the legal
descendant of one, an elector must be of good character and understand the
duties and obligations of citizenship under a Republican form of
government. When a negro claims qualifications under the good character
and understanding clauses he is put through an examination similar to the
following:
"What is a republican form of government?
"What is a limited monarchy?
"What islands did the United States come into possession of by the
Spanish-American War?
"What is the difference between Jeffersonian Democracy and Calhoun
principles, as compared to the Monroe Doctrine?
"If the Nicaragua Canal is cut, what will be the effect if the Pacific
Ocean is two feet higher than the Atlantic?" Should these questions be
answered satisfactorily, the negro must still produce two white men known
to the registrars to testify to his good character. A remarkable
exception in the treatment of negroes by the registrars of Dallas county,
Alabama, is shown in the following account taken from the Montgomery
Advertizer:--
"An old negro barber by the name of Edward E. Harris, stepped in before
the registrars, hat in hand, humble and polite, with a kindly smile on his
face. He respectfully asked to be registered. He signed the application
and waited a few minutes until the registrars had disposed of some other
matters, and being impressed with his respectful bearing, some member of
the board commenced to ask a few questions. The old man told his story in
a straight forward manner. He said: "Gentlemen, I am getting to be a
pretty old man. I was born here in the South, and I followed my young
master through all of the campaigns in Virginia, when Mas' Bob Lee made it
so warm for the Yankees. But our luck left us at Gettysburg. The Yankees
got around in our rear there, and I got a bullet in the back of my head,
and one in my leg before I got out of that scrape. But I was not hurt
much, and my greatest anxiety was about my young master, Mr. John Holly,
who was a member of the Bur Rifles, 18th Mississippi. He was a private and
enlisted at Jackson, Miss.
"He could not be found the first day; I looked all among the dead on the
battle field for him and he was not there. Next day I got a permit to go
through the hospitals, and I looked into the face of every soldier
closely, in the hope of finding my young master. After many hours of
searching I found him, but he was dangerously wounded. I stayed by his
side, wounded as I was, for three long weeks, but he gradually grew worse
and then he died. I went out with the body and saw it buried as decently
as I could, and then I went back to Jackson and told the young mistress
how brave he was in battle, how good he was to me, and told her all the
words he had sent her, as he lay there on that rude cot in the hospital.
That is my record as a Confederate soldier, and if you gentlemen care to
give me a certificate of registration, I would be much obliged to you."
It is needless to say that old Ed. Harris got his certificate.
It is insisted upon by the leaders of public opinion at the South, that
negroes should not be given equal political and civil rights with white
men, defined by law and enforceable by the courts; but that they should be
content to strive to deserve the good wishes and friendly feeling of the
whites, and if the South is let alone, they will see to it that negroes
get becoming treatment.
While there is a large number of the high-toned, chivalrous element of the
old master class yet living, who would stand by the negro and not permit
him to be wronged if they could prevent it, yet they are powerless to
control the great mass of the poor whites who are most bitter in their
prejudices against the negro. They should also bear in mind that the old
master class is rapidly passing way, and that there is constantly an
influx of foreigners to the South, and in less than fifty years the
Italians, or some other foreign nationality, may be the ruling class in
all the Southern States; and the negro, deprived of all political and
civil rights by the Constitution and laws, would be wholly at the mercy of
a people without sympathy for him.
In order to show the fallacy and the wrong and injustice of this doctrine,
and how helplessly exposed it leaves the negro to the prejudices of the
poor whites, I relate a tragedy in the life of a friend of mine, who was
well known and respected in the town of Rayville, Louisiana.
Sewall Smith, for many years ran the leading barber shop for whites in the
town of Rayville, and was well-liked and respected by the leading white
men of the entire parish. At the suggestion of his customers he bought
Louisiana state lands while they were cheap, before the railroad was put
through between Vicksburg and Shreveport; and as the road passed near his
lands he was thereby made a rich man, as wealth goes in those parts. His
good fortune, however, did not swell his head and he remained the same to
his friends. He became so useful in his parish that there was never a
public gathering of the leading white business men that he was not invited
to it, and he was always on the delegations to all the levee or river
conventions sent from his parish. He was chosen to such places by white
men exclusively; and in his own town he was as safe from wrong or injury,
on account of his race or color, as any white man.
After the trains began to run through Rayville, on the Shreveport road, he
had occasion to visit the town of Ruston, in another parish some miles in
the interior, and as he got off at the depot, a barefoot, poor white boy
asked to carry his satchel. Smith was a fine looking mulatto, dressed
well, and could have easily been taken for a white man, and the boy might
not have known at the time he was a negro. When he arrived at his stopping
place he gave the boy such a large coin that he asked permission to take
his satchel back to the train on the following day when he was to return.
The next day the boy came for the satchel, and they had nearly reached the
depot about train time, when they passed a saloon where a crowd of poor
whites sat on boxes whittling sticks. The sight of a negro having a white
boy carrying his satchel quite enraged them, and after cursing and abusing
Smith and the boy, they undertook to kick and assault Smith. Smith
defended himself. The result was a shooting affair, in which Smith shot
two or three of them and was himself shot. The train rolled up while the
fight was in progress, and without inquiring the cause or asking any
questions whatever, fully a hundred white men jumped off the train and
riddled Smith with bullets. That was the end of it. Nobody was indicted or
even arrested for killing an insolent "nigger" that did not keep his
place. That is the way the affair was regarded in Ruston. Of course, the
people of Rayville very much regretted it, but they could not do anything,
and could not afford to defend the rights of a negro against white men
under such circumstances, and the matter dropped.
I have preferred not to mention the numerous ways and many instances in
which the rights of negroes are denied in public places, and on the common
carriers in the South, under circumstances very humiliating and degrading.
Nor have I cared to refer to the barbarous and inhuman prison systems of
the South, that are worse than anything the imagination can conceive in a
civilized and Christian land, as shown by reports of legislative
committees.
If the negro can secure a fair and impartial trial in the courts, and can
be secure in his life and liberty and property, so as not to be deprived
of them except by due process of law, and can have a voice in the making
and administration of the laws, he shall have gone a great way in the
South. It is to be hoped that public opinion can be awakened to this
extent, and that it may assist him to attain that end.
_The Characteristics of the Negro People_
By H.T. KEALING
A frank statement of the virtues and failings of the race, indicating
very clearly the evils which must be overcome, and the good which must
be developed, if success is really to attend the effort to uplift them.
[Illustration: H.T. KEALING.]
The characteristics of the Negro are of two kinds--the inborn and the
inbred. As they reveal themselves to us, this distinction may not be seen,
but it exists. Inborn qualities are ineradicable; they belong to the
blood; they constitute individuality; they are independent, or nearly so,
of time and habitat. Inbred qualities are acquired, and are the result of
experience. They may be overcome by a reversal of the process which
created them. The fundamental, or inborn, characteristics of the Negro may
be found in the African, as well as the American, Negro; but the inbred
characteristics of the latter belong to the American life alone.
There is but one human nature, made up of constituent elements the same in
all men, and racial or national differences arise from the predominance
of one or another element in this or that race. It is a question of
proportion. The Negro is not a Caucasian, not a Chinese, not an Indian;
though no psychological quality in the one is absent from the other. The
same moral sense, called conscience; the same love of harmony in color or
in sound; the same pleasure in acquiring knowledge; the same love of truth
in word, or of fitness in relation; the same love of respect and
approbation; the same vengeful or benevolent feelings; the same appetites,
belong to all, but in varying proportions. They form the indicia to a
people's mission, and are our best guides to God's purpose in creating us.
They constitute the material to be worked on in educating a race, and
suggest in every case where the stress of civilization or education should
be applied in order to follow the lines of least resistance.
But there are also certain manifestations, the result of training or
neglect, which are not inborn. As they are inculcable, so they are
eradicable; and it is only by a loose terminology that we apply the term
characteristics to them without distinction between them and the inherent
traits. In considering the characteristics of the Negro people, therefore,
we must not confuse the constitutional with the removable. Studied with
sympathy and at first hand, the black man of America will be seen to
possess certain predominant idiosyncrasies of which the following form a
fair catalogue:
_He is intensely religious._ True religion is based upon a belief in the
supernatural, upon faith and feeling. A people deeply superstitious are
apt to be deeply religious, for both rest upon a belief in a spiritual
world. Superstition differs from religion in being the untrained and
unenlightened gropings of the human soul after the mysteries of the higher
life; while the latter, more or less enlightened, "feels after God, if
haply," it may find Him. The Negro gives abundant evidence of both phases.
The absolute inability of the master, in the days of slavery, while
successfully vetoing all other kinds of convocation, to stop the Negro's
church meetings, as well as the almost phenomenal influence and growth of
his churches since; and his constant referring of every event, adverse or
favorable, to the personal ministrations of the Creator, are things unique
and persistent. And the master class reposed more faith in their slaves'
religion ofttimes than they did in their own. Doubtless much of the
reverential feeling that pervades the American home to-day, above that of
all other nations, is the result of the Negro mammy's devotion and loyalty
to God.
_He is imaginative._ This is not evinced so much in creative directions as
in poetical, musical, combinatory, inventional and what, if coupled with
learning, we call literary imagination. Negro eloquence is proverbial. The
crudest sermon of the most unlettered slave abounded in tropes and glowing
tongue pictures of apochalyptic visions all his own; and, indeed, the
poetic quality of his mind is seen in all his natural efforts when the
self-consciousness of education does not stand guard. The staid religious
muse of Phillis Wheatley and the rollicking, somewhat jibing, verse of
Dunbar show it equally, unpremeditated and spontaneous.
I have heard by the hour some ordinary old uneducated Negro tell those
inimitable animal stories, brought to literary existence in "Uncle Remus,"
with such quaint humor, delicious conceit and masterly delineation of
plot, character and incident that nothing but the conventional rating of
Aesop's Fables could put them in the same class. Then, there are more
Negro inventors than the world supposes. This faculty is impossible
without a well-ordered imagination held in leash by a good memory and
large perception.
_He is affectionate and without vindictiveness._ He does not nurse even
great wrongs. Mercurial as he is, often furiously angry and frequently in
murderous mood, he comes nearer not letting the sun go down upon his anger
than any other man I know. Like Brutus, he may be compared to the flint
which,
"Much enforced, shows a hasty spark,
And straight is cold again."
His affection is not less towards the Caucasian than to his own race. It
is not saying too much to remark that the soul of the Negro yearns for the
white man's good will and respect; and the old ties of love that subsisted
in so many instances in the days of slavery still survive where the
ex-slave still lives. The touching case of a Negro Bishop who returned to
the State in which he had been a slave, and rode twenty miles to see and
alleviate the financial distress of his former master is an exception to
numerous other similar cases only in the prominence of the Negro
concerned. I know of another case of a man whose tongue seems dipped in
hyssop when he begins to tell of the wrongs of his race, and who will not
allow anyone to say in his presence that any good came out of slavery,
even incidentally; yet he supports the widowed and aged wife of his
former master. And, surely, if these two instances are not sufficient to
establish the general proposition, none will gainsay the patience,
vigilance, loyalty and helpfulness of the Negro slave during the Civil
War, and of his good old wife who nursed white children at her breast at a
time when all ties save those of affection were ruptured, and when no
protection but devoted hearts watched over the "great house," whose head
and master was at the front, fighting to perpetuate slavery. Was it
stupidity on the Negro's part? Not at all. He was well informed as to the
occurrences of the times. A freemasonry kept him posted as well as the
whites were themselves on the course of the war and the issue of each
battle. Was it fear that kept him at the old home? Not that, either. Many
thousands _did_ cross the line to freedom; many other thousands (200,000)
fought in the ranks for freedom, but none of them--those who went and
those who stayed--those who fought and those who worked,--betrayed a
trust, outraged a female, or rebelled against a duty. It was love, the
natural wellings of affectionate natures.
_He has great endurance, both dispositional and physical._ So true is the
first that his patience has been the marvel of the world; and, indeed,
many, regarding this trait manifested in such an unusual degree, doubted
the Negro's courage, till the splendid record of the '60's and the equal,
but more recent, record of the '90's, wrote forbearance as the real
explanation of an endurance seemingly so at variance with manly spirit.
Of his physical powers, his whole record as a laborer at killing tasks in
the most trying climate in America speaks so eloquently that nothing but
the statistics of cotton, corn, rice, sugar, railroad ties and felled
forests can add to the praise of this burden-bearer of the nation. The
census tables here are more romantic and thrilling than figures of
rhetoric.
_He is courageous._ His page in the war record of this country is without
blot or blemish. His commanders unite in pronouncing him admirable for
courage in the field, commendable for obedience in camp. That he should
exhibit such excellent fighting qualities as a soldier, and yet exercise
the forbearance that characterizes him as a citizen, is remarkable.
_He is cheerful._ His ivories are as famous as his songs. That the South
is "sunny" is largely due to the brightness his rollicking laugh and
unfailing good nature bring to it. Though the mudsill of the labor world,
he whistles as he hoes, and no dark broodings or whispered conspirings mar
the cheerful acceptance of the load he bears. Against the rubber bumper of
his good cheer things that have crushed and maddened others rebound
without damage. When one hears the quaint jubilee songs, set to minor
cadence, he might suppose them the expressions of a melancholy people.
They are not to be so interpreted. Rather are they the expression of an
experience, not a nature. Like the subdued voice of a caged bird, these
songs are the coinage of an occasion, and not the free note of nature.
The slave sang of griefs he was not allowed to discuss, hence his songs.
This cheerfulness has enabled the Negro to live and increase under
circumstances which, in all other instances, have decimated, if not
exterminated, inferior peoples. His plasticity to moulding forces and his
resiliency against crushing ones come from a Thalian philosophy,
unconscious and unstudied, that extracts Epicurean delights from funeral
meats.
The above traits are inborn and fundamental, belonging to the race
everywhere, in Africa as well as America. Strict correctness requires,
however, that attention be called to the fact that there are tribal
differences among African Negroes that amount almost to the national
variations of Europe; and these are reflected in American Negroes, who are
the descendants of these different tribes. There is as much difference
between the Mandingo and the Hottentot, both black, as between the Italian
and the German, both white; or between the Bushman and the Zulu, both
black, as between the Russian and the Englishman, both white. Scientific
exactness, therefore, would require a closer analysis of racial
characteristics than an article of this length could give; but, speaking
in a large way, it may be said that in whatever outward conformity may
come to the race in America by reason of training or contact, these traits
will lie at the base, the very warp and woof of his soul texture.
If, now, we turn to consider his inbred traits, those the result of
experience, conditions and environments, we find that they exist mainly as
deficiencies and deformities. These have been superimposed upon the native
soul endowment. Slavery has been called the Negro's great schoolmaster,
because it took him a savage and released him civilized; took him a
heathen and released him a Christian; took him an idler and released him a
laborer. Undoubtedly it did these things superficially, but one great
defect is to be charged against this school--it did not teach him the
meaning of home, purity and providence. To do this is the burden of
freedom.
The emancipated Negro struggles up to-day against many obstacles, the
entailment of a brutal slavery. Leaving out of consideration the many who
have already emerged, let us apply our thoughts to the great body of
submerged people in the congested districts of city and country who
present a real problem, and who must be helped to higher things. We note
some of the heritages under which they stagger up into full development:
_Shiftlessness._ He had no need to devise and plan in bondage. There was
no need for an enterprising spirit; consequently, he is lacking in
leadership and self-reliance. He is inclined to stay in ruts, and applies
himself listlessly to a task, feeling that the directive agency should
come from without.
_Incontinence._ It is not to the point to say that others are, too.
Undoubtedly, example has as much to do with this laxity as neglect. We
simply record the fact. A slave's value was increased by his prolificacy.
Begetting children for the auction block could hardly sanctify family
ties. It was not nearly so necessary for a slave to know his father as his
owner. Added to the promiscuity encouraged and often forced among this
class, was the dreadful license which cast lustful Caucasian eyes upon
"likely" Negro women.
_Indolence._ Most men are, especially in a warm climate: but the Negro
acquired more than the natural share, because to him as a bondman laziness
was great gain, for he had no pecuniary interest in his own labor. Hence,
holidays were more to be desired than whole labor days, and he learned to
do as little as he might, be excused as often as he could, and hail
Saturday as the oasis in a desert week. He hails it yet. The labor
efficiency of the Negro has greatly increased since the emancipation, for
self-interest is a factor now. In 1865, each Negro produced two-thirds of
a bale of cotton; now he produces an average of one whole bale to the man.
But there is still woful waste of productive energy. A calculation
showing the comparative productive capacity, man for man, between the
Northern[B] and Southern laborer would be very interesting.
_Improvidence and Extravagance._ He will drop the most important job to go
on an excursion or parade with his lodge. He spends large sums on
expensive clothing and luxuries, while going without things necessary to a
real home. He will cheerfully eat fat bacon and "pone" corn-bread all the
week[C] in order to indulge in unlimited soda-water, melon and fish at the
end. In the cities he is oftener seen dealing with the pawn-broker than
the banker. His house, when furnished at all, is better furnished that
that of a white man of equal earning power, but it is on the installment
plan. He is loath to buy a house, because he has no taste for
responsibility nor faith in himself to manage large concerns; but organs,
pianos, clocks, sewing-machines and parlor suits, on time, have no terrors
for him. This is because he has been accustomed to think in small
numbers. He does not regard the Scotchman's "mickle," because he does not
stop to consider that the end is a "muckle." He has amassed, at full
valuation, nearly a billion dollars' worth of property, despite this, but
this is about one-half of what proper providence would have shown.
_Untidiness._ Travel through the South and you will be struck with the
general misfit and dilapidated appearance of things. Palings are missing
from the fences, gates sag on single hinges, houses are unpainted, window
panes are broken, yards unkempt and the appearance of a squalor greater
than the real is seen on every side. The inside of the house meets the
suggestions of the outside. This is a projection of the slave's "quarters"
into freedom. The cabin of the slave was, at best, a place to eat and
sleep in; there was no thought of the esthetic in such places. A quilt on
a plank was a luxury to the tired farm-hand, and paint was nothing to the
poor, sun-scorched fellow who sought the house for shade rather than
beauty. Habits of personal cleanliness were not inculcated, and even now
it is the exception to find a modern bath-room in a Southern home.
_Dishonesty._ This is the logic, if not the training, of slavery. It is
easy for the unrequited toiler in another's field to justify reprisal;
hence there arose among the Negroes an amended Commandment which added to
"Thou shalt not steal" the clause, "except thou be stolen from." It was no
great fault, then, according to this code, to purloin a pig, a sheep, a
chicken, or a few potatoes from a master who took all from the slave.
_Untruthfulness._ This is seen more in innocent and childish exaggeration
than in vicious distortion. It is the vice of untutored minds to run to
gossip and make miracles of the matter-of-fact. The Negro also tells
falsehoods from excess of good nature. He promises to do a piece of work
on a certain day, because it is so much easier and pleasanter to say Yes,
and stay away, than it is to say No.
_Business Unreliability._ He does not meet a promise in the way and at
the time promised. Not being accustomed to business, he has small
conception of the place the promise has in the business world. It is only
recently he has begun to deal with banks. He, who has no credit, sees[D]
no loss of it in a protested note, especially if he intends to pay it some
time. That chain which links one man's obligation to another man's
solvency he has not considered. He is really as good and safe a debt-payer
when he owes a white man as the latter can have, but the methods of the
modern bank, placing a time limit on debts, is his detestation. He much
prefers the _laissez-faire_ of the Southern plantation store.
_Lack of Initiative._ It was the policy of slavery to crush out the
combining instinct, and it was well done; for, outside of churches and
secret societies, the Negro has done little to increase the social
efficiency which can combine many men into an organic whole, subject to
the corporate will and direction. He has, however, made some hopeful
beginnings.
_Suspicion of his own race._ He was taught to watch other Negroes and tell
all that they did. This was slavery's native detective force to discover
incipient insurrection. Each slave learned to distrust his fellow. And
added to this is the knowledge one Negro has that no other has had half
sufficient experience in business to be a wise counsellor, or a safe
steward of another man's funds. Almost all Negroes who have acquired
wealth have entrusted its management to white men.
_Ignorance._ The causes of his ignorance all know. That he has thrown off
one-half of it in forty years is a wonderful showing; but a great incubus
remains in the other half, and it demands the nation's attention. What the
census calls literacy is often very shallow. The cause of this shallowness
lies, in part, in the poor character and short duration of Southern
schools; in the poverty that snatches the child from school prematurely to
work for bread; in the multitude of mushroom colleges and get-smart-quick
universities scattered over the South, and in the glamour of a
professional education that entices poorly prepared students into special
work.
Add to this, too, the commercialism of the age which regards each day in
school as a day out of the market. Boys and girls by scores learn the
mechanical parts of type-writing and stenography without the basal culture
which gives these callings their greatest efficiency. They copy a
manuscript, Chinese-like, mistakes and all; they take you phonetically in
sense as well as sound, having no reserve to draw upon to interpret a
learned allusion or unusual phrase. Thus while prejudice makes it hard to
secure a place, auto-deficiency loses many a one that is secured.
We have discussed the leading characteristics of the Negro, his inborn
excellencies and inbred defects, candidly and as they are to be seen in
the great mass whose place determines the status of the race as a whole.
It would, however, be to small purpose if we did not ask what can be done
to develop the innate good and correct the bad in a race so puissant and
numerous? This mass is not inert; it has great reactionary force,
modifying and influencing all about it. The Negro's excellences have
entered into American character and life already; so have his weaknesses.
He has brought cheer, love, emotion and religion in saving measure to the
land. He has given it wealth by his brawn and liberty by his blood. His
self-respect, even in abasement, has kept him struggling upward; his
confidence in his own future has infected his friends and kept him from
nursing despondency or planning anarchy. But he has laid, and does lay,
burdens upon the land, too: his ignorance, his low average of morality,
his low standards of home, his lack of enterprise, his lack of
self-reliance--these must be cured.
Evidently, he is to be "solved" by educational processes. Everyone of his
inborn traits must be respected and developed to proper proportion.
Excesses and excrescences must not be carelessly dealt with, for they mark
the fertility of a soil that raises rank weeds because no gardener has
tilled it. His religion must become "ethics touched with feeling"--not a
paroxysm, but a principle. His imagination must be given a rudder to guide
its sails; and the first fruits of its proper exercise, as seen in a
Dunbar, a Chesnutt, a Coleridge-Taylor and a Tanner, must be pedestaled
along the Appian Way over which others are to march. His affection must be
met with larger love; his patience rewarded with privilege; his courage
called to defend the rights of others rather than redress his own wrongs.
Thus shall he supplement from within the best efforts of good men without.
To cure the evils entailed upon him by an unhappy past, he must be
educated to work with skill, with self-direction, in combination and
unremittingly. Industrial education with constant application, is the
slogan of his rise from racial pauperism to productive manliness. Not that
exceptional minds should not have exceptional opportunities (and they
already exist); but that the great majority of awkward and unskilled ones,
who must work somehow, somewhere, all the time, shall have their
opportunities for training in industrial schools near them and with
courses consonant with the lives they are to lead. Let the ninety and nine
who must work, either with trained or fumbling hands, have a chance. Train
the Negro to accept and carry responsibility by putting it upon him. Train
him, more than any schools are now doing, in morals--to speak the truth,
to keep a promise, to touch only his own property, to trust the
trustworthy among his own race, to risk something in business, to strike
out in new lines of endeavor, to buy houses and make homes, to regard
beauty as well as utility, to save rather than display. In short, let us
subordinate mere knowledge to the work of invigorating the will,
energizing productive effort and clarifying moral vision. Let us make safe
men rather than vociferous mountebanks; let us put deftness in daily labor
above sleight-of-hand tricks, and common sense, well trained, above
classical smatterings, which awe the multitude but butter no parsnips.
If we do this, America will have enriched her blood, ennobled her record
and shown the world how to deal with its Dark Races without reproach.
[Footnote B: In the original, this was 'Northen'.]
[Footnote C: In the original, this was 'weeek'.]
[Footnote D: In the original, this was 'seees'.]
_Representative American Negroes_
By PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
An enumeration of some of the noteworthy American Negroes of to-day and
yesterday, with some account of their lives and their work. In this
paper Mr. Dunbar has turned out his largest and most successful picture
of the colored people. It is a noble canvas crowded with heroic figures.
In considering who and what are representative Negroes there are
circumstances which compel one to question what is a representative man of
the colored race. Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and
others lived during the reconstruction period. To have achieved something
for the betterment of his race rather than for the aggrandizement of
himself, seems to be a man's best title to be called representative. The
street corner politician, who through questionable methods or even through
skillful manipulation, succeeds in securing the janitorship of the Court
House, may be written up in the local papers as "representative," but is
he?
I have in mind a young man in Baltimore, Bernard Taylor by name, who to me
is more truly representative of the race than half of the "Judges,"
"Colonels," "Doctors" and "Honorables" whose stock cuts burden the pages
of our negro journals week after week. I have said that he is young.
Beyond that he is quiet and unobtrusive; but quiet as he is, the worth of
his work can be somewhat estimated when it is known that he has set the
standard for young men in a city that has the largest colored population
in the world.
It is not that as an individual he has ridden to success one enterprise
after another. It is not that he has shown capabilities far beyond his
years, nor yet that his personal energy will not let him stop at one
triumph. The importance of him lies in the fact that his influence upon
his fellows is all for good, and in a large community of young Negroes the
worth of this cannot be over-estimated. He has taught them that striving
is worth while, and by the very force of his example of industry and
perseverance, he stands out from the mass. He does not tell how to do
things, he does them. Nothing has contributed more to his success than
his alertness, and nothing has been more closely followed by his
observers, and yet I sometimes wonder when looking at him, how old he must
be, how world weary, before the race turns from its worship of the
political janitor and says of him, "this is one of our representative
men."
This, however, is a matter of values and neither the negro himself, his
friends, his enemies, his lauders, nor his critics has grown quite certain
in appraising these. The rabid agitator who goes about the land preaching
the independence and glory of his race, and by his very mouthings
retarding both, the saintly missionary, whose only mission is like that of
"Pooh Bah," to be insulted; the man of the cloth who thunders against the
sins of the world and from whom honest women draw away their skirts, the
man who talks temperance and tipples high-balls--these are not
representative, and whatever their station in life, they should be rated
at their proper value, for there is a difference between attainment and
achievement.
Under the pure light of reason, the ignorant carpet bagger judge is a
person and not a personality. The illiterate and inefficient black man,
whom circumstance put into Congress, was "a representative" but was not
representative. So the peculiar conditions of the days immediately after
the war have made it necessary to draw fine distinctions.
When Robert Smalls, a slave, piloted the Confederate ship Planter out of
Charleston Harbor under the very guns of the men who were employing him,
who owned him, his body, his soul, and the husk of his allegiance, and
brought it over to the Union, it is a question which forty years has not
settled as to whether he was a hero or a felon, a patriot or a traitor. So
much has been said of the old Negro's fidelity to his masters that
something different might have been expected of him. But take the singular
conditions: the first faint streaks of a long delayed dawn had just begun
to illumine the sky and this black pilot with his face turned toward the
East had no eye for the darkness behind him. He had no time to analyze his
position, the right or wrong of it. He had no opportunity to question
whether it was loyalty to a union in which he aspired to citizenship, or
disloyalty to his masters of the despised confederacy. It was not a time
to argue, it was a time to do; and with rare power of decision, skill of
action and with indomitable courage, he steered the good ship Planter past
Fort Johnson, past Fort Sumter, past Morris Island, out where the flag,
the flag of his hopes and fears floated over the federal fleet. And Robert
Smalls had done something, something that made him loved and hated,
praised and maligned, revered and despised, but something that made him
representative of the best that there is in sturdy Negro manhood.
It may seem a far cry from Robert Smalls, the pilot of the Planter, to
Booker T. Washington, Principal of the Institute at Tuskegee, Alabama.
But much the same traits of character have made the success of the two
men; the knowledge of what to do, the courage to do it, and the following
out of a single purpose. They are both pilots, and the waters through
which their helms have swung have been equally stormy. The methods of both
have been questioned; but singularly neither one has stopped to question
himself, but has gone straight on to his goal over the barriers of
criticism, malice and distrust. The secret of Mr. Washington's power is
organization, and organization after all is only a concentration of force.
This concentration only expresses his own personality, in which every
trait and quality tend toward one definite end. They say of this man that
he is a man of one idea, but that one is a great one and he has merely
concentrated all his powers upon it; in other words he has organized
himself and gone forth to gather in whatever about him was essential.
Pilot he is, steadfast and unafraid, strong in his own belief,--yes
strong enough to make others believe in him. Without doubt or skepticism,
himself he has confounded the skeptics.
Less statesmanlike than Douglass, less scholarly than DuBois, less
eloquent than the late J.C. Price, he is yet the foremost figure in Negro
national life. He is a great educator and a great man, and though one may
not always agree with him, one must always respect him. The race has
produced no more adroit diplomatist than he. The statement is broad but
there is no better proof of it than the fact that while he is our most
astute politician, he has succeeded in convincing both himself and the
country that he is not in politics. He has none of the qualities of the
curb-stone politician. He is bigger, broader, better, and the highest
compliment that could be paid him is that through all his ups and downs,
with all he has seen of humanity, he has kept his faith and his ideals.
While Mr. Washington stands pre-eminent in his race there are other names
that must be mentioned with him as co-workers in the education of the
world, names that for lack of time can be only mentioned and passed.
W.H. Council, of Normal, Alabama, has been doing at his school a good and
great work along the same lines as Tuskegee. R.R. Wright, of the State
College of Georgia, "We'se a-risin' Wright," he is called, and by his own
life and work for his people he has made true the boyish prophecy which in
the old days inspired Whittier's poem. Three decades ago this was his
message from the lowly South, "Tell 'em we'se a-risin," and by thought, by
word, by deed, he has been "Tellin' em so" ever since. The old Southern
school has melted into the misty shades of an unregretted past. A new
generation, new issues, new conditions, have replaced the old, but the boy
who sent that message from the heart of the Southland to the North's heart
of hearts has risen, and a martyred President did not blush to call him
friend.
So much of the Negro's time has been given to the making of teachers that
it is difficult to stop when one has begun enumerating some of those who
have stood out more than usually forceful. For my part, there are two more
whom I cannot pass over. Kelly Miller, of Howard University, Washington,
D.C., is another instructor far above the average. He is a mathematician
and a thinker. The world has long been convinced of what the colored man
could do in music and in oratory, but it has always been skeptical, when
he is to be considered as a student of any exact science. Miller, in his
own person, has settled all that. He finished at Johns Hopkins where they
will remember him. He is not only a teacher but an author who writes with
authority upon his chosen themes, whether he is always known as a Negro
writer or not. He is endowed with an accurate, analytical mind, and the
most engaging blackness, for which some of us thank God, because there can
be no argument as to the source of his mental powers.
Now of the other, William E.B. DuBois, what shall be said? Educator and
author, political economist and poet, an Eastern man against a Southern
back-ground, he looms up strong, vivid and in bold relief. I say looms
advisedly, because, intellectually, there is something so distinctively
big about the man. Since the death of the aged Dr. Crummell, we have had
no such ripe and finished scholar. Dr. DuBois, Harvard gave him to us, and
there he received his Ph.D., impresses one as having reduced all life and
all literature to a perfect system. There is about him a fascinating calm
of certain power, whether as a searcher after economic facts, under the
wing of the University of Pennsylvania, or defying the "powers that be" in
a Negro college or leading his pupils along the way of light, one always
feels in him this same sense of conscious, restrained, but assured force.
Some years ago in the course of his researches, he took occasion to tell
his own people some plain hard truths, and oh, what a howl of protest and
denunciation went up from their assembled throats, but it never once
disturbed his magnificent calm. He believed what he had said, and not for
a single moment did he think of abandoning his position.
He goes at truth as a hard-riding old English squire would take a
difficult fence. Let the ditch be beyond if it will.
Dr. DuBois would be the first to disclaim the name of poet but everything
outside of his statistical work convicts him. The rhythm of his style, his
fancy, his imagery, all bid him bide with those whose souls go singing by
a golden way. He has written a number of notable pamphlets and books, the
latest of which is "The Soul of the Black Folk," an invaluable
contribution to the discussion of the race problem by a man who knows
whereof he speaks.
Dr. DuBois is at Atlanta University and has had every opportunity to
observe all the phases of America's great question, and I wish I might
write at length of his books.
It may be urged that too much time has already been taken up with the
educational side of the Negro, but the reasonableness of this must become
apparent when one remembers that for the last forty years the most helpful
men of the race have come from the ranks of its teachers, and few of those
who have finally done any big thing, but have at some time or other held
the scepter of authority in a school. They may have changed later and
grown, indeed they must have done so, but the fact remains that their
poise, their discipline, the impulse for their growth came largely from
their work in the school room.
There is perhaps no more notable example of this phase of Negro life than
the Hon. Richard Theodore Greener, our present Consul at Vladivostok. He
was, I believe, the first of our race to graduate from Harvard and he has
always been regarded as one of the most scholarly men who, through the
touch of Negro blood, belongs to us. He has been historian, journalist and
lecturer, but back of all this he was a teacher; and for years after his
graduation he was a distinguished professor at the most famous of all the
old Negro colleges. This institution is now a thing of the past, but the
men who knew it in its palmy days speak of it still with longing and
regret. It is claimed, and from the names and qualities of the men, not
without justice, that no school for the higher education of the black man
has furnished a finer curriculum or possessed a better equipped or more
efficient faculty. Among these, Richard T. Greener was a bright,
particular star.
After the passing of the school, Mr. Greener turned to other activities.
His highest characteristics were a fearless patience and a hope that
buoyed him up through days of doubt and disappointment. Author and editor
he was, but he was not satisfied with these. Beyond their scope were
higher things that beckoned him. Politics, or perhaps better, political
science, allured him, and he applied himself to a course that brought him
into intimate contact with the leaders of his country, white and black. A
man of wide information, great knowledge and close grasp of events he made
himself invaluable to his party and then with his usual patience awaited
his reward.
The story of how he came to his own cannot be told without just a shade of
bitterness darkening the smile that one must give to it all. The cause for
which he had worked triumphed. The men for whom he had striven gained
their goal and now, Greener must be recognized, but--
Vladivostok, your dictionary will tell you, is a sea-port in the maritime
Province of Siberia, situated on the Golden Horn of Peter the Great. It
will tell you also that it is the chief Russian naval station on the
Pacific. It is an out of the way place and one who has not the
world-circling desire would rather hesitate before setting out thither. It
was to this post that Mr. Greener was appointed.
"Exile," his friends did not hesitate to say. "Why didn't the Government
make it a sentence instead of veiling it in the guise of an appointment?"
asked others sarcastically.
"Will he go?" That was the general question that rose and fell, whispered
and thundered about the new appointee, and in the midst of it all, silent
and dignified, he kept his council. The next thing Washington knew he was
gone. There was a gasp of astonishment and then things settled back into
their former state of monotony and Greener was forgotten.
But in the eastern sky, darkness began to arise, the warning flash of
danger swept across the heavens, the thunder drum of war began to roll.
For a moment the world listened in breathless suspense, the suspense of
horror. Louder and louder rose the thunder peal until it drowned every
other sound in the ears of the nation, every other sound save the cries
and wails of dying women and the shrieks of tortured children. Then
France, England, Germany, Japan and America marshalled their forces and
swept eastward to save and to avenge. The story of the Boxer uprising has
been told, but little has been said of how Vladivostok, "A sea-port in the
maritime Province of Siberia," became one of the most important points of
communication with the outside world, and its Consul came frequently to be
heard from by the State Department. And so Greener after years of patience
and toil had come to his own. If the government had wished to get him out
of the way, it had reckoned without China.
A new order of things has come into Negro-American politics and this man
has become a part of it. It matters not that he began his work under the
old regime. So did Judge Gibbs, a man eighty years of age, but he, too,
has kept abreast of the times, and although the reminiscences in his
delightful autobiography take one back to the hazy days when the land was
young and politics a more strenuous thing than it is even now, when there
was anarchy in Louisiana and civil war in Arkansas, when one shot first
and questioned afterward; yet because his mind is still active, because
he has changed his methods with the changing time, because his influence
over young men is greatly potent still; he is, in the race, perhaps, the
best representative of what the old has brought to the new.
Beside him strong, forceful, commanding, stands the figure of George H.
White, whose farewell speech before the Fifty-sixth Congress, when through
the disfranchisement of Negroes he was defeated for re-election, stirred
the country and fired the hearts of his brothers. He has won his place
through honesty, bravery and aggressiveness. He has given something to the
nation that the nation needed, and with such men as Pinchback, Lynch,
Terrell and others of like ilk, acting in concert, it is but a matter of
time when his worth shall induce a repentant people, with a justice
builded upon the foundation of its old prejudice, to ask the Negro back to
take a hand in the affairs of state.
Add to all this the facts that the Negro has his representatives in the
commercial world: McCoy and Granville T. Woods, inventors; in the
agricultural world with J.H. Groves, the potato king of Kansas, who last
year shipped from his own railway siding seventy-two thousand five hundred
bushels of potatoes alone; in the military, with Capt. Charles A. Young, a
West Pointer, now stationed at the Presidio; that in medicine, he
possesses in Daniel H. Williams, of Chicago, one of the really great
surgeons of the country; that Edward H. Morris, a black man, is one of the
most brilliant lawyers at the brilliant Cook County bar; that in every
walk of life he has men and women who stand for something definite and
concrete, and it seems to me that there can be little doubt that the race
problem will gradually solve itself.
I have spoken of "men and women," and indeed the women must not be
forgotten, for to them the men look for much of the inspiration and
impulse that drives them forward to success. Mrs. Mary Church Terrell
upon the platform speaking for Negro womanhood and Miss Sarah Brown, her
direct opposite, a little woman sitting up in her aerie above a noisy New
York street, stand for the very best that there is in our mothers, wives
and sisters. The one fully in the public eye, with learning and eloquence,
telling the hopes and fears of her kind; the other in suffering and
retirement, with her knowledge of the human heart and her gentleness
inspiring all who meet her to better and nobler lives. They are both doing
their work bravely and grandly. But when the unitiate ask who is "la
Petite Reine," we think of the quiet little woman in a New York fifth
floor back and are silent.
She is a patron of all our literature and art and we have both. Whether it
is a new song by Will Marion Cook or a new book by DuBois or Chestnut,
than whom no one has ever told the life of the Negro more accurately and
convincingly, she knows it and has a kindly word of praise or
encouragement.
In looking over the field for such an article as this, one just begins to
realize how many Negroes are representative of something, and now it seems
that in closing no better names could be chosen than those of the two
Tanners.
From time immemorial, Religion and Art have gone together, but it remained
for us to place them in the persons of these two men, in the relation of
father and son. Bishop Benj. Tucker Tanner, of the A.M.E. Church, is not
only a theologian and a priest, he is a dignified, polished man of the
higher world and a poet. He has succeeded because he was prepared for
success. As to his writings, he will, perhaps, think most highly of "His
Apology For African Methodism;" but some of us, while respecting this,
will turn from it to the poems and hymns that have sung themselves out of
his gentle heart.
Is it any wonder that his son, Henry O. Tanner, is a poet with the brush
or that the French Government has found it out? From the father must have
come the man's artistic impulse, and he carried it on and on to a golden
fruition. In the Luxembourg gallery hangs his picture, "The Raising of
Lazarus." At the Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, I saw his
"Annunciation," both a long way from his "Banjo Lesson," and thinking of
him I began to wonder whether, in spite of all the industrial tumult, it
were not in the field of art, music and literature that the Negro was to
make his highest contribution to American civilization. But this is merely
a question which time will answer.
All these of whom I have spoken are men who have striven and achieved and
the reasons underlying their success are the same that account for the
advancement of men of any other race: preparation, perseverance, bravery,
patience, honesty and the power to seize the opportunity.
It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere
out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.
_The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day_
BY T. THOMAS FORTUNE
Considering the two hundred and forty-five years of his slavery and the
comparatively short time he has enjoyed the opportunities of freedom,
his place in American life at the present day is creditable to him and
promising for the future.
[Illustration: T. THOMAS FORTUNE.]
There can be no healthy growth in the life of a race or a nation without a
self-reliant spirit animating the whole body; if it amounts to optimism,
devoid of egotism and vanity, so much the better. This spirit necessarily
carries with it intense pride of race, or of nation, as the case may be,
and ramifies the whole mass, inspiring and shaping its thought and effort,
however humble or exalted these may be,--as it takes "all sorts and
conditions of men" to make up a social order, instinct with the ambition
and the activity which work for "high thinking and right living," of which
modern evolution in all directions is the most powerful illustration in
history. If pride of ancestry can, happily, be added to pride of race and
nation, and these are re-enforced by self-reliance, courage and correct
moral living, the possible success of such people may be accepted, without
equivocation, as a foregone conclusion. I have found all of these
requirements so finely blended in the life and character of no people as
that of the Japanese, who are just now emerging from "the double night of
ages" into the vivifying sunlight of modern progress.
What is the Negro's place in American life at the present day?
The answer depends entirely upon the point of view. Unfortunately for the
Afro-American people, they have no pride of ancestry; in the main, few of
them can trace their parentage back four generations; and the "daughter of
an hundred earls" of whom there are probably many, is unconscious of her
descent, and would profit nothing by it if this were not true. The blood
of all the ethnic types that go to make up American citizenship flows in
the veins of the Afro-American people, so that of the ten million of them
in this country, accounted for by the Federal census, not more than four
million are of pure negroid descent, while some four million of them, not
accounted for by the Federal census, have escaped into the ranks of the
white race, and are re-enforced very largely by such escapements every
year. The vitiation of blood has operated irresistibly to weaken that
pride of ancestry, which is the foundation-stone of pride of race; so that
the Afro-American people have been held together rather by the segregation
decreed by law and public opinion than by ties of consanguinity since
their manumission and enfranchisement. It is not because they are poor and
ignorant and oppressed, as a mass, that there is no such sympathy of
thought and unity of effort among them as among Irishmen and Jews the
world over, but because the vitiation of blood, beyond the honorable
restrictions of law, has destroyed, in large measure, that pride of
ancestry upon which pride of race must be builded. In no other logical
way can we account for the failure of the Afro-American people to stand
together, as other oppressed races do, and have done, for the righting of
wrongs against them authorized by the laws of the several states, if not
by the Federal Constitution, and sanctioned or tolerated by public
opinion. In nothing has this radical defect been more noticeable since the
War of the Rebellion than in the uniform failure of the people to sustain
such civic organizations as exist and have existed, to test in the courts
of law and in the forum of public opinion the validity of organic laws of
States intended to deprive them of the civil and political rights
guaranteed to them by the Federal Constitution. The two such organizations
of this character which have appealed to them are the National
Afro-American League, organized in Chicago, in 1890, and the National
Afro-American Council, organized in Rochester, New York, out of the
League, in 1898. The latter organization still exists, the strongest of
its kind, but it has never commanded the sympathy and support of the
masses of the people, nor is there, or has there been, substantial
agreement and concert of effort among the thoughtful men of the race along
these lines. They have been restrained by selfish, personal and petty
motives, while the constitutional rights which vitalize their citizenship
have been "denied or abridged" by legislation of certain of the States and
by public opinion, even as Nero fiddled while Rome burned. If they had
been actuated by a strong pride of ancestry and of race, if they had felt
that injury to one was injury to all, if they had hung together instead of
hanging separately, their place in the civil and political life of the
Republic to-day would not be that, largely, of pariahs, with none so poor
as to do them honor, but that of equality of right under the law enjoyed
by all other alien ethnic forces in our citizenship. They who will not
help themselves are usually not helped by others. They who make a loud
noise and courageously contend for what is theirs, usually enjoy the
respect and confidence of their fellows and get, in the end, what belongs
to them, or a reasonable modification of it.
As a consequence of inability to unite in thought and effort for the
conservation of their civil and political rights, the Afro-American
Negroes and colored people have lost, by fundamental enactments of the old
slave-holding States, all of the civil and political rights guaranteed
them by the Federal Constitution, in the full enjoyment of which they were
from the adoption of the War Amendments up to 1876-7, when they were
sacrificed by their Republican allies of the North and West, in the
alienation of their State governments, in order to save the Presidency to
Mr. Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. Their reverses in this matter in the old
slave-holding States, coupled with a vast mass of class legislation,
modelled on the slave code, have affected the Afro-American people in
their civil and political rights in all of the States of the Republic,
especially as far as public opinion is concerned. This was inevitable,
and follows in every instance in history where a race element of the
citizenship is set aside by law or public opinion as separate and distinct
from its fellows, with a fixed status or caste.
It will take the Afro-American people fully a century to recover what they
lost of civil and political equality under the law in the Southern States,
as a result of the re-actionary and bloody movement begun in the
Reconstruction period by the Southern whites, and culminating in
1877,--the excesses of the Reconstruction governments, about which so much
is said to the discredit of the Negro, being chargeable to the weakness
and corruption of Northern carpet-baggers, who were the master and
responsible spirits of the time and the situation, rather than to the
weakness, the ignorance and venality of their Negro dupes, who, very
naturally, followed where they led, as any other grateful people would
have done. For, were not these same Northern carpet-baggers the direct
representatives of the Government and the Army which crushed the slave
power and broke the shackles of the slave? Even so. The Northern
carpet-baggers planned and got the plunder, and have it; the Negro got the
credit and the odium, and have them yet. It often happens that way in
history, that the innocent dupes are made to suffer for the misdeeds and
crimes of the guilty.
The recovery of civil and political rights under the Constitution, as
"denied or abridged" by the constitutions of the States, more especially
those of the old slave holding ones, will be a slow and tedious process,
and will come to the individual rather than to the race, as the reward of
character and thrift; because, for reasons already stated, it will hardly
be possible in the future, as it has not been in the past, to unify the
mass of the Afro-American people, in thought and conduct, for a proper
contention in the courts and at the ballot-box and in the education of
public opinion, to accomplish this purpose. Perhaps there is no other
instance in history where everything depended so largely upon the
individual, and so little upon the mass of his race, for that development
in the religious and civic virtues which makes more surely for an
honorable status in any citizenship than constitutions or legislative
enactments built upon them.
But even from this point of view, I am disposed to believe that the
Negro's civil and political rights are more firmly fixed in law and public
opinion than was true at the close of the Reconstruction period, when
everything relating to him was unsettled and confused, based in
legislative guarantees, subject to approval or disapproval of the dominant
public opinion of the several States, and that he will gradually work out
his own salvation under the Constitution,--such as Charles Sumner,
Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F. Butler, Frederick Douglass, and their
co-workers, hoped and labored that he might enjoy. He has lost nothing
under the fundamental law; such of these restrictions, as apply to him by
the law of certain of the States, necessarily apply to white men in like
circumstances of ignorance and poverty, and can be overcome, in time, by
assiduous courtship of the schoolmaster and the bank cashier. The extent
to which the individual members of the race are overcoming the
restrictions made a bar to their enjoyment of civil and political rights
under the Constitution is gratifying to those who wish the race well and
who look beyond the present into the future: while it is disturbing the
dreams of those who spend most of their time and thought in abortive
efforts to "keep the 'nigger' in his place"--as if any man or race could
have a place in the world's thought and effort which he did not make for
himself! In our grand Republic, at least, it has been so often
demonstrated as to become proverbial, that the door of opportunity shall
be closed to no man, and that he shall be allowed to have that place in
our national life which he makes for himself. So it is with the Negro now,
as an individual. Will it be so with him in the future as a race? To
answer that we shall first have to determine that he has a race.
However he may be lacking in pride of ancestry and race, no one can accuse
the Negro of lack of pride of Nation and State, and even of county.
Indeed, his pride in the Republic and his devotion to it are among the
most pathetic phases of his pathetic history, from Jamestown, in 1620, to
San Juan Hill, in 1898. He has given everything to the Republic,--his
labor and blood and prayers. What has the Republic given him, but blows
and rebuffs and criminal ingratitude! And he stands now, ready and eager,
to give the Republic all that he has. What does the Republic stand ready
and eager to give him? Let the answer come out of the mouth of the future.
It is a fair conclusion that the Negro has a firmer and more assured civil
and political status in American life to-day than at the close of the
Reconstruction period, paradoxical as this may appear to many, despite the
adverse legislation of the old slave-holding States, and the tolerant
favor shown such legislation by the Federal Supreme Court, in such
opinions as it has delivered, from time to time, upon the subject, since
the adoption of the War amendments to the Federal Constitution.
Technically, the Negro stands upon equality with all other citizens under
this large body of special and class legislation; but, as a matter of
fact, it is so framed that the greatest inequality prevails, and was
intended to prevail, in the administration of it by the several States
chiefly concerned. As long as such legislation by the States specifies, on
the face of it, that it shall operate upon all citizens equally, however
unequally and unjustly the legislation may be interpreted and administered
by the local courts, the Federal Supreme Court has held, time and again,
that no hardship was worked, and, if so, that the aggrieved had his
recourse in appeal to the higher courts of the State of which he is a
citizen,--a recourse at this time precisely like that of carrying coal to
New Castle.
Under the circumstances, there is no alternative for the Negro citizen
but to work out his salvation under the Constitution, as other citizens
have done and are doing. It will be a long and tedious process before the
equitable adjustment has been attained, but that does not much matter, as
full and fair enjoyment of civil and political rights requires much time
and patience and hard labor in any given situation, where two races come
together in the same governmental environment; such as is the case of the
Negro in America, the Irishman in Ireland, and the Jew everywhere in
Europe. It is just as well, perhaps, that the Negro will have to work out
his salvation under the Constitution as an individual rather than as a
race, as the Jew has done it in Great Britain and as the Irishman will
have to do it under the same Empire, as it is and has been the tendency of
our law and precedent to subordinate race elements and to exalt the
individual citizens as indivisible "parts of one stupendous whole." When
this has been accomplished by the law in the case of the Negro, as in the
case of other alien ethnic elements of the citizenship, it will be more
gradually, but assuredly, accomplished by society at large, the
indestructible foundation of which was laid by the reckless and brutal
prostitution of black women by white men in the days of slavery, from
which a vast army of mulattoes were produced, who have been and are,
gradually, by honorable marriage among themselves, changing the alleged
"race characteristics and tendencies" of the Negro people. A race element,
it is safe and fair to conclude, incapable, like that of the North
American Indian, of such a process of elimination and assimilation, will
always be a thorn in the flesh of the Republic, in which there is,
admittedly, no place for the integrality and growth of a distinct race
type. The Afro-American people, for reasons that I have stated, are even
now very far from being such a distinct race type, and without further
admixture of white and black blood, will continue to be less so to the end
of the chapter. It seems to me that this view of the matter has not
received the consideration that it deserves at the hands of those who set
themselves up as past grand masters in the business of "solving the race
problem," and in accurately defining "The Negro's Place in American Life
at the Present Day." The negroid type and the Afro-American type are two
very distinct types, and the sociologist who confounds them, as is very
generally done, is bound to confuse his subject and his audience.
It is a debatable question as to whether the Negro's present industrial
position is better or worse than it was, say, at the close of the
Reconstruction period. As a mass, I am inclined to the opinion that it is
worse, as the laws of the States where he is congregated most numerously
are so framed as to favor the employer in every instance, and he does not
scruple to get all out of the industrial slave that he can; which is, in
the main, vastly more than the slave master got, as the latter was at the
expense of housing, feeding, clothing and providing medical service for
his chattel, while the former is relieved of this expense and trouble.
Prof. W.E.B. DuBois, of Atlanta University, who has made a critical study
of the rural Negro of the Southern States, sums up the industrial phase of
the matter in the following ("The Souls of Black Folk," pp. 39-40):
"For this much all men know: Despite compromise, war and struggle, the
Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and
miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the
whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to
an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the
Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule
of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must
have been, lawlessness and crime."
It is a dark and gloomy picture, the substitution of industrial for
chattel slavery, with none of the legal and selfish restraints upon the
employer which surrounded and actuated the master. And this is true of the
entire mass of the Afro-American laborers of the Southern States. Out of
the mass have arisen a large number of individuals who own and till their
own lands. This element is very largely recruited every year, and to this
source must we look for the gradual undermining of the industrial slavery
of the mass of the people. Here, too, we have a long and tedious process
of evolution, but it is nothing new in the history of races circumstanced
as the Afro-American people are. That the Negro is destined, however, to
be the landlord and master agriculturist of the Southern States is a
probability sustained by all the facts in the situation; not the least of
which being the tendency of the poor white class and small farmers to
abandon agricultural pursuits for those of the factory and the mine, from
which the Negro laborer is excluded, partially in the mine and wholly in
the factory. The development of mine and factory industries in the
Southern States in the past two decades has been one of the most
remarkable in industrial history.
In the skilled trades, at the close of the War of the Rebellion, most of
the work was done by Negroes educated as artisans in the hard school of
slavery, but there has been a steady decline in the number of such
laborers, not because of lack of skill, but because trade unionism has
gradually taken possession of such employments in the South, and will not
allow the Negro to work alongside of the white man. And this is the rule
of the trade unions in all parts of the country. It is to be hoped that
there may be a gradual broadening of the views of white laborers in this
vital matter and a change of attitude by the trade unions that they
dominate. Can we reasonably expect this? As matters now stand, it is the
individual Negro artisan, often a master contractor, who can work at his
trade and give employment to his fellows. Fortunately, there are a great
many of these in all parts of the Southern States, and their number is
increasing every year, as the result of the rapid growth and high favor of
industrial schools, where the trades are taught. A very great deal should
be expected from this source, as a Negro contractor stands very nearly on
as good footing as a white one in the bidding, when he has established a
reputation for reliability. The facts obtained in every Southern city bear
out this view of the matter. The individual black man has a fighting
chance for success in the skilled trades; and, as he succeeds, will draw
the skilled mass after him. The proper solution of the skilled labor
problem is strictly within the power of the individual Negro. I believe
that he is solving it, and that he will ultimately solve it.
It is, however, in the marvellous building up of a legal, comfortable and
happy home life, where none whatever existed at the close of the War of
the Rebellion; in the no less stupendous development of the church life,
with large and puissant organizations that command the respect and
admiration of mankind, and owning splendid church property valued at
millions of dollars; in the quenchless thirst of the mass of the people
for useful knowledge, displayed at the close of the War of the Rebellion,
and abating nothing of its intense keenness since, with the remarkable
reduction in the illiteracy of the mass of the people, as is eloquently
disclosed by the census reports--it is in these results that no cause for
complaint or discouragement can be found. The whole race here stands on
improved ground over that it occupied at the close of the War of the
Rebellion; albeit, even here, the individual has outstripped the mass of
the race, as it was but natural that he should and always will. But, while
this is true and gratifying to all those that hope the Afro-American
people well, it is also true, and equally gratifying that, as far as the
mass is concerned, the home life, the church and the school house have
come into the life of the people, in some sort, everywhere, giving the
whole race a character and a standing in the estimation of mankind which
it did not have at the close of the war, and presaging, logically, unless
all signs fail, a development along high and honorable lines in the
future; the results from which, I predict, at the end of the ensuing half
century, builded upon the foundation already laid, being such as to
confound the prophets of evil, who never cease to doubt and shake their
heads, asking: "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" We have the
answer already in the social and home life of the people, which is so vast
an improvement over the conditions and the heritage of slavery as to
stagger the understanding of those who are informed on the subject, or
will take the trouble to inform themselves.
If we have much loose moral living, it is not sanctioned by the mass,
wedlock being the rule, and not the exception; if we have a vast volume of
illiteracy, we have reduced it by forty per cent. since the war, and the
school houses are all full of children eager to learn, and the schools of
higher and industrial training cannot accommodate all those who knock at
their doors for admission; if we have more than our share of criminality,
we have also churches in every hamlet and city, to which a vast majority
of the people belong, and which are insistently pointing "the way, the
light and the truth" to higher and nobler living.
Mindful, therefore, of the Negro's two hundred and forty-five years of
slave education and unrequited toil, and of his thirty years of partial
freedom and less than partial opportunity, who shall say that his place in
American life at the present day is not all that should be reasonably
expected of him, that it is not creditable to him, and that it is not a
sufficient augury for better and nobler and higher thinking, striving and
building in the future? Social growth is the slowest of all growth. If
there be signs of growth, then, there is reasonable hope for a healthy
maturity. There are plenty of such signs, and he who runs may read them,
if he will.
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