Part II — The Problem Faced
II The Problem Faced
The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of language be called “white men’s countries.”47 In the British West Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.
But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the European, and not always very vividly realized even by the Northern American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal observation and through the medium of books. The details of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.
Numbers and Vitality of the Negro
In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers, distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.
It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one million in the North and West.48
Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they were multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied that by 1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from Maryland to Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself, and appears to have been based on defective enumeration in the census of 1870, which made the rate of negro increase between 1870 and 1880 seem quite inordinate. Now speculation has gone to the other extreme, and prophesies the not very distant extinction of the negro. This view is set forth with uncompromising emphasis by Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):
The only cloud of any portentousness hanging over the prospects of the Southern States is the continued expansion of the black population.... The fact, however, that the white inhabitants, as a body, are steadily outstripping the black in numbers, is an indication that the evils which are now created by the presence of so many negroes in the South will not relatively and proportionately grow more dangerous.... When the development of the Southern States along its present lines has reached its last stage, there is reason to think that an even greater relative decline in the numerical strength of the black population will set in. We have already pointed out the probable effect of the subdivision of Southern lands, and the growth of Southern towns, on the numerical expansion of the negro race. As injurious to that race in the end as being shut out of the general field of agriculture, or being subjected to an abnormally high rate of mortality, will be the relentless competition which is one of the conditions of modern life in all civilized communities. The vaster the growth of the Southern States in wealth and white population, the sharper and more urgent will be the struggle of the black man for existence. In order to hold even his present position as a common labourer he will have to exert himself to the utmost, and in doing so to submit to a manner of life that will be even more unwholesome and squalid than the one he now follows, and sure to lead to a great increase in the already very high rate of mortality for his race. The day will come in the South, just as it came long ago in the North, when for lack of skill, lack of sobriety, and lack of persistency, the negro will find it more difficult to stand up as a rival to the white working-man. Already it is the ultimate fate of the negro that is in the balance, not the ultimate fate of the Southern States in consequence of the presence of the negro. The darkest day for the Southern whites has passed.... The darkest day for the Southern blacks has only just begun.
When I find this forecast cited with approval by Dr. E. A. Alderman of the University of Virginia, it acquires some authority in my eyes; but still it seems far from convincing. It leaves out of account one probability and one certainty. The probability is that what may be called the Hampton-Tuskegee movement—industrial education and moral discipline—will in time so leaven the mass of the negro race as to make it fitter to compete with white labour, and abler to resist the destructive influences on which Mr. Bruce dwells with such gusto. I call this a probability, not a certainty, for it is hard to tell as yet whether the Hampton-Tuskegee spirit is really leavening the mass, or only playing upon the surface. The industrial college at Hampton is barely forty years old; Mr. Booker Washington’s great institute at Tuskegee came into being less than thirty years ago; and the minor offshoots of the movement are, of course, still younger. They have not had time to give any just measure of their influence in promoting the self-respect and the efficiency of the negro race. But there is no doubt whatever that they are doing a remarkable and (from the negro point of view) a beneficent work; the only doubt being as to whether the work is or is not proceeding fast enough to overtake and counteract the forces that make for degradation.49
This, I say, is doubtful; but what is scarcely doubtful is that the South, for its own sake, cannot suffer Mr. Bruce’s prophecy to fulfil itself. The gist of the forecast is, briefly, this: the rural negro, who is admittedly prolific, and whose children survive in fair proportions, will gradually be driven into the towns, where all possible influences are leagued against his moral and physical well-being, and where the rate of negro mortality, both infant and adult, is always very high and often appalling. Thus, according to Mr. Bruce, the “Afro-American” is being inexorably hounded into the jaws of death, and must in due time perish from off the face of the earth. But what is to be the state of the South while this amiable prophecy is working itself out? If the towns are the jaws of death to the negro, what are they to the white man and his children? Putting all question of humanity aside, can any sane civic policy permit negroes to crowd in their thousands into city slums, and there to die like flies in conditions “even more unwholesome and squalid” than those which at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro mortality so high? Simply because the black folk are less able than the whites to resist the poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as well as physical. But bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one race than to the other, inevitably takes its toll of both. Hear what a Southern health officer has to say on this point:
We face the following issues: First: one set of people, the Caucasian, with a normal death-rate of less than 16 per thousand per annum, and right alongside of them is the negro race, with a death-rate of 25 to 30 per thousand. Second: the first-named race furnishing a normal, and the second race an abnormal, percentage of criminals.... The negro is with you for all time. He is what you will make him, and it is “up to” the white people to prevent him from becoming a criminal, and to guard him against tuberculosis, syphilis, etc. If he is tainted with disease, you will suffer: if he develops criminal tendencies, you will be affected.
What can be more certain than this? And is it to be conceived that the South will deliberately refrain from looking to its physical and moral sewerage until the negro shall have been killed off?50
It is not to be conceived, and it is not what is happening. Better sanitary conditions are everywhere being secured, though the movement is slow in the cities of the South. In the North a great improvement has already been effected. In a report on “The Health and Physique of the Negro American” (Atlanta University Publications, No. XI., 1906) we read—
Ten years ago the [negro] death-rate was twice the birth-rate in New York; to-day they are about the same, with the death-rate steadily decreasing and the birth-rate increasing. Ten years ago the birth-rate of Philadelphia was less than the death-rate; to-day it is six per thousand higher.... With the improved sanitary condition, improved education, and better economic opportunities, the mortality of the race may, and probably will, steadily decrease until it becomes normal.
If there is any permanence and any efficacy in the “wave of prohibition” that is passing over the South, it must certainly cause a great reduction in negro mortality; and it surely cannot be long before means are found to check the vending of noxious drugs. Unless, in short, the civilization of the South is to stand still while the negro dies off, there seems to be little likelihood of his fulfilling Mr. Bruce’s prognostic. This great and beautiful region cannot possibly find its salvation in making itself a hell for the negro.
When I quoted to Mr. Booker Washington Mr. Bruce’s death-sentence on his people, he was moved to one of his rare laughs. In Mr. Washington’s opinion, which may very well prove to be correct, the natural increase of the negro in the South about keeps pace with that of the white man. The white race, however, is being largely recruited by immigration, so that its numerical preponderance is doubtless increasing. It would appear, then, that, unless conditions very greatly alter, there is little chance of the black race out-breeding and submerging the white, but equally little chance of the black race being obliging enough to die out. “Conservative” statisticians estimate that at the close of this century there will be anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five million negroes in America.51
Taking the Southern States at large, then, we find that one person out of every three is wholly or partly of African blood. It is sometimes maintained that really pure-bred negroes are very rare; but this seems to be a mistake. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a man of mixed origin and not likely to underestimate the number of his own class, thinks that in two-thirds of the negroes of the United States there are no “recognizable traces” of white blood. He adds that white blood doubtless exists in many who show no trace of it; but for practical purposes this speculation may be disregarded. I think we may take it as pretty certain that if, in the South, one person out of every three is of African descent, one person out of every four is either actually or virtually a full-blooded negro. But it must not be supposed that the distribution of the races is by any means even. Some districts, such as the mountainous regions of Tennessee and West Virginia, contain hardly any negroes; while in other districts, not a few, the blacks largely outnumber the whites. These are, no doubt, the districts in which the pure-bred black most abounds.
Is there a “Negro Problem”?
Having ascertained, approximately, the numerical relations of the two races, we are now in a position to consider the problem or problems involved. And first we are confronted with the question, “Is there any real problem at all?”
Some people deny it, or at all events maintain that the problem is created solely by the almost insane arrogance and inhumanity of the Southern white man. This view lingers in the North, among the inheritors of the old abolitionist sentiment. In England, it has been roundly expressed by Mr. H. G. Wells, and somewhat more considerately by even so high an authority as Sir Sydney Olivier. I need scarcely say that it is a very popular view among the negroes in the South itself.
For a typical (though moderate) American utterance of this opinion the following may suffice. It is a passage from “Race Questions and Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of Harvard (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906):
Scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so much problems caused by anything which is essential to the existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies.... Such antipathies will always play their part in human history. But what we can do about them is to try not to be fooled by them, not to take them too seriously, because of their mere name. We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with a dread of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature.
The attitude of the South, then, in the conception of Professor Royce, is no more rational than that of a woman who shrieks, jumps on a chair, and gathers her skirts about her ankles, because a mouse happens to run across the floor. I should have thought that the wiser tendency of modern science was to divine something more than a “caprice” in so deep-rooted an instinct as the dread even of mice. As for the dread of snakes, it was surely by a slip of the pen that Professor Royce adduced it.
Not at all dissimilar is the judgment of Mr. H. G. Wells. Hearing a great deal of loose, illogical, inconclusive talk on the colour question, and having himself taken a “mighty liking” to these “gentle, human, dark-skinned people” as he saw them in a Chicago music-hall and elsewhere, Mr. Wells formed the opinion that there was no reason at all in the Southern frame of mind. His conclusion is that “these emotions are a cult;” and by a cult he evidently means a contagious, fanatical folly.
Now, Mr. Wells is a man for whose essential wisdom I have a very high respect. If I were bound to acknowledge myself the disciple of any living thinker, I should have small hesitation in selecting him as my guide and philosopher. But his chapter on “The Tragedy of Colour” in “The Future in America” is tinged with what I cannot but take to be a dogmatic impatience of all distinctions and difficulties of race. Before writing it, he might, I think, have asked himself whether the theory of sheer race-monomania was not, perhaps, a rather too simple way of accounting for “emotions” felt with absolute unanimity (in a greater or less degree) by some twenty million Southern white people. The arguments he heard might be weak, ill-informed, inconclusive; the conduct in which the emotions expressed themselves might often be indefensible and abhorrent; and yet there might lie at the root of the emotions something very different from sheer unreason. I think Mr. Wells should have been chary of “indicting a nation” without more careful reflection and a closer scrutiny of evidence.
Sir Sydney Olivier, on the other hand, speaks with the authority of one who has spent many years in close contact with negroes, having been a successful administrator of large communities in which they greatly preponderate. It is impossible to suspect him of hastiness or of à priori doctrinairism. What, then, is his view? In his “White Capital and Coloured Labour” (1907), he tells us that both in visiting the United States and in discussing race questions with American visitors to Jamaica, “he found himself, as a British West Indian, unable to entirely account for an attitude of mind which impressed him as superstitious, if not hysterical, and as indicating misapprehensions of premises very ominous for the United States of the future.” He proceeds:
The theory held in the Southern States of America and in some British Colonies, comes, in substance, to this—that the negro is an inferior order in nature to the white man, in the same sense that the ape may be said to be so. It is really upon this theory that American negrophobia rests, and not only upon the viciousness or criminality of the negro. This viciousness and criminality are, in fact, largely invented, imputed, and exaggerated, in order to support and justify the propaganda of race exclusiveness (p. 43).
And again, in another part of his book:
My argument has been that race prejudice is the fetish of the man of short views; and that it is a short-sighted and suicidal creed, with no healthy future for the community that entertains it (p. 173).
I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of a man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply studied; but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one of Southern unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however unwise in much of her talk and her action, the South is in the main animated by a just and far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That there has been an infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in the South alone, no one nowadays denies. But I believe that the problem, far from being unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly difficult that nothing but an almost superhuman wisdom, energy, and courage will ever effectually deal with it.
Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.
White Man’s Land or Brown Man’s Land?
No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the importation of the African into America was an egregious blunder as well as a monstrous crime. Without him the South would perhaps have developed more slowly during the eighteenth century; but she would have escaped the arrest of development which sums up her history during the nineteenth century. She would have escaped the war by which she strove, with misguided heroism, to perpetuate that arrest of development. She would have escaped the “horrors” of that Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory like a nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in the past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her wealth, is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much more truly may he be said to have created her poverty.52
This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts of Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in America is not the result of a natural movement, an inevitable expansion, a migration springing from economic necessity or from deep impulses of folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome of what may almost be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman cupidity in the slave-dealers and economic short-sightedness in the slave-owners.
The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance, would certainly not be a more desirable place of residence if one-fourth of her population were transmuted into the semblance of Dahomeyans, even supposing that the metamorphosis involved no moral or intellectual change for the worse. A monochrome civilization is on the face of it preferable to such a piebald civilization as at present exists in the Southern States.
Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and the West Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to overlook. The West Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white man’s land”; or, if it was ever possible that they should become one, the chance was lost at the very outset of their history. They are once for all black men’s lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and exploiting them. It would be much more reasonable for the black to chafe under the dominance of the white, than for the white to resent the presence of the black. But the case in the Southern States is absolutely different. They were explored, settled, organized by white men; by white men their liberties were vindicated. They are fitted by their climate and resources to be not only a white man’s land, but one of the greatest white men’s lands in the world. The black man came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen) tool for their development. When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims a third part of the heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and exceedingly moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which, after all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern white man would be more than human if he accepted the part with perfect equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no right to assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his case are even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is the essence and foundation of life: in the United States he is a regrettable accident.
Four Possibilities: I. Extinction.
It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions of this piebald community which a violent interference with the normal course of race-distribution has established in the Southern States.
The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather, conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.
(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly unsatisfactory condition, until the negro gradually dies out.
(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic elevation of the black race, may gradually enable them to live side by side in mutual tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but without clashing.
(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean might conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by “miscegenation.”
(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by deportation or otherwise, and established in a community or communities of its own.
The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have already examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only add here that there is one way in which it might conceivably be brought about—a way too horrible to be contemplated, yet not wholly beyond the bounds of possibility. The recurrence of such an outbreak as the Atlanta riot of 1906 might lead to very terrible consequences. On that occasion the white mob found the negroes unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically unopposed. But the lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar onslaught would, in many places, find them armed and capable of a certain amount of resistance. In that case one dares not think what might happen. Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense of intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary, infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or any other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part of the race, be violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to lose that natural buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race, as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic Negerhetze? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr. P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he anticipated.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the brink of such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are present which might one day bring it to pass.53 Sir Sydney Olivier is quite right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners towards the negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the class that is handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises have been written to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a “beast,” and, on scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape than a man. These works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their insanity is by no means peculiar to their individual authors. The word “extermination” is gravely spoken by men who are not therefore held to be maniacs or even monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, is “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk”; and where such a condition prevails, the possibility of sudden disaster is never far off. To recognize the possibility is not to bring it nearer, but rather to indicate the urgent need of measures that shall place it infinitely remote.