Following the Color Line Part 10

Washington now."

Sure enough! I don't think I have heard him called Mr. Washington since I came down here. It is always "Dr." or just "Booker." They are ready to call a Negro "Professor" or "Bishop" or "The Reverend"--but not "Mr."

In the same way a Negro may call Miss Mary Smith by the familiar "Miss Mary," but if he called her Miss Smith she would be deeply incensed. The formal "Miss Smith" would imply social equality.

I digress: but I have wanted to impress these relationships. There are all gradations of Negroes between the wholly dependent old family servant and the new, educated Negro professional or business man, and, correspondingly, every degree of treatment from indulgence to intense hostility.

I must tell, in spite of lack of room, one beautiful story I heard at Atlanta, which so well ill.u.s.trates the old relationship. There is in the family of Dr. J. S. Todd, a well-known citizen of Atlanta, an old, old servant called, affectionately, Uncle Billy. He has been so long in the family that in reality he is served as much as he serves. During the riot last September he was terrified: he did not dare to go home at night. So Miss Louise, the doctor's daughter, took Uncle Billy home through the dark streets. When she was returning one of her friends met her and was much alarmed that she should venture out in a time of so much danger.

"What are you doing out here this time of night?" he asked.

"Why," she replied, as if it were the most natural answer in the world, "I had to take Uncle Billy safely home."

Over against this story I want to reproduce a report from a Kentucky newspaper which will show quite the other extreme:

_Tennessee Farmer Has Negro Bishop and His Wife Ejected from a Sleeping Car_

Irvine McGraw, a Tennessee farmer, brought Kentucky's Jim Crow law into prominent notice yesterday on an Illinois Central Pullman car.

When McGraw entered the car he saw the coloured divine, Rev. Dr. C.

H. Phillips, bishop of the coloured Methodist Episcopal Churches in Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas and a portion of Arizona and New Mexico, and his wife preparing to retire for the night. He demanded that the conductor order them out of the car, but the conductor refused.

After he entered Kentucky he hunted for an officer at every station and finally at Hopkinsville Policeman Bryant Baker agreed to undertake the task of ejecting the Negroes from the car. The train was held nine minutes while they dressed and repaired to the coloured compartment.

I have now described two of the three great cla.s.ses of Negroes: First, the worthless and idle Negro, often a criminal, comparatively small in numbers but perniciously evident. Second, the great middle cla.s.s of Negroes who do the manual work of the South. Above these, a third cla.s.s, few in numbers, but most influential in their race, are the progressive, property-owning Negroes, who have wholly severed their old intimate ties with the white people--and who have been getting further and further away from them.

_A White Man's Problem_

It keeps coming to me that this is more a white man's problem than it is a Negro problem. The white man as well as the black is being tried by fire.

The white man is in full control of the South, politically, socially, industrially: the Negro, as ex-Governor Northen points out, is his helpless ward. What will he do with him? Speaking of the education of the Negro, and in direct reference to the conditions in Atlanta which I have already described, many men have said to me:

"Think of the large sums that the South has spent and is spending on the education of the Negro. The Negro does not begin to pay for his education in taxes."

Neither do the swarming Slavs, Italians, and Poles in our Northern cities.

They pay little in taxes and yet enormous sums are expended in their improvement. For their benefit? Of course, but chiefly for ours. It is better to educate men in school than to let them so educate themselves as to become a menace to society. The present _kind_ of education in the South may possibly be wrong; but for the protection of society it is as necessary to train every Negro as it is every white man.

When I saw the crowds of young Negroes being made criminal--through lack of proper training--I could not help thinking how pitilessly ignorance finally revenges itself upon that society which neglects or exploits it.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE BLACK BELT: THE NEGRO FARMER

The cotton picking season was drawing to its close when I left for the black belt of Georgia. So many friends in Atlanta had said:

"The city Negro isn't the real Negro. You must go out on the cotton plantations in the country; there you'll see the genuine black African in all his primitive glory."

It is quite true that the typical Negro is a farmer. The great ma.s.s of the race in the South dwells in the country. According to the last census, out of 8,000,000 Negroes in the Southern states 6,558,173, or 83 per cent., lived on the farms or in rural villages. The crowded city life which I have already described represents not the common condition of the ma.s.ses of the Negro race but the newer development which accompanies the growth of industrial and urban life. In the city the races are forced more violently together, socially and economically, than in the country, producing acute crises, but it is in the old agricultural regions where the Negro is in such ma.s.ses, where ideas change slowly, and old inst.i.tutions persist, that the problem really presents the greatest difficulties.

There is no better time of year to see the South than November; for then it wears the smile of abundance. The country I went through--rolling red hills, or black bottoms, pine-clad in places, with pleasant farm openings dotted with cabins, often dilapidated but picturesque, and the busy little towns--wore somehow an air of brisk comfort. The fields were lively with Negro cotton pickers; I saw bursting loads of the new lint drawn by mules or oxen, trailing along the country roads; all the gins were puffing busily; at each station platform cotton bales by scores or hundreds stood ready for shipment and the towns were cheerful with farmers white and black, who now had money to spend. The heat of the summer had gone, the air bore the tang of a brisk autumn coolness. It was a good time of the year--and everybody seemed to feel it. Many Negroes got on or off at every station with laughter and snouted good-byes.

_What Is the Black Belt?_

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BLACK BELT

In the region shaded more than half of the inhabitants are Negroes.]

And so, just at evening, after a really interesting journey, I reached Hawkinsville, a thriving town of some 3,000 people just south of the centre of Georgia. Pulaski County, of which Hawkinsville is the seat, with an ambitious new court-house, is a typical county of the black belt. A census map which is here reproduced well shows the region of largest proportionate Negro population, extending from South Carolina through central Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi. More than half the inhabitants of all this broad belt, including also the Atlantic coastal counties and the lower Mississippi Valley (as shaded on the map), are Negroes, chiefly farm Negroes. There the race question, though perhaps not so immediately difficult as in cities like Atlanta, is with both white and coloured people the imminent problem of daily existence. Several times while in the black belt I was amused at the ardent response of people to whom I mentioned the fact that I had already seen something of conditions in Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia:

"Why, they haven't any Negro problem. They're _North_."

In Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas the problem is a sharp irritant--as it is, for that matter, in Ohio, in Indianapolis, and on the west side of New York City--but it is not the life and death question that it is in the black belt or in the Yazoo delta.

All the country of Central Georgia has been long settled. Pulaski County was laid out in 1808; and yet the population to-day may be considered spa.r.s.e. The entire county has only 8,000 white people, a large proportion of whom live in the towns of Hawkinsville and Cochran, and 12,000 Negroes, leaving not inconsiderable areas of forest and uncultivated land which will some day become immensely valuable.

_A Southern Country Gentleman_

At Hawkinsville I met J. Pope Brown, the leading citizen of the county. In many ways he is an example of the best type of the new Southerner. In every way open to him, and with energy, he is devoting himself to the improvement of his community. For five years he was president of the State Agricultural Society; he has been a member of the legislature and chairman of the Georgia Railroad Commission, and he represents all that is best in the new progressive movement in the South.

One of the unpleasant features of the villages in the South are the poor hotels. In accounting for this condition I heard a story ill.u.s.trating the att.i.tude of the old South toward public accommodations. A number of years ago, before the death of Robert Toombs, who, as a member of Jefferson Davis's cabinet was called the "backbone of the confederacy," the spirit of progress reached the town where Toombs lived. The thing most needed was a new hotel. The business men got together and subscribed money with enthusiasm, counting upon Toombs, who was their richest man, for the largest subscription. But when they finally went to him, he said:

"What do we want of a hotel? When a gentleman comes to town I will entertain him myself; those who are not gentlemen we don't want!"

That was the old spirit of aristocratic individualism; the town did not get its hotel.

One of the public enterprises of Mr. Brown at Hawkinsville is a good hotel; and what is rarer still, North and South, he has made his hotel building really worthy architecturally.

Mr. Brown took me out to his plantation--a drive of some eight miles. In common with most of the larger plantation owners, as I found not only in Georgia, but in other Southern states which I afterward visited, Mr. Brown makes his home in the city. After a while I came to feel a reasonable confidence in a.s.suming that almost any prominent merchant, banker, lawyer, or politician whom I met in the towns owned a plantation in the country.

From a great many stories of the fortunes of families that I heard I concluded that the movement of white owners from the land to nearby towns was increasing every year. High prices for cotton and consequent prosperity seem to have accelerated rather than r.e.t.a.r.ded the movement.

White planters can now afford to live in town where they can have the comforts and conveniences, where the servant question is not impossibly difficult, and where there are good schools for the children. Another potent reason for the movement is the growing fear of the whites, and especially the women and children, at living alone on great farms where white neighbours are distant. Statistics show that less crime is committed in the black belt than in other parts of the South. I found that the fear was not absent even among these people.

I have a letter from a white man, P. S. George, of Greenwood, Mississippi, which expresses the country white point of view with singular earnestness:

I live in a country of large plantations; if there are 40,000 people in that country, at least 30,000 are Negroes, and we never have any friction between the races. I have been here as a man for twenty years and I never heard of but one case of attempted a.s.sault by a Negro on a white woman. That Negro was taken out and hanged. I said that we never had any trouble with Negroes, but it's because we never take our eyes off the gun. You may wager that I never leave my wife and daughter at home without a man in the house after ten o'clock at night--because I am afraid.

As a result of these various influences a traveller in the black belt sees many plantation houses, even those built in recent years, standing vacant and forlorn or else occupied by white overseers, who are in many parts of the South almost as difficult to keep as the Negro tenants.

Thousands of small white farmers, both owners and renters, of course, remain, but when the leading planters leave the country, these men, too, grow discontented and get away at the first opportunity. Going to town, they find ready employment for the whole family in the cotton mill or in other industries where they make more money and live with a degree of comfort that they never before imagined possible.

_Story of the Mill People_

Many cotton mills, indeed, employ agents whose business it is to go out through the country urging the white farmers to come to town and painting glowing pictures of the possibilities of life there. I have visited a number of mill neighbourhoods and talked with the operatives. I found the older men sometimes homesick for free life of the farm. One lanky old fellow said rather pathetically: