Your Negro Neighbor Part 3

It is the purpose of the present chapter to reply to some of the more common of the arguments brought forward against the Negro. We shall by no means attempt to cover the whole ground, or even pretend that in every case we have summoned the most representative critics. At the same time we feel that those that are adduced are fairly typical of those of harsher view.

One of the noteworthy characteristics of discussion in recent years has been a tendency to deny the ideals on which America was founded, especially where the Negro was concerned. One of the frankest statements along this line was a Fourth of July address in 1911 by no less a person than Ex-President Eliot of Harvard University. This distinguished citizen gave voice to an opinion which is just now gaining more and more converts in this country, in effect this: The Declaration of Independence is a wornout doc.u.ment; it never was meant to be taken seriously; and, in the words of Rufus Choate, it is made up simply of "glittering and sounding generalities of natural right."

The pa.s.sage to which exception seems especially to be taken is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It will be observed that in a way each successive one of the three clauses here explains the one preceding; that is to say, all men are equal in the rights given to them by G.o.d, and these rights consist in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The fathers were not thinking about such things as that one child was born in a palace and another in a hut, or that one was born with brilliant intellect and the other with little power of mind. Certainly the "facts submitted to a candid world" are based on no such principles as these. The founders were talking about things moral. Each man deserved at least that no other man should have power to declare that he _must_ live in a hut. In other words, each man deserved a man's chance in the world.

So far as the Negro is concerned then we hold that the Declaration of Independence is a very live doc.u.ment. More and more, however, within recent years has it been the fashion to fix attention upon his shortcomings, and this att.i.tude has led some people to strange conclusions. One of the most accessible statements of the adverse point of view is "The Color Line," by Prof. William Benjamin Smith, for years a teacher at Tulane University. This book is in no sense better than many others. At the same time it was written by a man who had broadened his scholarship in Europe, being the holder of a doctor's degree from a German university, and who in his own studies had emphasized such subjects as mathematics and philosophy. From such a source one would at least expect some degree of consideration for logic; and yet "The Color Line" but shows the lengths to which some persons will go when they discuss the Negro. The central thesis seems to be the following (p. 174): "Drawing the color line, firm and fast, between the races, first of all in social relations, and then by degrees in occupations also, is a natural process and a rational procedure, which makes equally for the welfare of both." Professor Smith remarks several Negroes of distinction, shows that in fact most of them were not pure Negroes at all, but persons with an infusion of white blood, and concludes (p. 44): "It seems vain to deny that the mixed blood is notably more intelligent than the pure black; the necessary inference is that the white blood with which it was mixed is far more intelligent still." The same line of argument is used by Mr.

Alfred Holt Stone in his _Atlantic_ paper on "The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem," included in "Studies in the American Race Problem,"

as well as by Mr. E.B. Reuter in his recent study in the _American Journal of Sociology_, "The Superiority of the Mulatto." "Have equal opportunities," we are asked, "raised the Negroes in Pennsylvania to the white level?" Education has been a complete failure. Professor Smith visited a Negro school (p. 166): "An olive-colored young man was at the board trying to explain to a mulatto woman, the only member of the cla.s.s, the mysterious nature of the perpendicular. He appeared very earnest in his exposition, but unable to awaken any answering intelligence." "The higher culture at 'colored universities' merely spoils a plough-hand or house-maid." Finally (p. 259), "nearly forty years of devoted and enthusiastic effort to elevate and educate the Southern Negro lie stretched out behind us in a dead level of failure."

This whole argument is guilty of the vicious fallacy of begging the question by arguing in a circle. First we degrade human beings by the curse of slavery for two hundred and fifty years, and then because they are not advanced we argue that they have not the capacity to rise. Far from being an advantage to both races the color line is the curse of both. Obsessed by the Negro problem, the white South has always been held back and still finds it impossible to think in the large; while the Negro is daily met with such insults as shake the very foundations of his citizenship. The argument on the mulatto goes back to the circle already remarked. Everybody knows that in a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a field-hand; but no thorough test in Negro schools has ever demonstrated that the black boy is intellectually inferior to the fair one. This is all a part of the general American sn.o.bbishness that places on the Negro the burden of any blame or deficiency, but that claims for the white race any merit that an individual may show, even while many advantages of citizenship are withheld from both mulatto and Negro alike. Furthermore, and this is a point not previously remarked in discussions of the Negro problem, the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist of mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather than Anglo-Saxon; note the romantic and elemental sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller and the mystical religious paintings of Henry O.

Tanner. As to labor, how can any one a.s.sert that the Negro in the North has had an equal chance with the white man, in view of the att.i.tude of the labor unions? The whole matter of education represents the circle worse than anything else. Would anybody who knows the South contend for a moment that public school appropriations are evenly divided between the white and black? And shall we allow one stupid pupil in a poorly organized school to offset the brilliant attainments in the foremost colleges in the country, from which inst.i.tutions Negro graduates are each year coming by the scores? Not a year pa.s.ses now but that some of these students win noteworthy honors, receive valuable prizes, or take doctors' degrees. Let one observe in full proof of this the educational number of the _Crisis_, published in July of each year. The point about "colored universities" simply represents a state of ignorance common throughout the South. The day never was when Fisk and Knoxville and Morehouse simply crammed Greek into unreceptive minds. No schools in the country have had a clearer idea of their mission, or have done more to answer it with limited facilities. The pity is that not one of a dozen representative colleges has the beginning of an adequate endowment, and all have had to do their work with the cheapest tools. And certainly such leadership as the race has had, and such advance as the race has made, have been due primarily to the large idea of Christian service behind the missionary inst.i.tutions.

Within recent years, however, there has developed a fear of the part that the Negro is to play in American civilization. This was fairly well stated in an article in the _Forum_ a few years ago by Mr. W.W.

Kenilworth, "Negro Influences in American Life." Mr. Kenilworth is much disturbed. "Can it be," he asks, "that America is falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro?" "It is unthinkable that the increase of Negro population, the increased and unhampered (_sic_) circ.u.mstances of Negro expression should not have an important reaction on the white population." The pity is that the whole article is based on unwarranted a.s.sumptions, and, in spite of some elements of truth, the reasoning, condensed, is somewhat as follows:--

The Negro element is daily becoming more potent in American society.

American society is daily becoming more immoral.

Therefore at the door of the Negro may be laid the general increase of divorce and all other evils of society.

Somewhat more subtle than all this is the criticism in Volume VII of "The South in the Building of the Nation," in the article on "The Intellectual and Literary Progress of the Negro" written by Mr. H.I.

Brock. The central thesis here is the following: "The Negro is mentally quite sufficiently developed to use his brain with effect upon the immediate and the concrete. He is not sufficiently developed to start with the white man's generalizations, or more exactly, the formulas in which these generalizations are expressed, and work down to the concrete. He is in the cla.s.s in arithmetic. He is not fit yet awhile for that in algebra and a.n.a.lytics." In proof of this position it is a.s.serted that Booker T. Washington was in type and in fact "exactly like Peter the successful barber and Walker who runs a profitable carrier's business in a certain Southern town, though neither Peter nor Walker can read or write." As for Frederick Dougla.s.s, what happened to him "cannot be set down as his achievement. He was a sign and a symbol held up for men to see. He was floated on the top of the abolition wave into public office. He did not climb there." Phillis Wheatley was "taught the trick of verse. Her verses were printed as a curiosity at the time and her 'Poems' have no other interest." "Even Paul Laurence Dunbar has a fame quite disproportionate to his actual place in the catalogue of contemporary minor poets. He, too, is, in part, a curiosity." The whole question at issue, so far as the country at large is concerned, is "not so much how to advance the Negro as how to prevent the Negro from r.e.t.a.r.ding the upward tendency of the rest of the population." All of his books and compositions so far "are like the schoolboy's essay which gets into the school magazine; they are to be considered as 'exercises,' not as achievements."

There is a very real criticism here, one deliberately frank and even harsh, but deserving of attention. If we understand it, it says in substance that the Negro in America has not yet developed the great creative or organizing mind that points the way of civilization. He has so far produced no Plato, no Jonathan Edwards, no Pierpont Morgan, no Edison. The larger thought here will be considered in our next chapter. Just now let us observe that the argument makes the familiar a.s.sumption that because a thing never has been it never will be. All America is crude, however. While she has made great advance in applied science, she certainly has not as yet produced a Shakespeare or a Beethoven. If America has not reached her heights after three hundred years, she ought not to be impatient with the Negro after only fifty years of opportunity. Furthermore, all signs go to prove the a.s.sumption fundamentally false. We know of some of the younger men of to-day who have not only mastered language and science, but who have outshone brilliant groups of white students in pure philosophy. It would be a miracle if this were the everyday occurrence. It is not; but the fact that it is an occurrence at all means that the Negro is at least capable of the highest things. Furthermore, it is not true that everything that the Negro has written may be dismissed with a wave of the hand as school boy exercises, though we grant that only a beginning has been made. Give us time. Give us time! Within the next fifty years we shall astound you!

VIII

THE PROMISE OF THE NEGRO

So far we have lightly touched upon some of the most important phases of the life of the Negro people in America. We have looked at a people whose ancestors were brought to the country against their own will and suddenly thrust into the rising civilization of a new nation, and we have looked at some of the more hopeful features of their life as well as at some of their greatest problems. Even now, however, in spite of untoward conditions there are those who honestly ask if the effort and money that have been expended have been wisely invested. Those who have spent most time on the problem only wish that ten times as much had been done. Nevertheless for the sake of the honest seeker after truth, we wish to answer one or two fundamental questions.

First of all, to what extent has the Negro exemplified the principle of self-help and thus justified philanthropic and missionary effort in his behalf? The best answer to this is found not in such a shining example of self-help as Booker Washington, but in efforts that better represent the rank and file of the race. Take education. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, that branch of the Methodists which has always emphasized the race idea, from very early years took an active interest in educational work. To-day it maintains twenty schools and colleges--one or more in each Southern state, two in Africa, and one in the West Indies. The property represented by these inst.i.tutions is approximately $1,500,000. The third Sunday in September is set apart as Education Day, and on this a general collection is taken in all the churches. The total income from all sources for the educational work of the church is now not less than $175,000 a year. Two other distinct branches of Negro Methodists, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, have sometimes raised even more money in proportion to their membership. The Baptists because of their church polity are of course not so thoroughly organized. Most of the higher missionary effort of this denomination has been done through the American Baptist Home Mission Society, which from its headquarters in New York maintains wholly eight higher inst.i.tutions, contributing in a smaller degree to twenty preparatory schools. The word of the secretary of this organization in a recent report may be taken as summing up what the Negro Baptists have done for themselves: "We are sometimes told that it is about time for the Negroes to do something toward their own education, and some members of our churches seem to believe that their missionary money boards and clothes the thousands of pupils in attendance at the twenty-eight schools of the Home Mission Society. The following facts entirely refute these a.s.sertions: During the ten years ending March 31, 1907, pupils paid for tuition $300,517.62; for board $954,822.01, and Negro churches and individuals gave for the support of the work or for new buildings to supplement the gifts of their Northern friends, $197,995.70. This makes a total of $1,453,335.33 paid or given by the Negroes for ten years, or $145,333.53 annually. It should be remembered that this is only a small part of the vastly larger amount contributed by these people for education, for all through the South many a.s.sociations have their own denominational schools, and sacrifices are made for their maintenance which reflect credit upon the race which is so rapidly coming forward. The Negro presidents and princ.i.p.als are showing unusual wisdom in collecting funds for their work. Negro churches, too, are taking a great interest in these mission schools. The gifts from the Home Mission Society are hastening the day of still larger efforts from those benefited."

Let us, however, grant, say some, that the Negro helps himself; that is not sufficient. Anybody should help himself, anybody can; but what is the race worth as a constructive factor in American civilization?

Is it finally to be an agency making for the upbuilding of the nation, or simply one of the forces that r.e.t.a.r.d? What is its promise in American life?

In reply to this we recall first of all the work that has already been remarked along industrial lines. We have seen that the nation, especially in the South, depends upon Negro men and women as the stable labor supply in such occupations as farming, sawmilling, mining, cooking, and washing. Figures bearing this out have already been given. The tremendous new emphasis on farming and mining incident to the war is known to all. The Negro is now helping most vitally to feed the American people and to produce the materials for transportation and the making of munitions. Let any one ask, even the prejudiced observer, if he would like to see every Negro in the country out of it, and then he will decide whether economically the Negro is a liability for the country or an a.s.set.

Again, consider the Negro soldier. In all our history there are no pages more heroic, more pathetic than those detailing the exploits of the black man. We remember the Negro, three thousand strong, fighting for the liberties of America when his own race was still held in bondage. We remember the deeds at Port Hudson, Fort Pillow, and Fort Wagner. We remember Santiago and San Juan Hill, not only how Negro men went gallantly to the charge, but how a black regiment faced pestilence and fever that the ranks of their white comrades might not be decimated. And then Carrizal. Once more, at an unexpected moment, the soul of the nation was thrilled by the bravery of the black troopers of the Tenth Cavalry. Once more, despite Brownsville, the tradition of Fort Wagner was preserved and pa.s.sed on. It mattered not that "some one had blundered." "Theirs not to make reply; theirs but to do and die." So in the face of odds they fought by the cactus and lay dead beneath the Mexican stars.

And now, all around us, everywhere is the greatest of all wars. Once more has the Negro been summoned to the colors, and, because he is not fully protected in some places, because he has not the full power of suffrage, summoned out of all proportion to his numbers, summoned even when he could best serve at his regular work on the farms--not because the government intended unfairness, but because local registration officials have not been fair, because exemption boards have not been honest. And yet, even when physically disabled, even when he had the roughest work to do, he has still obeyed orders, not because he was not brave, not because he was not strong, but because he was true.

Others might desert, but not the Negro; others might be spies or strikers, but not he--not he in time of peril. In peace or war, in victory or danger, he, the Negro, has ever been loyal to the Stars and Stripes.

Not only, however, does the Negro give promise because of his economic worth; not only does he deserve the fullest rights of citizenship on the basis of his work as a soldier; he brings nothing less than a great spiritual contribution to civilization in America. His is a race of enthusiasm, imagination, and high spiritual fervor. He revels in the sighing of the wind, the falling of the stars, the laughter of children, and already his music is recognized as the most original that the country has produced; from his deep-toned melodies wails a note of intolerable pathos. But over all the doubt and fear through which it pa.s.ses there still rests with the great heart of the race an abiding trust in G.o.d. Around us everywhere are commercialism, politics, graft--sordidness, selfishness, cynicism. We need faith and hope and love, a new birth of idealism, more fervent faith in the unseen; and the stone that the builders rejected is become the head of the corner. Already the work of some members of the race has pointed the way to great things in the realm of conscious art; but above even art soars the great world of the spirit. This it is that America most sadly needs; this it is that her most fiercely persecuted children bring to her.

IX

A PLEA FOR A MORALIST

The preceding pages have more than once emphasized the need of reforms to be made in our American life. Before all reforms, however, there must be the guiding-star of high idealism. Only through the inspiration of lofty spiritual motive are changes likely to be permanent.

If now we look into our American life we are brought face to face with the fact that in our haste to get rich or even to meet new conditions that must legitimately be met we are in danger of losing all of our old standards of conduct, of training, and of morality. America is still _bourgeois_. We have hardly begun to reap the real fruits of rich, abiding culture, and because we have not we are still wasteful, superficial, and insincere, in our economic life, in our church life, in our courts, in literature, in education, in every phase of activity.

Consider national organization. We were beguiled into thinking that our country as a whole was rich, well arrayed, amply prepared to take care of itself, invincible beyond question. As the first six months of the war slowly dragged by in their agonizing course, the conviction gradually forced itself upon us that we were only in the elementary cla.s.s in economics, that we were neither organized nor prepared, and that it was after all vitally necessary for the government to a.s.sume official charge of the railroads. With our ideas of democracy we had slowly drifted into cra.s.s individualism, and sooner or later that was forced to mean selfishness. One year after the opening of the war we still had the sad spectacle of senators fiercely a.s.sailing the administration because of the tardiness of its shipping and airplane programs. We should not be too hasty in finding a scapegoat for what after all is a national delinquency. We had indeed produced such masters in large organization as Morgan and Hill and Harriman; but the talents of such men had not been utilized in Washington. Slowly we have learned that our country needs its very best brains, needs them always, and that it is folly to play petty politics when questions of great national interest are at stake. To _politics_ as we have long understood the term the present war should give the death-blow. Let responsibilities gravitate to those who are able to shoulder them without the endless coil of officialdom. Let democracy mean the perfect freedom of the individual, the _equal_ freedom of _all_ individuals, but _not_ license, and not that the rights of one individual shall endanger the rights of most. When the war began we availed ourselves of the talents of Thomas Alva Edison. Suppose we had done this ten years before. No, we were rich, comfortable, safe, invincible. Suddenly our smug self-complacency received a shock. One great result of this war is going to be to give us new ideas of efficiency in our national government. We shall place greater emphasis on having not only experts in important minor positions, but also men of supreme business talents in the places of greatest responsibility.

We shall have a new searching of our whole system of party government, with its arbitrary exits and entrances, and its despicable spoils system. We shall have a glorified, a chastened, a regenerated United States--a country about whose greatness there shall be no doubt, and on whose honor there shall be no stain, a country that shall in the highest sense stand for law and efficiency and justice, and one for which not some, but _all_, would be willing to die, because all would know that the government was thinking wisely for every one of its citizens.

So in our courts. The same principle would work. The average citizen in America knows only this about our courts, that he wants to keep away from them. So far we have not been a.s.sured of justice. The poor man has not stood an equal chance with the rich, nor the black with the white. Money has been freely used for the changing of laws, if need be. In South Carolina a white man stole an automobile and was sentenced for thirty days; on the same day and by the same judge a Negro who stole a bicycle was sent to the chain-gang for three years.

Such a travesty on justice can not much longer abide in a country that has pa.s.sed through fire. Let us turn our faces to the morning.

Our churches need a new baptism. About thirty years ago the conviction began to force itself that somehow the church as an organization was becoming too set and staid in its ways, that it was in fact a beautiful antique, regarded with somewhat amused condescension by the young men and women who played golf on Sunday or the crowds that went to a baseball game. Suddenly we became fearfully introspective; we studied sociology; we read "The Inside of the Cup"; we were ashamed of the impotency of the old sermons on justification and regeneration; and we swung to the other end of the pendulum. Our churches began to be "inst.i.tutional"; the most famous evangelist in the country became the one who was outstanding for his use of slang; the music in Sunday Schools became rag-time; and in general in religious services there developed a tendency to attract the crowd by using the methods of the vaudeville stage. Evening services in Protestant churches partook more and more of the nature of socialistic conferences, and, in general, dignity and reverence suffered. After a few years of this we have found that we are just at much at fault in another way as we were thirty years ago. We have done away with Puritanism, it is true; but in its stead we have placed irreverence and worldliness. Such is the situation in the church, in organized, conventional religion; when we look at the still larger principle of vital Christianity, at the heart of things of which mere churchgoing is only a symbol, we are still more appalled. Neither bigotry nor irreverence is right. Young people will not tolerate cant; but neither will they be attracted to a worship that features what they can find better done in a theater.

Simple goodness and kindness, however, never fail to command respect.

Love is never hissed off the stage; and the love of Christ, pure and simple, is sufficient even for the sorrow of such a sad world as ours.

What has been said about our economic life, our courts, and our churches applies also in our home-life, in education, and in literature. The family altar is almost extinct; children are not properly trained in respect for their elders; and all too generally young girls learn the lessons of extravagance and immodesty in dress.

Many of our modern methods of training have so simplified and made easy the lessons to be learned that the boy who goes to school is in danger of receiving little stout mental development. Excessive emphasis on ill.u.s.trations and pictures has resulted in the "moving-picture mind" that has only a modic.u.m of initiative on its own account. In literature we have stodginess in style and decadence in morals, and _vers libre_, that is to say, no verse at all. In hardly anything does it seem that we have any art, any standards, any _taste_. Any pa.s.sing fad is sufficient to gain followers and to pose as worthy achievement. I quote from a representative review of a representative novel by one of the most popular writers in America: "The reader first meets X when he is still a youth of twenty-four enjoying a trip around the world. In Y he meets an American miss of fifteen who falls wholly and entirely in love with him, and he, being somewhat in love with the idea of love, imagines himself in love with her and they become engaged. Afterward, in Paris, and a year or so later on the way home across the Atlantic, the author makes known the instability of the hero's character in the grosser forms of love.

Nevertheless he marries the child, barely past her middle teens, and forthwith sets out upon a career of escapades and license.... With the coming of the war he becomes first an ambulance driver and then an aviator, and his long-suffering and much-forgiving wife enters a military hospital as a nurse. But the author is discreetly silent as to the extent to which she is impressed by his a.s.surance that he is going to be a good husband." This story was published by one of the oldest, most respectable, and supposedly most conservative firms in the United States.

It is customary for those who are brought face to face with this irreverence, this injustice, this extravagance, and this loosening of the moral code to pa.s.s upon the matter lightly as a mere pa.s.sing phenomenon of our industrial advance; more recently the blame has been placed on that bearer of all burdens, the war. Such an explanation is hardly sufficient. Even before the war we were beginning to be influenced by continental standards. Now that the crisis is upon us all the more do we need to think clearly and conserve our energies for the future. Germany, under the guidance of her military philosophy, has destroyed the sanct.i.ty of the tenderest of all inst.i.tutions, the home, encouraging temporary unions of men and women as a patriotic duty; and France in her hour of trial has further fallen prey to debauchery. We plead that American womanhood shall be preserved sacred and inviolate.

All of this has very close connection with our chief subject, the Negro. Such characteristics and tendencies in America as we have sketched have resulted in a peculiar brand of sn.o.bbishness that has so developed as very largely to undermine our fundamental conception of morality. Mr. Alfred Booth Kuttner has recently written in the _Dial_ "A Study of American Intolerance," showing how the tradition of tolerance was upset by "the aftermath of the Civil War and by the sudden large influx of diversely alien immigrants which began during the seventies and eighties of the last century. The first of these is the more fundamental, and to a great extent it explains the second.

Our hostility towards the foreigner was fostered by a comparison with the relations already existing towards a people in our midst." This spirit of hostility of course accounts for the Chinese Exclusion bill, for the alien land law against the j.a.panese in California, for the literacy test, and even for the American att.i.tude toward the people of Latin-American countries; thus logically the Negro problem becomes the final test of our democracy, the crux on which all other great social problems have turned. We say that certain aliens are diseased or illiterate, that they are incipient anarchists or that they make working conditions intolerable; but let us suppose that in the main they become otherwise, as many of every race are already. Is the American white man, in the face of the rising brotherhood of man the world over, going to take the position that other races, and especially the colored races--the j.a.panese, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Negro--shall not occupy places of dignity and responsibility in this country? Does he expect to maintain the position that any person not an Anglo-Saxon, no matter how cultured or educated or talented he may be, must forever maintain a politically and socially inferior status in the greatest republic in the world? Such a position, we hold, in view of the great events now taking place in Europe, is utterly untenable. If it were the correct point of view, it would be better that we had never fired a single gun against Germany.

THE END