University of Virginia Library

WHAT SHALL THE NEGRO DO?

1. This paper is addressed directly to the colored
people of the United States. A large mass
of them, of course, will not see it; yet others of
them will. Nothing more forcibly illustrates the
great progress of our times than the fact that
already one may safely count on reaching a considerable
body of readers, wholly or partly of
Negro blood, through the pages of a monthly
publication adapted to the highest popular intelligence
of the Anglo-Saxon race. The explanation
of this is, that although the colored man in
America enters the second quarter-century of his
emancipation without yet having attained the
full measure of American freedom decreed to
him, he has, nevertheless, enjoyed, for at least
twenty years, a larger share of private, public, religious
and political liberty than falls to the lot of
any but a few peoples—the freest in the world.

It would be far from the truth to say that other
men everywhere, or even that all white men, are
freer than he. No subject of the Czar, be he
peasant or prince, however rich in privileges,
dares claim the rights actually enjoyed by an
American freedman. The Negro's grievance is

not that his liberties are few; it is that, in a land
and nation whose measure of every man's freedom
is all the freedom any one can attain without
infringing upon a like freedom in others, and
where all the competitions of life are keyed on
this idea, his tenure of almost every public right
is somehow mutilated by arbitrary discriminations
against him. Not that he is in slave's
shackles and between prison walls, or in a Russian's
danger of them, but that, being entered
in the race for the prize of American citizenship,
in accordance with all the rules of the
course, and being eager to run, he is first declared
an inferior competitor, and then, without
gain to any, but with only loss to all, is handicapped
and hobbled.

Without gain to any and with loss to all. For
in this contest no one truly wins by another's
loss; no one need lose by another's gain; the
prize is for every one that reaches the goal, and
the more winners there are the better for each
and all. The better public citizen the Negro
can be the better it will be for the white man.
But the Negro's grievance is, that the discriminations
made against him are more and more unbearable
the better public citizen he is or tries to
be; that they are impediments, not to the grovelings
of his lower nature, but to the aspirations

of his higher; that as long as he is content to
travel and lodge as a ragamuffin, frequent the
vilest places of amusement, laze about the streets,
shun the public library and the best churches
and colleges, and neglect every political duty of
his citizenship, no white man could be much
freer than he finds himself; but that the farther
he rises above such life as this the more he is
galled and tormented with ignominious discriminations
made against him as a public citizen,
both by custom and by law; and finally,
that as to his mother, his wife, his sister, his
daughter, these encouragements to ignoble, and
discouragements to nobler, life are only crueler
in their case than in his own.

2. What large enjoyment of rights, with what
strange suffering of wrongs! Yet to explain
the incongruity is easy; the large enjoyment of
rights belongs to a new order of things, which
has only partly driven out the old order, of
which these wrongs are, by comparison, but a
slender remnant. To explain is easy, but to remove,
to remove these sad and profitless wrongs,
what shall the nation do?

There are many answers. We are reminded
of what the nation has done, and the record is
a great one. For forty years of this nineteenth
century, one of whose years counts for a score

of any other century's, it made the condition of
the Negro the absorbing national question, to
which it sacrificed its peace and repose. Admitting
much intermixture of motives of selfish
power and of self-preservation, yet the fundamental
matter was a moral conviction that moved
the majority of the nation to refuse to hold slaves
or countenance slave-holding by State legislation.
To have waived this conviction would have
avoided a frightful civil war. The freedom of
the Negro was bought at a higher price, in white
men's blood and treasure, than any people ever
paid, of their own blood and treasure, for their
own liberty. Since the close of the war, many
millions of dollars have been spent by private
benevolence in the North to qualify the Southern
Negro, morally and intellectually, for his new
freedom, and the outlay continues still undiminished.
No equal number of people elsewhere on
earth receives so great an amount of missionary
educational aid. In the South itself a great change
has taken—is taking—place in popular sentiment
concerning certain aspects of the Negro's
case. In 1885-86 over 58 per cent. of the colored
school population in seven great Southern
States were enrolled in State public schools, in
recognition of the necessity and advantage of
the Negro's elevation.

These things are not enumerated to remind
the Negro of his obligations. His property, as
far as it goes, is taxed equally with the white
man's for public education and the maintenance
of the State; and all the benefactions he has
received, added to all the peculations of which
he stood accused in the days of his own misrule,
are not yet equal to the just dues of a darker
past still remaining, and that must ever remain,
unpaid to him. They are enumerated not to
exhaust the record, but merely to indicate the
range of what has been done in the past, and is
being done in the present, by white men concerning
the Negro's rights and wrongs. The great
national political party that first rose to power,
and for almost a quarter of a century held governmental
control, by its espousal and maintenance
of the Negro's cause, still declares that
cause a living issue in the national interest. The
great party now in power,[1] with one or more disaffected
wings from the opposition, though it
does not propose to do anything, as to the Negro,
that has thus far been left undone, at least consents
not to undo anything that has been done.
Yet other important issues have been pushed to
the front by both parties, and the "Negro question,"

however preëminent in the nation's true
interest, is not paramount in the public attention.

But what has the Negro done? What is he
doing? The trite answer is, that he has increased
from four millions to seven, and is still
multiplying faster by natural increase than any
other race on the continent. But, also, he has
accepted his freedom in the spirit of those who
bestowed it; that is, limited by, and only by, the
civil and political rights and duties of American
citizenship equally devoid of special privileges
and special restrictions. He fought in no mean
numbers in the great army that achieved his
liberation, and he has laid down, since then,
many a life rather than waive the rights guaranteed
to him by the American Constitution. In
the infancy of his citizenship, steeped in moral
and intellectual ignorance, with some of his
former masters disfranchised and the rest opposed
to almost the whole list of his civil rights,
he fell into the arms of unscrupulous leaders and
covered not a few pages of history with a record
of atrociously corrupt government; yet, as the
present writer has lately asserted elsewhere, the
freedman never by legislation removed the penalties
from anything that the world at large calls a
crime, and here it may be added that he never

put upon the statute book a law hostile to the
universal enjoyment of American liberty. In
the darkest day of his power he established the
public school system. He has exceeded expectation
in his display of industry, his purchase of
land, his accumulation of wealth, his eagerness
and capability for education, and even in his political
intelligence and parliamentary skill. Even
under the artificial and undiscriminating pressure
of public caste he is developing social ranks with
wide moral and intellectual differences, from the
stupid, idle, criminal, and painfully numerous
minority at the bottom, to a wealth-holding, educated
minority at the top; each emerging, or half
emerging, from a huge middle majority of peace-keeping,
but uneducated and unskilled farmers,
mechanics, and laborers, yet a majority unestranged
from the more cultured and prosperous
minority of their own race by any differences of
religion, conflict of traditions, or rivalry of capital
and labor, and hearkening to their counsels
more tractably than the mass listens to the few
among any other people on the continent. He
is not open to the charges urged against the
Indian or the Chinamen; he does not choose to
be a savage, as the one, nor a civil alien and a
heathen, as the other, is supposed to choose.
He accepts education, sometimes under offensive,
and sometimes under expensive, conditions He
proposes to stay in this country, and is eager to
be in all things a citizen. His religion is Christianity;
and if it is often glaringly emotional and
superficial, so, confessedly, is the Christianity of
his betters the world over. He only shares the
fault, after all, in large and gross degree, amply
explained by his past and present conditions;
and in many leading features a description of his
faith and practice, worship and works, would
differ but little from the history of religion
among our white settlers of the Mississippi Valley
scarcely seventy-five years ago.

3. Thus far has the nation come, and in view
of these developments the old but still anxious
question, What shall be done with the Negro?
makes room beside it for this: What shall the
Negro do? For, as matters stand, it seems
only too probable that until the Negro does
something further, nothing further will be done.
And, indeed, are not the times and the question
saying, themselves, by mute signs, that the day
has come when the Negro, not the rice-field savage,
but you, the educated, the law-abiding, taxpaying
Negro, must push more strenuously to the
front in his—in your—own behalf, and thus in the
behalf of all your race in the land? In particular,
then, What can—what shall—the Negro do?

You can make the most of the liberty you
have. You have large liberty of speech, much
freedom of the press, of petition, of organization,
of public meeting, liberty to hold property, to
prosecute civil and criminal lawsuits, a perfect
freedom to use the mails, and a certain—or must
we say an uncertain—freedom of the ballot. All
these are inestimable liberties, and have been,
and are being, used by you. But are they being
used faithfully to their utmost extent?

Freedom of public organization, for instance.
From the earliest days of his emancipation the
Negro has shown a zest and gift for organization,
and to-day his private, public, and secret
societies, which cost him money to maintain,
have thousands of members. Yet only here and
there among them is there a club or league for
the advocacy and promotion of his civil rights.
There is probably no other great national question
so nearly destitute of the championship of
an active national organization, with officers,
treasury, and legal counsel. The causes of this
are plain enough. As long as it was the supreme
political issue it was left, after our American
fashion, entirely to the heated treatment of the
daily press, the stump, and the national and
State legislatures. From them a large part
of the question passed into a long period of

suspense in the Supreme Court. Only the
matter of casting and counting votes kept, and
keeps, the attention of parties, and this with a
constant loss of power, showing that partisan
treatment is no longer the question's only or
chief need.

In the politics of a great nation even the greatest
questions must take their turns, according as
now one and now another gains the lead in the
public attention, and the more sagaciously and
diligently any worthy question is pressed to the
front by the forces that dictate to the daily press,
the stump, and the national and State legislatures,
the sooner and oftener will its turn come
round to lay uppermost hold upon the national
conscience and policy. There always was good
reason, but now there is the greatest need, that
you give and get this kind of backing for the
question of your civil and political rights. We
say give and get, because every endeavor should
be used to secure by personal solicitation not the
condescension—there has been enough of that—
but the friendly countenance and active coöperation
of white men well known in their communities
for intelligence and integrity. A certain local
civil rights club of colored men that had thought
this impracticable at length tried it, and soon
numbered among its active members some of the

best white citizens of its town. And naturally,
for it declared only such aims as any good citizen
ought gladly to encourage and aid any other to
seek by all lawful means.[2]

You can as urgently claim the liberty to perform
all your civil duties as the liberty to enjoy
all your civil rights. The two must be sought
at the same time and by the same methods.
They should never be divided. You must feel
and declare yourself no longer the nation's, much
less any political party's, still less your old master's,
mere nursling; but one bound by the
duties of citizenship to study, and actively to
seek, all men's rights, and the public welfare of

the nation, and of every lesser community—
State, county, city, village—to which he belongs.
Nothing else can so hasten the acquisition of all
your rights as for you to make it plain that your
own rights and welfare are not all you are striving
for, but that you are, at least equally with
the white man, the student of your individual
duty toward every public question in the light
of the general good.

Holding this attitude, you can make many
things clear, concerning the cause of civil rights,
that greatly need to be made so. For instance,
that this cause is not merely yours, but is a great
fundamental necessity of all free government,
in which every American citizen is interested,
knowing that they who neglect to defend any
principle of liberty may well expect to lose its
substance.

Or, for another instance, that the demand for
equal civil, including political, rights is by no
means a demand for supremacy, much less for
the supremacy of one race over another.

Or, again, that this demand is not for a share
in the popular power by a mass knowing and
caring nothing about the popular welfare.

Or, yet again, that it is not the demand of an
irresponsible herd deaf to the counsels of its
own intelligent few and of any other.

Or, that the demand for equal unpolitical civil
rights is not a demand that public indecency and
unrespectability shall enjoy all the rights of decency
and respectability, but that mere color be
not made the standard of public decency and
respectability.

Or, that equality in these unpolitical civil
rights is urged, not for the difference in comfort,
but for the effect upon the inward character of
those qualified to enjoy it, and for its power to
awaken, even in those yet without them, aspirations
that should not be lacking in the mind of
any citizen.

Or, lastly, you can make it clear that the
Negro is not the morally and mentally nerveless
infant he was fifteen years ago.

But there is a negative side to what the Negro
may do.

4. You can proclaim what you do not want.
We have already implied this in what goes just
before. There are tens of thousands of intelligent
people who to-day unwittingly exaggerate
the demands made by and in behalf of the Negro
into a vast and shapeless terror. Neither he, his
advocates, nor his opponents have generally
realized how widely his claims have been, sometimes
by and sometimes without intention, misconstrued.
He needs still to make innumerable

reiterations of facts that seem to him too plain
for repetition; as, for example, that he does not
want "Negro supremacy," or any supremacy
save that of an intelligent and upright minority,
be it white, black or both, ruling, out of office,
by the sagacity of their counsels and their
loyalty to the common good, and in office by
the choice of the majority of the whole people;
that, as to private society, he does not want any
man's company who does not want his; or that,
as to suffrage, he does not want to vote solidly,
unless he must in order to maintain precious
rights and duties denied to, and only to, him
and all his.

There is another thing which the Negro must
learn to say, and feel, that he does not want. It
is hard for a white man to name it, for it is principally
the fault of white men that it is hard for
the Negro to say it. It is our—the white man's
—fault that the only even partial outlet for the
colored man from a menial public status, in the
eyes of the white man, is political office. Even
when he attains a learned profession he attains
no such consideration as he gains in political
office, superficial and tawdry though it be. Yet,
self-regard has grown; scholarly callings win for
him more and more regard from both whites and
blacks; in the whole national mind the idea has

wonderfully grown—scarcely current at all when
the Negro began his political life—that public
office is not the legitimate spoils of party and
the legitimate reward of mere partisan loyalty
and activity, to be apportioned, pro rata, to each
and every race, class, and clique among the partisan
victors; and the time has come when the
Negro, for his own interest, must learn to say:
"My full measure of citizenship I must and will
have; but I yield no right of public office or
emolument to any man because he is white, nor
claim any because I am black; and I do not
want any office that does not want me." Such
an attitude will win better rewards than the
keeping of doors and sweeping of corridors.

But it is equally important to say that there
are other things for the Negro to do that must
by no means be either negative or passive.

5. You must keep your vote alive. This means
several things. It means that, without venality
or servility, you must hold your vote up for the
honorable competitive bid of political parties. A
vote which one party can count on, as a matter
of course, and the opposite party cannot hope to
win at any price, need expect nothing from either.
In no campaign ought the Negro to know certainly
how he will vote before he has seen both
platforms and weighed the chances of their

words being made good. You will never get
your rights until the white man does not know
how you are going to vote. You must let him
see that the "Negro vote" can divide whenever
it may, and come together solidly again whenever
it must.

Keeping your vote alive means, also, that
while to be grateful is right and to be ungrateful
is base, you must nevertheless stop voting for
gratitude. The debts of gratitude are sacred,
but no unwise vote can lighten them. A vote
is not a free-will offering to the past; it is a
debt to the present.

Again, keeping your vote alive means voting
on all questions. What makes great parties if
it be not the combination of men of various
political interests consenting to concern themselves
in one another's aims and claims for the
better promotion of those designs in the order
of their urgency and practicability? Now, here
is the Negro charged, at least, with rarely—almost
never—making himself seen or heard in any widespread
interest except his own. Small wonder
if other men do not more hotly insist upon his
vote being cast and counted. The Negro may
be not the first or principal one to blame in this
matter, but he is largely the largest loser.

Last, keeping the vote alive means casting it.

You must vote. You must practically recognize
two facts, which if white men had not recognized
in their own case long ago, you would be in
slavery still to-day: that there is an enormous
value in having votes cast; first, even though
they cannot win; and, secondly, even though
they are not going to be counted. A good
cause and a stubborn fight are a combination
almost as good as victory itself; better than victory
without them; the seed of certain victory
at last. Even if you have to cope with fraud,
make it play its infamous part so boldly and so
fast that it shall work its own disgrace and destruction,
as many a time it has done before negroes
ever voted. Vote! Cast your vote though
taxed for it. Cast your vote though defrauded
of it, as many a white man is to-day. Cast your
vote though you die for it. Let no man cry,
"Liberty or blood;" leave that for Socialists
and Parisian mobs; but when liberty means duty,
and death means one's own extinction, then the
cry of "Liberty or death" is a holy cry, and the
man who will not make it his own, even in freedom
is not free. Seek not to buy liberty with
the blood either of friends or of enemies; it is
only men's own blood at last that counts in the
purchase of liberty. Whatever may have been
the true philosophy for more ferocious times,
this is the true philosophy for ours. Cast your
votes, then, even though many of you die for it.
Some of you have died, but in comparison how few;
three hundred thousand white men poured out
their blood to keep you bound, other three hundred
thousand died to set you free, and still the
full measure of American freedom is not yours.
A fiftieth as much of your own blood shed in the
inoffensive activities of public duty will buy it.
Keep your vote alive; better nine free men than
ten half free. In most of the Southern States
the negro vote has been diminishing steadily for
years, to the profound satisfaction of those white
men whose suicidal policy is to keep you in alienism.
In the name of the dead, black and white,
of the living, and of your children yet unborn,
not as of one party or another, but as American
freemen, vote! For in this free land the people
that do not vote do not get and do not deserve
their rights.

6. And you must spend your own money. No
full use of the liberties you now have can be made
without coöperation, however loose that coöperation
may have to be; and no coöperation can be
very wide, active, or effective without the use of
money. This tax cannot be laid anywhere
upon a few purses. Falling upon many, it will
rest too lightly to be counted a burden. White

men may and should help to bear it; but if so,
then all the more the Negro must spend his own
money. Half the amount now idled away on
comparatively useless societies and secret orders
will work wonders.

Money is essential, especially for two matters.
First, for the stimulation, publication, and wide
distribution of a literature of the facts, equities,
and exigencies of the negro question in all its
practical phases. This would naturally include
a constant and diligent keeping of the whole
question pruned clear of its dead matter. From
nothing else has the question suffered so much, at
the hands both of friends and of foes, as from lack
of this kind of attention. And, secondly, money
is essential for the unofficial, unpartisan, prompt,
and thorough investigation and exposure of
crimes against civil and political rights.

You must press the contest for equal civil
rights and duties in your separate States. The
claim need by no means be abated that the national
government has rights and duties in the
matter that have not yet been fully established;
but for all that you can urge the question's recognition
in State political platforms, and, having
made your vote truly and honorably valuable to
all parties, can bestow it where there is largest
prospect of such recognition being carried into

legislation and such legislation being carried into
effect.

There is a strong line of cleavage already running
through the white part of the population in
every Southern State. On one side of this line
the trend of conviction is toward the establishment
of the common happiness and security
through the uplifting of the whole people by the
widest possible distribution of moral effects and
wealth-producing powers. It favors, for example,
the expansion of the public-school system,
and is strongest among men of professional callings
and within sweep of the influence of colleges
and universities. It antagonizes such peculiar
institutions as the infamous convict-lease system,
with that system's enormous political powers.
It condemns corrupt elections at home or abroad.
It revolts against the absolutism of political parties.
In a word, it stands distinctively for the
New South of American ideas, including the idea
of material development, as against a New South
with no ideas except that of material development
for the aggrandizement of the few, and the
holding of the whole Negro race in the South to
a servile public status, cost what it may to justice,
wealth, or morals. Let the Negro, in every State
and local issue, strive with a dauntless perseverance
intelligently, justly, and honorably to make

his vote at once too cheap and too valuable for
the friends of justice and a common freedom to
despise it or allow their enemies to suppress it.
Remember, your power in the nation at large
must always be measured almost entirely by your
power in your own State.

And, finally, you must see the power and necessity
of individual thought and action. It is
perfectly natural that the Negro, his history being
what it is, should magnify the necessity of coöperating
in multitudinous numbers to effect any public
result. He has not only been treated, but has
treated himself too much, as a mere mass. While
he has too often lacked in his organized efforts
that disinterested zeal, or even that semblance of
it which far-sighted shrewdness puts on, to insure
wide and harmonious coöperation, he has, on the
other hand, overlooked the power of the individual
and the necessity of individual power to
give power to numbers.

You rightly think it atrocious that you should
lose your vote by its fraudulent suppression.
But what can your vote when counted procure
you? Legislation? Probably. But what can
legislation procure you if it is contrary to public
sentiment? And how are public sentiment and
action, in the main, shaped? By the supremacy
of individual minds; by the powers of intellect,

will, argument, and persuasion vested by nature
in a few individuals here and there, holding no
other commission but these powers, and every
such individual worth from a hundred to a hundred
thousand votes. Without this element and
without its recognition there is little effective
power even in organized masses. Do not wait
for the mass to move. The mass waits for the
movement of that individual who cannot and will
not wait for the mass. You may believe your
powers to be, or they may actually be, humble;
but even so, there are all degrees of leadership
and need of all degrees. There is work to be done
which it is not in the nature of violence or votes
or any mere mass power, organized or unorganized,
to accomplish.

An attempt has been made here to enumerate
a few of its prominent features. They are things
that the Negro can do so profitably and honorably
to all, of whatever race, class, or region,
that no white citizen can justly refuse his public,
active coöperation. The times demand these
things. The changes already going on in the
South are just what call for promptness and
vigor in this work, for they mark the supreme
opportunity that lies in a formative stage of public
affairs. What will the Negro do?