Chapter IV: Part I: Southward Ho! (2)

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.

[Sidenote: “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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

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Footnote 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.

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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. [Sidenote: “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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.” [Sidenote: 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.” [Sidenote: 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.

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.”

[Sidenote: 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]

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Footnote 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.

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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. [Sidenote: 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?

[Sidenote: “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.

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Footnote 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.”

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[Sidenote: “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!

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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.

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Footnote 20:

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

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[Sidenote: 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.”

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Footnote 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.

Footnote 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.

Footnote 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?

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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.

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Footnote 24:

“Mr. Richard H. Edmonds, in an illuminating article in the _Review of
Reviews_ for February, 1906, has declared that no country ever
dominated, as does the South, an industry of such value and importance
as the cotton crop.... Three-fourths of this great crop, which must be
relied on to clothe civilization, and in the exploitation of which two
billions of capital are used, is raised in the South. It is a
stupendous God-made monopoly. To-day, the South has invested, in 777
mills, with their 9,200,000 spindles, $225,000,000, as against
$21,000,000 twenty-five years ago. The fields of the South furnish the
raw material for three-fourths of the mills of all the world with
their 110,000,000 spindles. The South now consumes 2,300,000 bales,
which is about the amount consumed by the rest of the country, and is
a fourfold increase over its consumption in 1890.”—Dr. E. A. Alderman:
“The Growing South,” p. 18. A threefold increase in the cotton-crops
seems easily possible; but whether prices could be kept up under such
conditions is another question. Be this as it may, an immense
agricultural development seems practically certain.

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

[Sidenote: 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.”

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Footnote 25:

“The figures of our national census show that from 1860 to 1870 there
was a fall of $2,100,000,000 in the assessed value of Southern
property, and that the period of Reconstruction added, in the years
from 1870 to 1880, another $67,000,000 to the loss.”—E. G. Murphy,
“The Present South,” p. 40. “No other region, except Poland, ever knew
such losses; and Poland ceased to exist. The year 1900 had come and
gone before the whole South had regained its _per capita_ wealth of
1860.”—E. A. Alderman: “The Growing South,” p. 7.

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