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CHAPTER XXXII
Race Prejudice

As late as 1890, Senator Ingalls said: “The use of the torch and dagger is advised. I deplore it, but as God is my judge, I say that no people on this earth have ever submitted to the wrongs and injustice which have been put upon the coloured men of the South without revolt and bloodshed.” Others spoke of the negro’s use of torch and sword as his only way to right himself in the South. When prominent men in Congressional and legislative halls and small stump speakers everywhere fulminated such sentiments, the marvel would have been if race prejudice had not come to birth and growth. Good men, whose homes were safe, and who in heat of oratory or passion for place, forgot that other men’s homes were not, had no realisation of the effect of their words upon Southern households, where inmates lay down at night trembling lest they wake in flames or with black men shooting or knifing them.

But for a rooted and grounded sympathy and affection between the races that fierce and newly awakened prejudice could not kill, the Sepoy massacres of India would have been duplicated in the South in the sixties and seventies. Under slavery, the black race held the heart of the white South in its hands. Second only in authority to the white mother on a Southern plantation, was the black mammy; hoary-headed white men and women, young men and maidens and little children, rendered her reverence and love. Little negroes and little white children grew up together, playing together and forming ties of affection equal to almost any strain. The servant was dependent upon his master, the master upon his servant. Neither could afford to disregard the well-being of the other. No class of labour on earth today is as well cared for as were the negroes of the Old South. Age was pensioned, infancy sheltered. There was a state of mutual trust and confidence between employer and employee that has been seen nowhere else and at no time since between capital and labour.

Had the negro remained a few centuries longer the white man’s dependant, often an inmate of his home, and his close associate on terms not raising questions and conflicts, his development would have proceeded. Through the processes of slavery, the negro was peaceably evolving, as agriculturist, shepherd, blacksmith, mechanic, master and mistress of domestic science, towards citizenship – inevitable when he should be ready for it; citizenship all the saner, because those who were training him were unconscious of what they were doing and contemplated making no political use of him. They were intent only on his industrial and moral education. His evolution was set back by emancipation.

Yet, if destruction of race identity is advancement, the negro will advance. The education which he began to receive with other Greek gifts of freedom has taught him to despise his skin, to loath his race identity, to sacrifice all native dignity and nobility in crazy antics to become a white man. “Social equality!” those words are to be his doom. It is a pity that the phrase was ever coined. It is not to say that one is better than the other when we say of larks and robins, doves and crows, eagles and sparrows, that they do not flock together. They are different rather than unequal. Difference does not, of itself, imply inequality. To ignore a difference inherent in nature is a crime against nature and is punished accordingly by nature.

The negro race in America is to be wiped out by the dual process of elimination and absorption. The negro will not be eliminated as was the Indian – though the way a whole settlement of blacks was made to move on a few years ago in Illinois, looks as if history might repeat itself in special instances. Between lynchings and race riots in the North and West and those in the South there has usually been this difference: in the former, popular fury included entire settlements, punishing the innocent with the guilty; in the latter, it limited itself to the actual criminal. Another difference between sectional race problems. I was in New York during Subway construction when a strike was threatened, and overheard two gentlemen on the elevated road discussing the situation: “The company talks of bringing the blacks up here.” “If they do, the tunnel will run blood! These whites will never suffer the blacks to take their work.” I thought, “And negroes have had a monopoly of the South’s industries and have scorned it!” I thought of jealous white toilers in the slime of the tunnel; and of Dixie’s greening and golden fields, of swinging hoes and shining scythes and the songs of her black peasantry. And I thought of her stalwart black peasants again when I walked through sweat-shops and saw bent, wizened, white slaves.

The elimination of the negro will be in ratio to the reduction of his potentiality as an industrial factor. Evolutionary processes reject whatever has served its use. History shows the white man as the exponent of evolution. There were once more Indians here than there are now negroes. Yet the Indian has almost disappeared from the land that belonged to him when a little handful of palefaces came and found him in their way. Had he been of use, convertible into a labourer, he would have been retained; he was not so convertible, and other disposition was made of him while we sent to Africa for what was required. The climate of the North did not agree with the negro; he was not a profitable labourer; he disappeared. He was a satisfactory labourer South; he throve and multiplied. He is not now a satisfactory labourer in any locality. What is the conclusion if we judge the white man’s future by his past?

The white man does not need the negro as littérateur, statesman, ornament to society. Of these he has enough and to spare, and seeks to reduce surplus. What he needs is agricultural labour. The red man would not till the soil, and the red man went; if the black man will not, perhaps the yellow man will. Sporadic instances of exceptional negroid attainments may interest the white man – in circumscribed circle – for a time. But the deep claim, the strong claim, the commanding claim would be that the negro filled a want not otherwise supplied, that the negro could and would do for him that which he cannot well do for himself – for instance, work the rice and cotton lands where the negro thrives and the white man dies.

The American negro is passing. The mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, strike the first notes in the octave of his evolution – or his decadence, or extinction, or whatever you may call it. The black negro is rare North and South. Negroes go North, white Northerners come South. In States sanctioning intermarriage, irregular connections obtain as elsewhere between white men and black women; and, in addition, between black men and white women of most degraded type or foreigners who are without the saving American race prejudice. Recent exposure of the “White Slave Syndicate” in New York which kidnapped white girls for negro bagnios, is fresh in the public mind.

Under slavery many negroes learned to value and to practice virtue; many value and practice it now; but the freedwoman has been on the whole less chaste than the bond. With emancipation the race suffered relapse in this as in other respects. The South did not do her whole duty in teaching chastity to the savage, though making more patient, persistent and heroic struggle than accredited with. The charge that under slavery miscegenation was the result of compulsion on the part of the superior race finds answer in its continuance since. Because he was white, the crying sin was the white man’s, but it is just to remember that the heaviest part of the white racial burden was the African woman, of strong sex instincts and devoid of a sexual conscience, at the white man’s door, in the white man’s dwelling.²⁸

In 1900, negroes constituted 20.4 per cent. of the population of Texas, the lowest rate for the Southern States; in Mississippi, 58.6, the highest. In Massachusetts, they were less than two per cent. Questions of social intermingling can not be of such practical and poignant concern to Massachusetts as to Mississippi, where amalgamation would result in a population of mulatto degenerates. Prohibitions are protective to both races. Fortunately, miscegenation proceeds most slowly in the sections of negro concentration, the sugar and cotton lands of the lower South. In these, it is also said, there is lower percentage of negro crime of all kinds than where negroes are of lighter hue.

Thinkers of both races have declared amalgamation an improbable, undesirable conclusion of the race question; that it would be a propagation of the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. In a letter (March 30, 1865) to the Louisville “Courier-Journal,” recently reproduced in “The Outlook,” Mr. Beecher said: “I do not think it wise that whites and blacks should mix blood … it is to be discouraged on grounds of humanity.” Senator Ingalls said: “Fred Douglas once said to me: ‘The races will blend, coalesce, and become homogeneous.’ I do not agree with him. There is no affinity between the races; this solution is impossible… There is no blood-poison so fatal as the adulteration of race.”

At the Southern Educational Conference in Columbia, 1905, Mr. Abbott, in one of the clearest, frankest speeches yet heard from our Northern brotherhood, declared the thinking North and South now one upon these points: the sections were equally responsible for slavery; the South fought, not to perpetuate slavery, but on an issue “that had its beginning before the adoption of the Federal Constitution;” racial integrity should be preserved. In one of the broadest, sanest discussions of the negro problem to which the American public has been treated, Professor Eliot, of Harvard, has said recently: “Northern and Southern opinion are identical with regard to keeping the races pure – that is, without admixture of the one with the other … inasmuch as the negroes hold the same view, this supposed danger of mutual racial impairment ought not to have much influence on practical measures. Admixture of the two races, so far as it proceeds, will be, as it has been, chiefly the result of sexual vice on the part of white men; it will not be a wide-spread evil, and it will not be advocated as a policy or method by anybody worthy of consideration.”

“It will not be a wide-spread evil!” The truth stares us in the face. Except in the lower South the black negro is now almost a curiosity. In any negro gathering the gamut of colour runs from ginger-cake to white rivaling the Anglo-Saxon’s; and according as he is more white, the negro esteems himself more honourable than his blacker fellow; though these gradations in colour which link him with the white man, were he to judge himself by the white man’s standard, would be, generally speaking, badges of bastardy and shame.

In Florida, a tourist remarked to an orange-woman: “They say Southerners do not believe in intermingling of the races. But look at all these half-white coons!” “Well, Marster,” she answered, “don’t you give Southern folks too much credit fuh dat. Rich Yankees in de winter-time; crap uh white nigger babies in de fall. Fus’ war we all had down here, mighty big crap uh yaller babies come up. Arter de war ’bout Cuba, ’nother big crap come ’long. Nigger gal ain’ nuvver gwi have a black chile ef she kin git a white one!” Blanch, my negro hand-maiden, is comely, well-formed, black; the descendant of a series of honest marriages, yet feels herself at a disadvantage with quadroons and octoroons not nearly her equals in point of good looks or principle. “I’d give five hundred dollars ef I had it, ef my ha’r was straight,” she tells me with pathetic earnestness; and “I wish I had been born white!” is her almost heart-broken moan.²⁹ She would rather be a mulatto bastard than the black product of honest wedlock.

The integrity of the races depends largely upon the virtue of white men and black women; also, it rests on the negroid side upon the aspiration to become white, acknowledgment in itself of inferiority and self-loathing. The average negress will accept, invite, with every wile she may, the purely animal attention of a “no-count white man” in preference to marriage with a black. The average mulatto of either sex considers union with a black degradation. The rainbow of promise spanning this gloomy vista is the claim that the noble minority of black women who value virtue is on the increase as the race, in self-elevation, recognises more and more the demands of civilisation upon character, and that dignity of racehood which will not be ashamed of its own skin or covet the skin of another. The virtuous black woman is the Deborah and the Miriam of her people. She is found least often in crowded cities, North and South; most often in Southern rural districts. Wherever found, she commands the white man’s respect.

Hope should rest secure in the white man. If the faith of his fathers, the flag of his fathers, the Union of his fathers, are worthy of preservation, is not the blood of his fathers a sacred trust also? Besides, before womanhood, whatever its colour or condition, however ready to yield or appeal to his grosser senses, the white man should throw the ægis of his manhood and his brotherhood.

The recent framing of State Constitutions in the South to supersede the Black and Tan creations revived the charge of race prejudice because their suffrage restrictions would in great degree disfranchise the negro. As compared with discussion of any phase of the race issue some years ago, the spirit of comment was cool and fair. “The Outlook” led in justifying the South for protecting the franchise with moderate property and educational qualifications applying to both races, criticising, however, the provision for deciding upon educational fitness – a provision which Southerners admit needs amendment. One effect of these restrictions will be to stimulate the negro’s efforts to acquire the necessary education or the necessary three hundred dollars’ worth of property. Another effect will be decrease of the white farmer’s scant supply of negro labour; this scarcity, in attracting white immigrants, provides antidote for Africanisation of the South.

As to whether negro ownership of lands improves country or not, I will give a Northern view. I met in 1903 at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, a wealthy Chicagoan and his wife (originally from Massachusetts), who were looking for a holiday residence in Tidewater Virginia. They made various excursions with land agents, and one day reported discovery of their ideal in all respects but one. “The people around are ruining property by selling lands to negroes. A gentleman at whose house we stopped, a Northerner, had just bought, as he told us, at much inconvenience, a plantation adjoining his own to make sure it would not be cut up and sold by degrees to negroes.” I hear Southern farmers in black belts say: “I had much rather have a quiet, orderly negro for neighbour than a troublesome white.” But the fact remains that negro ownership of property reduces value of adjoining lands. Besides the social reason, the average negro exhausts and does not improve lands.

“Why don’t the negroes live up North?” one is asked; “they go up there and make a little money and come back and buy lands.”

“Land is cheap here. It is almost beyond their reach there. The climate here appeals. Then, this is home.” Thus I answered in 1902, in Southside, Virginia. After further travel, I amend: Negroes do not wish to work for white land-owners; they wish to remain in the South or to return to the South, as land-owners. They are acquiring considerable property. But, generally speaking, they are thinning out. One may journey miles along Southern railroads and see but few in fields where once were thousands. In Northern cities and pleasure resorts negroes increase. The race problem is broadening, changing territory.

The daughter of an Ohioan gave me a glimpse of this changing base. “Columbus negroes – those born there or who came there long ago, are very different from Southern negroes. They will have nothing to do with the negroes coming direct. The Southern negroes have nice, deferential manners; the Northern negroes hate them for it. Columbus negroes – why, they will push white ladies off the streets!” In a New York store in 1904, I observed two negresses in a crowd near a window where articles of baggage were on check. They pushed their way to the front and demanded belongings without the courteous “please” which any Southerner, or which Northern gentlefolks, would have used; the young white girl in charge – it was a hot day and she looked faint – was doing her cheerful best to meet the noon rush, but was not quick enough for the coloured persons; they hurried and reproved her; as she turned about within, confused by their descriptions and commands, they exclaimed: “That’s it! Right befo’ you! Don’t you see that case right there? What a fool!” She never thought of resenting; came up humbly, loaded with their property, glad to have found it. Their manners would have scandalised a black aristocrat of the Old South.

We cannot afford to wrong this race as we wronged the Indian. We must aid the negro’s advancement in the right direction. But we should not discriminate against the white race. Educational doors are open to the negro throughout the land; the South is rich in noble institutions of learning for him; in black belts Southerners are paying more to educate black children than white. In black belts, in white belts, in the mountains, white children are put into fields and factories when they ought to be going to school. Educational odds are against the white children. In regard to schools of manual training, to limit the negro to these and these to the negro is to put a stigma on manual labor in the eyes of white youth and to continue the negro’s monopoly of a field which he does not appreciate. We should do more educationally for the white child and not less for the negro. The negro pays small percentage of the Southern educational tax and enjoys full benefits. The negro needs to realize that if the white man owes him a debt, he owes the white man one; and that he cannot safely despise the school of service in house and field which white people from Europe and yellow people from the Orient are eager to enter.

I would close no door of opportunity to the negro. But I must say my affection is for the negro of the old order. I owe reverence to the memory of a black mammy and a debt to negroes generally for much kindness. The real negro I like, the poet of the veldt and jungle, the singer in field and forest, the tiller of the soil, the shepherd of the flocks, the herdsman of the cattle, the happy, soft-voiced, light-footed servitor. The negro who is a half-cut white man is not a negro, and it can be no offense to the race to say that he is unattractive when compared with the dear old darkey of Dixie who was worth a million of him! At Fort Mill, S. C., hard by a monument to a forgotten people, the Catawba Indians, stands a monument to the “Faithful Slaves of the Confederacy,” type of a memorial many hearts yet hold. The new negro, in reaching out for higher and better things than the old attained, will be wise not to sacrifice those qualities which told in his ancestor in spite of all shortcomings.

The one true plane of equalisation is that of mutual service, each race doing for the other all it can. The old negro and the white man stood more surely on this plane than do their descendants, yet not more surely than all must wish their descendants to stand. My regard for the negro, my pride in what he has really accomplished under the hammering of civilisation, call, in his behalf, for a race pride and reserve in him which shall match the Anglo-Saxon’s. There are negroes who have it and who deplore efforts placing them in the position of postulants for a social intermingling which they do not consider essential to their dignity or happiness.³⁰ Between blacks and whites South we constantly see race pride maintained on one side as on the other while humanities are observed in manifold exchanges of kindness and courtesy that make a bond of brotherhood.³¹ Whatever position the white Southerner takes theoretically on manufactured race issues, he will usually fight rather than see his inoffensive black neighbour or employe maltreated; his black neighbour or employe will often do as much for him. This attitude is sometimes an expression of the clan habit surviving the destruction of clan-life (old plantation-life in which the white man was Chief and his negroes his clansmen); also, it exists in the recognition of a common bond of humanity more than skin deep. Upon this rock the future may be builded.³² As a useful, industrious, citizen, the negro is his own argument and advocate.³³

MEMORIAL DAY

Daughters of all the South! Sons of all the South! We, your own old soldiers, pause a moment this day in our march and facing to the front, touching eternity on our right, we stand erect before you as if on dress parade. We know that the day of our personal presence has passed its noon, but we would cast no shadow upon the land we leave to you and yours, nor raise one barrier to your full possession of local and national rights. We are but the living Color Guard of the great army of your Southern fathers, and their history and honor are safely in your keeping. The war flag of precious memory waves peacefully above us, and we ask you for our sakes, and its own sake, to love it forever. The Star-spangled Banner of our country waves over all of us and over all our States and people, commanding the respect of every nation. Let it never be dishonored. With the feeling of pride that we are Confederate soldiers, we salute you, not by presenting arms, but with the salutations of our beating hearts. And now we will march on, march forward in column: and, as we go you will hear from us the echo of the angels’ song – Peace on earth, good will to men. —From an address by General Clement A. Evans, Commander of the Georgia Division, U. C. V., Memorial Day, 1905, Atlanta, Ga.