IV Rhetoric in Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky, is not an attractive city. It is as flat as my hand; its atmosphere is grimy; its buildings vary from the commonplace to the mean. It has one or two of the dumpy sky-scrapers—only some ten or twelve storeys high—which are indispensable to the self-respect of every American city of a certain size; but one feels that they are products of mere imitative ostentation, not of economic necessity. In Louisville the names, or numbers, of the streets are scarcely ever stuck up. It is characteristic of a half-grown American town that you can generally read the names of streets which have no houses in them; but when the houses are built, the name-boards seem to be thrown away.
I am apt to estimate the civilization of a city by inspecting its book-stores; but during a long day in Louisville I could not find a single one. No doubt I failed to look in the right place; but I certainly perambulated the leading business streets. I was reminded of a couplet from I know not what poet—
“Alas for the South! Her books have grown fewer;
She was never much given to literature.”
Let me hasten to add that in all the other cities I visited I found one or more fairly well-supplied book-stores.
For reasons I have elsewhere stated at length, an American barber’s shop is an abomination to me. |Tonsorial Sarcasm.| Among the least of its terrors is the interminable time occupied by the disgusting processes to which you are submitted. However, I had time on my hands in Louisville, and, being a vagrant with no fixed abode, had no conveniences for shaving myself. So I ventured into a “tonsorial parlour.”
I was “attended” by a white “artist”; for this is one of the trades from which the negro is being rapidly ousted all over the South.11
“Have you special seats for coloured people in the street-cars here”? I asked my torturer.
“No,” he replied, “we haven’t. They can sit wherever they please. And, what’s more, they won’t sit beside each other, but insist on plumping themselves down alongside of white folks. If I had my way, they’d ride on the roof.” I need scarcely remark that, as American street-cars have no outside seats, this was an ironical recommendation.
It was with some hesitancy that I offered a tip to this champion of the dignity of the white man. But he showed no resentment.
I had been recommended to call on Mr. A. B. Shipton (I alter the name), a coloured lawyer of some prominence. |A Negro Lawyer.| Entering his office, I found a man of aquiline features and tawny rather than brown complexion, carrying on a conversation through the telephone. From its matter I gathered that he was talking to his wife; and this conjecture was confirmed when he, so to speak, rang off with two sounding kisses into the instrument. The trait was characteristic; for the domestic negro is very domestic indeed.
He now put on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses and read my letter of introduction, all the time smoking a long pipe, which he had kept alight even while at the telephone. I presently found that some of his habits in relation to the use of tobacco savoured of the period of “Martin Chuzzlewit”; but he was a man whom one instinctively, and with no effort, met on the equal terms on which one would meet a member of his profession in England.
As I was well accredited, he received me with cordiality and talked freely. Not only freely, indeed, but copiously; not only copiously, but with rhetorical finish and emphasis. I soon realized that I was listening to extracts from speeches which he was in the habit of delivering.
Looking back upon the whole tenor of our interview, I find it curiously like the talk which a sixteenth-century Englishman might have held with a Spanish or Venetian Jew. Mr. Shipton related, indeed, a series of wrongs, injustices, and humiliations; but the ever-recurring burden of his tale was a celebration of the material progress of his race, the wealth they were amassing, the homes they were founding, the heroism they were developing in the teeth of adverse circumstance.
The Plaint of the Uncomplaining.
“As you go southward, sir,” he said, “people will tell you over and over again that they, the Southern whites, alone know the negro and know how to deal with him. That is precisely the reverse of the truth. They do not know the negro, because they won’t know him. They won’t enter into any sympathetic relation with him.
“It was different in the days of slavery, no doubt. Then, in most cases, there was a certain amount of human intercourse between the slave and the master. But the growing white generation has no approach to the knowledge of the black man (to say nothing of sympathy with him) that its grandfathers had in ante-bellum days.
“Is race-prejudice weakening at all? It is not weakening, but altering, and that in an ominous way. Thirty years ago the prejudice was against the ignorant, shiftless and thriftless black; now it is against the thrifty and industrious, the refined and the cultured—against those, in a word, who come into competition with the middle-class white.12
“Just think, sir, what we have done! Forty years ago, when slavery came to an end, we were four million ignorant, homeless, schoolless, friendless creatures. Now there are ten millions of us, and we have a hundred colleges, thousands of schools, tens of thousands of homes. We pay taxes on a billion dollars’ worth of property.13
“Forty years ago we had no business men, no professional men. Now we have painters, poets, architects, inventors, merchants, lawyers, doctors, divines. And yet we are shut off from the body-politic. We have to submit to taxation without representation. Even those of us who cannot be defrauded of our votes are excluded from the councils of the party which would not exist without us. That” (with peculiar bitterness) “is what they call the lilywhite policy!14
“But, sir, we are uncomplaining. If there is a colour-problem, it is not we who raise it. No! it is the unprincipled white politician who finds anti-negro agitation a popular plank in his platform.
“Even under this government of the two races by and for the one race, the negro is loyal to the country which he has enriched by his labour, hallowed by his graves, watered with his blood.
“We are a docile and an instinctively religious race. You will find few negro atheists or infidels. We are susceptible to any and all of the forms of the Christian religion. We are Methodists or Baptists among the Methodists and Baptists, Presbyterians among the Presbyterians, Episcopalians among the Episcopalians, Roman Catholics among the Roman Catholics.”
I could not but think this remark significant of much—of far more, indeed, than the speaker realized.
“Are you excluded from municipal as well as from political life?” I asked.
“Even more strictly, if possible,” was the reply. “All municipal offices are in the hands of ‘sho’ ’nuff white folks,’ though they may be Dagos, or Germans, or Slavs. Of course the city government and the police department are run by the Irish. No negro holds a job higher than that of washing spittoons in the Court House. Yet in this city we pay taxes on three millions of property.
Arithmetical Progression.
“But this is the saving trait of the negro’s character: shut off from all other activities, he goes on quietly and uncomplainingly working, educating himself, and accumulating property.15 For the righting of our wrongs we must look to the negroes in those States where they hold the balance of power—in Ohio, Indiana, Connecticut, New Jersey, and others. And think what an element we are destined to form in the body politic! In fifty years we shall be twenty-five millions; next century we shall be fifty millions. Not a drop of our blood is lost to us—the whites take care of that. If you haven’t got but a sixteenth part of black blood, you’re a negro all right.”
Twenty-five millions in fifty years! Next century fifty millions! I did think of it; and it was a thought to give one pause. Perhaps a more careful estimate would somewhat reduce the figures. Cautious statisticians, proceeding on the best available data, place the probable number of negroes at the beginning of the next century somewhere about 35,000,000—that is to say, some 10,000,000 more than the whole population of the eighteen Southern States at last census.16
As I left Mr. Shipton I asked whether his practice was mainly among his own people. “Yes,” he said; “ninety nine per cent. of it; though, by-the-by, I got divorces for a couple of white men the other day.”
And now a word of amends to Louisville. An hour before sunset I took a car down all the long length of Broad Street, till it landed me at the entrance to Shawnee Park. |An Idyll.| This expanse of lush and yet delicate verdure is embraced by a bend of the majestic Ohio. The steep banks of the river are nobly wooded, and you look across the splendid sheet of water to what might be primeval forest beyond. In that soft sunset hour, the air was full of the scent of flowering shrubs. A mocking-bird was singing in a thicket; far off I heard voices of children playing, and, on the river, the clunk of a pair of oars in rowlocks; but within sight there were only two lovers on a grassy mound, and a student bent over his book. As the sun touched the trees of the opposite bank and threw a glow over the yellow eddies of the great river, I thought it would be hard to picture a more peaceful, a more beautiful, a more idyllic scene. So even Louisville is not without its charms.
Notes
11. “There are more coloured barbers in the United States to-day than ever before, but a larger number than ever cater to only the coloured trade.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Negro in the South,” p. 99. On this point, however, a wise word of Mr. E. G. Murphy’s deserves to be noted: “If the man who ‘disappears’ as a barber reappears as a carpenter, or as a small farmer on his own land, he may figure in the census-tables to prove all sorts of dismal theories; but, as a matter of fact, he has been forced into a sounder and stronger economic position. Many negroes are suffering displacement without gaining by the process; but it is a mistake to assume that displacement in itself is always an evidence of industrial defeat.” “The Basis of Ascendancy,” p. 64.
12. “If my own city of Atlanta had offered it to-day the choice between five hundred negro college graduates—forceful, busy, ambitious men of property and self-respect—and five hundred black, cringing vagrants and criminals, the popular vote in favour of the criminals would be simply overwhelming. Why? Because they want negro crime? No, not that they fear negro crime less, but that they fear negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can. But the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man.”—W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Negro in the South,” p. 180.
13. According to Mr. W.H. Thomas, a negro writer violently hostile to his race, negroes in the year 1901 owned about $700,000,000, and paid state and municipal taxes of over $3,000,000. This, he reckons, would mean property to the amount of about $90 per head, or a saving of about $2·60 (ten and sixpence) per head per year since emancipation. Mr. Thomas also states that before the war there was in the South a free negro population of a quarter of a million, owning between thirty-five and forty million dollars’ worth of property. “The American Negro,” pp. 39 and 74. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page also points out that some negroes accumulated wealth during the Reconstruction period “by other means than those of honest thrift.” But it is probable that in most cases the money thus gained was not so employed as to constitute a permanent addition to the wealth of the race.
15. Mr Booker Washington declares (“The Negro in the South,” p. 73) that “the race has acquired ownership in land that is equal in area to the combined countries of Belgium and Holland.” He does not say how much of it is under mortgage. Elsewhere, Mr. Washington has stated (on the authority of the census of 1900) “that from a penniless population just out of slavery, 372,414 owners of homes have emerged, and of these 255,156 are known to own their homes absolutely free of encumbrance.” See E. G. Murphy: “The Present South,” p. 184. But the negroes were not absolutely “penniless” at the outbreak of the war. See p. 33.
16. But see foot-note, p. 189.