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THROUGH AFRO-AMERICA

THROUGH
AFRO-AMERICA

AN ENGLISH READING OF THE

RACE PROBLEM

BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

LONDON

CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.

1910

TO

H. G. WELLS

WITH WHOM I SO RARELY

DISAGREE THAT, WHEN

I DO, I MUST NEEDS

WRITE A BOOK ABOUT IT

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

“The problem of the twentieth century,” says Mr. W. B. Du Bois, “is the problem of the colour line.” That, no doubt, is the view of a man born “within the veil”; but, whatever our point of view, we cannot but admit that racial adjustment is one of the two or three most urgent problems of the near future.

Ought the colour-lines drawn by Nature to be enforced by human ordinance, and even by geographical segregation? Or ought they to be gradually obliterated by free intermingling and intermarriage? Or, while intermarriage is forbidden (whether by law or public sentiment), is it possible for people of different colours to dwell together in approximately equal numbers and on terms of democratic equality? Or is it for the benefit of both races that one race should always maintain, by social and political discriminations, its superiority over the other? Or is this opinion a mere hypocritical disguise of the instinct which begot, and maintained throughout the ages, the “institution” of slavery?

These are questions which the coming century will have to answer, not only in America, but in Africa. It is in the Southern United States, however, that the problem presents itself in its acutest and most fully developed form. In South Africa it is looming ahead, in America it is present and hourly insistent. Though the conditions in the two countries can never be precisely similar, yet the experience of the one ought certainly to be of the utmost value in shaping the counsels of the other. My interest, then, in the colour-question in the South was not a mere abstract interest in an alien problem; nor was it due solely to the special sympathy for America and all things American which (I am happy to say) has been strong in me from my youth upward. It was a personal interest which ought, I think, to be shared by every Englishman who is so far an Imperialist as to feel that he cannot simply wash his hands of the problems of Empire.

It was heightened, moreover, by the feeling that a great deal of what passes in England as advanced thought on the subject of race-relations is very superficial and remote from the realities of the case. This suspicion had for some time beset me, and was perhaps the main factor in inducing me to utilize a rare interval of leisure in getting into touch with the facts of the problem as it presents itself in Afro-America.

Some thinkers display an almost furious antipathy to the very idea of race. They hold it a mere superstition or illusion, and look forward, not only with equanimity, but with eagerness, to an obliteration of all race-boundaries in a universal “pan-mixture.” I cannot believe that this is a true ideal of progress; nor does it seem to me that the world at large is verging in that direction. No considerable fusion is taking place between the European and the Asiatic races. No one dreams of seeking on that line the solution of our difficulties in India. No practical politician dreams of encouraging yellow immigration into America or Australia on the same terms of permanent citizenship and free intermixture that obtain in the case of white settlers. If the myriads of China and Japan are to “expand” in the same sense in which the European races have expanded, it must be by conquest and something like extermination. That is, in fact, the “yellow peril” which haunts so many dreams.

The truth is, it seems to me, that no race problem, properly so called, arises until two races are found occupying the same territory in such an approach to equal numbers as to make it a serious question which colour shall ultimately predominate. A handful of white administrators, as in India, or of white traders, as in China and Japan, may give rise, no doubt, to important and difficult questions, but they are not specifically questions of race. No one doubts that India belongs to the Indians; that is the theory of the British “raj” no less than of the most fervid Nationalist; the dispute is as to whether the Indian people do or do not benefit by the British administration. So, too, in China and Japan: it may be doubtful whether the privileges accorded to foreigners are judicious, but neither the racial integrity nor the political autonomy of the yellow races is for a moment in question. The race problem means (in its only convenient definition) the problem of adjustment between two very dissimilar populations, locally intermingled in such proportions that the one feels its racial identity potentially threatened, while the other knows itself in constant danger of economic exploitation. Now these conditions, as a matter of experience, arise only where a race of very high development is brought into contact with a race of very low development, and only where the race of low development is at the same time tenacious of life and capable of resisting the poisons of civilization. In other words, the race problem, as here defined, is a purely Afro-European or Afro-American problem.

Where civilization has met civilization, as in India, China, Japan, there has never been any question of local intermixture in such proportions as to give rise to the conditions indicated. Where civilization has met savagery, elsewhere than in Africa, the savage race has generally dwindled to a degraded and negligible remnant. The African races alone have shown considerable tenacity of life and considerable power of putting on at any rate a veneer of civilization. This is as much as to say that only between Europeans and Africans has the active competition arisen which is the essence of the race problem. In some parts of Spanish America it has resulted in the practical fusion of the races; a solution which, as above noted, commends itself to some thinkers. But where fusion is resisted, the problem must one day become acute; and that day has arrived in the Southern States. There the two races are more nearly than anywhere else on a footing of numerical equality; there, more than anywhere else, is the ambition of the African race stimulated by political theory and seconded by education, organization, and considerable material resources. The Southern States, then, are, so to speak, the great crucible in which this experiment in inter-racial chemistry is working itself out. There you can watch the elements simmering. To some hopeful eyes they may even seem to be clarifying and settling down. The following pages will show that I, personally, am not confident of any desirable solution, unless a new element of far-sighted statesmanship can be thrown into the brew.

Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, author of that admirable series of studies, “Following the Colour-Line,” was good enough to map out for me a zig-zag tour through the States east of the Mississippi, which enabled me to employ my time to the best advantage. I was also much indebted to Mr. Baker, as well as to Mr. Walter H. Page and Dr. Booker Washington, for many valuable introductions. Wherever I went, my first preoccupation was with the colour question; but I also welcomed the opportunity to see something of the great agricultural, industrial, and educational revival which is rapidly transmuting the South from a ghost-haunted region of depression and impoverishment into one of the most eagerly progressive, and probably one of the wealthiest, of modern communities. This book, then, is mainly to be regarded as a series of rapid impressions of travel, intermingled with conversations, in which I try to present the colour-problem from various points of view, and to suggest the temper in which it is approached by men of both races. In the middle of my travel-sketches, however, at the point where I leave the American Continent, I have inserted an essay of some length which embodies my reflections on the preceding “choses vues” with such tentative conclusions as I felt justified in drawing. This essay, which appeared in McClure’s Magazine for July, 1909, has elicited a good deal of criticism in the South, which has led me to modify one or two passages. I am happy to say, however, that none of the criticism which has reached me, either privately or through the Press, has been in any sense hostile. Many critics have declared impossible the only solution of the problem which at all commends itself to me; but only one out of a hundred or thereabouts has accused me of seriously misrepresenting the conditions.

From Florida, I proceeded by way of Cuba and Jamaica to a detached but very important section of the United States, the Canal Zone at Panama. I make no apology for including in this book a few notes of that journey. For one thing, I was still in Afro-America, still studying certain aspects of the colour-problem. But another motive prompts the inclusion of these sketches—the hope that some readers may be moved to follow in my footsteps, and enjoy a very delightful and interesting tour. Anything is worth doing, in my judgment, that tends to encourage Englishmen to cross the Atlantic. If any considerable proportion of the English travelling public could be induced to set their faces westward, we should soon get rid of many of the little prejudices and ignorances which still interpose themselves between the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon stem. The route which I followed—roughly, New York, Washington, Memphis, New Orleans, Charleston, Florida, Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Cartagena, Trinidad, Southampton—is as easy and comfortable as it is interesting and instructive. No doubt the completion of the Canal will carry a rush of travel in this direction. But even before the gates of the Pacific are opened, I see no reason why the fascinating ferment of the Southern States, in conjunction with the glorious beauty of the West Indies, should not attract the travelling Briton.

The chapters in the First Part of this book appeared, with two exceptions, in the Westminster Gazette; those in the Third Part, with one exception, appeared either in the Morning Leader or the Pall Mall Magazine. The chapters on Hampton and on Jamaica are here printed for the first time.

PART I
SOUTHWARD HO!

I
ON THE THRESHOLD

The scene is Chicago; the occasion, a luncheon-party at the Cliff-Dwellers’ Club. All the intellect and talent of the Middle West (I am credibly assured) are gathered round one long table. I mention to an eminent man of letters that I am going into the South.

“Well,” he says, “you are going into a country that is more foreign to me than most parts of Europe. I do not understand the Southern people, or their way of looking at things. I never feel at home among them. The one thing I have in common with them is a strong antipathy to the black man.”

This, of course, is only an individual point of view; but many other men are listening, and, while some nod assent, no one protests.

But here is another point of view. A few days later I met an old friend, a Philadelphian, who said, “I like the South and the Southerners. They are men of our own stock and our own tongue—even the ‘poor whites’ whom slavery and the hookworm have driven to the wall. In the North we are being jostled and elbowed aside by the foreigner, who murders our speech, and knows nothing and cares nothing about our history or traditions. Yes; give me the South. It is true that, intellectually, it scarcely exists. The Southerner may be living in the twentieth century, but he has skipped the nineteenth. His knowledge of literature, for instance, if he have any at all, stops at the Waverley Novels and ‘The Corsair.’ But I’m not sure that that isn’t part of the charm.”

Thus early did I learn that no two men can talk to you about the South without flatly contradicting each other.

It was evident that my plan must be simply to gather views and impressions as I went along, and trust to sifting and co-ordinating them later.

An invitation, equivalent to a command, called me to Washington. |Nearing the Colour-line.| For a whole day my slow train dragged wearily through Northern Ohio; and in the course of that day two young couples in succession got into my car, who interested me not a little. In each case it seemed to me that the girl had a streak of black blood in her, while the young man was in each case unimpeachably white. As to one of the girls, I was practically certain; as to the other I may have been mistaken. Her features were aquiline and she was uncommonly handsome; but the tint of her skin, and more especially of her eyeballs, strongly suggested an African strain. Both girls were lively, intelligent, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-mannered—distinctly superior, one would have said, to the commonplace youths by whom they were accompanied. Yet I felt pretty certain that a few hours’ travel would have taken them into regions where they would be forbidden by law to sit in the same railroad-car, and where marriage between them would be illegal.[^[1]]

At any rate, even supposing that in these particular cases my conjecture was mistaken, it was not on the face of it improbable. On the other side of the Ohio River, these girls would have had, so to speak, to clear themselves of the suspicion of African blood, else any association on equal terms between them and their male companions would have been regarded as an outrage. This seemed a senseless and barbarous state of affairs. But I was there to observe, not (as yet) to form conclusions; and I kept my mind open, wondering whether, in the coming weeks, I should discover any reason or excuse for the apparent barbarism.

In Indiana, rain; in Ohio, torrents; at Pittsburg, a deluge. But when I awaken next morning, just on Mason and Dixon’s line, the sun is shining on the woods of Maryland, and I feel at once that the South and the spring are here. |“Summer is i-cumen in.”| These spring coppices are far richer in colour than any of our English woods. They run the whole gamut of green, from the blue-green of the pine to the silver-green of the poplar and the gold-green of the birch; and the greens are freely interspersed with red and yellow foliage, and with white and pink blossoms. The red is that of the maple, whose blush at birth is almost as vivid as its flush in death.

The new Union Station at Washington is a vast and grandiose palace of shining white. Its “concourse” (a new American word for the central hall of a station) seems a really impressive piece of architecture. But it is a Sabbath Day’s journey from the platforms to the cabs; and the porters seem to be making a Sabbath Day of it, for I cannot find a single one. Let me not embark, however, on the endless story of a traveller’s tribulations. Every country has its own inconveniences, and recriminations are not only idle but mischievous.

The city of Washington is one great sea of exquisite green, out of which the buildings rise like marble rocks and islands. Yes, I am in the South; the leafless elms of New England and the shrewd, bracing blasts of New York are left behind.

And this day of sunshine was the first of many days. Save for a few thunder-showers, the South was to be all sunshine for me.

And with the sunshine—the Negro. Here he is in his thousands, and in his deepest dye. |A Question of Elbow-room.| In the North one sees him now and then, but he is swamped and submerged in the crowds of the great cities. To be very clearly conscious of his presence you must go to special quarters of New York or Chicago. “Coloured persons” (seldom pure blacks) are waiters at hotels and clubs, but no longer at the best hotels and clubs. The Pullman porter is always coloured; so are most, if not all, of the ordinary railway porters—when there are any. But “at the North” (as they say here) you have to go out of your way to find any problem in the negro. The black strand in the web of life is not yet particularly prominent—whatever it may be destined to become.

But here in Washington the web of life is a chequer of black-and-white—a shepherd’s tartan, I think they call it. In 1900 there were over 85,000 negroes in the city—now there must be at least 100,000, in a total population of considerably under a quarter of a million, or something like the population of Nottingham.

Imagine nearly half the population of Nottingham suddenly converted into black and brown people—people different not only in colour but in many other physical characteristics from you and me. Imagine that all the most striking of these differences are in the direction of what our deepest instincts, inherited through a thousand generations, compel us to regard as ugliness—an ugliness often grotesque and simian.[^[2]] Imagine that this horrible metamorphosis--or, if you shy at the word “horrible,” let us say fantastic—imagine this fantastic metamorphosis to have taken place as a punishment for certain ancestral crimes and stupidities, of which the living men and women of to-day are personally innocent. Can you conceive that, after the first shock of surprise was over, Nottingham would take up life again as a mere matter of course, feeling that there was no misfortune in this mingling of incongruities, no problem in the adjustment of their relations?

Do not object that in Washington there has been no sudden metamorphosis, but that the condition of things has gradually come to pass through the slow operation of historic forces. That makes no real difference, save that the Washingtonian has no “first shock of surprise” to get over. The essence of the matter is that half of the elbow-room of life is taken up by an alien race. Even disregarding, as (perhaps) temporary and corrigible, the condition of hostility between the races, we cannot but see in the bare fact of their juxtaposition in almost equal numbers, and, theoretically, on a standing of equal citizenship, an anomalous condition of affairs, as to the probable outcome of which history affords us no guidance.

Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.

It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. But there they are, not to be ignored or sentimentalized away. They are part of the stuff of human character, out of which the future must be shaped. The wise statesman will no more disregard them than the wise carpenter will disregard the grain of a piece of timber—or the knots in it.

One principle I arrived at very early in this investigation—namely, that black is not always white, nor white invariably black.

[1]. “Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern States, and also in the following Northern and Western States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western States marriage between the races is lawful.”—Ray Stannard Baker: “Following the Colour-Line.”

[2]. There is no doubt, I think, that the white man—and here I mean not the Southerner, nor the American, but the white man as such—resents in extremes of the negro type just that air of caricaturing humanity which renders the monkey tribe so painful and humiliating to contemplate. This seems an inhuman saying, but instinctive emotions are fundamental facts which it is useless to blink. And the suggestion of caricature is the stronger, the more closely the negro mimics the white man in dress and bearing. In Washington, on a Sunday, one meets scores of fat, middle-aged negro women, decked out in an exaggerated extreme of European fashion, from whom one can only look away as from something grotesque and degrading—a page of Swift at his bitterest. Yet the same women in cotton gowns and bandana headgear might look far from unpleasing. No doubt the like uneasy sense of humiliation besets one on seeing white women decked in finery unsuited to their age or their contours. But that does not alter the fact that the urban negro of either sex, when he or she indulges in extremes of European adornment, is a spectacle highly disturbing to Caucasian self-complacency. Caricature is none the more agreeable for being, in a certain sense, just.

II
THE BLACK MAN’S PARADISE

It was my good fortune to have for my hosts in Washington two active sympathizers with the negro. The husband hails from a North-Western State; the wife is a New Englander. They knew personally some of the Abolitionist leaders, and are still full of their spirit.

They related to me cruel and deplorable incidents in the everyday life of the streets.

“One afternoon,” said my host, “I was sitting peaceably in a street-car, when I was suddenly conscious of an altercation between the conductor and a coloured man. The absolute rights of the matter I don’t know, but it had somehow arisen out of a recent modification of the ‘transfer’ system, which the coloured man probably did not understand. I had scarcely realized what was happening, before men were standing on the seats of the car, shouting, ‘Kill the d——d nigger! We’ll all stand by you! All Virginia is behind you!’ The motor-man detached the heavy brass handle by which he works the car, ran up to the negro, and had actually raised it to strike. I interposed, and told the man that, if anything happened, he would get into trouble for leaving his post. He replied: ‘The nigger’s abusive,’ but sullenly went back to his platform.”

“Was the nigger abusive?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear him say anything; but it is quite possible that he had been ‘sassy.’ All I know is that he stood his ground like a man, with that yelling crowd around him.”

“And what happened?”

“Oh, the thing blew over. The negro walked away, and the crowd dispersed. As I took my seat again in the car, the man next me said, ‘If that had happened in South Carolina, he would have been a dead nigger.’”

“Not long ago,” my hostess said, “I was in a crowded street-car. |Street-Car Episodes.| A black woman with a baby got in, and had to stand. You know how our Washington cars are constantly rounding corners; and at every curve the woman was nearly thrown from her feet. Presently one of two white shop-girls who were sitting near her rose and gave the mother her place. The two girls soon after got out; and as they passed me, the one who had kept her seat said to the other, ‘I wonder you would do such a thing!’ ‘Didn’t you see she had a baby?’ the other replied; so, after all, we are not quite without humanity.”

“But tell about the two boys,” my host put in.

“Oh, that was two or three years ago. I noticed in a street-car a very distinguished-looking old man with two boys of about fourteen and twelve, evidently his grandsons. I thought what very nicely-mannered boys they were. A white woman got in, and, the car being full, the elder boy rose and gave her his seat. Immediately after, a mulatto woman got in, very well and quietly dressed—entirely a lady in manner and appearance. The younger boy was rising to give her his seat, when the elder pushed him down angrily, saying quite aloud, ‘I thought you knew better than to get up for a nigger.’”

“Did the lady hear?”

“Oh, perfectly. It was most painful.”

“And what said the distinguished grandfather?”

“He smiled, and nodded to the elder boy.”

Mr. Roosevelt and the Washerwoman.

I took out my pocket-book and handed my hostess a cutting I had made a few days before. It was a letter signed “Edgar S. Walz,” and ran thus:

“To the Editor of the New York Times.

“I read in your Sunday’s issue an item headed ‘Subway Manners: Boys keep their Seats rather than Give to a Sick Old Woman,’ which reminds me of the first time I saw Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, about eight or nine years ago. He was sitting next to me in a Broadway car, and somewhere along about Thirtieth-street the car stopped to let some people on. All secured seats except a coloured woman with a large bundle of clothes. As soon as Mr. Roosevelt saw that she had to stand, he jumped up, took off his hat, and bowed as graciously as though she were the first woman in the land.”

“Yes,” said my hostess, as she handed back the cutting; “you will find these differences.”

“Of course,” I said, “Mr. Roosevelt is a Northerner.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t always mean liberality of feeling nowadays,” was the reply. “I should rather say Mr. Roosevelt is Mr. Roosevelt.”

My host is a chief of department in a large Government office.

Sent to Coventry.

“Have you any coloured people working under you?” I asked him.

“Not long ago,” he replied, “a coloured girl was sent to me—I think because they knew that I would ‘kick’ less than any other chief of department. It was suggested to me that I should assign her some special work by herself. I refused. ‘No,’ I said, ‘if she comes to me at all, she follows the regular routine.’ I made a point of speaking to the three most responsible young women among my clerks—all girls of good family and standing—and telling them they must behave well to her.”

“And how did they behave?”

“Oh, well enough, on the surface; there was no trouble; but she was quietly sent to Coventry. Soon afterwards a Russian girl entered the department, who knew nothing and cared nothing about our prejudices. She made friends with the coloured girl; but when she sat at the same table with her in the lunch-room, the quadroon herself said to her, ‘You mustn’t do this; you’ll get into trouble with the others. They don’t behave badly to me; but when I seat myself even at the other end of a long table they make an excuse to move away.’”

“How are negroes placed in these positions?” I asked.

“Why, through various political ‘pulls.’”

“Do you think it a wise policy to try to break down the colour-line here and there—at this point and that—by the nomination of negroes to Government appointments?”

“Ah, that is just the question.”

“Meantime,” I asked, “are matters getting better or worse?”

“Oh, worse—decidedly worse,” said my hostess. “They are coming to something like open war. For instance, I constantly see stone-fights between white boys and black boys in the open space outside our house. That doesn’t mean much, perhaps; for boys will be boys everywhere. But sometimes lately the white boys have seemed to go frantic, and have begun stoning black men and women who were going peaceably about their business. Once I had to telephone to the police to interfere, or I believe there would have been a riot.”

“I am told that in New York the white and black street-boys play amicably together.”

“Yes,” said my host, “that is because the blacks are comparatively few. The tension increases in the direct ratio of the number of negroes.”

This I find to be essentially, if not quite universally, true. What is the inference? Is it not at bottom an instinct of self-preservation that spurs the South to inhumanity—an unreasoning, or half-reasoned, panic fear of racial submergence? There are many other factors in the situation; but I think, beyond all doubt, this is one.

“You can see any day on the street-cars,” said my host, “the embitterment of feeling. Formerly a black man would always rise and give his seat to a white woman; now he aggressively refrains from doing so.”

I repeated this to a friend in Baltimore, a gentleman of an old Southern family, who had fought for the Confederacy, even while he realized that the institution of slavery was doomed. |A Pessimistic View.| “You must remember,” he said, “that the problem is acute in Washington. The Washington negro is particularly bumptious and intolerable. Immediately after the war, Washington was the black man’s paradise. They flocked there in their thousands, thinking that the Government was going to do everything for them, and that there was nothing they had not a right to expect. That spirit still survives and makes trouble.”

“And how do you feel as to the way things are shaping? Do you see any actual or probable improvement in the relations of the races?”

“What shall I say?” he replied. “I do all I can to put the matter out of my thoughts. I do not personally feel the pinch of the problem. My children are in the North, and my life here pursues an even routine. I have old coloured servants, with whom I get on very well. But I am constitutionally a pessimist, and I confess I do not see how the thing is going to work out.”

“Education?” I suggested.

“Education is all very well; but if it removes some difficulties it raises others. It tends to make the negro unwilling to work where he is wanted, and desirous of working where he is not wanted—at any rate by the white artisan who is in the field before him. The industrial education of the black race, which is in some quarters regarded as a panacea, will no doubt do a great deal of good; but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that it will intensify race-friction in the labour market.”

“Still, you are not one of the Southerners who want to keep the black ignorant—who think that education, as a whole, merely teaches him ‘not to know his place’?”

“That is an outworn and impossible point of view. But you can understand that even the reasonable Southerner feels a certain bitterness on the subject of education when he sees the black child marching off to a school provided by Northern philanthropy, while the child of the ‘poor white’ goes into the cotton-factory.”[^[3]]

“You say you have black servants?”

“Oh yes, I have; and many people still have. But you know the race as a whole is turning against domestic service. I have friends in Mobile, Alabama, who tell me that their servants make the most fantastic conditions. For instance, they won’t do a stroke of work after three o’clock. If you want a meal after that hour, you must prepare and serve it yourself. As for the abstraction of household stuff from the kitchen, it is carried on openly and systematically—they call it ‘Cook’s excursion.’ In the case of domestic service, in fact, the difficult conditions which are being felt all over the world are intensified by—what shall I call it?—the race pride, or the race resentment, of the black. Domestic service was one of the badges of slavery; and now, if he or she will undertake it at all, it must be on such terms as shall remove from it all taint of servility.”

“A very natural feeling,” I remarked.

“No doubt; but not calculated to relieve the friction between the races.”

[3]. It is not only the child of the “poor white,” in the special Southern sense of the term, that goes to the factory. Mr. Stannard Baker, in “Following the Colour-Line,” says: “One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a negro woman to cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to school!”

III
THE NIGHTMARE OF THE SOUTH

My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia, and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established by General Samuel Armstrong, the alma mater of Mr. Booker Washington, and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face south-westward towards Kentucky and Tennessee. But I determined to “stop off” for a day at Virginia Hot Springs, where some friends had invited me to visit them.

Virginia Hot Springs is nothing but a huge rambling hotel, with a number of “cottage” dependencies. |A Happy Valley.| The hotel company has bought up the whole mountain-valley, and runs it like a little kingdom. It is a delightful place; the air fresh and sparkling, the hotel and cottages sufficiently picturesque, the basin of the valley entirely given up to the brilliant sward of the golf-course. Around the hotel runs a spacious “piazza,” with innumerable rocking-chairs. A score of buggies and saddle-horses, at the disposition of the guests, gather round the steps. Inside, every American luxury is at command. You move noiselessly on deep-piled carpets; the news-stand is heaped with the latest magazines and novels; there is a little row of shops where you can buy hats and frocks, jewellery and bric-à-brac, at fifty per cent. over Fifth-avenue prices; and—most indispensable luxury of all—there is a stock- and share-broker’s office, and there are long-distance telephones, whereby you can keep in touch with Wall Street and the various Exchanges. That curious oval excrescence at one corner of the building is the ballroom. It opens into the great hall of the hotel, called “Peacock Walk”; for here the ladies assemble after dinner to air their “rags” and their diamonds.

My friends chartered a buggy, and drove me after lunch to Warm Springs, an old Colonial health-resort, where it is on record that General Washington came to nurse his gout; and thence to a point called Flagstaff Hill, or something of the sort, where we had a glorious view over an endless stretch of hill-country, running far into West Virginia. But, oh! the reckless, suicidal waste of timber that is going on here, as almost everywhere in America. Here, however, it is sheer thoughtlessness that is at work—not the criminal cupidity which is converting the forests of Maine and New Hampshire into wood-pulp, and ruining for generations to come the climate, the fertility, the water-power of the country.

Our talk, of course, strays (not through my leading) to the question of the negro.

The Darkest Phase.

“I have two cousins,” says Mrs. X., “who are sisters. One of them devotes all her spare money to the amelioration of the black race, while personally she loathes them and shrinks from them. The other has no philanthropic feeling whatever; she regrets that slavery was ever abolished; but she likes the black people personally; she goes among them, and nurses them when they are ill—just as she would a favourite horse or dog. That is in Philadelphia, where, as you know, I was born.”

“And you yourself—how do you feel on the subject?”

“I had lived so much abroad that I had no very definite feeling towards the black race, one way or another, until a few summers ago, when I spent some time at Aiken, South Carolina, where the bulk of the population is black. I don’t think I am hysterical, but I assure you it was an almost intolerable sensation to walk down the main street of Aiken, even at midday, under the eyes of those hundreds of great hulking blacks, staring at you with half-suppressed insolence. It gives me a little shudder now to think of it.”

“Last year,” said her husband, “I was shooting in North Carolina, in a district where the population is pretty evenly divided between white and black. I boarded in a farmer’s family. The grandfather had fought in the war, of course on the Confederate side; the father and mother were solid, unpretending, intelligent people. There was a school-house only a mile and a half away, but they could not let their two daughters go to it. They could not let them stir away from home unprotected. They had to pay for their education at home, while at the same time they were being taxed for the education of the negro children of the district. That is not a pleasant state of affairs.”

A Significant Admission.

Some time afterwards, I stated this case to a loading educator of negroes, a man widely recognized as one of the best friends of the race.

“Do you think,” I asked him, “that these girls could not safely have gone to school? Or was their parents’ action the result of groundless, or, at any rate, exaggerated, panic—as of one who should forbid his children to pass through a wood lest a tree should fall upon them?”

“It would depend on the district,” was the reply. “In some districts the girls could have gone to school safely enough; in others, no!”

This, I think, was a terrible admission; for, after all, a “safe” district can only be one in which no outrage has occurred; and that is no guarantee against its occurring to-morrow.[^[4]] What father, what husband, is going to rest on such security?

Here, then, I was face to face with the most hideous factor in the problem—that which keeps popular sentiment in the South chronically inflamed and exasperated. Again and again, at every turn, I came upon it; not only in the shape of revolting stories, but in accounts of the constant and most burdensome precautions which the state of affairs imposes.

To give only one instance: I asked an American long resident in Havana whether there was any trouble of this nature in Cuba. “No,” he said, “practically none. It’s true that about a year ago a sort of half-witted black was accused of an outrage on a mulatto woman, and committed suicide in prison to escape the garotte; but I believe an American nigger has since confessed that he was the real culprit. It’s very different,” he went on, “in my native State, Louisiana. I have two sisters married there. The husband of one of them never dares to leave his home unless he takes his wife with him. The husband of the other is compelled to leave home for days at a time; but he keeps a loaded shot-gun in every room in the house, and he has made his wife practice till she is a very fair shot, both with gun and revolver. There isn’t a white man in the country districts that doesn’t take similar precautions.”

Think what it means to have this nightmare constantly present to the mind of every woman and girl of a community—at any rate in the country districts, and on the outskirts of the towns. |A Malign Enchantment.| No doubt the state of “nerves” it sets up is responsible for many errors and cruelties. Many attempted outrages may be purely imaginary. Negroes may have been lynched or shot down, not only for crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were never committed at all.[^[5]] But there are quite enough authentic cases of crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.[^[6]] It is all very well to say that it is the precautions taken, and most of all the lynchings, that suggests the crime to vagrant, dissolute, drink-and-drug-ruined negroes. That is probably in great measure true—the evil moves in a vicious circle. But who or what is to break the circle of malign enchantment? Education? Yes, perhaps; but education is at best a slow process. I cannot to-day throw my revolver into the Mississippi because I hope that fifty years hence my grandson may have no use for it.

“During the war,” a very intelligent coloured man said to me, “the planters’ wives and children were left to the protection of the negroes. |Who is to Blame?| Not a single case of outrage occurred, and scarcely a case of theft or breach of trust. Had we been the lecherous brutes we are now supposed to be, we should have written the darkest page in history, and brought the Southern armies home to the defence of their own hearthstones.”

That is true. It is admitted on every hand that the conduct of the slaves during the war was, on the whole, excellent, and in many cases touchingly beautiful.[^[7]] And therein lies, by the way, not, certainly, an apology for slavery, but a proof that its most melodramatic horrors were exceptional. But what matters the admission that the malignant and bestial negro did not exist forty years ago, if it has to be admitted in the same breath that he exists to-day?

What has bred him? Who is responsible for his existence? History may one day apportion the burden between the doctrinaire self-righteousness of the respectable North, the rascality of the “carpet-bag” politician, the stiff-necked pride of the South, and the vanity, the resentfulness, and the savagery of the negro himself. But what avails recrimination or apportionment of blame, while the monstrous evil—none the less monstrous because it necessarily awakens a morbid imagination on both sides—exists and calls aloud to be dealt with? While the relations of the two races remain as they are, there can be no doubt that an act of brutal lust often justifies itself to a semi-savage imagination as an act of war—a racial reprisal. And who shall say that a state of war does not exist?

Few sensible men in the South have now a word to say for lynching.[^[8]] It has proved itself as ineffectual in practice as it is unjustifiable in theory. |Lynch Law.| It cannot even be palliated as an ungovernable reaction of horror at the particular atrocity here in question; seeing that, as a matter of fact, more negroes are lynched for mere murder than for outrages on women.[^[9]] There seems to be little hope, however, of a cessation of lynchings in the near future. The Southern Press abounds with evidences that the lynching impulse is strong, and is with difficulty held in check[^[10]] even when the provocation is comparatively trifling.

One thing seems to me certain—namely, that crimes against women, and all sorts of negro crime, will be far more effectually checked when respectable and well-disposed negroes can feel reasonably confident that people of their race will be treated with common fairness in white courts of law. At present it is certain that they can feel no such confidence. But, in making this statement, I am anticipating matters. The point is one to which I must return later.

[4]. In a paper read in 1901, Mr. A. H. Stone said of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta: “There is now no more feeling of fear on the white man’s part, whether for himself or his wife or his children, than in the days of slavery.” But he afterwards added: “Writing to-day, 1908, it would be necessary to modify this statement somewhat—certainly for some part of this territory.” “The American Race Problem,” p. 91. The footnotes to Mr. Stone’s paper point out one or two other instances of a deterioration of conditions.

[5]. Among the “Causes Assigned” for lynchings in the statistical statement prepared by the Chicago Tribune, “Race Prejudice” stands fourth on the list; and in the four years, 1900-1903, twenty-four cases are assigned to it. Among the other causes are “Unknown offences” (10), “Mistaken Identity” (5), and “No offence” (1).

[6]. “Making allowance for all exaggerations in attributing this crime to negroes, there still remain enough well-authenticated cases of brutal assault on women by black men in America to make every negro bow his head in shame.”—Atlanta University Publications, No. IX. (A negro monograph).

[7]. “No race ever behaved better than the negro behaved during the war. Not only were there no massacres and no outbreaks, but even the amount of defection was not large.... Many a master going off to the war entrusted his wife and children to the care of his servants with as much confidence as if they had been of his own blood. They acted rather like clansmen than like bondmen.... As Henry Grady once said, ‘A thousand torches would have disbanded the Southern army; but there was not one.’”—Thomas Nelson Page: “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,” p. 21.

[8]. One of the most sensible men in the South is certainly Mr. E. G. Murphy, who writes (“The Present South,” p. 177): “The mob, so far as it has a conscious philosophy, has attempted the justification of its course upon these grounds: It has insisted that its methods were necessary in order to prevent the crime; in order to avoid the procrastination of the courts; and in order to protect the victim of assault from the ordeal of presenting testimony at the trial of the offender. It has become increasingly obvious, however, that the practice of lynching ... is not a remedy. It does not prevent crime. Through the morbid interest which it arouses, and through the publicity which it creates, it inflames to the utmost the power of criminal suggestion and aggravates all the conditions of racial suspicion and antagonism. The so-called ‘remedy’ has always been followed by new outbreaks of the disease, the most atrocious crimes coming at short intervals after the previous exercise of the mob’s philosophy of ‘prevention.’” “Lynching as a remedy,” says Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, “is a ghastly failure.” The opposite opinion, however, has still its champions. “The lynch lightning,” says Mr. W. B. Smith (an anti-negro extremist), “seldom strikes twice in the same district or community.” “The Colour-Line,” p. 259.

[9]. The commonly accepted statistics of lynchings are those supplied by the Chicago Tribune. I have before me the figures for the years 1885-1904, somewhat vitiated by the fact that the enumeration for 1888 is incomplete. It would appear that in these years 2942 lynchings in all occurred, 2042 of the victims being negroes, and the remaining 900 belonging to other races. But the proportion of negro lynchings steadily increased. In 1886, 71 negroes were lynched, as against 62 men of other races; whereas in 1901 the respective figures were 107 and 28. Out of the whole number of lynchings 25 per cent. were for rape, 42 per cent. for murder, and 33 per cent. for other offences. More than 80 per cent. of the whole number of lynchings occurred in the Southern States.

[10]. Washington, November 15, 1909. “Ninety days’ imprisonment was imposed to-day upon ex-Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp, of Chattanooga, Tenn., by the supreme court of the United States for contempt of court in failing to prevent the lynching of a negro, Edward Johnson, whose execution had been stayed by the court.

“Luther Williams and Nick Nolan were sentenced to imprisonment for ninety days for connection with the lynching, and Jeremiah Gibson, the jailer, Henry Padgett and William Mayers, all of Chattanooga, for sixty days.”

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.

[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.

[14]. See foot-note, p. [171].

[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.

V

“DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS

A night’s railway journey on the Illinois Central carries you from Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee, and from the Ohio to the Mississippi. You strike the Father of Waters some time before you reach Memphis. Here two sets of literary associations were awakened in my mind. We passed through miles of swampy, malarial-looking forests, with snake-like vines binding the trees together; and every here and there would come a clearing on the river-bank, still bristling with huge gaunt stumps of dead timber, and showing a melancholy cabin or two, which forcibly recalled the Eden of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” And then, again, in some quiet backwater, we would see a great raft of lumber, with a hut or tent on it—the very raft of Huckleberry Finn and Jim. So strongly have the great rivers always appealed to my imagination that the first thing I did in Memphis was to go down to the wharf and ascertain whether I could not travel at least part of the way to New Orleans by steamer. There are plenty of huge sternwheel boats, still on the river; but alas! their movements are not arranged in view of passenger traffic. Only in short stages, and at great expenditure of time, could I have carried out my ambition. Baffled at Memphis, I still hoped to take boat from Vicksburg to Natchez; but I found that I should have to wait two days for a boat, and should then spend two more days in covering a distance which I could do by rail in a single night. So, except for a short excursion at New Orleans, I did not go a-sailing on the waters of the Mississippi.

Memphis is a much brighter, cleaner, more alert and prosperous-looking place than Louisville. |Charity and Colour.| There are shops on Main Street that would make a good figure in Paris; and at night it is as gay with electricity as the “Great White Way” of New York. When I arrived, Memphis was evidently in the thick of some excitement. The side-walks of Main Street were crowded with ladies, young and—less young, who were making dashes at every male passer-by, and seeking to pin a square purple badge to the lapel of his coat. It was soon evident that life was not worth living unless you wore one of these badges; so I secured one, at the expense of half-a-dollar, and on examining it found that it was inscribed—“Tag-Day for the Tennessee Home for Incurables.” This was, in fact, a sort of Hospital Saturday, and the tag pinned to your coat was a certificate that you had paid up.

The system struck me as ingenious; but it is because of a significant sequel that I mention it. In the afternoon, I called on a negro professional man who had invited me to go for a drive in his buggy. As we left the house I noticed that he wore no tag. I touched my own tag, and said, smiling, “Dare you venture into the streets without one of these?” “Why,” he replied, “they wouldn’t for anything ‘tag’ a coloured man!”

This was “discrimination” with a vengeance! Even charity fenced round by the colour-line! I felt that here at last I had touched the limit.

“Free” Libraries.

We drove past the small but attractive-looking Public Library, situated on a bluff, with a glorious view over the lake-like Mississippi.

“Is there discrimination here?” I asked.

“Why, certainly,” was the reply. “My son is in an office where several of the white young men have cards enabling them to draw books from the library. My son applied for a card; and as he is very light in colour, it at first seemed that there was going to be no difficulty. But when they heard his name, they identified him as my son and refused him a card. The librarian wrote to me privately, and said that the boy could have as many books as he liked without any card. But I would not have that; I threatened to take the case into court by refusing to pay any tax for the support of the library. But then they offered to establish a branch library for coloured people, and that compromise I accepted.”

Some time later, in another city, I was reminded of this conversation on seeing a very handsome Carnegie Free Library occupying a prominent site.

“Is it free to coloured people?” I asked.

“Oh dear no,” was the reply. “Carnegie offered to give an extra $10,000 for a black branch library, if the town would contribute $1000 a year to its support. This the town agreed to do, on condition that the negro community provided the site. We, on our part, consented to this, merely stipulating that we should have a voice in the management. The town replied emphatically ‘No,’ and the whole thing fell through. It would simply have meant, you see, that they would have dumped upon us any rubbish for which they hadn’t room in the main library. Can you wonder that we declined?” I could not.

To return to Memphis. I had gone there, not exactly to attend the annual “Conference for Education in the South,” but to see several people who were attending it. |Educators in Council.| However, I did go to one or two meetings, and notably to one which was to be addressed by the British Ambassador, Mr. James Bryce. It was in the Lyceum Theatre, and I sat on the platform (the stage) and looked out over the crowded house, where a dozen electric fans were keeping the sultry air in motion. It seemed to me odd that, while the floor of the house and the first and second circle were overcrowded, there were only one or two people in the gallery. Presently I looked up again; there were now about twenty people in the upper regions, and I had a curious difficulty in distinguishing their features. A light burst upon me—they were negroes. In a “Conference for Education in the South” the whites did all the conferring and the blacks, if they were so minded, might listen from the gallery.

Next day my black, or rather olive-coloured, friend said: “I could have whipped myself this morning when I opened the paper and saw that I’d missed hearing Bryce. I was bent upon hearing him, but somehow I forgot that yesterday was the evening.” I wondered whether he realized that he would have had to sit in the gallery. But I did not ask him. Every now and then, in this country, one turns tail and flees from the haunting colour question. It is the skeleton at the feast of Southern life.

In New York I had met President Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, one of the most notable men in America, an accomplished speaker, and an authority, if ever there was one, on the education of the negro. “No doubt I shall see you at Memphis,” I said, in an off-hand way. He answered, rather drily, “No;” and some time afterwards he said, “You asked me if I would be at Memphis—I am not at all sure that I should be welcome there. I received a printed circular notifying me of the meeting, but no invitation to attend it. You will find friends of the negro there, and of negro education—oh yes, plenty. But they will not be of my colour.”

I did, as a matter of fact, hear one friend of negro education hold forth—Bishop Bratton, of Mississippi. |A Bishop on Race Equality.| The Bishop laid down a good many principles—among them that “the negro is capable of development to a point whose limit he (the speaker) had not discovered,” but that “the vast majority are still children intellectually, and little short of savages morally.” The purport of his address was the assertion that negro education should not be left entirely or mainly to negro teachers. The ideal school would be one under the supervision of a white clergyman, where carefully selected portions of Scripture should be necessary parts of the curriculum, and “where the race should be taught that race integrity is obedience to God’s own creation and appointment, and that race intercourse, kindly and cordial, is not race equality.” “Indeed,” the Bishop proceeded, “the very expression ‘race equality’ is an anachronism belonging to the mediæval period of reconstruction history [that is, roughly, the period between 1866 and 1876], which has long gone to its account.” These remarks were warmly received by the audience, and greatly applauded by the leading Southern papers. But one understands why Mr. Booker T. Washington—and, still more, why Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta University—were not bidden to the conference. Of these two negro leaders I shall try to give a sketch in my next paper.

VI
TWO LEADERS

“People are always laying stress on the white blood in me,” said Mr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “and attributing to that anything I do that is worth doing. But they never speak of the white blood in Mr. Booker Washington, who, as a matter of fact, has a larger share than I have.”

“How do you make that out?” I asked; and Mr. Du Bois gave me the story of his ancestry. The story went back two hundred years, for he comes of a New England stock, and has had no slave ancestors (I take it) for many generations. I could not follow his proof that more of Africa flows in his veins than in Mr. Booker Washington’s; nor does it greatly matter; for if it be so in fact, Nature has taken great pains to conceal the fact, and the popular error of which he complains is practically inevitable.

A Contrast of Personalities.

Principal Booker T. Washington is a negro in every lineament, and not, one would say, of the most refined type. His skin is neither black nor copper-coloured, but rather of a sort of cloudy yellow, to which the other shades are, perhaps, æsthetically preferable. His hair, his ears, his nose, his jaw, all place his race beyond dispute; only his grave, candid, forceful eyes announce a leader of men. He is above middle height, and heavily built; seated, he is apt to sprawl. He has a curious trick of drawing back the corners of his mouth, so as to reveal almost the whole of his range of teeth. At first I took this for a slow smile, heralding some humorous remark; but humour is not Mr. Washington’s strong point. His grin is a nervous habit, and scarcely a pretty one.[^[17]] Altogether, in talking with him, you have no difficulty in remembering the race of your interlocutor, and if you make an untactful remark—if you let the irrepressible instinct of race-superiority slip out—you have all the more reason to be ashamed.

With Mr. Du Bois the case is totally different. His own demonstration notwithstanding, I cannot believe that there is more of the negro in him than in (say) Alexandre Dumas fils. Meeting this quiet, cultivated, French-looking gentleman, with his pointed beard, olive complexion, and dark melancholy eyes, it is hard to believe that he is born, as he himself phrases it, “within the Veil.” In appearance he reminded me a good deal of Gabriele d’Annunzio, only that D’Annunzio happens to be fair, while Mr. Du Bois has something more like the average Italian complexion. In speaking to this man of fine academic culture—this typical college don, one would have said—the difficulty was to feel any difference of race and traditions, and not to assume, tactlessly, an identical standpoint.

These two men are unquestionably the leaders of their race to-day; but their ideals and their policy are as different as their physique. Mr. Washington leads from within; Mr. Du Bois from without. Should he read this phrase he will probably resent it; but it may be none the less true. Mr. Washington could never have been anything else than a negro; he represents all that is best in the race, but nothing that is not in the race. Mr. Du Bois is a negro only from outside pressure. I do not mean, of course, that there are no negro traits in his character, but that it is outside pressure—the tyranny of the white man—that has made him fiercely, passionately, insistently African. Had there been no colour question—had the negro had no oppression, no injustice to complain of—Mr. Du Bois would have been a cosmopolitan, and led the life of a scholar at some English, German, or perhaps even American University. As it was, he felt that to desert his race would be the basest of apostasies; but it was because he could have been disloyal that he became so vehemently—one might almost say fanatically—loyal.

I have heard a well-known New York publicist, the editor of an influential paper, express the opinion that Mr. Booker Washington is one of the greatest men at present alive in America. |“Up from Slavery.”| One of the others was President Eliot, of Harvard; the third I will not name—thus leaving the gate of hope ajar for many eminent persons. There was, perhaps, a spice of paradox in this appraisement of Mr. Washington; but a remarkable man he certainly is. Not, I think, a great intellect, but assuredly a strong and admirable character. His life, as related by himself in “Up from Slavery,” is a story of quiet heroism to rank with any in literature. Born a slave in a one-room cabin, with no glazed window and an earthen floor, he remained there until, when he was eight or nine, emancipation came. After that he worked in a salt-furnace and in a coal-mine, devoured all the time by a passion for knowledge which overcame what seemed almost incredible difficulties. At last he set forth for Hampton Institute, where General Armstrong was then just beginning his beneficent work. He had five hundred miles to travel and scarcely any money. He worked and even begged his way; for Mr. Washington has never been ashamed to beg when there was a good object to be served. Arriving at Richmond, Virginia, without a cent, he worked for several days unloading a ship, and slept at night in a hollow under a wooden side-walk.

At Hampton he found the system in operation which he has since adopted at Tuskegee—namely, that tuition is covered by endowment, while the student is enabled to pay (in part, at any rate) by work, for his board and clothing. He soon distinguished himself, not by great attainments, but by the thoroughness of his work and the sincerity and elevation of his character. Then, in 1881, it occurred to the State of Alabama to start a normal school for coloured people at a little village named Tuskegee, some forty miles from the capital, Montgomery. It did not, however, occur to the State of Alabama to provide any buildings or apparatus; it simply allotted £400 a year to be applied to the salaries of the teachers. On General Armstrong’s recommendation, Mr. Washington, then a youth of some five-and-twenty, was entrusted with the organization and management of the school; and the account of how, with practically no resources at all, he built up the great and beneficent institution which has now made the name of Tuskegee world-famous, is indeed a remarkable story of indomitable courage and perseverance. Mr. Washington felt that his personal failure would be reckoned a failure for his race. Out of the nettle, danger, he plucked the flower, safety; and Tuskegee now represents perhaps the greatest individual triumph his race has ever achieved.

Of course it has been achieved largely through philanthropic help from the North—Mr. Washington, as I have said, is an unashamed, though very tactful, beggar. |Statesman or Time-Server?| It is precisely that tactfulness, in its largest sense, with which the fierier spirits of his race reproach him. In their milder moods they call him an opportunist and time-server; in moments of irritation they call him a betrayer of his people, and a pitiful truckler to the white man. He is, in fact, nothing of the sort; on the wrongs of his race he has spoken with no uncertain voice, when he felt it to be in season; but he has not harped upon them in and out of season. While he has plenty of race-pride, he has no race-vanity, and realizes that the negro has yet to conquer his place among the fully-developed and civilized races of the world. To help in this conquest is the mission and glory of his life; and he feels, rightly or wrongly, that material progress must precede and serve as a basis for intellectual progress. Therefore what is called the academic course—the course of language, literature, and abstract science—plays only a secondary part at Tuskegee. The curriculum is mainly industrial and agricultural, though the chemical and mechanical theory which lies behind agriculture and the handicrafts is by no means neglected. The fostering of aptitudes and the upbuilding of character—these are the two great aims of Tuskegee. The negro, says Mr. Washington, must render himself necessary to the American Commonwealth before he can expect to take a highly esteemed place in it, and the best way to claim a vote is to show that you are capable of using it wisely. Such are the maxims which he inculcates on his students—thereby earning the contumely of the fierier spirits aforesaid. They broke up one of his meetings in Boston, not long ago, with red pepper, and with the racial weapon—the razor.

But if any one imagines that Mr. Washington is a saint-like spirit in whom the wrongs of his race awaken no bitterness, he is very much mistaken. He has, when he cares to show it, a quiet contempt for the pettinesses of Southern policy which is rendered all the more scathing by his acceptance of them as matters of course.

It was at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 that Mr. Booker Washington made his first great success—the success which brought him national renown as a speaker and a leader of his race. |The Atlanta Compromise.| In an address delivered at the opening ceremony, he formulated what has since become famous as the Atlanta Compromise, in this oft-quoted sentence: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Mr. Washington has himself described with dignified simplicity the enthusiasm which this speech aroused among an audience which, if not hostile at the outset, was at least sceptical of the policy of allowing a negro to speak on such an occasion. The chairman—the Governor of Georgia—rushed across the platform and shook him by the hand, and the country was soon ringing with the fame of his tactful eloquence. But though it is the phrase above quoted that has become classic, there was another, which, if I am not greatly mistaken, did more to conciliate his audience. Speaking of the progress of his race, as manifested in their department of the Exposition, he reminded his hearers that the negro had “started thirty years ago with ownership here and there in a few quilts and pumpkins and chickens (gathered from miscellaneous sources).” I would wager a good deal that it was this parenthesis, this genial allusion to the tender topic of chicken-stealing, that finally won the hearts of his white hearers. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Du Bois thus playing, not to the gallery, but rather to the stalls. And Mr. Washington no doubt deliberately calculated his effect, for he is certainly not by nature an irrepressibly facetious personage.

This famous speech, with its famous metaphor, was delivered, as I have said, at Atlanta, in 1895. At Atlanta in 1906 an outbreak of popular frenzy, excited by one or two real and several imaginary outrages, led to the slaughter in the streets of an unknown number of negroes (probably thirty or forty), not one of whom was even suspected of any crime. It does not seem as though the Atlanta Compromise had as yet borne much fruit, at any rate on its native soil.

Even more significant than Mr. Washington’s “Up from Slavery” is a book called “Tuskegee and its People,” to which he contributes a general introduction. |Tuskegee Ideals.| Two-thirds of the book consist of “Autobiographies by Graduates of the School,” with such titles as “A College President’s Story,” “A Lawyer’s Story,” “The Story of a Blacksmith,” “The Story of a Farmer,” “A Druggist’s Story,“ “A Negro Community Builder.” These stories are all interesting, many of them heroic and touching, and all permeated with the Booker-Washington spirit of indomitable self-help, unresentful acceptance of outward conditions, and unquestioning measurement of success by material standards. And yet not wholly material. The formation and maintenance of the “home” are the aspiration and ideal everywhere proclaimed—the home connoting, to the negro mind, not only pecuniary well-being, but decency, morality, education, a certain standard of refinement. Here is a characteristic passage from “The Story of a Farmer”:

Rev. Robert C. Bedford, Secretary of the board of trustees, Tuskegee Institute, some time ago visited us.... He wrote the following much-appreciated compliment regarding our homes and ourselves: “The homes of the Reid brothers are very nicely furnished throughout. Everything is well kept and very orderly. The bedspreads are strikingly white, and the rooms—though I called when not expected—were in the best of order.”

To this subject of the “home” I shall return later. I have seen few things more touching than the negro’s pride in the whiteness of his bedspreads.

Not less characteristic, however, is this further passage from the same “Story of a Farmer,” which follows, indeed, on the same page:—

Under the guidance of the Tuskegee influences ... the importance of land-buying was early brought to our attention, but because of the crude and inexperienced labourers about us, we found that we could, with advantage to all, rent large tracts of land, sub-rent to others, and in this way pay no rent ourselves, as these sub-renters did that for us. We could in this way also escape paying taxes, insurance, and other expenses that naturally follow.

It does not appear that “the Tuskegee influence” involves any economic idealism, or any doubt as to the legitimacy of capitalistic exploitation.

Principal Washington’s message, by his own admission, or, rather, insistence, might not unfairly be called “The Gospel of the Toothbrush.” |Washingtonian Optimism.| Again and again he uses this unpretending appliance as a symbol of the clean-living self-respect which he has made an ideal for his race. His policy, as he puts it in a remarkable passage, is to teach the negro to “want more wants.” It is the man with scarcely any wants who can satisfy them by working one day a week and loafing the other six. The man who wants many things “to make a happy fireside clime for weans and wife,” is the man who can be trusted to work steadily for six days out of the seven. This undeniable and (from the employer’s point of view) most salutary truth ought to put to silence the dwindling minority of Southerners who still object to the very idea and principle of negro education.

But suppose the majority of the race converted either into men of independent substance or satisfactory labourers for hire, will the problem be thereby solved? Principal Washington has no doubt on the subject. In the introduction to “Tuskegee and its People,” he proclaims his optimism in no uncertain voice:

The immeasurable advancement of the negro, manifested in character, courage, and cash ... is “confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ” that the gospel of industry, as exemplified by Tuskegee and its helpers, has exerted a leavening influence upon civilization wherever it has been brought within the reach of those who are struggling towards the heights. Under this new dispensation of mind, morals, and muscle, with the best whites and best blacks in sympathetic co-operation, and justice meaning the same to the weak as to the strong, the South will no longer be vexed by a race problem.

Such is the teaching of Washingtonian optimism.

And what is the reply of Du Boisian idealism?

The reply is implicit in the very title of Mr. Du Bois’ book, “The Souls of Black Folk.” |Du Boisian Idealism.| “Your method of securing peace, decency, and comfort for our bodies,” say the idealists to Mr. Washington, “implies, even if successful, the degradation and atrophy of our souls.” Mr. Du Bois celebrates with fervour the saints, the rebels, and the martyrs of his race, of whom Mr. Washington seems never to have heard. Mr. Du Bois admits, of course, the misfortunes of his people, but apparently regards them as a pure contrariety of Fate, with nothing in the racial constitution or character to account for them. Nothing less than the most perfect equality, not only economic and political, but social and intellectual, will satisfy him. If the negro is to hold a place apart, it must be by his own free choice, because he does not desire or condescend to mingle with the white. “Those who dislike amalgamation,” he says, “can best prevent it by helping to raise the negro to such a plane of intelligence and economic independence that he will never stoop to mingle his blood with those who despise him.” Mr. Washington admits to the full the mistakes of the Reconstruction Period—when the negro was made the dominant race in the South—and promises that they shall never be repeated. For Mr. Du Bois the mistake lay in not resolutely carrying through (of course, with greater wisdom and purity of purpose) the Reconstruction policy. He sees no reason why “the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landowner, which the nation had all but categorically promised to the freedmen”—should not have been literally realized. In short, while Mr. Washington is an opportunist and a man of action, Mr. Du Bois is a cloistered intransigeant.

But especially does he resent the over-emphasis laid, as he thinks, on manual as opposed to intellectual training. Manual training is good; but without intellectual training it must leave the race on a low and servile level; and Mr. Washington’s “deprecation of institutions of higher learning,” is leading to a “steady withdrawal of aid” from negro universities. The spectacle of a “lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home,” which raised in Mr. Washington only a pitying smile, seems to Mr. Du Bois heroic and admirable. The “gospel of work and money,” he thinks, “threatens almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” “To seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.”

I have paused in the story of my pilgrimage in order to give a little sketch of two conflicting tendencies, embodied in two remarkable men. Mr. Washington I have called an optimist; but it must not be understood that Mr. Du Bois is wholly a pessimist. He even says in one place: “That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear.” But is it? I wish I could share the confidence of either the optimist or the idealist.

[17]. Since writing this, I have heard Mr. Washington make a speech, and now conceive this grin to be partly, at any rate, a habit contracted in the effort to secure perfectly clear enunciation.

VII
A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK

In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street; and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” which I had not yet read.

Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right shop. He exuded information at every pore. He had no prejudice against the negro—no, not he! Why, he employed three or four of them on his own place. (This protestation of impartiality I found to be the constant exordium of such a tirade.) But he was simply stating a matter of incontrovertible fact when he said that there was no nigger that would not assault a white woman whenever he saw a chance of doing so with impunity.

“But,” I objected, “outrages are not, after all, such daily occurrences. Do you mean to suggest that there are many outrages and lynchings that are never heard of—that don’t get into the newspapers?”

“Oh no; they get into the papers right enough. The reason there aren’t more outrages is simply that we whites have learnt to protect ourselves against the negro, just as we do against the yellow fever and the malaria—the work of noxious insects. You’re at the Hotel Gayoso, are you? Well, you see the wire-gauze screens over all the doors and windows? That’s to keep out the muskeeters; and just in the same way we must keep the nigger out of our lives.”

An Impartial Philosopher.

Then came a phrase which I was to hear repeated many times, not by irresponsible fanatics, but by Southerners of a much higher type: “I tell you, sir, no pen can describe the horrors of the Reconstruction Period, when all that was best in the white South was outlawed, and the nigger rode roughshod over us. The true story of that time will never be written in history. It is known only to those who went through it.”[^[18]]

He then poured forth in terms of romantic extravagance the tale of the Ku-Klux-Klan, and how it had saved American civilization. He referred me, by way of proof, to the statue of General Forrest, right here in Memphis, who had been Grand Titan, or Grand Dragon, or I know not what, of the said organization, and whom British soldiers, General French and General Wolseley, had declared to have been the greatest military genius that ever lived.

To all this I was no unwilling listener; yet my time was limited, and now and then I sought to return to the prime object of my visit. In vain! He literally button-holed me, held me by the lapel of my coat, while he informed me that there was not an honest woman, in any sense of the word, among the whole negro race, and that the coloured population was ravaged by every sort of vice and disease. Had it been possible to take his assurances literally, one must have concluded that the race problem must quickly solve itself by the extinction of the negro. And he frankly looked forward to that consummation. “Our vagrancy laws are going to be a bitter pill for them. You see”—here he sketched a diagram to assist my understanding—“a nigger can’t come here to the front-door of my house and ring the bell; but he can go round to the back door”—a line represented his tortuous course—“and I tell you he does. Every household supports at least four or five niggers. Now the vagrancy laws are going to drive that class of niggers to the North, and the Yankee ain’t goin’ to stand his ways. We’re a long-sufferin’ people here in the South.”

As for Mr. Du Bois’s book, it was evident that, even if he had it, he was not going to sell it to me. I left the shop with two books: one was “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, jun., a melodramatic romance of the Ku-Klux-Klan; the other a pseudo-scientific onslaught on the negro race—a brutal and disgusting volume.

An hour or two later I was sitting in the consulting-room or “office” of a coloured physician—Dr. Oberman, let me call him. |A Doctor’s Story.|His real name was that of a we ll-known Southern family, and I remarked upon the fact, expecting to hear that he had been born a slave in that family. In a sense this was the case; but his story was a strange one, and he told it with frank simplicity.

“My father,” he said, “was in fact a member of that family”—and he told of sundry political offices which his white kindred had filled. “But my father attached himself openly and honourably to my mother, who was a slave in the family, and for that reason had to leave his home in North Carolina. For some reason or other they chose to go to the State of Mississippi. In 1850 that was a long and toilsome journey; and I was born on the way, not far from this place. For some years they lived in Mississippi, but they were again driven from there and passed into Ohio. My father was one of the noblest of men, and as soon as he was in a State where he could legally do so, he married my mother. I was present at the wedding.”

“Your mother, Dr. Oberman,” I said, “must surely have been a quadroon, or even an octoroon?”

“My dear mother,” he said, “was very nearly of the same colour as myself. You see, sir, we don’t breed straight,”—and he proceeded to give several instances in which the children either of two people of mixed blood, or of a white father and a mother of mixed blood, had varied very widely in complexion and facial type, some seeming almost pure white, others emphatically negroid. I did not say it, but I could not help thinking: This is scarcely a point in favour of that mixing of bloods which is here called miscegenation. Or is it merely another form of race-prejudice to hold that marriage undesirable in which the colour of the offspring cannot be foretold, and is apt to be variegated?

“Miscegenation.”

In a country where such terrible disabilities and humiliations await those in whom there is the slightest strain of black blood, it is surely manifest that the people who impose these humiliations, and scout the idea of legal marriage between the races, ought to visit with the severest penalties any relation (necessarily illicit) between a white man and a coloured woman—any augmentation by the white man of that half-bred caste on which colour-disabilities press with such peculiar cruelty. I asked Dr. Oberman whether there was any adequate feeling of this sort in the white community—whether the white man who was known to have relations with coloured women was denounced and ostracised?

“My dear sir,” he replied, “I can assure you that many of those who preach most loudly against miscegenation are far from practising what they preach.”

I am glad to say, however, that white men everywhere assured me that there was a strong and increasingly efficient public sentiment against this most anti-social form of transgression.[^[19]] I cannot but think that the lynching of a few white men notoriously guilty of it would beneficially equalize matters.

“Our Moses.”

As I had come to Dr. Oberman with an introduction from Mr. Booker Washington, it was natural that the talk should fall upon the comparative merits of academic and of industrial education for the negro. Said the doctor: “We acquire property, and we want bankers; we fall ill, and we want physicians; we have business difficulties, and we want lawyers; we have souls, and we want preachers who can give us something better than the old ranting theology. But for every one of our race who can profit by a literary education, there are ninety-nine for whom manual training is the first essential.”

Then, looking up at a portrait of Mr. Washington on the wall of his office, he said, “Ah! he is our Moses!”

But a stronger proof of the reverence with which this leader is regarded awaited me as I left Dr. Oberman’s house. I had gone some twenty yards down the street, when I fancied I heard my name called. It must be an illusion, I thought, but nevertheless I looked round. There was the doctor, with his head thrust out of his office-window on the first floor, calling to me and beckoning me back.

“Did you take away that letter of Mr. Washington’s?” he asked.

I searched my pockets, but had it not. Meanwhile the doctor apparently rummaged on his bureau, and found it.

“Here it is! All right!” he cried; and I passed on.

A formal type-written note of introduction, signed by the great man’s hand, was a thing to be treasured like a pearl of great price. The first thought in the doctor’s mind on parting from me had been to assure himself of its safety!

[18]. For the benefit of English readers, it may be well to state clearly what Reconstruction meant. I do so in the words of Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 9): “The policies of reconstruction represented two cardinal movements of purpose. One was the withdrawal of political and civic power from those, especially those in official positions, who had borne arms against the United States. This effort was an expedient of distrust. It was as natural as it was unintelligent, and it was as successful as it was mischievous.... This was not all. The suffrage which the masters were denied was by the same act committed into the hands of their former slaves, vast dumb multitudes, more helpless with power than without power.” It is almost universally admitted that the Reconstruction policy was a mistake, which would never have been made had Lincoln lived, and that its results were grotesque and often tragic. I find only Professor Du Bois putting in a word for it and for some of its results. “The granting of the ballot to the black man,” he says (“The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 38), “was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war.” But he adds, “Thus negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.” The Reconstruction policy was overthrown by the “Revolution” of 1876, when the military support, on which the Reconstruction governments had rested, was withdrawn.

[19]. That excellent investigator, Mr. Stannard Baker, in his chapter on “The Tragedy of the Mulatto,” presents a good deal of conflicting evidence on this point. In the city of Montgomery, with its 35,000 inhabitants, it has been publicly stated without contradiction that 400 negro women live in more or less permanent concubinage with white men, while “there are thirty-two negro dives operated for white patronage”; nor does it seem that this state of things is at all exceptional. On the other hand, the feeling against such connections is certainly growing, and finds expression on every hand. The New Orleans Times Democrat, for instance, declares it to be a public scandal that no law against miscegenation should be on the statute-book of Louisiana, “and that it should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples.” Mr. Baker is, however, able to say that “the class of white men who consort with negro women is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago.”

VIII
IN THE BLACK BELT

For a whole long hot summer’s day I journeyed down the Mississippi Valley from Memphis to Vicksburg, stopping at every wayside station. Here I first felt—what was afterwards to grow upon me every day—an impression of the extraordinary potential wealth of the South. These fat champains, many of them scarcely reclaimed from the wilderness, and few of them subjected to more than a rough surface culture, seemed to me to reek of fertility and to cry aloud for development. As scenery they were monotonous enough, but as the seed-plot of an illimitable future they were vastly impressive.

There was no dining-car on the train, and at Clarksville, at 12.30, we were allowed twenty minutes for “dinner.” We rushed for the dingy refreshment-room, and found at each place a plate of soup, surrounded by little saucers containing a cube of butter, a sort of dough-nut in syrup, and some lettuce with a slice of hard-boiled egg. There was also at each place a coffee-cup, a small milk-pot, and some sugar. The soup-plates were removed by being piled in the middle of the table; a negro waiter came round with fresh plates, and then served the following menu, all dumped successively upon a single plate: (1) chunks of boiled bacon with sauerkraut; (2) stewed veal; (3) mashed potatoes; (4) baked beans; (5) roast chicken; (6) boiled beef. The meal ended with pumpkin pie and ice-cream; and for beverage you had your choice of either coffee or iced-tea. For this refection the charge was seventy-five cents, or three shillings—the regular tariff, it would seem, at roadside stations. Moral: Never, if you can help it, take a train without a dining-car.

Approaching Vicksburg, we ran for miles and leagues through a lovely region of luxuriantly green, vine-tangled forest, mirrored in perfectly clear water. Here, indeed, might the poet have sung of

“Annihilating all that’s made,

To a green thought in a green shade.”

How the water got there I cannot say. If it was simply the result of a flood, how came it so exquisitely clear? It seemed as though the forest grew naturally out of this pellucid mirror; the rather as we passed many open glades of blue water, where a race of lake-dwellers had built their cabins on piles. These glades I conceive to be “bayous,” but found no native who could inform me. In any case, I shall never forget that run up to Vicksburg. Until then, I scarcely knew the meaning of the word “green.” The South was afterwards to teach me many other shades of its significance.

This whole day’s journey lay through the “black belt” of the State of Mississippi. |Africa in the Ascendant.| It was manifest to the naked eye that the black population enormously outnumbered the white. Few and far between were the cottages occupied by white folks, numberless the cabins of the blacks. At the stations the blacks—who love hanging around railway stations—were to the whites as ten to one. They were a lively, good-humoured, talkative crowd, and on the whole, one would have said, a fine race physically. Neither the men nor the women showed any obvious sign of that dwindling vitality wherein my friend the Memphis bookseller rejoiced—which is not to say that he was entirely mistaken as regards the urban negro. These were rural negroes—a wholly different matter.

The newsman on the train was selling the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and I noticed that he found quite as many customers among the blacks as among the whites—two or three at each station. This would have gratified Mr. Booker Washington, for it was not only a proof of education but of easy circumstances—the paper costing just about as much as the Times. Mr. Washington, too, would have rejoiced to see the rather exquisitely-dressed negro cavalier, mounted on a pretty little well-bred mare, with spick-and-span new saddle and appurtenances, who, at Mound Bayou, rode up to the Jim Crow car, and chatted with a friend. Here was the Gospel of the Toothbrush supplemented by that of the curry-comb.

At this point I must face an avowal which I have long seen looming ahead. |The Jim Crow Car.| Without sincerity these impressions would be worse than useless. What I think about the colour question must be superficial, and may be foolish; but there is a certain evidential value in what I feel. The whole question, ultimately, is one of feeling; and the instinctive sensations of an observer, with the prejudices of his race, no doubt, but with no local Southern prejudices, are, so far as they go, worth taking into account.

Well, that day in the “black belt” of Mississippi brought home to me the necessity of the Jim Crow car. The name—the contemptuous, insulting name—is an outrage. The thing, on the other hand, I regard as inevitable. There are some negroes (so called) with whom I should esteem it a privilege to travel, and many others whose companionship would be in no way unwelcome to me; but, frankly, I do not want to spend a whole summer day in the Mississippi Valley cheek by jowl with a miscellaneous multitude of the negro race.

The Jim Crow car is defended by many Southerners as a means of keeping the peace, and on the ground of the special aversion which, owing to deplorable and (in time) corrigible circumstances, the negro male excites in the white woman. But I think the matter goes deeper than this. The tension between the races might be indefinitely relaxed, outrages might become a well-nigh incredible legend, the Gospel of the Toothbrush might be disseminated among the negroes ten times more widely than it is; and still it would not be desirable that the two races should be intermingled at close quarters in the enforced intimacy of a long railway journey. The permanent difficulty, underlying all impermanent ones, that time, education, Christian charity, and soap and water may remove, is that of sheer unlikeness.

Oh! they are terribly unlike, these two races! I am postulating no superiority or inferiority. I say, with Bishop Bratton, that “the negro is capable of development up to a point which neither he nor any one else can as yet fix;” and I will even assume that, from an astral point of view, the negro norm of physical beauty may be quite as well justified as that of the white. But they are essentially, irreconcilably different; and instincts rooted through untold centuries lead the white man to associate ugliness and a certain tinge of animalism with the negro physiognomy and physique. Call it illusion, prejudice, what you will, this is an unalterable fact of white psychology; or, if alterable, not in one generation, nor yet in one century. No doubt there is something good-humoured and not unsympathetic in the very ugliness (from the white point of view) of the negro. For that reason, among others, the two races can get on well enough, if you give them elbow-room. But elbow-room is just what the conditions of railway travelling preclude; wherefore I hold the system of separate cars a legitimate measure of defence against constant discomfort. Had it not been adopted, the South would have been a nation of saints, not of men. It is in the methods of its enforcement that they sometimes show themselves not only human but inhuman.

Remember that the question is complicated by the American’s resolute adherence to the constitutional fiction of equality. |The Fiction of Equality.| As there are no “classes” in the great American people, so there must be no first, second, or third class on the American railways.[^[20]] Of course, the theory remains a fiction on the railroad no less than in life. Everyone travels first class; but those who can pay for it may travel in classes higher than first, called parlour-cars, drawing-room cars, and so forth. The only real validity of the fiction, it seems to me, lies in the unfortunate situation it creates with regard to the negro. If our three classes (or even two) were provided on every train, the mass of the negro population would, from sheer economic necessity, travel third. It might or might not be necessary to provide separate cars on that level; but if it were, the discrimination would not be greatly felt by the grade of black folks it would affect. In the higher-class cars there would be no reasonable need for discrimination, for the number of negroes using them would be few in comparison, and personally unobjectionable. The essential elbow-room would seldom be lacking; conditions in the first and second class would be very much the same as they are at present in the North. It is the crowding, the swamping, the submerging of the white race by the black, that the South cannot reasonably be expected to endure; and what I realized on that day in Mississippi was that such swamping would be an inevitable and everyday incident unless measures were taken to obviate it.

A Dual Paradox.

Of all historic ironies this is surely the bitterest—that the Republic founded to demonstrate eighteenth-century ideals of human equality should have been fated to provide their most glaring reductio ad absurdum. This is far from an original observation: but there is another paradox in the case which is not so generally recognized. It is that the most religious of modern peoples should all the time be flying in the face of the plainest dictates of Christianity. The South is by a long way the most simply and sincerely religious country that I ever was in.[^[21]] It is not, like Ireland, a priest-ridden country; it is not, like England, a country in which the strength of religion lies in its social prestige; it is not, like Scotland, a country steeped in theology. But it is a country in which religion is a very large factor in life, and God is very real and personal. In other countries men are apt to make a private matter of their religion, in so far as it is not merely formal; but the Southerner wears his upon his sleeve. There is a simple sincerity in his appeal to religious principle which I have often found really touching. I have often, too, been reminded of that saying of my Pennsylvanian friend: “The South may be living in the twentieth century, but it has skipped the nineteenth.” The Southerner goes to the Gospels for his rule of life, and has never heard of Nietzsche; yet I am wholly unable to discover how the system of race-discriminations is reconcilable with the fundamental precepts of Christianity. It is far easier to find in the Old Testament the justification of slavery than in the New Testament the justification of the Jim Crow car, the white and black school, and the white and black church.[^[22]] This is not necessarily a condemnation of the Southerner’s attitude; I do not think that the colour problem was foreseen in the New Testament. Christianity is one thing, sociology another, and the Southerner’s logical error, perhaps, lies in not keeping the distinction clear.[^[23]] But I am sure there are many sincere and earnest Christians in the South who will scarce be at ease in heaven unless they enter it, like a Southern railway station, through a gateway marked “For Whites.”

[20]. Is this one of what Mr. E. G. Murphy calls “the divine inconveniences of a Republic”?

[21]. “The fancied home of the cavalier is the home of the nearest approach to puritanism and to the most vital protestant evangelicalism in the world to-day.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 20.

[22]. “The result of the war was the complete expulsion of negroes from white churches.... The Methodist Church South simply set its negro members bodily out of doors. They did it with some consideration for their feelings ... but they virtually said to all their black members, ‘You cannot worship God with us.’ There grew up, therefore, the Coloured Methodist Episcopal Church.... From the North now came those negro church bodies born of colour discrimination in Philadelphia and New York in the eighteenth century; and thus a Christianity absolutely divided along the colour-line arose. There may be in the South a black man belonging to a white church to-day; but if so, he must be very old and very feeble. This anomaly—this utter denial of the very first principle of the ethics of Jesus Christ—is to-day so deep-seated and unquestionable a principle of Southern Christianity that its essential heathenism is scarcely thought of.” W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro in the South,” p. 174. I have been told, but make the statement “with all reserve,” that no colour-line is drawn in Roman Catholic churches in the South.

[23]. The perils of biblical argument may be illustrated by this passage from “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” a book of which I shall have more to say later (p. 235): “The same inspired authority who tells us that ‘God made the world ... and hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on the face of the earth,’ reminds us in the same breath that He Himself ‘hath determined the bounds of their habitations.’” But if, on this principle, the presence of the negro in America is a breach of divine ordinance, what are we to say of the presence of the white man in America?

IX
EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM

Enormous undeveloped or half-developed fertility is the impression one receives on every hand in the South; but the lack of development belongs to a state of things soon to pass away. There can be little doubt that the South stands on the threshold of an agricultural Golden Age.[^[24]] It is being brought about mainly by three agencies: (1) The United States Department of Agriculture; (2) The General Education Board of New York; (3) the boll-weevil, which, entering Texas from Mexico in 1899, has extended its ravages over the States of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and part of Mississippi, and at one time threatened the ruin of the whole cotton industry. It may seem odd that this unwelcome invader should be reckoned among the factors that are promoting agricultural development; but, in a very real sense, he has served as a pioneer to the movement.

Dr. Wallace Buttrick, of the General Education Board, was so kind as to give me an outline of the course of events.

Rockefeller to the Rescue.

“Our Board,” he said, “was established and endowed, and has been at various intervals re-endowed, by Mr. Rockefeller.”

“To promote education in the South?”

“Not in the South alone, nor even primarily; but we had, of course, to study the special conditions prevailing in the South. We soon convinced ourselves that the deficiencies of Southern education—and they were enormous—were due to the sheer poverty of the country.[^[25]] In the Southern towns there are good schools, and the accommodation is fairly adequate. But only 15 per cent. of the population of the South is a city population. The remaining 85 per cent. is rural and agricultural—not even, for the most part, gathered in villages of any size—so that the problem of bringing education to the doors of the people is an immensely difficult one.”

“I suppose compulsory education is not to be thought of?”

“It is thought of; it is mooted; it is coming; but not yet awhile. That is just what, as I say, we realized—that the South is too poor to pay for an adequate system of education, and that the problem is too huge a one for even the most lavish outside philanthropy to tackle. What was to be done, then? Manifestly to enrich the Southern agriculturalist, so as to enable him to pay for the schooling of his children. As it is, his average income is something like a third of the average income of a man of his class in (say) the State of Iowa, where the public-school system is adequate and satisfactory. Multiply his income by three, or even by two, and he also will be able to afford an adequate public-school system.”

“So your problem was nothing less than to double or treble the wealth of the fifteen or sixteen Southern States?”

The Boll-Weevil.

“Something like that; and it was right here that the boll-weevil came in. With ruin staring them in the face, the farmers of the affected districts took up eagerly the system of what are called Demonstration Farms, organized by Dr. S. A. Knapp, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That department, at its experimental stations and with the aid of its entomologists, had devised a method of combating the pest. Roughly speaking, it consisted of getting in ahead of the weevil—carefully preparing the ground and selecting the right varieties of seed, so that the main part of the crop could be harvested before the insect was ready to attack it. But it is one thing to devise a scientific method and another thing to persuade and teach farmers to carry it out. This difficulty Dr. Knapp got over by the following means: he organized a body of skilled agents, who went to the leading citizens—merchants, bankers, or what not—of a given district, and said, ‘Introduce us to the most intelligent and progressive farmer of your neighbourhood.’ Then to this farmer the agent would say, ‘If you will set apart a certain amount of land to be treated, under my supervision, exactly as I shall prescribe, I (that is to say, the Government) will provide you with the right seed for the purpose, and you will see what the result will be.’ Then meetings would be called of the neighbouring farmers, principles explained, and their attention directed to the experiment. Their life-and-death interest in the matter would make them watch the result closely; and as, in each case, the result would be a far larger crop per acre than they had been used to before the appearance of the weevil, you may imagine whether the methods of culture were eagerly adopted and the right sorts of seed eagerly applied for.

An Educational Campaign.

“Well, we of the General Education Board saw in the method of Dr. Knapp’s campaign against the boll-weevil the very thing we were wanting. The Government was operating only in the boll-weevil districts—there were constitutional objections to its extending its activity to regions unaffected by the pest. There we stepped in, and offered to finance the extension of the Demonstration Farms to other districts, in accordance with their needs and capabilities. So long as only a nominal money appropriation was required of it, the Government had no objection to our acting under its authority, our agents thus having the prestige of Government emissaries. For the current year, we have appropriated £15,000 to the work, while Congress has voted a somewhat larger sum for work in the boll-weevil States. Altogether, about 12,000 Demonstration Farms have already been established, and about 20,000 farmers have agreed to ‘co-operate’—that is, to work the whole or part of their land according to our instructions. The system is quite new. It has nowhere been at work more than two years, and there are many regions which are not yet even touched by it; but already the results are surprising.”

“It does not, I presume, apply solely to cotton-growing?”

“Certainly not; on the contrary, one of our great objects is to break down the exclusive reliance on cotton so common in many districts, and to show how the exhaustion of land may be avoided by the judicious rotation of crops. In short, we aim at providing object-lessons in scientific agriculture all over the Southern States, and of course always with strict reference to the particular advantages and disadvantages of a district. I assure you the South is at the opening of a new agricultural era; and it will not be many years before our work will produce a marked effect on education. Come back ten years hence, and you will no longer find it true that the Southern school is open, on an average, only about three months in the year; that the Southerner gets, on an average, something less than three years’ schooling in his whole life; and that about 10 per cent. of the native-born white population of the Southern States is wholly illiterate, and about 40 per cent. of the negro population. We are going to change all that.”

The Way to Wealth.

Shortly afterwards I met, not Dr. Knapp himself, but his son, Mr. Arthur Knapp, who gave me some further information as to the new era in Southern agriculture.

“Not only,” he said, “is much Southern land unimproved, but much of it is exhausted by careless and ignorant cultivation. It has been the method of many Southern farmers to work their land until it would no longer raise a paying crop of cotton; then to sell their farms for what they could get and move on to fresher soil. The system of Demonstration Farms will put an end to this, along with many other abuses and stupidities. It is the only sound method of educating the farmer. You may deluge him with Government bulletins of printed advice without producing the slightest effect. Even if he reads and understands the advice, he can’t or won’t apply it in practice. You must show him the process and show him the results. Much more is done by talking than by reading in the South; things circulate from mouth to mouth much more effectually than even through the newspapers. Each of the 12,000 Demonstration Farms is visited by from thirty to one hundred neighbouring farmers. That means that the object-lessons reach something like 400,000 every year. And then the spirit of emulation is awakened. Intelligent and energetic men are fired with the idea that they will beat the Government; and they go off and have a very good try.”

“I think I roughly understand the method of fighting the boll-weevil; but can you tell me something of what is being done for the benefit of other products than cotton?”

“Well, we insist on the necessity of better drainage, of deeper and more thorough ploughing, of carefully selecting and storing the best varieties of seed. We demonstrate the judicious rotation of crops, and show the advantages of devoting portions of the farm to legumes, which have a high food value for stock, and at the same time enrich the soil. Above all, perhaps, we insist on the necessity of economizing labour by the use of more horse-power and better implements, and urge the increasing of stock to such an extent that all the waste products and idle lands of the farm may be utilized.”

“But most, if not all, of these prescriptions surely demand fresh capital. Where is that to come from?”

“Why, no one pretends that the average farmer can introduce all these improvements at once. The fundamental ones do not require more capital, but only more thought and labour; and, these once applied, the more expensive improvements will gradually become possible. The more intelligent preparation of the soil and selection of the seed produce wonderful results at once in the case of corn—what you call maize—no less than in the case of cotton. If a farmer, under our guidance, plants half his land with corn and cowpeas, and only the other half with cotton, he gets as much cotton as he used to before, and has his corn and cowpeas in addition, while the land will be gradually restored to its original fertility. It is one of our great objects to teach farmers, while keeping cotton their ‘cash crop,’ as they call it, to divert from cotton as much land as is necessary to raise their own essential food-stuffs and the fodder for their stock—things which, under the present wasteful system, they mostly buy from outside.”