 | THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question |  |
The Question.
I.
The matter that is made the subject of these
pages is not to-day the most prominent, but it is
the gravest, in American affairs. It is one upon
which, of late years, as we might say, much
inattention has been carefully bestowed. It has
become a dreaded question. We are not politically
indolent. We are dealing courageously with
many serious problems. We admit that no nation
has yet so shaken wrong and oppression from
its skirts that it may safely and honorably sit
down in a state of mercantile and æsthetical
pre-occupation. And yet the matter that gives
us daily the profoundest unrest goes daily by
default. The Nation's bitter experiences with
it in years past, the baffling complications that
men more cunning than wise have woven around
it, its proneness to swallow up all other questions
and the eruptions of rancor and strife that attend
every least sign of its spontaneous re-opening,
great majority, and especially to our commercial
impatience, that the public mind in large part
eagerly accepts the dangerous comfort of postponement.
What is this question? Superficially, it is
whether a certain seven millions of the people,
one-ninth of the whole, dwelling in and natives
to the Southern States of the Union, and by law
an undifferentiated part of the Nation, have or
have not the same full measure of the American
citizen's rights that they would have were they
entirely of European instead of wholly or partly
African descent. The seven millions concerning
whom the question is asked, answer as with one
voice, that they have not. Millions in the Northern
States, and thousands in the Southern, of
whites, make the same reply. While other millions
of whites, in North and South, respond not
so often with a flat contradiction as with a declaration
far more disconcerting. For the "Southerner"
speaks truly when he retorts that nowhere
in the entire Union, either North or South, are
the disadvantages of being a black, or partly
black, man confined entirely to the relations of
domestic life and private society; but that in
every part there is a portion, at least, of the community
that does not claim for, or even willingly
rights in the same far-reaching amplitude
and sacredness that they do for, or to, the white
man. The Southern white man points to thousands
of Northern and Western factories, counting-rooms,
schools, hotels, churches and guilds,
and these attest the truth of his countercharge.
Nowhere in the United States is there a whole
community from which the black man, after his
physical, mental and moral character have been
duly weighed, if they be weighed at all, is not
liable to suffer an unexplained discount for mere
color and race, which he would have to suffer
publicly in no other country of the enlightened
world. This being the fact, then, in varying degrees
according to locality, what does it prove?
Only that this cannot be the real point of issue
between North and South, and that this superficial
definition is not the true one.
Putting aside mere differences of degree, the
question is not, Are these things so? but, Ought
they so to be? To this a large majority in the
Northern States from all classes, with a small
minority of the Southern whites, also from all
ranks of life, and the whole seven million blacks,
irrespective of party leanings, answer No. On
the other hand, a large majority of the whites in
the Southern States—large as to the white population
in the Nation at large—answer a vehement "Yes;
these things should and shall be so."
But how does this small minority maintain
itself? It does so owing to the familiar fact that,
although by our scheme of government there is
a constant appeal to the majority of the whole
people, the same scheme provides, also, for the
defence of local interests against rash actions of
national majorities by a parallel counter-appeal
(constantly through its Senate and at times in
other ways) to the majority, not of the people
en masse, but of the States in their corporate
capacity. Now a very large minority in the
Northern States, whose own private declaration
would be against a difference between white
men's rights and other men's rights, nevertheless
refuse now, as they refused before the Civil War,
to answer with a plain yes or no, but maintain,
with the Southern white-rule party, that whether
these things ought so to be or not is a question that
every State must be allowed to answer for, and to,
itself alone; thus so altering the voice of the
Nation, when it speaks by States, as virtually to
nullify that negative answer which would be
given by a majority of the whole people. In the
Civil Rights bill the verdict of the States was
once given against all race discrimination in all
confining it within that true domain—of private
choice—to which the judgment of other Christian
nations consigns it. But the Civil Rights
bill, never practically effective in the communities
whose upper ranks were hostile to it, has at
last perished in the inner citadel of our government's
strong conservatism, the national Supreme
Court, and the Senate majority that passed the
bill was long ago lost by revolutions in the
Southern States. Thus, by a fundamental provision
in the National Government, intended for
the very purpose of protecting the weak from
the strong, a small national minority has for
twenty-five years been enabled to withstand the
pressure of an immense majority.
Whether this is by a right or wrong use of the
provision is part of the open question. The weak
are protected from the strong, but the still weaker
are delivered into the hands of the strong. Seven
millions of the Nation, mostly poor, ignorant and
degraded, are left for the definition and enjoyment
of rights, worth more than safety or property, to
the judgment of some ten other millions of unquestioned
intelligence and virtue, but whose
intelligence and virtue were not materially less
when, with a courage and prowess never surpassed,
they drenched their own land with their
slavery. However, be it a use or an abuse of the
Nation's scheme of order; be it right or wrong;
this is politically the stronghold of the conservative
party in the Southern States; and it is made
stronger still, steel-clad and turreted, as it were,
with the tremendous advantage of the status quo
—that established order of things which, good
or bad, until it becomes intolerable to themselves,
men will never attack with an energy equal to
that with which it is defended.
But political strength is little by itself. The
military maxim, that no defences are strong without
force enough in them to occupy their line,
is true of civil affairs. Entrenchment in the letter
of a constitution avails little with the people at
large on either side of a question, unless the line
of that entrenchment is occupied by a living
conviction of being in the right. The most
ultra-Southern position on the negro question
has an element of strength close akin to this.
To be right is the only real necessity; but where
is the community that will not make and defend
with treasure and blood the assumption that what
is necessary is right? "Southerners," in the
political sense of the term, may sometimes lack
a clear, firm-founded belief that they are right;
they may have no more than a restless confidence
at least a profound conviction that they are
moved by an imminent, unremitting, imperative
necessity. Not that this is all; hundreds of
thousands of them, incapacitated by this very
conviction from falling into sympathy with the
best modern thought, have been taught, and are
learning and teaching, not only on the hustings,
but in school, in college, at the fireside, through
the daily press, in the social circle and in church,
that in their attitude on the negro question they
are legally, morally and entirely right.
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.
III.
And then they would make one more discovery.
They would find that not only were they
victims of bolder infractions of the most obvious
common rights of humanity than are offered to
any people elsewhere in Christendom, save only
the Chinaman in the far West, but that to make
the oppression more exasperating still, there is
not a single feature of it in any one State, though
justifiable on the plea of stern necessity, that
does not stand condemned by its absence, under
the same or yet more pronounced conditions, in
a State will utterly stultify the attitude held in
another part. In Virginia or South Carolina a
colored person of decent appearance or behavior
may sit in any first-class railway car, but
in Georgia the law forbids it, and in Kentucky
the law leaves him to the caprice of railway managements,
some of which accord and others withhold
the right. In some States he is allowed in
the jury box, in some he is kept out by the letter
of statutes, and in some by evasion of them;
while in Tennessee some counties admit him to
jury duty and others exclude him from it. In
one or two Southern cities, the teachers in colored
public schools must be white. In certain
others they must be colored; and in still others
they may be either. In Louisiana certain railway
trains and steamboats run side by side,
within a mile of one another, where in the trains
a negro or mulatto may sit where he will, and on
the boats he must confine himself to a separate
quarter called the "freedman's bureau."
The Civil Rights bill was fought for years and
finally destroyed, with the plea that it infringed
the right of common carriers and entertainers to
use their own best judgment in distributing their
passengers and guests with an equitable consideration
for the comfort of all. In fact, it only
the common comfort, humor the demand of one
crudely self-assorted private social class for an
invariable, ignominious isolation or exclusion
of another. Yet the same States and persons
who so effectually made this plea, either allow
and encourage its use as a cover for this tyrannous
inequity, or else themselves ignore their
own plea, usurp the judgment of common carriers
and entertainers, and force them by law
to make this race distribution, whether they deem
it best or not.
And yet again, all over the South there are
scattered colleges, academies and tributary grammar
schools, established and maintained at the
expense of individuals and societies in the Northern
States, for the education, at low rates of tuition
and living, of the aspiring poor, without
hindrance as to race or sex. For more than
twenty years these establishments have flourished
and been a boon to the African-American, as well
as to the almost equally noted "poor whites" of
the Southern mountain regions, sandhills and
"pauper counties," and through both these classes
to the ultra-Southern white man of the towns and
plantations—a boon the national value of which
neither he nor one in a thousand of its hundreds
of thousands of Northern supporters has an adequate
receive seven times their present pecuniary support.
These institutions have graduated some
hundreds of colored students as physicians and
lawyers. At one time lately they had more than
eight hundred divinity students, nearly all of
them colored. Their pupils of all grades aggregate
over seventeen thousand, and the sixteen
thousand colored teachers in the public schools
of the South have come almost entirely from
them. But now in these institutions there is a
complete ignoring of those race distinctions in
the enjoyment of common public rights so religiously
enforced on every side beyond their borders;
and yet none of those unnamable disasters
have come to or from them which the advocates
of these onerous public distinctions and separations
predict and dread. On scores of Southern
hilltops these schools stand out almost totally
without companions or competitors in their peculiar
field, so many refutations, visible and complete,
of the idea that any interest requires the
colored American citizen to be limited in any of
the civil rights that would be his without question
if the same man were white. Virtually, the
whole guild of educators in the Southern States,
from once regarding these institutions with unqualified
condemnation and enmity, are now
cases, their converts. So widely have the larger
colleges demonstrated their unique beneficence
that in some cases Southern State Governments,
actively hostile to the privileges of civil liberty
they teach and apply, are making small annual appropriations
in contribution toward their support.
So bristling with inconsistencies, good and
bad, would our three travelers find this tyrannous
and utterly unrepublican régime. Nowhere
else in enlightened lands and in this day do so
many millions see their own fellow-citizens so
play football with their simplest public rights; for
the larger part of the Southern white people do
with these laws of their own making what they
please, keeping or breaking them as convenient.
But their discoveries would still go on. They
would hear these oppressions justified by Southern
white people of the highest standing, and
—more's the shame—by Northern tourists in
the South, on the ground that the people upon
whom they are laid are a dull, vicious, unclean
race, contact with which would be physically,
intellectually and morally offensive and mischievous
to a higher race. And when they
might ask why the lines of limited rights are not
drawn around the conspicuously dull, vicious
and unclean of both races for the protection of
to face upon the amazing assumption that the
lowest white man is somehow a little too good
for even so much contact with the highest black
as may be necessary for a common enjoyment of
public rights; and, therefore, that no excellence,
moral, mental or physical, inborn or attained,
can buy for a "man of color" from these separationists
any distinction between the restrictions
of his civil liberty and those of the stupidest
and squalidest of his race, or bring him one step
nearer to the enjoyment of the rights of a white
man; or, if at all, then only as a matter of the
white man's voluntary condescension and with
the right disguised as a personal privilege. They
would find that the race line is not a line of
physical, moral or intellectual excellence at all.
Stranger yet, they would learn that no proportion
of white men's blood in their own veins,
unless it washes out the very memory of their
African tincture, can get them abatement of those
deprivations decreed for a dull, vicious and unclean
race, but that—men, women and children
alike—hundreds and thousands of mixed race
are thus daily and publicly punished by their
brothers for the sins of their fathers. They
would find the race line not a race line at all.
They would find that the mere contact of race
any and every sort of contact on an equal footing.
They would find that what no money, no
fame, no personal excellence and no fractional
preponderance of European blood can buy, can
nevertheless be bought instantly and without
one of these things by the simple surrender of
the attitude of public equality. They would
find that the entire essence of the offence, any
and everywhere where the race line is insisted
on, is the apparition of the colored man or
woman as his or her own master; that masterhood
is all that all this tyranny is intended to preserve,
and that the moment the relation of master
and servant is visibly established between race
and race there is the hush of peace.
"What is that negro—what is that mulattress—doing
in here?" asks one private individual
of another in some public place, and the
other replies:—
"That's nothing; he is the servant of that
white man just behind him; she is the nurse of
those children in front of her."
"Oh, all right." And the "cordial relation"
is restored. Such conversation, or equivalent
soliloquy, occurs in the South a hundred times
a day.
The surrender of this one point by the colored
amity; an amity clouded only by a slight but
distinct and constant air and tone of command
on the one part, a very gross and imperfect
attitude of deference on the other, and the perpetual
unrest that always accompanies forcible
possession of anything. But since no people
ever compelled another to pay too much for
peace without somehow paying too much for it
themselves, the master-caste tolerates, with unsurpassed
supineness and unconsciousness, a
more indolent, inefficient, slovenly, unclean,
untrustworthy, ill-mannered, noisy, disrespectful,
disputatious, and yet servile domestic and
public menial service than is tolerated by any
other enlightened people. Such is but one of
the smallest of many payments which an intelligent
and refined community has to make for
maintaining the lines of master and servant-hood
on caste instead of on individual ambition and
capacity, and for the forcible equalization of millions
of unequal individuals under one common
public disdain. Other and greater payments and
losses there are, moral, political, industrial, commercial,
as we shall see when we turn, as now
we must, to the other half of this task, and
answer the two impatient questions that jostle
each other for precedence as they spring from
of affairs.
The two questions are these: If the case is so
plain, then, in the first place, how can the millions
of intelligent and virtuous white people of
the South make such a political, not to say such
a moral, mistake? And, in the second place,
how can the overwhelming millions of the North,
after spending the frightful costs they spent in
the war of '61-'65, tolerate this emasculation of
the American freedom which that war is supposed
to have secured to all alike?
| THE NEGRO QUESTION. The Negro question | |