XV The City of a Hundred Hills
The quaintly named “Seaboard Air Line” carries you from Birmingham to Atlanta, Georgia, for the most part through a region of fresh and woody highlands, with blue mountains on the southern horizon. The woods consist of pine and leaf trees about evenly mixed. Large tracts of them, unfortunately, have been ruthlessly hewn or burnt away—that crime against the future so prevalent in America.
Atlanta is finely situated at an elevation of about 1000 feet above the sea, on a billowy upland which has earned for it the name of “the city of a hundred hills.” The guide-book states that it is “laid out in the form of a circle”; but to the casual observer it seems to lack the usual regularity of plan. It has many spacious streets and handsome buildings, with the usual sprinkling of sky-scrapers. Its Park Lane or Fifth Avenue is named Peachtree Street, and is a really beautiful winding road, with handsome houses on either hand, shadowed by fine trees. It was hard to believe that this well-built, bright, busy, windy city had, only eighteen months before, been the scene of a sanguinary riot, almost a massacre, in which many innocent coloured people lost their lives.
The population of Atlanta is a little over 100,000, about 40 per cent. being coloured. |Gunpowder and Fire.| Most of the white people, I was told, come of a mountain stock, who never held slaves or came in contact with the negro before the war. Hence there is even less of mutual comprehension between the races here than elsewhere.
The riot was the outcome of a political campaign, in which negrophobia had been carefully worked up with a view to securing votes—yellow journalism aiding with inflammatory headlines. Then came a series of five or six outrages on women within twenty-four hours. Two of them, perhaps, were genuine; the rest were figments of hysterical imagination. The papers came out with edition after edition, piling horror on horror’s head; the saloons seethed with virtuous and highly alcoholized indignation; and some trifling incident sufficed to let loose the bloodthirsty frenzy of the mob. The police judiciously made themselves scarce, and for four days there was no law in Atlanta.
It is admitted on all hands that not one of those who were killed was even suspected of any crime. The mob went from unprotected house to house, ostensibly searching for firearms. But it kept carefully to parts of the city where it knew it would meet with no real resistance. It did not go down into the negro quarter; it avoided the criminal negro, whose criminality might have gone the length of “putting up a fight.” It preferred to harry the respectable and law-abiding coloured person, and “teach him his place.”
Atlanta is now very sorry for its sport. Its better people, of course, reprobated and deplored the riot from the first; but even the average man soon realized what it had cost the city. Its credit was shaken; there was an immediate fall in real estate and rise in wages. In no community does the sane element favour such outbreaks; but I had only to think of my Memphis bookseller to realize that nowhere in the South is the point very far distant at which the insane element may get out of hand.
There were fears of an outbreak last Christmas, and if it had come it would have been a very different matter, for the negroes were armed to the teeth.
Nor did my talk with Judge Mansfield (as I shall call him) altogether reassure me. |A Friend of the Negro.| The Judge is one of the leading citizens of the State, and took a prominent part in a sort of conciliation movement which immediately followed the riot. He is a man well advanced in years, was himself a slaveholder before the war, and is full of the warm Southern sentiment for the “old-time negro.” He is well known among white people as a friend of the coloured race and a defender of its rights. I do not know whether the negroes themselves rank him high among their champions.
He seemed to me more concerned with injustices done by the North to the South than with injustices done by the South to the negro. “Sherman said, ‘War is hell,’” so he led off; “but there is a worse state than hell, and we passed through that state. It was called Reconstruction.”40
As to that, however, he was content to let bygones be bygones. His real complaint was of the immediate past and present—of the ignorant intermeddling of Northern folk in Southern affairs, the ignorant and contemptuous criticisms of the Northern Press.
“The other day,” he said, “Mr. Smith, a Congregationalist minister—I’m a Baptist myself, but I have a great respect for the Congregationalists—Mr. Smith came to me and said, ‘I hear that the coloured people in your town are sending their children to school in flies and waggons rather than let them ride in the street-cars. What am I to say to my people in the North about that?’ ‘I suggest, sir,’ was my reply, ‘that you should tell them it is none of their business.’”
He was absolutely opposed in theory to lynching, but seemed hopeless of its being put down so long as outrages on women continued. Here, again, his last word was a tu quoque to the North: “I addressed a meeting in Ohio last year, and I said to them, ‘Here in Ohio you have 2 per cent. of negroes; in Georgia we have 47 per cent.; yet you have lynchings here, not so many fewer than ours. Until we have twenty-three times as many as you have, I don’t see that you have anything to say to us.’”
His account of negro morality was very low, and he maintained that the negro Churches could do little to check it, because at least 25 per cent. of the preachers—in some places a much larger percentage—lived as loosely as their flocks. I found other Southern white men of opinion that the influence of the negro Church was, on the whole, a bad influence.
But it was on the necessity for absolute social separation between the races that Judge Mansfield was most emphatic. |“I would Brain him.”| “Jim Crow” regulations, he declared, are essential to prevent constant breaches of the peace. “If a big black man got into the street-car and pressed up against my wife, I would brain him!”
And again: “I was staying with a friend in Ohio last year—a man of wealth and position—in a place where there are several well-to-do coloured people, and where coloured children go to the same school with the whites. I said to my host, ‘Does your wife take her coloured lady friends driving with her?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, because she doesn’t want to.’ ‘Your boy has a rig?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does he ask the coloured girl friends he made at school to drive out with him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to.’ ‘I’ll tell you why he doesn’t want to, and you don’t want him to. It’s because, if he did, the girl’s brother would come to you, and say, “I want to marry your daughter”—and you would brain him!”
A third time this phrase occurred in the Judge’s conversation—I forget the precise context, but it referred to another instance of negro presumption.
I felt that, after all, the key to the Atlanta riot was not so far to seek; nor could I feel in the spirit of Judge Mansfield any absolute guarantee against the recurrence of such unpleasantnesses. None the less do I remember him with kindness and respect. He was as fine a type of the Southern gentleman of the old school as any I met in my travels.
That evening I spent at Atlanta University with Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois. Twilight fell as we stood on the eminence which is crowned by the University buildings, and looked out over a wide expanse of red Georgian landscape. |Atlanta University.| The sunset had left behind it a delicate rosy flush, and, just where it paled off into greenish blue, the slender crescent of a new moon hung in the sky, with a glorious planet above it. Behind us lay the city, with its 60,000 white men ready to “brain” its 40,000 black and brown men on the slightest provocation. Before us lay the silent country and the ineffable peace of heaven. A mood of deep melancholy fell upon me as I reflected that under the silence of the country the same passions were vibrating, and that the peace of heaven was nearer, at any rate to this generation, than any peace on earth.
The influence of the immediate surroundings, too, had something to do with my mood. About Atlanta University there is nothing of the cheerful energy and optimism of Tuskegee. This is a home of intellectual culture; and intellectual culture, however necessary, can scarcely be exhilarating to the negro race at this stage of its history. The more you strive to break through the veil (to use Mr. Du Bois’ favourite metaphor), the more keenly are you conscious of its galling and darkening encumbrance. For assuredly it galls and darkens, whether it be a real barrier or a figment conjured up by the pride and folly of man.
At all events, his culture, which is great, and his genius, which is not small, have not made of Mr. Du Bois a happy man. With perfect simplicity, without an atom of pose, he is and remains a singularly tragic figure. |Professor Du Bois.| He is, perhaps, more impressive than his book, able as that is. In some of its pages we are conscious of a little rhetorical shrillness; but there is nothing of this in the man. He is perfectly urbane and dignified; there is nothing of the apostle, and still less of the martyr about him. He regards and discusses phenomena with the calm of the trained sociologist. But beneath his calm one is conscious of a profound bitterness of spirit. If he is hopeful at all, it is for a day that he will never see; and, in a man still in the prime of life, such hope is not very different from despair.
I met no man in the South with whom I felt more at ease, or seemed to have more in common. And yet, as we talked, there lurked in my mind a sense of hypocrisy, almost of treachery. I could not frankly expose to him my doubts as to whether the stars in their courses did not fight against his racial ideal.
Of his very interesting conversation I shall here record only a few fragments.
“The problem in the South,” he said (almost echoing Mr. Shipton, of Louisville), “is not that of the vagabond or the criminal, but of the negro who is coming forward. That is why even the good people of the South are taking their hands off, saying, ‘We can’t do anything.’
“The older generation of negroes had friends among the white people of their own age; but the boys and girls now growing up have no white friends. The younger white people have no feeling towards the negro but dislike, founded on utter lack of comprehension.
“The race antipathy is fomented in the schools. The progressive negro is held up as a bugbear to the white child, who is told to ‘Look out, or he will get ahead of you!’ Fear, jealousy, and hatred are actively taught to the rising generation of whites. But, after all, they are being taught something, and that’s more than their fathers were. Where intelligence increases there is always hope.”
At one point I did come near to hinting to Mr. Du Bois the doubt lurking in my mind. I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”
“Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites (in the South), they feel acutely the false position in which the negro problems place them.... But... the present social position of the negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded; if there were nothing to charge against the negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime?”
“Now, tell me, Mr. Du Bois,” I said, “whatever these people may say, is it not really just the other way about? The ignorance, shiftlessness, etc., are manifestly temporary and corrigible; is it not precisely the ‘blackness and other physical peculiarities’ that are the true crux of the problem?”
Mr. Du Bois smiled. “No,” he said; “that is the point of view of the outsider, the foreigner. The Southerner, brought up among negroes, has no such feeling.41 In using the argument I there attribute to him he is perfectly sincere.”
I refrained from pressing the point, but Mr. Du Bois’ answer did not quite meet my difficulty. I had no doubt of the Southerner’s sincerity; what I questioned was rather his self-knowledge, or (perhaps I should say) his reading of race psychology. And that doubt, I own, remains.
If the Ethiopian could but change his skin, how trifling would be the problem raised by his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime!
Notes
40. This typical Southern view is forcibly expressed by Mr. Thomas Nelson Page: “The history of that period, of the Reconstruction period of the South, has never been fully told. It is only beginning to be written. When that history shall be told, it will constitute the darkest stain on the record of the American people.... They took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigour of intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just elevated their race in the sight of mankind, and placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern history.”—“The Negro: the Southerner’s Problem,” pp. 243, 246.
41. Another negro writer, Mr. W. H. Thomas (“The American Negro,” p. 295), is still more emphatic on this point: “That colour is the prime cause of American prejudice against negroes is not to be believed for one moment. Every shred of authentic evidence disproves conclusions so preposterous.” Mr. Thomas goes on to argue that the condition of “the low class of whites” in the South is “infinitely inferior to that of the lowest plantation negro.” Somewhat similar is the view of a clergyman who writes to me from Clyde, Kansas: “The problem is simply one of caste, and the negro is the extreme example of the labour caste. The problem is one of aristocracy whatever the colour of the plebeians.... Whatever its professions, the South is still pro-slavery. It wants the negro, but it wants him as a slave. And it would want to enslave any other race that came to take his place.” Both of these views seem to me so manifestly paradoxical and excessive that I venture to maintain the position taken up in the text. At the same time, I would not be understood to mean that the difficulty lies in colour alone, apart from the “other physical peculiarities.” On this point a gentleman in Port Arthur, Texas, writes to me: “I have long had a feeling that negrophobia is not a matter of colour.... No, the thing that rouses a blind disgust—not superficial, not capricious, but deep-rooted—is the body odour, the flat nose, the thick lips, the suggestion of ‘slobber’ in the voice and the mouth-movements, together with the unnatural hair and the animalism of bodily contour at many points. I have often thought that some accidental discovery may at any moment put it in the African’s power to remove the dark pigment from his skin: if this ever happens, it will, I think, be found that the real repulsiveness of the negroid type has been merely unveiled, not dissipated.”
Let me take this opportunity of saying that to the best of my belief the “body odour” of which we hear so much is mainly a superstition. The fact probably is that the negro ought to be at least as scrupulous in his ablutions as the white man—but often is not.