Following the Color Line Part 22

_PART THREE_

THE NEGRO IN THE NATION

CHAPTER VIII

THE MULATTO: THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE

I had not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question:

"What is a Negro?"

I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose a.s.sertion that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft straight red hair. I have seen Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he was a Negro. And I have met several people, pa.s.sing everywhere for white, who, I knew, had Negro blood.

Nothing, indeed, is more difficult to define than this curious physical colour line in the individual human being. Legislatures have repeatedly attempted to define where black leaves off and white begins, especially in connection with laws prohibiting marriage between the races. Some of the statutes define a Negro as a "person with one-eighth or more of Negro blood." Southern people, who take pride in their ability to distinguish the drop of dark blood in the white face, are themselves frequently deceived. Several times I have heard police judges in the South ask concerning a man brought before them:

"Is this man coloured or white?"

Just recently a case has arisen at Norfolk, Va., in which a Mrs. Rosa Stone sued the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company for being compelled by the white conductor, who thought her a Negro, to ride in a "Jim Crow" car.

Having been forced into the Negro compartment, it remained for a real coloured woman, who knew her personally, to draw the line against her.

This coloured woman is reported as saying:

"Lor, Miss Rosa, this ain't no place for you; you b'long in the cars back yonder."

It appears that Mrs. Stone was tanned.

_Curious Story of a White Man Who Was Expelled as a Negro_

Here is a story well ill.u.s.trating the difficulties sometimes encountered by Southerners in deciding who is white and who is coloured. On March 6, 1907, the Atlanta _Georgian_ published this account of how a man who, it was said, was a Negro pa.s.sing for a white man, was expelled by a crowd of white men from the town of Albany, Ga.:

Peter Zeigler, a Negro, was last night escorted out of town by a crowd of white men. Zeigler had been here for a month and palmed himself off as a white man. He has been boarding with one of the best white families in the city and has been a.s.sociating with some of Albany's best people. A visiting lady recognised him as being a Negro who formerly lived in her city, and her a.s.sertion was investigated and found to be correct. Last night he was carried to Forester's Station, a few miles north of here, and ordered to board an outgoing train.

Zeigler has a fair education and polished manners, and his colour was such that he could easily pa.s.s for a white man where he was not known.

Immediately after suffering the indignity of being expelled from Albany, Mr. Zeigler communicated with his friends and relatives, a delegation of whom came from Charleston, Orangeburg, and Summerville, S. C. and proved to the satisfaction of everyone that Mr. Zeigler was, in reality, a white man connected with several old families of South Carolina. Of this return of Mr. Zeigler the Albany _Herald_ says:

The _Herald_ yesterday contained the account of the return to Albany of Peter B. Zeigler, the young man who was forced to leave Albany between suns on the night of March 4th. The young man upon his return was accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential friends from his native state of South Carolina.

Nothing surely could throw a more vivid light on colour line confusions in the South than this story.

Another extraordinary case is that of Mrs. Elsie Ma.s.sey, decided in Tipton County, Tenn., after years of litigation, in which one side tried to prove that Mrs. Ma.s.sey was a Negro, the daughter of a cotton planter named "Ed"

Barrow, and a quadroon slave, and the other side tried to prove that she was of pure Caucasian blood. On June 13, 1907, a jury of white men finally declared that Mrs. Ma.s.sey was white and that she and her children might inherit $250,000 worth of property. Such instances as these, a few among almost innumerable cases, will indicate how difficult it often is to decide who is and who is not a Negro--the definition of Negro here being that used in the South, a person having any Negro blood, no matter how little.

_How Many Mulattoes There Are_

Few people realise how large a proportion of the so-called Negro race in this country is not really Negro at all, but mulatto or mixed blood, either half white, or quadroon, or octoroon, or some other combination. In the last census (1900) the government gave up the attempt in discouragement of trying to enumerate the mulattoes at all, and counted all persons as Negroes who were so cla.s.sed in the communities where they resided. The census of 1870 showed that one-eighth (roughly) of the Negro population was mulatto, that of 1890 showed that the proportion had increased to more than one-seventh. But these statistics are confessedly inaccurate: the census report itself says:

"These figures are of little value. Indeed, as an indication of the extent to which the races have mingled, they are misleading."

From my own observation, and from talking and corresponding with many men who have had superior opportunities for investigation, I think it safe to say that between one-fourth and one-third of the Negroes in this country at the present time have a _visible_ admixture of white blood. At least the proportion is greater than the census figures of 1870 and 1890 would indicate. It is probable that 3,000,000 persons out of the 10,000,000 population are visibly mulattoes. It will be seen, then, how very important a matter it is, in any careful survey of the race problem, to consider the influence of the mixed blood. In the North, indeed, the race problem may almost be called a mulatto problem rather than a Negro problem, for in not a few places the mixed bloods are in excess of the darker types.

Many mulattoes have a mixed ancestry reaching back to the beginning of civilisation in North America; for the Negro slave appeared practically as soon as the white colonist. Many Negroes mixed (and are still mixing in Oklahoma) with the Indians, and one is to-day often astonished to see distinct Indian types among them. I shall never forget a woman I saw in Georgia--as perfect of line as any Greek statue--erect, lithe, strong, with sleek straight hair, the high cheekbones of the Indian, but the lips of the Negro. She was plainly an Indian type--but had no memory of anything but Negro ancestry. A strain of Arab blood from Africa runs in the veins of many Negroes, in others flows the blood of the Portuguese slave-traders or of the early Spanish adventurers or of the French who settled in New Orleans, to say nothing of every sort of American white blood. In my cla.s.sification I have estimated 3,000,000 persons who are "visibly" mulattoes: the actual number who have some strain of blood--Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indian--other than Negro, must be considerably larger.

It is a curious problem, this of colour. Several times, in different parts of the country, I have been told by both white and coloured observers that Negroes, even without the admixture of white blood, were gradually growing lighter--the effect of a cold climate, clothing and other causes. A tendency toward such a change, an adaptation to new environment, is certainly in accord with the best scientific beliefs, but whether a mere century or two in America has really operated to whiten the blackness of thousands of years of jungle life, must be left for the careful scientist to decide. It is certain that the darkest American Negro is far superior to the native African Negro.

_Story of a Real African Woman_

At Montgomery, Ala., Mr. Craik took me to see a real African woman, one of the very few left who were captured in Africa and brought to this country as slaves. She came in the _Wanderer_, long after the slave trade was forbidden by law, and was secretly landed at Mobile about 1858. She is a stocky, vigorous old woman. She speaks very little English, and I could not understand even that little. She a.s.serts, I am told, that she is the daughter of a king in Africa, and she tells yet of the hardships and alarms of the ocean voyage. Her daughter is married to a respectable-looking Negro farmer. Mr. Craik succeeded, in spite of her superst.i.tious terrors, in getting her to submit to having a picture taken.

And yet all these strange-blooded people are cla.s.sed roughly together as Negroes. I remember sitting once on the platform at a great meeting at the People's Tabernacle in Atlanta. An audience of some 1,200 coloured people was present. A prominent white man gave a brief address in which he urged the Negroes present to accept with humility the limitations imposed upon them by their heredity, that they were Negroes and that therefore they should accept with grace the place of inferiority. Now as I looked out over that audience, which included the best cla.s.s of coloured people in Atlanta, I could not help asking myself:

"What is this blood he is appealing to, anyway?"

For I saw comparatively few men and women who could really be called Negroes at all. Some were so light as to be indistinguishable from Caucasians. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who sat near me on the platform was a nephew of Robert Toombs, one of the great men of the South, a leader of the Confederacy. Another man present was a grandson of a famous senator of South Carolina. Several others that I knew of were half-brothers or sisters or cousins of more or less well-known white men. And I could not hear this appeal to heredity without thinking of the not at all humble Southern blood which flowed in the veins of some of these men and women. How futile such advice really was, and how little it got into the hearts of the audience, was forcibly impressed on me afterward by the remark of a mulatto I met.

"They've given us their blood, whether we wanted it or not," he said, "and now they ask us not to respond to the same ambitions and hopes that they have. They have given us fighting blood and expect us not to struggle."

_Att.i.tude of the Mixed Blood Toward the Black Negroes_

In the cities of the South no inconsiderable communities of mulattoes have long existed, many of them highly prosperous. Even before the war thousands of "free persons of colour" resided in Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans. In places like Charleston they had (and still have to some extent) an exclusive society of their own which looked down on the black Negro with a prejudice equal to that of the white man. The census of 1860 shows a population of 3,441 "free persons of colour" in Charleston alone, of whom 2,554 were mulattoes. In New Orleans in the same year lived 9,084 free Negroes, of whom 7,357 were mulattoes; and they were so far distant in sympathy from the slave population that they even tendered their support to the Confederacy at the beginning of the war.

But with the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation the aristocratic "free person of colour" who had formed a sort of third cla.s.s as between the white above and the black below, lost his unique position: the line was drawn against him. When I went South I expected to find a good deal of aloofness between the mulatto and the black man. It does exist, but really less to-day in the South than in Boston! The very first mulatto, a preacher in Atlanta, with whom I raised the question, surprised me by denying that the mulatto was in any degree potentially superior to the real Negro: that if the black man were given the same advantages and environment as the mulatto, he would do as well, that the prominence of the mulatto is the result of the superior advantages he has long enjoyed, being the house servant in slavery times, with opportunities for education and discipline that the black man never possessed. This was his argument, and to support it he gave me a long list of black Negroes who had achieved success or leadership. I found Booker T. Washington and Professor Du Bois (themselves both mulattoes) arguing along the same lines. In other words, the prejudice of white people has forced all coloured people, light or dark, together, and has awakened in many ostracised men and women who are nearly white a spirit which expresses itself in the pa.s.sionate defence of everything that is Negro.

And yet, with what pathos! What is this race? The spirit and the ideals are not Negro: for the people are not Negro, even the darkest of them, in the sense that the inhabitants of the jungles of Africa are Negroes. The blackest of black American Negroes is far ahead of his naked cousin in Africa. But neither are they white!

One evening last summer I attended a performance at Philadelphia of a Negro play called the "Shoo-Fly Regiment." It was written, both words and music, by two clever mulattoes, Cole and Johnson; and it was wholly presented by Negroes. The audience was large, mostly composed of coloured people, and the laughter was unstinted. The point that impressed me was this, that the writers had chosen a distinct Negro subject. The play dealt with two questions of much interest among coloured people: the matter of industrial education, and the Negro soldier. That, it seemed to me, was significant: it was an effort to appeal to the cla.s.s consciousness of the Negro.

And yet as I sat and watched the play I could not help being impressed with the essential tragedy of the so-called Negro people. The players of the company were of every colour, from the black African type to the mulatto with fair hair and blue eyes. In spite of this valiant effort to emphasise certain racial interests, one who saw the play could not help asking:

"What, after all, is this Negro race? What is the Negro spirit? Is it in this black African or in this white American with the drop of dark blood?"

In a recent address a coloured minister of San Francisco, J. Hugh Kelley, said:

"My father's father was a Black Hawk Indian, seven feet tall. My father's mother was an Irishwoman. My mother's father was an American white man.

Her mother was a full-blooded African woman. What am I?"

_Pathetic Desire of Negroes to Be Like White Men_