A Negro State
What, then, is the alternative? Manifestly, concentration within the United States—the formation of a new State which should be, not a white man’s land, but a black man’s land.
Is this physically possible? Is there enough unoccupied territory to permit of such a concentration? Of absolutely unoccupied territory there probably is not enough; but those who have studied the matter tell us that there is plenty of territory so thinly occupied that the white settlers could be removed and compensated at no extravagant cost. According to the Honourable John Temple Graves:—
Lower California might be secured. The lands west of Texas may be had. But the Government does not need to purchase. Four hundred million acres of Government land is yet untaken and undeveloped in the West. Of these vast acres the expert hydrographer of the Interior Department has reported that it is easily possible to redeem by irrigation enough to support in plenty a population of sixty million people.
We may liberally discount this estimate, and yet leave it unquestionable that the resources of the United States are amply sufficient to admit of the establishment of a new State without any exorbitant disturbance of the existing distribution of territory.
It would be absurd for me to forecast in any detail the methods by which the concentration should be brought about. They must be devised and elaborated by the great American statesman who is to come. If he can successfully grapple with this colossal task, he will deserve to rank with Washington and Lincoln in the affections of his countrymen. It may be pretty safely predicted that he will attempt no sudden and forcible displacement of the mass of the negro race. Rather he will establish local conditions that shall tempt the younger and more enterprising negroes to migrate of their own free will; while he will probably fix by legislation a pretty distant date—say five-and-twenty years ahead—after which it shall be competent for the various State governments70 forcibly to evict (with compensation) and transplant to the new State any negroes under, say, forty-five years of age still lingering within their boundaries. There will be no need at any time to disturb old or middle-aged negroes who are disinclined to start life afresh under new conditions.
The probability is, however, that if once the new State were judiciously set on foot, the difficulty would be so to moderate the westward rush as to prevent an unnecessary dislocation of the labour-market in the South. Negro labour could and would be gradually replaced by white labour; but a sudden negro exodus on a large scale would embarrass agriculture and other industries in most of the Southern States. It would be one of the main problems of the case so to regulate the flow of migration as to make it continuous, yet not excessive.
There seems to be little doubt that the negro race, as a whole, would welcome any reasonable means of escape from the galling conditions of their life in the South. On the other hand, there is no doubt whatever that all the more intelligent members of the race are staunchly and even pathetically loyal to American ideals, and would be very unwilling to live under any other than the American form of government. In the new State, they would be members of a negro community without ceasing to be American citizens. It might be necessary at first to establish some provisional government like that of an American territory or English crown colony; but as soon as the country was sufficiently settled, and the mechanism of life in full swing, there could be no difficulty or danger in admitting the new community into the Union, with full State rights. Negro education has enormously progressed since the bad old days of Reconstruction; and there is no reason to doubt that the population could furnish a competent legislature, executive and judiciary. Legislative aberrations would be checked by the Supreme Court of the United States; and if things went thoroughly wrong, and a new Haiti threatened to develop in the heart of the Republic, why, United States troops would always be at hand to hold a black mob or a black adventurer in awe. But it would doubtless be a fundamental principle that no white man could vote or hold office in the negro State, while, reciprocally, no coloured man could vote or hold office in the white States.71 The abrogation of the Fifteenth Amendment would remove from the Constitution of the United States a constant source of trouble.
I am far from denying that this racial readjustment would demand a huge effort and a very large expense. In many individual cases it might cause a good deal of hardship to people of both colours. But that both colours would enormously and permanently benefit by the effort seems to me indubitable. It would be, before everything, an act of justice to the negro. It would enable him to build up a polity of his own, on lines to which his mind is already habituated. It would offer him full opportunity for the development of his talents and ambitions, unhampered by any social discriminations or disabilities. The Hampton-Tuskegee movement has been fitting great numbers of the race to carry out the necessary tasks of construction and organization involved in the material and moral upbuilding of the new community. Every aid should, of course, be afforded for the transference to the new domain of all negro universities, colleges, and similar institutions. I see little reason to doubt that the sense of new and unhampered opportunity would stimulate the mental and moral energies of the race, and beget a higher competency, a new self-respect. They would feel that they were on trial before the eyes of the world, that their future was in their own hands, and that they must vindicate their claim to the rights and liberties of civilized humanity. They would have a very fair chance of success; and in case of failure they would at worst relapse upon some sort of crown colony government. A regularly established and benevolent despotism would, at any rate, be better than the capricious and malevolent despotism to which they are now subjected in the South.
“But,” it may be said, “the rights and liberties of civilized humanity include the right to move freely hither and thither over the face of the earth. This right, at any rate, would be denied to the Afro-American, inclosed within the ring-fence of his own State.” There is, I think, a sufficient answer to this objection. The right to travel would not be denied to the negro. Nor would he be debarred from emigrating and settling abroad among any community that was willing to receive him. It is, I think, becoming more and more clear that the right of every man, white, black, or yellow, to effect a permanent settlement outside his own country, is subject to this qualification. The idea that all the world ought to belong equally to all men, and that rational development tends toward an unrestricted intermingling of races, seems to be signally contradicted by the trend of events. Is it not the great essential for the ultimate world-peace that races should learn to keep themselves to themselves?
If the negro State is established with any success, I do not believe that its inhabitants will feel it an undue restriction on their liberties that they are forbidden to settle in other parts of the Union. The population question will gradually regulate itself. A fairly civilized people, with limited opportunities of expansion, will soon realize the penalties of breeding beyond its means of subsistence.
And what of the South, when this act of justice to the negro shall have been performed? It will awaken, as from a nightmare, to the realization of its splendid destiny. No longer will one of the richest and most beautiful regions of the world be hampered in its material and spiritual development by a legacy of ancestral crime. All that is best in the South—and the Southern nature is rich in elements of magnanimity and humanity—abhors the inhuman necessities imposed upon it by the presence of the negro. The Southern white man writhes under the criticisms of the North and of Europe, which he feels to be ignorant and in great measure unjust, yet which he can only answer by an impotent, “You do not know! You cannot understand!”72 He has to confess, too, that there is much in Southern policy and practice that even the necessities of the situation cannot excuse—much that can only be palliated as the result of a constant overstrain to which human nature ought never to be subjected. Remove the causes of this overstrain, and a region perhaps the most favoured by Nature of all in the Western Hemisphere will stand where it ought to stand—in the van, not only of civilization, but of humanity.
PART III
HAVANA TO PANAMA
Notes
47. Mr. A. H. Stone (“The American Race Problem,” p. 230) points out that “the Latin’s prejudice of colour is nowhere as strong as the Teuton’s.” In the same excellent book I find this sentence quoted from “The Foundations of Sociology,” by Professor E. A. Ross: “North America from the Behring Sea to the Rio Grande is dedicated to the highest type of civilisation; while for centuries the rest of our hemisphere will drag the ball and chain of hybridism.”
48. I jot down almost at random, as they occur in my notes, a few statements on the population question.
Mr. W. B. Smith, author of “The Colour-Line” (a strongly anti-negro book), makes out that the negro population has since 1860 increased by about 1,100,000 per decade. Thus, in 1860, it stood at 4,400,000, and in 1900 at 8,800,000. Meanwhile the number of negroes per thousand of the whole population has been steadily declining. In 1860 it was 141 per thousand; in 1900 only 116.
In the census of 1900, which gave the total population of the United States as 75,994,575, the coloured population was set down at 9,185,379, or 12·1 per cent.; but as the term “coloured” included 351,394 Indians and Mongolians, the actual number of negroes is reduced to 8,833,985. The coloured population of the South Atlantic and South Central States is given at 8,001,557; and as Indians and Mongolians are few in these regions, we may take it that the number of negroes was nearly eight millions. The white population of these States numbered 16,521,960, of whom only a little more than 2 per cent. were foreign-born, as against 22·5 per cent. in the North Atlantic division, and 15·8 per cent. in the North Central division. But, no doubt, the next census will show a much higher percentage of foreign-born whites in the South. See tables in “The Present South,” by E. G. Murphy.
From a carefully argued statistical paper by W. F. Willcox in Stone’s “Studies in the American Race Problem,” it appears that, taking periods of twenty years together, the percentage of increase in the negro population of the United States has steadily declined. In 1800-1820 it was 76 per cent., in 1880-1900 it was only 34 per cent. Mr. Willcox places the “maximum limit of probable negro population a century hence” at 25,000,000, and thinks that by that time the negroes will constitute only 17·8 per cent. of the population of the Southern States, instead of 32·4 per cent. as at present.
49. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the third chapter of “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” takes a pessimistic view, arguing that the apparent progress of the coloured population is “confined to the upper fraction of the race,” while “the other nine-tenths, far from advancing in any way, have either stood stagnant, or have retrograded.” His argument leaves me unconvinced; and I think he gives too much weight to the evidence of Mr. William Hannibal Thomas, author of “The American Negro,” whose invectives against his own race are too virulent to be accepted without the utmost caution.
50. There seems to be no doubt that the economic and social future of the South must be radically influenced by the campaign against the hookworm—uncinaria—which, financed by Mr. Rockefeller, is being actively set on foot. This intestinal parasite, which works its way in through the skin, has only of late years been recognized and studied; and as yet scarcely a beginning has been made in that cleansing of the polluted soil which is the obvious and only method of mastering the pest. Both races suffer from it, but the negro far less than the white; and it is said that the laziness and shiftlessness of the “po’ white trash” of the South is almost entirely due to the terrible anæmia produced by its ravages. If this “poor white” population could be converted from two million degraded paupers into as many healthy and industrious citizens, the effect on the labour-market would certainly be far-reaching. The disease ought to be a comparatively easy one to stamp out; and, even when infection has occurred, it commonly yields, in early stages, to a simple treatment.
51. See foot-note, p. 190. The American use of the word “conservative,” as employed above, is curiously illustrated in this sentence from “The American Race Problem,” p. 247: “The position of the more conservative, or liberal, section of opinion was that of attempting to show the folly and injustice of attacking Roosevelt by an argument based upon a comparison of the number of negro appointments during his and McKinley’s administrations.”
52. In this connection it is perhaps worth noting that the hookworm—that “vampire of the South”—is now pretty clearly proved to be an importation from Africa. On the other hand, it is a far greater scourge to the white than to the black race, the negro possessing a power of resistance to its ravages which amounts almost to immunity.
53. “It has become the fashion of late for certain negro leaders to talk, in conventions held outside the South, of fighting for their rights. For their own sake and that of their race, let them take it out in talking. A single outbreak would settle the question.”—T. N. Page: “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” p. 281.
54. This distinction is illustrated by the anecdote of a negro in a Northern city going from door to door of a long street, asking for work and food, and being everywhere met by a polite and regretful refusal. At last he came to a door which was flung open by a man, who thus addressed him: “You d——d black hound, how have you the impudence to come to the front door! Go to the back door, ask for a broom, and sweep out the yard.” “Bless de Lord!” said the negro, “He’s led me to my own Southern people at last!”
55. Negro labour is indispensable to the South only inasmuch as the negro has kept and keeps out the white labourer. “Should the negro be deported, there would be no trouble in filling his place with white men, who would bring the South up to its proper agricultural standard.” William P. Calhoun, “The Caucasian and the Negro,” p. 15. Mr. A. H. Stone, a large employer of negro labour, writes: “It has been the curse of the South for a hundred years that her people have clung, and stubbornly, to a conviction, never reasonable or well-founded, that negro labour was essential to the cultivation of her soil.”—“The American Race Problem,” p. 174.
56. See foot-note, p. 64.
57. Mr. Booker Washington said to Mr. Wells: “May we not become a peculiar people—like the Jews? Isn’t that possible?” What so long kept the Jews a peculiar people was the constancy with which Jewish women declined to intermingle with the Gentiles around them. If negro women showed such a spirit of racial chastity, the problem would be very different.
58. On p. 47 of “Race Adjustment,” by Mr. Kelly Miller, a coloured professor at Howard University, the author says, addressing Mr. Thomas Dixon, Junr., “You are mistaken. The negro does not ‘hope and dream of amalgamation.’... A more careful reading of the article referred to would have convinced you that I was arguing against amalgamation as a probable solution of the race problem. I merely stated the intellectual conviction that two races cannot live indefinitely side by side, under the same general régime, without ultimately fusing.” For practical purposes, the difference is not great between “hoping and dreaming” of amalgamation, and merely looking forward to it as inevitable.
59. Of course this does not imply that many individual negroes would not be as unwilling as any white man or woman to marry outside their colour limits.
It is on the whole very difficult to state my point in the above paragraph, without seeming to imply a great deal more of conscious and formulated will than I am, as a matter of fact, assuming. There are doubtless thousands of negroes who oppose a race-pride of their own to the race-pride of the whites, and hundreds of thousands who have no conscious desire whatever regarding the future of their race. I am trying to state what I believe, rightly or wrongly, to be deep instinctive tendencies, which seldom, perhaps, emerge into consciousness.
60. This I wrote from deep conviction, yet with a certain sense of daring; for I thought the idea entirely my own, and feared it might give dire offence. More than a year later, I was reassured on reading the following passage in “The Basis of Ascendancy,” by Mr. E. G. Murphy (p. 52): “Much of the South’s talk against the negro has therefore been the South talking to itself; it has been its rebuke, by implication, of those corrupting elements within the limits of its own life which answer to no high policy of social self-respect, to no fine purpose of racial conservation, but which, under the lowest impulses, would degrade the present and betray the future.”
61. “The only truly Anglo-Saxon communities in the world to-day are in rural England and the Southern States.” Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 5. It may perhaps not be quite irrelevant to note that I was struck by the immense preponderance of fair hair and complexion among the women of the South. I would almost go so far as to say that, with the exception of women who had obviously a negro strain in their blood, I did not see a single brunette in the course of my wanderings. As regards Louisiana, this no doubt only means that I had not time or opportunity for adequate observation. But in the case of the other States, I am inclined to think there must be good grounds for the strong impression left on my mind.
62. Jean Finot: “Race Prejudice,” London, 1806, p. xv.
63. There is some conflict of evidence as to whether many persons of negro blood “cross the line” or “go over to white”—that is to say conceal and renounce the negro strain in their ancestry. Mr. Kelly Miller states that, as a result of white persecution, “hundreds of the composite progeny are daily crossing the colour-line and carrying as much of the despised blood as an albicant skin can conceal without betrayal.” (“Race Adjustment,” p. 49.) “Hundreds daily” is probably an exaggeration; but it would appear that such cases are not infrequent; and it is significant that negroes generally, instead of resenting this disloyalty to their blood, enter into “a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the negro who crosses the line.” “Such cases,” says Mr. Stannard Baker, “even awaken glee among them, as though the negro thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.”
64. “One day, while walking in one of the most fashionable residence districts of Atlanta, I saw a magnificent gray stone residence standing somewhat back from the street. I said to my companion, who was a resident of the city:
“‘That’s a fine home.’
“‘Yes; stop a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you about that. The anti-kink man lives there.’
“‘Anti-kink?’ I asked in surprise.
“‘Yes; the man who occupies that house is one of the wealthiest men here. He made his money by selling to negroes a preparation to smooth the kinks out of their wool. They’re simply crazy on that subject.’
“‘Does it work?’
“‘You haven’t seen any straight-haired negroes, have you?’ he asked.”—Ray Stannard Baker.
65. This volume contains portraits of ninety-seven contributors to it, whom I have roughly classified according to their features and apparent complexion. There are only three whom one can put down as probably pure negroes. Of the remainder, twenty-three seem to be predominantly negroes, but clearly not pure-bred; thirty-four are typical mulattoes (that is to say, appear to be half black, half white); in thirty-three the features are almost entirely Caucasian, but the complexion is unmistakably swarthy, while in five there is scarcely any recognizable trace of negro blood. The decoration round the portraits in this book is curious and instructive. It consists of a scroll-work encircling two pairs of contrasted medallions. On the one side we have a black slave being flogged, on the other a very light mulatto writing in a study, surrounded with books; on the one side a negro kneeling with broken fetters on his wrists, on the other a frock-coated mulatto on a platform, with an ice-water pitcher on his table, lecturing with gesticulation to a crowded audience.
66. “What evil spirit has come upon the present-day Afro-American that a people who, from the days of Homer until this generation, have borne the epithet of ‘blameless Ethiopians’ should now be accused as the scourge of mankind?” Kelly Miller (coloured), “Race Adjustment,” p. 77.
67. I do not dwell on his surely unadvised initial statement that the “barriers” between white and black “are not different in kind or in strength from those which once separated neighbouring European tribes.” I presume that “once” must be taken as referring to pre-historic ages, reconstructed on scanty ethnological evidence.
68. Yet I cannot but call attention once more to the doubt even on this point. See p. 108. The general manager (a Canadian) of the company which laid down the street-car lines in Kingston, Jamaica, reported that “the best and most reliable of the workmen were the pure blacks. This was found to be invariably the case.”—W. P. Livingstone, “Black Jamaica,” p. 182.
69. Several of my critics, when this essay first appeared, misunderstood this phrase. I do not mean that if the legal barriers were removed white men would rush to marry black women. What I mean is that, in a democratic community, the legal barrier could not possibly be removed unless there had previously occurred a relaxation, or rather reversal, of public sentiment with regard to mixed unions.
70. I assume that, the principle once accepted, there will be small difficulty in arranging the respective rights and duties in this matter of the central and the State governments. The colour problem is a national concern, if ever there was one.
71. The negro State would, of course, send to Congress its two Senators and its due proportion of members of the Lower House.
72. “I know of no other community of white people of equal numbers in the world to-day carrying the burden borne by those of the Southern States.... I mean the burden of... administering the same law for the two most diverse races on earth; of so carrying themselves in the various relations of daily life with these childish people that their conduct may have the approval of their consciences; of living with a due regard for the opinions of their fellow-men, the while oppressed by the consciousness that their fellow-men do not, will not, or cannot understand.”—A. H. Stone, “The American Race Problem,” p. 74.