The Negro: Another View

So much has appeared in the public prints touching the various phases of the negro problem in the South that it is perhaps presumptuous to attempt any further contribution to the literature on that subject. Previous discussion, however, seems open to two very serious criticisms, — it has been largely sectional ; and, by consequence, it has been for the most part partisan.

Northern writers, with practically no knowledge or experience of actual conditions, have theorized to meet a condition that they did not understand. Since emancipation, the negro has been regarded as the rightful protégé of the section that wrought his freedom; and his cause has been championed with a bitter and undiscriminating zeal as earnest as it is misguided. Southern writers, on the contrary, remembering the negro as the slave, consider him and his rights from a position of proud and contemptuous superiority, and would deal with him on the ante-bellum basis of his servile state.

The North, with many things in the Southern treatment of the negro justly open to impeachment, by a general indictment at once weakens its own case and fortifies the evils it seeks to overthrow. The South, in answer to what is unjust in the charge of the North, recalls former days, persuades herself of the righteousness of her cause, and continually recommits herself to an antiquated and unsound policy.

Such partisan and sectional discussion cannot fail to be alike bitter and unfruitful. While it may, indeed, have been natural at the close of the Civil War that the hostile sections should align themselves on opposite sides, and carry on by the pen, and with a more virulent because impotent animosity, the discussion that had been fought out with the sword, yet now, surely, the time for such recrimination is past. If we are, indeed, one people, United States in more than name only, the problems, perplexities, and interests of every section appertain in no slight or trivial measure to the country as a whole. It is true that each section and state and county and township has its own problems, — but the particular problems of the part are the general problems of the whole; and the nation, as a nation, is interested in the administration and concerns of the most insignificant members of the body politic.

It would be trite and old-fashioned to apply to ourselves the old fable of the body and its members ; but we surely lie open to its application in our treatment of the negro question. The South has regarded it as a local and not a national matter; has refused to receive any light upon it from outside sources; and has met any suggestions and offers of outside help with a surly invitation to “ mind your own business.” The North, on the other hand, considering the question in its wider bearings, has approached it from the side of preformed theories, rather than of actual facts ; in a spirit of tearful or indignant sentimentality, rather than of calm, unbiased reason ; and has therefore proposed remedies that must, in the very nature of things, be at once undesirable and impossible. As is usual in such cases, the truth lies between the two extremes.

The negro question is a national one ; as much so as the question of tariff, of immigration, of subsidies, or any such issue that is universally recognized as touching the interests of the whole people. It is but right, therefore, that the solution of the question should command the attention and enlist the interest of the people as a people, regardless of section or party or ante-bellum attitude; and the South has no right to take offense at any well-meant and kindly effort to relieve the situation.

But, at the same time, the fact must be recognized that the negro question is not different from all other questions, does not occupy a place apart, unique, and cannot be dealt with in any other way than the common, rational method applicable to the commonest social and political problem. Ignorance of the facts cannot take the place of knowledge here any more than elsewhere. Sentiment cannot safely here or elsewhere usurp the place of reason. Blindness, prejudice, uncharitableness, vilification, have the same value here as elsewhere, and are as likely to lead to a fair and satisfactory solution of the negro problem as of any other, — just as likely and no more. We must, as a whole people, candidly and honestly recognize a certain set of underlying facts, which may or may not differ from our theories, cross our sympathies, or contravene our wishes. Then we shall be in a position to deal with the question.

Now, the fundamental facts to be recognized in the case are these : —

(1.) The negro belongs to an inferior race.

And this not by reason of any previous condition of servitude or brutal repression on the part of his former master, whether in the days of slavery or since ; not on account of his color or his past or present poverty, ignorance, and degradation. These, to be sure, must be reckoned with ; but they do not touch the fundamental proposition.

The negro is lower in the scale of development than the white man. His inferiority is radical and inherent, a physiological and racial inequality that may, indeed, be modified by environment, but cannot be erased without the indefinite continuance of favorable surroundings and the lapse of indefinite time. But what the negro race may become in the remote future by process of development and selection is not a matter for present consideration. The fact remains that now the negro race is an inferior race.

There can hardly be any need to defend this proposition in these days of the boasted universal supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon. Occasionally we hear hysterical utterances by negroes or by wellmeaning, but misguided friends of the race to the effect that the negro is the equal of any white man anywhere. But in general such ill-advised cant is being laid aside, and the inferiority of the race is coming to be recognized.

This is a hopeful sign. And the general recognition of the proper place of the freedman will go far toward adjusting conflicting theories and removing lingering sectional misunderstanding and bitterness. It will do away at once with all those schemes that used to find favor in the North, and are still at times most unwisely advocated, for the establishment of social equality and the amalgamation of the races.

Probably no scheme advanced for the solution of this problem has given more lasting offense to the people of the South, or done more to embitter sectional feeling than this of amalgamation. It has been received in the same spirit, and has engendered the same feelings, as a proposition to bring about equality and a union between some cultured New England belle and the public scavenger of her city, with all the filth and foulness of his calling on his person and in his blood. The very words are sickening. And the idea, so coarse and repugnant to every finer feeling, could have originated only in the brain of the wildest theorist, ignorant of conditions, and hurried by his negrophile propensities and desire to do justice to the black man into entire forgetfulness of the rights and feelings of the Southern white man.

There seems to be no essential condition of causality between the previous bondage and suffering of the negro and the assumption by him or for him, on emancipation, of any equality with his former master other than the grand and fundamental equality of man to man before God and the national law. Emancipation could not eradicate the essential inferiority of the negro. No such conditions existed as in other states of slavery, — in Greece or Rome, for example, where the slave was often of kindred blood, and even higher born, better educated, and of finer tastes and feelings than his master. Emancipation there might naturally be followed by an approximate equality between the exslave and his former master. But the negro when enslaved was — a negro ; and the emancipated negro was a negro still. Freedom had not made him a new creature. He was, indeed, better than when he entered slavery ; but his emancipation had not changed, and could not change, the fundamental features, the natural inferiority of his race.

(2.) But the negro has inalienable rights.

While the North has erred in approaching the negro question with the assertion of the equality of the races, and seeking to solve it on that unsound postulate, the South has, much more grievously, erred in precisely the opposite direction. For our section has carried the idea of the negro’s inferiority almost, if not quite, to the point of dehumanizing him. This is an unpalatable truth; but that it is the truth, few intelligent and candid white men, even of the South, would care to deny. Blatant demagogues, political shysters, courting favor with the mob ; news sheets, flattering the prejudices, and pandering to the passions of their constituency ; ignorant youths and loud-voiced men who receive their information at second hand, and either do not or cannot see, — these, and their followers, assert with frothing vehemence that the negro is fairly and kindly treated in the South, that the Southern white man is the negro’s friend, and gives him even more than his just desert.

But, if we care to investigate, evidences of our brutal estimate of the black man are not far to seek. The hardest to define is perhaps the most impressive, — the general tacit attitude and feeling of the average Southern community toward the negro. He is either nothing more than the beast that perishes, unnoticed and uncared for so long as he goes quietly about his menial toil (as a young man recently said to the writer, “ The farmer regards his nigger in the same light as his mule,” but this puts the matter far too favorably for the negro) ; or, if he happen to offend, he is punished as a beast with a curse or a kick, and with tortures that even the beast is spared; or, if he is thought of at all in a general way, it is with the most absolute loathing and contempt. He is either unnoticed or despised. As for his feelings, he has n’t any. How few — alas how few — words of gentleness and courtesy ever come to the black man’s ear! But harsh and imperious words, coarseness and cursing, how they come upon him, whether with excuse or in the frenzy of unjust and unreasoning passion! And his rights of person, property, and sanctity of home, — who ever heard of the “ rights ” of a " nigger ” ? This is the general sentiment, in the air, intangible, but strongly felt; and it is, in a large measure, this sentiment that creates and perpetuates the negro problem.

If the negro could be made to feel that his fundamental rights and privileges are recognized and respected equally with those of the white man, that he is not discriminated against both publicly and privately simply and solely because of his color, that he is regarded and dealt with as a responsible, if humble, member of society, the most perplexing features of his problem would be at once simplified, and would shortly, in normal coarse, disappear. But the negro cannot entertain such feelings while the evidence of their groundlessness and folly is constantly thrust upon him. We do not now speak of the utterly worthless and depraved. There are many such; but we whose skins are white need to remember that our color too has its numbers of the ignorant, lecherous, and wholly bad. But take a good negro, — well educated, courteous, Godfearing. There are many such; and they are, in everything save color, superior to many white men. But what is their life ? As they walk our streets, they lift their hats in passing the aged or the prominent, whether man or woman ; yet no man so returns their salutation. They would go away; at the depot they may not enter the room of the whites, and on the train they must occupy their own separate and secondclass car. Reaching their destination, they may not eat at the restaurant of the whites, or rest at the white hotel. If they make purchases, shop ladies and messenger gentlemen look down upon them with manifest contempt, and treat them with open brusqueness and contumely. And if, on a Sabbath, they would worship in a white man’s church, they are bidden to call upon God, the maker of the black man as well as of the white, and invoke the Christ, who died for black and white alike, from a place apart. And so, from the cradle to the grave, the negro is made, in Southern phrase, “ to know and keep his place.”

In the case we are considering, these distinctions are not based on this negro’s ignorance, on his viciousness, on his offensiveness of person or of manner; for he is educated, good, cleanly, and courteous. They are based solely on the fact that he is a negro. They do not so operate in the case of a white man. But the black man, because of his blackness, is put in this lowest place in public esteem and treatment.

Lynching, again, is but a more inflamed and conspicuous expression of this same general sentiment. An investigation of the statistics of this practice in the United States will bring to light several interesting and startling facts.

1. In the last decade of the last century of Christian grace and civilization, more men met their death by violence at the hands of lynchers than were executed by due process of law. And this holds true, with possibly one exception, for each year in the decade. The total number thus hurried untried and unshriven into eternity during these ten unholy years approximated seventeen hundred souls.

2. The lynching habit is largely sectional. Seventy to eighty per cent of all these lynchings occur in the Southern states.

3. The lynchings are largely racial. About three quarters of those thus done to death are negroes.

4. The lynching penalty does not attend any single particular crime, which, by its peculiar nature and heinousness, seems to demand such violent and lawless punishment. But murder, rape, arson, barn-burning, theft, — or suspicion of any of these, — may and do furnish the ground for mob violence.

These facts, especially the second, third, and fourth items, are bitterly controverted in the section which they most concern. But they are as demonstrable as any other facts, and demand the assent of every candid mind.

The world is familiar with the usual Southern defense of lynching. Passing by the number, place, and race of the victims, the defense centres on the fourth statement above made ; and our public men and our writers have long insisted that this terrible and lawless vengeance is visited upon the defilers of our homes, who should be as ruthlessly destroyed as they have destroyed our domestic purity and peace. This is the regular plea put forth in defense of this brutal practice, warmly maintained by hot-blooded and misinformed people in private and in the public prints. No less a person than a former Judge Advocate-General of Virginia, in a recent issue of the North American Review, reiterates these threadbare statements.

He says: “ It is unnecessary to shock the sensibilities of the public by calling attention to the repulsive details of those crimes for which lynching, in some form, has been the almost invariable penalty. They have always been, however, of a nature so brutal that no pen can describe and no imagination picture them.” “ Lynchings in the South are mainly caused by the peculiar nature of the crimes for which lynching is a penalty; ” and, more explicitly, “ The crime itself, however, is more responsible for mob violence than all other causes combined.” “No right thinking man or woman, white or black, ought to have, or can have, any sympathy for such criminals as those who suffer death for the crime described, nor can they believe that any punishment, however cruel or severe, is undeserved.” This is a fair type of the usual plea of the Southern advocate. For such a statement as the last quoted to be possible is sufficient evidence of the general sentiment of the section.

But, now, if it were strictly the fact that violent rape is the cause of most of our lynchings ; if it were true, moreover, that the man were suddenly and violently slain by the husband, lover, father, brother, of the dishonored one, in quick tempest of wrath and agony unspeakable, — while we must still condemn, we might, in sympathy and sorrow, condone the deed of hurried vengeance. But neither of these things is true.

It has been repeatedly shown, in the first place, that only a very small proportion (in some years one tenth) of Southern lynchings are due to rape, either actual or suspected. Statistics on the subject may be had for the asking; and in their light it seems about time for our apologists to drop this stock and entirely false pleading. “ But the writer in the Review cites a case where this plea held good.” Granted ; but this is advocacy : and for every case so cited from five to ten cases can be cited where it not only did not hold good, but was not even pretended by the workers of mob violence. So, in a recent issue of a noted and rabid Southern daily a case of lynching for rape is indicated by large headlines ; and just beneath it is a short and insignificant paragraph noting the lynching of two negroes for suspected barn-burning. But these latter cases are not mentioned by our advocates ; or, if mentioned, are minified by those who feel that our section must be defended at any cost, and so plead.

On the contrary, a frank consideration of all the facts, with no other desire than to find the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, however contrary to our wishes and humiliating to our section the truth may be, will show that by far the most of our Southern lynchings are carried through in sheer, unqualified, and increasing brutality. In nearly every case, neither the sentiment that prompts them nor the spirit of their execution deserves anything less than the most bitter arraignment. We do, indeed, hear from time to time of an “ orderly body of leading citizens ” conducting a lynching. But, while the writer knows of certainly one instance where this took place, — the accused being, however, a white man known as guilty, and put to death in the most painless possible way with chloroform by those nearest and dearest to his victim, — it is fortunately a much rarer occurrence than our newspapers would have us believe. Our lynchings are the work of our lower and lowest classes. What these classes are is hardly comprehensible to one who has not lived among them and dealt with them.

One adult white man in the South in every six or eight can neither read nor write ; and if the standard be put above the level of most rudimentary literacy the disproportion rapidly increases. A generation before our Civil War, George Bourne charged the Southern slaveholders with “ self-conceit,” “ marble-hearted insensibility,” total lack of “ correct views of equity,” and “ violence in cruelty.” Whether applicable, as used by Mr. Bourne, or not, this terrible indictment at once intimates the origin of our present views and treatment of the negro, and may be applied to-day, in every term, to the classes that supply our lynchers. Wholly ignorant, absolutely without culture, apparently without even the capacity to appreciate the nicer feelings or higher sense, yet conceited on account of the white skin which they continually dishonor, they make up, when aroused, as wild and brutal a mob as ever disgraced the face of the earth. For them, lynching is not “ justice,” however rude ; it is a wild and diabolic carnival of blood.

No candid man who has seen the average lynching mob, or talked with the average lyncher, can deceive himself for a moment with the idea that this is the expression of a public sentiment righteously indignant over the violation of the law and its impotence or delay. This, too, is a common Southern plea ; but it is pure pretense. The lyncher is not, even under ordinary circumstances, overzealous for the law ; and in this case he is not its custodian, but himself its violator. As for the law’s delay or inefficiency, the lyncher does not wait to see what the law will do ; and yet it is a well-known fact in the South that in the case of a negro, where violent rape is proven, the punishment of the law is both swift and sure. And in other crimes as well, it is known that the negro will receive at the hands of the constituted authorities the same, perhaps even a little sharper justice than is meted out to the white man. But as the lyncher sees it, the case stands thus : A negro has committed or is supposed to have committed a crime. A negro, — and the rest follows. There may be some maudlin talk about the “ dreadful crime,” about “ upholding the majesty of the law,” about “ teaching the niggers a lesson ; ” yet the lyncher is but little concerned with the crime, less with the law. As for “ teaching the niggers a lesson,” that catch phrase of the lynching mob betrays its whole attitude and temper. It would teach the negro the lesson of abject and eternal servility, would burn into his quivering flesh the consciousness that he has not, and cannot have, the rights of a free citizen or even of a fellow human creature. And so the lyncher seizes his opportunity at once to teach this lesson and to gratify the brute in his own soul, which the thin veneer of his elemental civilization has not been able effectually to conceal.

A recent experience of the writer’s may serve to illustrate. A murder had been committed in one of our Southern states. On a night train, returning to the capital of the state, were a marshal and several deputies. Word had gone before that these officers had in charge a negro, suspected of being the murderer ; and at four stations in less than forty miles, as many mobs were gathered to mete out summary vengeance to the merely suspected black. Fortunately, the negro was not on the train. Had he been, his life were not worth the asking ; and he would have been most fortunate to find a speedy end on the nearest tree. It cannot be supposed that these mobs were composed of friends and kinsmen of the murdered man. Probably not one quarter of them had ever heard of him previous to the murder, and fewer knew him. They were not orderly bodies of leading citizens, nor of the class in which one would usually find the upholders of the law; but they were coarse, and beastly, and drunk, mad with the terrible blood-lust that wild beasts know, and hunting a human prey.

Take another instance. The burning of Sam Hose took place on a Sabbath day. One of our enterprising railroads ran two special trains to the scene. And two train-loads of men and boys, crowding from cow-catcher to the tops of the coaches, were found to go to see the indescribable and sickening torture and writhing of a fellow human being. And souvenirs of such scenes are sought, — knee caps, and finger bones, and bloody ears. It is the purest savagery.

The utter shallowness and hypocrisy of this Southern plea that this is a righteous public sentiment, aroused and administering a rude but terrible justice, is patent and undeniable, and can be shown in the clearest light by a single simple proposition. White men commit the same crimes, and worse, against the black man, for which the black man pays this terrible and ungodly penalty. Can any sane man, white or black, North or South, suppose for a single instant that a Southern community would either permit a black mob to lynch a white man, whether merely suspected or known as guilty of his crime, or that a white mob would lynch one of its own color for any crime against a black ? The idea is inconceivable. The color of the victim’s skin is the determining factor in most of our lynchings.

And yet, the home of the negro is as sacred as that of the white man; his right to live as truly God-given. If the negro can be kicked and cuffed and cursed rightly, so can the white man. If there is no wrong in dishonoring a negro’s home, there is no more wrong in dishonoring the white man’s. If the negro criminal may be burned at the stake with the usual accompaniments of fiendish cruelty, a white man guilty of the same crime deserves, and should suffer, the same penalty. There is nothing in a white skin, or a black, to nullify the essential rights of man as man. And yet to the average Southern white man this manifestly just view seems both disloyal and absurd.

It is useless to speak of any solution of the negro question while the condition of public sentiment above described continues to exist. The negro’s poverty is, in the main, the result of the regular operation of economic laws; his ignorance is the result of several, but, in general, very natural causes ; his social position is, aside from general sentiment, the result of a manifest inferiority and antipathy of race ; so that any effort satisfactorily to solve his problem on any of these lines, not touching the root of the matter, cannot hope to meet with any large success. The radical difficulty is not with the negro, but with the white man ! So long as the negro is popularly regarded and dealt with as he is to-day, his problem will remain unsolved, and any views as to its solution or “ passing ” under present conditions are optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, it may be fairly said that, as things now are, the educational, financial, or social advancement of the negro will only serve to render more acute the situation in the South.

It is not necessary, nor desired, that the negro should be the social equal of the white man. His political privileges may be curtailed, and without injustice or offense, provided the curtailment work impartially among blacks and whites alike. If fifty per cent of the negroes are deprived of the right of suffrage by reason of illiteracy, and the same legislation is fairly permitted to work the disenfranchisement of all whites (fifteen to twenty per cent of our voting population) of the same class, no injustice is done, and there is no ground for complaint. His economic and educational condition may be left to the operation of natural and statute laws, fairly administered. For it is certainly most unwise in any case to surround him with artificial conditions, and to create in him artificial ideas, ideals, or desires.

The development of a free people is a process of law, — the gradual unfolding and expansion of the inherent potentialities of the race. If they are capable of advancement, they will inevitably advance ; if not, they will as inevitably fail and fall out; and no artificial conditions, temporarily created, can permanently affect the operation of this law.

Yet it will not do, on this principle, to say, as is so often said in the South, that the negro has had his chance and has failed. He is but a generation from servitude and almost complete illiteracy. During that time he has lived under the cloud of his former state, and in the miasmic atmosphere of unfriendliness and repression. That he has made any progress is strange ; that he has made the progress that he has is little short of wonderful. For the development of a servile people cannot be measured by the standards of the free. But freedom is not a matter of form and statute only. No people is free whose simple human privileges and possibilities are curtailed or denied by the public sentiment that surrounds them. No people is free that is dominated and terrorized by a more numerous and powerful class. No people is free whose inherent rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, how much soever guaranteed by the organic law, are, in practice and in fact, held on sufferance, and constantly at the mercy of a lawless mob.

Freedom does not, indeed, imply social, intellectual, or moral equality ; but its very essence is the equality of the fundamental rights of human creatures before God and the law. Such freedom is not a human institution ; and no man or men have any right inhering in their birth, color, or traditions, to tamper with or curtail such freedom at their arbitrary pleasure, or in accordance with the dictates of their frenzied passions. Such men are violators of the law, both human and divine.

And here lies the remedy for the condition of things as existing in the South. The white man who wrongs a black and the white mob that lynches a negro have, by that act and to that extent, become criminals in the eyes of the law, and should be dealt with unsparingly as such. It should no longer be a notable thing, to be chronicled in the news columns and elicit editorial comment, that several white men should be punished for the brutal murder of one inoffensive negro. It should be the rule. And as for lynching, — let all the officers of the law, with all the powers of the law, defend the rights and life of every prisoner. Surely we who can revel in the burning of a fellow human being, and a section some of whose prominent men can soberly defend such a bloody proceeding, ought not to have any over-sensitive scruples at the shedding of a little additional blood, and that too of criminals caught in the very act of crime. So let our marshals have instructions, failure to obey which shall result in criminal prosecution, to protect at any cost the accused who come into their care.

If this seems bloody, is it more bloody than the lyncher’s purpose ? Or is he any the more a murderer who, in silence and alone, takes the life of a fellow man, than every member of a mob which, without the process of the law, takes a human life ? And if the mob calls murder a justification for its course of vengeance, does it not, by its own act and attitude, condemn itself to a like penalty ? At any rate, this is the only restraining influence that our lynchers can comprehend, and this together with the most rigid administration of the law in the case of every wrong done to a negro, is the only available remedy for conditions as they now exist. Our lower classes must be made to realize, by whatever means, that the black man has rights which they are bound to respect.

This is the heart of the Southern problem of the negro. If we call upon the people of the North to give over their mistaken ideas of the equality of the races in superficial and accidental things, we are called upon by the louder voice of simple humanity to give over our much more vicious idea of the inequality of the races in the fundamental rights of human creatures. If we call upon them to lay aside sentiment, we must lay aside cruelty. If they are not to elevate the negro above his proper sphere, we are not to debase him to the level of the brute. But in mutual understanding, a frank (if sorrowful) recognition of all the facts, — of the limitations of the race on the one hand, and of its inalienable rights on the other, with charity and good will between North and South, and of both toward the black man, — let us give him fair and favorable conditions, and suffer him to work out, unhampered, his destiny among us.

Andrew Sledd.