 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
II.
Now, specifically, what are these things that
the majority of a free nation says ought not to
be, while a sectional majority triumphantly maintains
they must, will, ought to and shall be?
Give an example of an actual grievance. One
commonly esteemed the very least on the list is
this: Suppose a man, his wife and their child,
decent in person, dress and deportment, but
visibly of African or mixed blood, to take passage
on a railway train from some city of the
Eastern States, as Boston, or of the Western, as
Chicago. They will be thrown publicly into
company with many others, for an ordinary
American railway passenger coach seats fifty persons,
and they will receive the same treatment
from railway employés and passengers as if,
being otherwise just what they are, they were of
pure European descent. Only they will be much
less likely than white persons to seek, or be
offered, new acquaintanceships. Arriving in New
York, Philadelphia, or any other Northern city,
they will easily find accommodations in some
hotel of such grade as they would be likely to
choose if, exactly as they are, they were white.
They may chance upon a house that will refuse,
on account of their color, to receive them; but
such action, if made known, will be likely to
receive a wide public reprobation, and scant applause
even from the press of the Southern
States. If the travelers choose to continue their
journey through the night, they will be free to
hire and occupy berths in a sleeping-car, and to
use all its accessories—basins, towels, pillows,
etc.—without the least chance of molestation in
act or speech from any one of the passengers or
employés, let such passengers or employés be
from any State of the Union, Northern or
Southern.
But, on reaching the Southern States, the three
travelers will find themselves at every turn under
special and offensive restrictions, laid upon them
but solely and avowedly on account of the
African tincture in their blood, however slight
that may be. They may still be enjoying the
comforts of the sleeping-car, by virtue of the
ticket bought in a Northern State and not yetfully
redeemed. But they will find that while in one
Southern State they may still ride in an ordinary
first-class railway coach without hindrance, in
another they will find themselves turned away
from the door of one coach and required to limit
themselves to another, equal, it may be, to the
first in appointments, and inferior only in the
social rank of its occupants. They may protest
that in America there are no public distinctions
of social rank; but this will avail them nothing.
They may object that the passengers in the car
from which they are excluded are not of one, but
palpably of many and widely different social
ranks, and that in the car to which they are
assigned are people not of their grade only but
of all sorts; they will be told with great plainness
that there is but one kind of negro. They
will be told that they are assigned equal but separate
accommodation because the presence of a
person of wholly, or partly, African blood in the
same railway car on terms of social equality with
the white passengers is to those white passengers
father replies that it is itself the height of vulgarity
to raise the question of private social rank
among strangers in railway cars, he will be fortunate
if he is only thrust without more ado into
the "colored car," and not kicked and beaten by
two or three white men whose superior gentility
has been insulted, and he and his wife and child
put off at the next station to appeal in vain to
the courts. For in court he will find that railway
companies are even required by the laws of
the State to maintain this ignominious separation
of all who betray an African tincture, refined or
unrefined, clean or unclean, from the presence
of the white passengers in the first-class cars, be
those passengers ever so promiscuous a throng.
Such is an example of one of the least grievances
of the colored man under the present régime
in the Southern States; and so dull is the
common perception of wrongs committed at a
distance, that hundreds of thousands of intelligent,
generous, sensitive people in the Northern
States are daily confessing their inability to see
any serious hardship in such a case, if only the
"colored car" be really equal in its appointments
to the one in which only white people of every
sort are admitted; as if a permanent ignominious
distinction on account of ancestry, made in public,
public rights were not an insult or an injury
unless joined to some bodily discomfort.
Let it be plainly understood that though at least
scores of thousands are intelligent and genteel,
yet the vast majority of colored people in the
United States are neither refined in mind nor very
decent in person. Their race has never had "a
white man's chance." In America it has been
under the iron yoke of a slavery that allowed no
distinction of worth to cross race lines; and in
Africa it has had to contend for the mastery of
wild nature on a continent so unconquerable
that for thousands of years the white race has
striven in vain to subdue it, and is only now at
last strong enough to pierce it, enriched, enlightened
and equipped by the long conquest
of two others less impregnable. For all that is
known the black is "an inferior race," though
how, or how permanently inferior, remains unproved.
But the core of the colored man's
grievance is that the individual, in matters of
right that do not justly go by race, is treated,
whether man or child, without regard to person,
dress, behavior, character or aspirations, in public
and by law, as though the African tincture, much
or little, were itself stupidity, squalor and vice.
But let us see whether the grievance grows.
On passing into a third Southern State, the
three travelers, though still holders of first-class
tickets, will be required to confine themselves to
the so-called second-class car, a place never
much better than a dram shop. When the
train stops for meals, and the passengers, men,
women and children, the rough, the polished, all
throng into one common eating-room to receive
a common fare and attention, those three must
eat in the kitchen or go hungry. Nor can they
even await the coming of a train, in some railway
stations, except in a separate "colored
room." If they tarry in some Southern city
they will encounter the most harassing and
whimsical treatment of their most ordinary public
rights as American citizens. They may ride
in any street car, however crowded, seated beside,
or even crammed in among, white men or
women of any, or every, station of life; but at
the platform of the railway train, or at the
threshold of any theatre, or concert, or lecture
hall, they will be directed to the most undesirable
part of the house, and compelled to take
that or nothing. They will find that the word
"public" rarely means public to them; that
they may not even draw books from the public
libraries or use their reading rooms.
Should the harried and exasperated man be
strike, some white man, he will stand several
chances to a white man's one of being killed on
the spot. If neither killed nor half-killed, but
brought into court, he will have ninety-nine
chances in a hundred of confronting a jury from
which, either by, or else in spite of, legal provision,
men of African tincture have been wholly
or almost wholly excluded. If sent to prison he
must come under a penal system which the report
of the National Commissioner of Prisons
officially pronounces "a blot upon civilization."
He will find the population of the State prisons
often nine-tenths colored, divided into chain-gangs,
farmed out to private hands, even subleased,
and worked in the mines, quarries, in
railway construction and on turnpikes, under
cordons of Winchester rifles; veritable quarry
slaves. He will find most of the few white convicts
under this system suffering the same outrages;
but he will also find that the system itself
disappears wherever this general attitude toward
the black race disappears, and that where it and
its outrages continue, the race line in prison is
obliterated only when the criminal becomes a
negotiable commodity and it costs the lessee
money to maintain the absurd distinction. He
would find the number of colored men within
the colored population outside, as compared with
the percentages of blacks in and out of prison in
States not under this régime. There are State
prisons in which he would find the colored convicts
serving sentences whose average is nearly
twice that of the white convicts in the same
places for the same crimes. In the same or
other prisons he would find colored youths
and boys by scores, almost by hundreds, consorting
with older criminals, and under sentences
of seven, ten, twenty years, while the State Legislatures
vote down year after year the efforts of
a few courageous and humane men either to
establish reformatories for colored youth, or to
introduce the element of reform into their so-called
penitentiaries.
But suppose he commits no offence against
person or property; he will make another list of
discoveries. He will find that no select school,
under "Southern" auspices, will receive his
child. That if he sends the child to a public
school, it must be, as required by law, to a school
exclusively for colored children, even if his child
is seven times more white than colored. Though
his child be gentle, well-behaved, cleanly and
decorously dressed, and the colored school so
situated as to be naturally and properly the
he will have no more liberty than before;
he will be told again, "We know but one kind
of negro." The child's father and mother may
themselves be professional instructors; but however
highly trained; of whatever reputation for
moral and religious character; however talented
as teachers or disciplinarians; holding the diploma
of whatever college or university, Wellesley,
Vassar, Yale, Cornell; and of whatever age
or experience, they will find themselves shut out
by law from becoming teachers in any public
school for white children, whether belonging to,
and filled from, the "best neighborhood," or in,
and for, the lowest quarter of alleys and shanties.
They will presently learn that in many hundreds
of Southern school-districts where the populations
are too sparse and poor to admit of separate
schools for the two races, the children of
both are being brought up in ignorance of the
very alphabet rather than let them enjoy a common
public right under a common roof. They
will find that this separation is not really based
on any incapacity of children to distinguish between
public and private social relations; but
that the same separation is enforced among
adults; and that while every Southern State is
adequate outlay for public education, and hundreds
of thousands of colored children are growing
up in absolute illiteracy largely for lack of
teachers and school-houses, an expensive isolation
of race from race is kept up even in the
normal schools and teachers' institutes. Even
in the house of worship and the divinity school
they would find themselves pursued by the same
invidious distinctions and separations that had
followed them at every step, and would follow
and attend them still to, and in, the very almshouse
and insane asylum.
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |