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THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO RACE IN AMERICA.
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There are, as it seems to me, four ways in which the American negro may develop: first, his present condition of serfdom may be perpetuated; secondly, his race may die out and become extinct in this land; thirdly, he may migrate to some foreign land; and fourthly, he may become an American citizen.
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| [2]
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In all history slavery has usually been succeeded by a
period of semi-slavery or serfdom. Just how far this is
necessary, and how far it is the result of imperfect
emancipation, it is difficult to determine. There was a
disposition in the United States, for a few years following
the Civil War, to insure the complete emancipation of
the negro slave. This was a tremendously difficult
undertaking, but not necessarily impossible. The nation,
however, quickly tired of the task, and the present state of
serfdom ensued. And I call it serfdom without apology,
because serfdom it is. Throughout the United States the
mass of the negro population is curtailed in personal
liberty, is insecure in life and property, has peculiar
difficulty in earning a decent living, has almost no voice in
his own government, does not enjoy adequate educational
facilities, and suffers, no matter what its ability or desert,
discount, impertinence and contempt, by reason of race and
colour. To be more specific, it is clear that negroes are
usually unable to enjoy fully the ordinary rights of domicile
or of travel, the use of public conveniences, and of many
facilities for instruction and entertainment. The black man
is in continual danger of mob violence in New York as in
New Orleans, in the West as in the South; his economic
condition is especially unfortunate; he was emancipated
suddenly, without land, capital, or tools, or skill, and
generously bidden to go to work, be sober, and save money.
He did go to work, he did work faithfully, and he did save
some money. And yet his most frantic efforts, under the
circumstances, could not save him from sinking into an
economic serfdom which, at its best, is organised and
systematic pauperism. To turn astray in modern competitive
industry a mass of ignorant, unguided working-men,
whose employers despise them, and for whom the rest of the
nation evinces only spasmodic concern, is to invite oppression.
The result is oppression. On the plantations of
the southern backwoods the negro is a peon bound to
the soil without wages or rights; throughout the rural
South cunningly devised labour laws—laws as to contract
and lien, vagrancy, and employer and servant—are so
applied to black men as to reduce them to the level of
fourteenth-century serfs. In the cities of the South and in
the North the colour line is so drawn as to increase
competition against the negro, restrict his chances of
employment, and lower his labour price, and while agencies
for his degradation welcome and invite him, those for his
uplifting are closed or coldly tolerant.
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In a day when political power is, for weal or woe, so
intimately bound up with economic success and efficiency,
the negro is being systematically and quickly disfranchised.
Taxation without representation is the rule of his life. In
the South he is taxed for libraries which he may not use,
for public high schools and colleges which he may not
attend, and for public parks where he cannot sit. The fear
of political consequences or of labour strikes never deters
an employer from discharging his negro hands or reducing
their wages, while that same fear may keep out negro
labourers or lead to the substitution of whites even at
an economic disadvantage.
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In regard to the present educational facilities of the land
only one negro child in three receives regular instruction,
and that for only a few months in the year, under teachers
often poorly equipped and sometimes not equipped at all.
It is fair to say that less than 20 per cent. of the negro children
in the United States to-day are getting good elementary
school training. There are a number of poorly furnished
high schools for training teachers, and a few institutions
doing college work. The only branch of education that
to-day can command large and ungrudging support is
manual and industrial training, the importance of which,
great as it certainly is, is being obviously exaggerated and
unduly emphasised at present. If those at the higher
schools for negroes' training should turn their class-rooms
into blacksmiths' shops and make wagons instead of making
men, they would get far more enthusiastic support. They
have not all seen fit to do this—not that for a moment they
fail to recognise the importance of wagons or fail to honour
the artisan. They simply maintain that there is a place
in the world for training men as such, and when the public
ceases to agree with them they must close their doors.
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In this plain statement I am not seeking to minimise
the vast efforts put forth for negro education in the United
States; I am simply pointing out that, great as those efforts
have been, they are strikingly inadequate, and that under
present conditions the majority of negro children are
growing up in ignorance, and without the proper moral and
intellectual leadership of adequately trained teachers,
ministers, and heads of families.
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And finally the whole social atmosphere in which the
negro lives and works, the intangible and powerful spiritual
environment of the race, is such as to foster more and
more either a false humility or hypocrisy, or an unreasoning
radicalism and despair.
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This is a condition of serfdom. Its symptoms vary, of
course, in time and place; localities might easily be found
where certain phases of the condition are better than I
have indicated, and others where they are worse. The
picture I have painted is perhaps an average one.
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Now, I have said that the first possible future of the
American negro is the perpetuation and perfection of this
present serfdom. This would involve the strengthening
of present prescriptive laws, the further disfranchisement of
black men, and the legal recognition of customary caste
distinctions. This has been the distinct tendency of the
South in the last decade, and this programme has gained
respectful hearing and acquiescence in influential parts of
the North.
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The question then is: What does such a policy involve
so far as the negro is concerned? If along with the
repression and proscription there could be expected cheerful
acquiescence in inferiority and faithful work, then this solution
would have much in its favour. It is, however, difficult
to see how under the long continuance of the present system
anything but degeneration into hopelessness, immorality,
and crime could ensue. Under modern conditions of life and
social and economic organisation, a permanent and successful
caste system is impossible. The essence of modern
democracy is the placing in the hand of the individual
the power and responsibility for maintaining his right and
liberty; and even in the larger social democracy which we
see in the future the corner-stone must be that no social
group is to be placed at the mercy of, or in entire dependence
upon, the sense of justice of another group. To-day
and to-morrow the reduction of a mass of men to permanent
or long-continued economic and political inferiority means
the deliberate reduction of their chances of survival, and
the deliberate encouragement of degeneration among
them.
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"chances of survival"
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In any social group, however prosperous, degenerative
tendencies may always be disclosed. The situation becomes
critical and fatal when such tendencies are more manifest
than those of upbuilding and progress. Among American
negroes the tendencies to degeneration, while not yet in the
ascendency, have undoubtedly been encouraged and fostered
by the history of the last two decades. To-day men criticise
American negroes and say they are not trustworthy—they
cannot bear responsibility; they seem lacking in self-respect
and personal dignity and in courage; and they have even
lost something of the tact and courtesy of their fathers.
Now a careful consideration of these defects will clearly
show that they are the children, and the legitimate children,
of a caste system. What is it that slavery and serfdom
have been most assiduous in teaching the negro if it be not
timidity, lack of a sense of personal worth, and inability to
bear responsibility, and must not such teaching eventually
engender carelessness and lack of courtesy? These men
must be ever hesitant as to their rights and duties; in the
face of continued disappointment their courage must waver;
it is hard to maintain one's self-respect when all the world,
even to the urchins on the street, regard you with evident
contempt; and self-reliance and persistency must be fed by
reasonable hope of success if it is to become characteristic
of a people.
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On the other hand, those qualities of character which,
by four hundred years of persistent artificial selection,
have been partially educated out of the negro are the very
qualities upon which the civilised world is putting an exaggerated
emphasis to-day. A people without pluck that
borders on brazenness and courage akin to brutality is
ruthlessly thrust aside, euphoniously designated as "lesser
breeds without the law," and is robbed, routed, and raped
by every civilised agency from the battleship to the Christian
Church.
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From such considerations it seems inevitable that the
present policy of the nation toward the negro must eventually
result in increasing hopelessness, immorality, and
crime. Indeed, it is one of the most curious developments
of the present to witness the widespread and touching surprise
of the people in the United States at the spread of
crime among negroes. Men shake their heads and say, "How surprising! And such a docile and sweet-tempered
race!" And yet is it surprising? If you enslave and
oppress a people, ravish and degrade their women, emancipate
them into poverty, helplessness, and ignorance, systematically
teach them humility in a braggart age—would
you expect to develop angels or devils? The negro
criminal has appeared, and negro crime is spreading. Is
this phenomenon a new and peculiar race characteristic, or
simply the logical effect of known causes?
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Suppose, now, that these tendencies to degenerate
among the negroes gain the ascendency over the persistent
struggles of the negro to rise; suppose that crime
and immorality gain such a headway as to check and
choke the accumulation of wealth and the education of
children—what then?
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There seems to be a fatuous and curious notion among
some Americans that such a consummation is devoutly to
be wished; they discover with evident glee any indication
that a wholesale process of degeneration has finally
mastered the negro. But has America no interest—no
merely selfish interest—in such an outcome? If men fear
with a mighty fear an epidemic of small-pox, or are urged
to extraordinary exertions to stamp out yellow fever, can
they look with equanimity and lack-lustre eye upon the
infection of nine million neighbours with a far more deadly
virus? Can anyone but a fool think it is to his interest
to make every eighth man in his country a pauper and a
criminal, in addition to the growing load of his own
degenerates? Not even a rich and healthy land like
America could, without imminent and lasting peril, stand
the moral and physical shock, the frightful contagion which
must accompany the slow degradation and social murder
of ten million human souls. Every selfish interest of this
land—and I hesitate to appeal to higher motives—every
selfish interest of this land demands that if the negro is to
remain there he be raised, and raised rapidly, to the level
of the best culture of the day.
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The second possible future of the American negro arises
from the possibility hinted at that the negro is not destined
to remain long in this land. It is the expectation of many
Americans, and Americans too of honesty and integrity,
that gradually but inevitably the negro will die out before
degeneration sets in to such an extent as to make him a
menace to the land. These are the portion of Americans
who cannot conceive how the negro can ever become an
integral part of this republic; for the sake of the land,
therefore, and the interests of the many, and from no
especial dislike or prejudice against the negro, they hope
that the race will either die out or migrate from the land.
This is the practical and unemotional way in which the
Darwinian doctrine of survival is applied in America to the
negro problem. And I presume it is fair to say that a
very large proportion, if not the majority, of the thinking
people of America have adopted this attitude.
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"Darwinian doctrine of survival"
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The question of race and survival which is thus
touched upon is of so deep a significance to-day, when
European civilisation is coming in contact with nearly
all the world's great races, that it is of the utmost
importance that sane and correct ideas on the subject
should be current among the mass of citizens. To-day
this is not the case. On the contrary, there is unfortunately
widespread ignorance of the doctrines of race
survival and human efficiency current even among people
who ought to think more clearly. And this ignorance is
helped on by the marvellous [sic] ignorance of human history
permissible among people called intelligent, among Jingo
writers, and the readers of Kipling's doggerel.
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"doctrines of race survival and human efficiency"
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In such way we have come to a more or less clearly
conceived public opinion which considers the present
civilisation of Europe and America as by far the greatest the
world has seen; which gives the credit of this culture to
the white germanic peoples, and considers that these races
have a divine right to rule the world in such way as
they think best. This, I take it, is the creed of most
Englishmen and Americans to-day. That such a creed is
dangerous and needs the most careful scrutiny and revision
is clear from the extraordinary deeds that have been committed
under its guidance. The red-handed crimes that
to-day may be laid at the door of men who have honestly and
sincerely sought to work in accordance with this scheme of
survival are enough to cause heart-searching among decent
people, not to mention Christians and Christian Churches.
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"this scheme of survival"
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I need cite here but a single case. There lies to the
westward of America, in the summer seas, a cluster of
islands bursting with beauty and fragrance, with men and
women and children neither better nor worse than the
average of primitive folk. Some of the grandfathers and
grandmothers of present Americans wandered over there
with the Bible in their hands and the golden rule of Christ
on their lips. They told these children of the sea of
Christian civilisation founded on Justice and Truth and
Right, and then they invited their fellow-citizens to come
over and finish the tale. And they came, and with them
came land-grabbers, swindlers, and whoremongers, who began
the work of robbery and debauchery until finally they
suddenly discovered that the God of the Americans never
intended islands so sweet and rich for weak-minded immoral
Hawaiians; so they stole the soil from beneath the converts'
feet, sent their queen wandering on the face of the
earth, and gave the booty to America, and America took
it. You may dress this tale of Hawaii in the most gracious
clothing you can command. You may emphasise the degradation
of the nation, the guileless altruism of the Americans,
and the present prosperity of the sugar-planters; and yet
if there sits beyond the stars a God of Justice who metes
out to men their reward for murder and theft and adultery,
then the blood of this helpless people will rest on America
and on its children's children.
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This is but one of the many tales of nineteenth-century
enterprise in civilising the heathen, and arranging for the
survival of the fittest: West Africa, South Africa, Uganda,
the Congo Free State, China, Cuba, and the Philippines
are similar chapters. Making all due allowance for different
ways of interpreting facts, it must be confessed by all
honest men that a theory of human civilisation which
stands sponsor for the enormities committed by European
civilisation on native races is an outrage and a lie.
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"survival of the fittest"
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But do the theories of Darwin and Spencer, properly
interpreted, support any such crude views of justice and right
and the spread of civilisation as those current to-day? It
may safely be answered they do not. Ignorant and selfish
interpretation of great sociological laws must not any
longer be allowed to obscure and degrade those laws.
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Darwin and Spencer "properly interpreted"
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First of all, the man of true learning and breadth of
views is less sanguine of the overmastering completeness
of our present culture or of its incomparable superiority
over civilisations of the past. He sees its strength and its
weaknesses, and above all he realises that the one
conspicuous triumph of modern culture—namely, the
diffusion of its benefits among the lower strata of society—is an accomplishment which is, logically, a flat
contradiction to the theory of the natural aristocracy of
races. He knows that the world has staggered and
struggled up to the idea that national welfare is not simply
the welfare of a privileged few, and he consequently has
serious doubts of a theory of races which assumes that
white-faced men must inherit the earth simply because they
have bigger guns and looser morals, and which forestalls the
writhings of other races by branding them as inferior and
then sitting on them.
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Such a course is not simply arrogant, it is at once
dangerous and unreasonable. Why is it that, while
European races are at present leading civilisation, most
African races are in barbarism? This is a question that
cannot be satisfactorily and definitely answered. A Greek
of the age of Pericles might have put just as puzzling
and unanswerable a query to the ancestors of the present
Europeans who were crawling about the forests of Germany
half-naked and periodically drunk. And the ancient
Egyptians in the day of their glory might have put equally
uncomfortable queries to the ancestors of the Greeks.
Why at certain times in the world's history civilisations
have flashed up here and there, have smouldered and died,
smouldered and burned anew, while the rest of the world
lay still in common darkness, is a mystery which true
intelligence frankly acknowledges to be such.
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Du Bois is arguing against a teleological conception of history that posits a unilinear and inevitable (deterministic) path of development towards an end goal of white supremacy, which itself would supposedly mark the acme of human achievement.
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But the failure of complete knowledge here is no denial
or disparagement of the great light thrown upon race
development by the theories of evolution and by
sociological research. It has become clearer to us that
races and nations as well as men may be healthy and
vigorous, may contract diseases and waste away, may
commit sin and pay the penalty. It may easily happen too
that circumstances and surroundings which favour one race
may be fatal to another. And it is here that those who
look for the extinction of the negro in America may
legitimately take their stand. If, for instance, under
conditions of civilised life as favourable as ordinary justice
can make them a race of people have not the sheer
physical stamina to survive, then, however pitiable the
spectacle, there is little that surrounding civilisation can
do. And it certainly cannot jeopardise the lives and
prospects of the great mass of people by efforts to save a
doomed remnant. While this is certainly true, it is by no
means certain that such a case often occurs. Nearly all
the instances of native races fading away on the advent
of civilisation have been instances where the fading
away was easily explicable. If all authority is stripped
from a people, their customs interfered with, their religion
laughed at, their children corrupted, and ruin, gambling, and
prostitution forced upon them—such a proceeding will
undoubtedly kill them off, and kill them quickly. But that
is not the survival of the fittest—it is plain murder.
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Du Bois criticizes what he argues is the incorrect application of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The "survival of the fittest", or the failure to survive, under conditions of oppression is explained by the relations of colonial domination, not by any supposedly innate aspects of the "native races".
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Turning, then, to the second possible future of the
negro in America—namely, that he may die out—it must
be candidly acknowledged that this is quite possible. If
the negro is given no voice in his own government and
welfare, if he continues increasingly to be shut out of
employment, if his wages become lower and lower, and his
chances of justice and consideration less; if, inconsequence
of this, he loses hope and lets himself sink deeper and
deeper into carelessness, incompetence and crime; if, instead
of educating his brains, we get increasing pleasure and
profit in making him simply a useful instrument of labour—
a mere hand—if his common school system continues to be
neglected, if his family life has no respect in custom and
little in law, it is quite possible—I might say
probable—that the American negro will dwindle away and die from
starvation and excess. This will simply add a few million
more murders to the account of civilisation. But it would,
of course, prove nothing as to the stamina and capabilities
of the negro race.
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Such a course of action is to-day impossible, however.
The chances are that, along with the repressive, discouraging,
and debauching influences, philanthropic and educational
agencies will continue their work, and in some degree
counteract them. In such event everything depends on
the ability of the negroes to keep up their courage and
hope. If they succeed in this, the chances of their dying
out are exceedingly small. A people that have withstood
the horrors of the African slave trade, American slavery,
reconstruction, disfranchisement, the disruption of the
family, unhealthy homes, famine, pestilence, and disease,
and, above all, the studied, ingenious, and bitter prejudice
and contempt of their fellow-citizens, and yet, in a single
century, with practically no additions from without, have
increased from one to ten millions of souls, are, to say the
least, in no immediate danger of extinction. If extinction
comes, it will be a long and tedious process covering many
decades, accompanied by widespread crime and disease,
and caused by unusual race bitterness and proscription.
And during such a process we must always face the
possibility of revolt and insurrection on the part of the
oppressed.
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I was sitting in the Philadelphia depot
not long ago with
the editor of an influential paper. We spoke of a late riot
against negroes, and he turned to me after several minutes of
general talk and said point-blank, "Why didn't the negroes
fight?" I answered, "Because they are hopeful." The
negro knows that in a trial of brute strength the odds are
infinitely against him. He still believes, however, that he
can in other ways gain success at some time. So long as
that hope remains general, there is little chance of widespread
degeneration or extinction. But when that hope
goes, and in its place comes blank despair, when the desperation
of disappointed striving and the mockery of effort
seize the millions of black people in this land, no man can
answer for the consequences. That seventy-two millions
can eventually overpower nine millions goes without
saying. But it will cost something.
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Suppose, then, that we acknowledge that present conditions
cannot continue, that the doctrine of the survival of fit
races does not compel us to assume that the negro race is
incapable of advancement, or likely with an ordinary
chance of living to become extinct in America, there are
then left two possible alternatives—the migration of the
negro or his raising himself to full citizenship.
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"survival of fit races"
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It is the irony of fate that the solution of the negro
problem which would seem in some respects most simple
is made complex and improbable by the very theory that
most warmly supports it—viz., the theory of
race incompatibility
and relative inferiority. I mean this, the present
tendency among civilised nations towards land-grabbing
and overawing weaker nations and races makes the
possibility of any permanent settlement by American
negroes being left in peace extremely small. Nay, more,
the absorption has already gone so far that nowhere is
there left in the world a foothold for a new nation; certainly
not in Africa, where every inch of soil is claimed,
and where the negro immigrant would only exchange the
tyranny of America for the tyranny of Europe, with the
additional disadvantage of being further from the ear of
the sovereign power.
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Moreover, modern methods make it impossible to hold
a rich or even moderately rich country without capital to
exploit it. Yet the negro immigrants from the United
States must be comparatively poor. Let a gold mine appear
in their midst, or an iron mine, or even good crops of potatoes,
and immediately some one would hear the voice of
God calling him to rescue this beautiful land from the lazy
blacks—at a profit of seventy per cent.
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If there were a land where negro immigrants would be
welcomed, and reasonably secure of their rights and
liberties and of a chance to earn a living, it might and
undoubtedly would attract a large proportion of American
negroes. It would, however, attract the very class that
America could best afford to keep—the intelligent, the
thrifty, those who had some capital and those who had
self-respect. In other words, you would skim the cream
from the mass, and leave perhaps a worse problem than
before.
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The hope that an asylum beyond the sea would attract
all the negro population, or that they could be under any
circumstances removed en masse, is, of course, chimerical.
Five hundred negro children are being born every twenty-four
hours in America. To carry these alone out of the
country would call for a fleet of a dozen or score of ships
plying constantly between America and the African coast.
No such stupendous transplanting of a nation has ever
been successfully attempted in human history. Six million
negroes were brought to Brazil, but it took three hundred
years and cost perhaps ten million human lives. Unless
the transportation is to be sheer butchery, the property of
negroes must be bought from them, and those with no
property must be furnished with tools and food; transportation
across the United States must be given and
subsistence while in transport; indeed, it is safe to say that
the cost of such an enterprise would exceed the cost of the
Civil War, even taking it for granted that the negro
wished to go—and he does not wish to do so. He has
sense enough not to jump from the frying-pan into the fire,
not to give up a fighting chance in America for a hopeless
struggle against the combined civilised world. A helpless
child may be ill-treated and abused in its own home, but
that is little excuse for midnight wandering amid the
marauders of the street.
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There is left the last alternative—the raising of the
negro in America to full rights and citizenship. And I
mean by this no half-way measures; I mean full and fair
equality. That is, the chance to obtain work regardless of
colour, to aspire to position and preferment on the basis of
desert alone, to have the right to use public conveniences,
to enter public places of amusement on the same terms as
other people, and to be received socially by such persons
as might wish to receive them. These are not extravagant
demands, and yet their granting means the abolition of the
colour line. The question is: Can American negroes hope
to attain to this result? The answer to this is by no means
simple. To use mathematical terms, the problem is a
dynamic one, with two dependent and two independent
variables. Let us consider first the dependent variables:
they are the social condition of the negro on the one hand,
and public opinion or social environment on the other.
These are dependent variables in the sense that, as the
social condition of the negro improves, public opinion
toward him is more tolerant, and, vice versa, as public
opinion is more sympathetic, it is easier for him to improve
his social condition. Now, thinkers unacquainted with the
problem often see here an easy solution. One says: "Let
the negroes improve in morality, gain wealth and education,
and the battle is won." The other says: "Let public
opinion change toward the negro, give him work and
encouragement, treat him fairly and justly, and he will
rapidly rise in the world." Here now are two propositions
which contain a subtle logical contradiction, and yet practically
all the solutions of the negro problem outside the
radical ones I have mentioned have been based on the
emphasis of one of these propositions. From 1860-1880 the
United States insisted on the duty of liberalising the public
conscience; from 1880 to 1900 they have insisted on social
progress among the negroes. The difficulty with these
propositions is that each alone is a half-truth which may
under certain circumstances become a flat mockery. I saw
once in the Black Belt a tall sad-faced young fellow with a
new wife and baby; he had married in the spring and
started up in the world with a mule and cabin furniture.
But the season was bad, cotton fell in price, and at harvest
time the landlord took the cotton and took the mule, and
stripped the cabin of bed and chairs and bureau, and left
the little family naked to the world. Shall I tell that man
that the way to gain the world's respect and help is to rise
in the world and become wealthier and wiser? On the
other hand, a New York merchant hires a negro servant:
he finds her incompetent, untrustworthy and slovenly; his
meals are late and not worth eating when they come; his
servant is unaccommodating and sour-faced, and leaves
without notice. Is there anything to be gained in
telling this man that a more liberal attitude and broader
appreciation towards the coloured race will make them
more careful and deserving? And yet, while taken apart
these phases are half true, if not at times untrue, yet
taken together they certainly express a truth—viz.,
that, given a continuous improvement in social conditions,
there will follow increased respect and consideration,
and given liberal intelligent public interest, there will
be stimulated in any class a desire to be richer, truer, and
better. The difficulty is, with the problem stated thus
dynamically, to get the double movement started; social
condition may greatly improve before public opinion
realises it. Public opinion may grow liberal before men
are aware of the new chances opening. And, above all, the
continual tendency in such dynamic problems is to a stable
equilibrium—where public opinion becomes fixed and
immovable, and social condition merely holds its own.
That has been the continual tendency with the negro
problem; for a few brief years after the war a whirling
revolution of public opinion was accompanied by a
phenomenal rush and striving upward. Then the public
conscience grew cold, the cement of the new nation
hardened, and while in a few brief years we had turned
slaves into serfs, we left them merely serfs, nothing more.
In fine there is a great and important truth in the
often-spoken-of interdependence of condition and environment in the
rise of a social group; but it is no simple thing—it
is rather a matter of peculiar subtlety and complexity.
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There is a further point: when I said that public
opinion and social condition were dependent variables, and
varied inversely to each other, it must have occurred to
many that sometimes this variable failed to respond proportionately;
that an improving people, sometimes far from
reaping approbation, reap additional hate and difficulty, and
increasing liberality in the national conscience is sometimes
repaid by degradation and degeneration. In plainer terms,
there is, without doubt, an independent element in these
variable social quantities which is above all rule and reason.
And in the matter of social condition the independent
variable is the question of the real capability of the
negro race; and deep down beyond all questions of public
opinion in this matter is the deeper problem of innate racial
prejudice. Radical partisans usually place themselves upon
these arguments. The radical American Southerner says
that back of all questions of social condition lies the
ineradicable question of race, and that varieties of the
human species so utterly different as the white and black
races can never live together on a basis of equality; either
subordination or extermination must ensue when they come
in contact. The radical negro, on the other hand, resents
warmly any intimation that the negro race is deficient in
ability and capacity compared with other races; he points
out that for such differences as exist to-day good and
sufficient cause may be found in the slave trade and slavery
reconstruction; he insists that every generation in this
land has seen negroes of more than ordinary ability from
Phillis Wheatley and Banneker to Douglass and Dunbar.
He thinks that in the history of the modern world negro
genius has shown itself in Pushkin, Toussaint L'Ouverture,
and Alexander Dumas, not to mention men whose negro
blood was seldom acknowledged from the time of the
Pharaohs to that of Robert Browning.
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There are a good many exaggerations and contradictions
in the statements made in regard to the accomplishments
of the negro race since emancipation, but it is clear
beyond dispute that the negro has done five things. He
has (1) restored the home, (2) earned a living, (3) learned
to read and write, (4) saved money and bought some twelve
million acres of land, (5) begun to furnish his own group
leaders.
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There is no way of denying that these comparatively
simple things are really extraordinary accomplishments.
The negro home is not thoroughly pure or self-protecting
or comfortable, but it is a home created by main strength
out of a system of concubinage and amid discouragement
and mockery. The living earned has been a poor one,
and yet without hesitation, lawlessness, or wholesale
pauperism the negroes have changed themselves from
dumb driven cattle to labourers bearing the responsibility
of their own support.
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From enforced ignorance so great that over 90 per cent.
of the coloured people could not read and write at the close
of the war, they have brought themselves to the place
where the 56 per cent. can read and write. Starting a
generation ago, without a cent or the ownership of their
own bodies, they have saved property to the value of not
less than 300,000,000 dollars, besides supporting themselves;
and finally they have begun to evolve among themselves
men who know their situation and needs.
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All this does not prove that the future is bright and
clear, or that there is no question of race antipathy or
negro capacity; but it is distinctly and emphatically
hopeful, and in the light of history and human development
it puts the burden of proof rather on those who deny the
capabilities of the negro than on those who assume that
they are not essentially different from those of other
members of the great human family.
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If such a hopeful attitude toward the race problem in
America is to prevail, then the attitude of the cultured
classes of England and Europe can do much to aid its
triumph. Hitherto English sympathy and opinion has
been largely cast on the side of slavery and retrogression.
Can we not hope for a change? Better than that, may we
not look for an example of large-hearted tolerance and
far-seeing philanthropy in the treatment of our brothers in
South Africa that may shame the sons of Englishmen in
the United States?
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W. E. Burghardt Du Bois.
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Robert Williams