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Title: The Negro Problem

Contributor: Booker T. Washington
Charles W. Chesnutt
W. E. B. Du Bois
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Timothy Thomas Fortune
H. T. Kealing
Wilford H. Smith

Release date: February 14, 2005 [eBook #15041]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15041

Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Melissa Er-Raqabi, and the PG Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEGRO
PROBLEM ***

THE
NEGRO PROBLEM

CONTENTS
I Industrial Education for the Negro
Booker T. Washington 7
II The Talented Tenth
W.E. Burghardt DuBois 31
III The Disfranchisement of the Negro
Charles W. Chesnutt 77
IV The Negro and the Law
Wilford H. Smith 125
The Characteristics of the Negro
V
People
H.T. Kealing 161
VI Representative American Negroes
Paul Laurence Dunbar 187
The Negro's Place in American
VII
Life at the Present Day
T. Thomas Fortune 211

[Transcriber's Note: Variant spellings
have been left in the text. Obvious
typos have been corrected and
indicated with a footnote.]

Industrial Education for the Negro
By BOOKER T. WASHINGTON,

Principal of Tuskegee Institute

The necessity for the race's learning the difference between being
worked and working. He would not confine the Negro to industrial
life, but believes that the very best service which any one can render to
what is called the "higher education" is to teach the present generation
to work and save. This will create the wealth from which alone can
come leisure and the opportunity for higher education.

One of the most fundamental and far-reaching deeds that has been
accomplished during the last quarter of a century has been that by which the
Negro has been helped to find himself and to learn the secrets of civilization
—to learn that there are a few simple, cardinal principles upon which a race
must start its upward course, unless it would fail, and its last estate be worse
than its first.
It has been necessary for the Negro to learn the difference between being
worked and working—to learn that being worked meant degradation, while
working means civilization; that all forms of labor are honorable, and all
forms of idleness disgraceful. It has been necessary for him to learn that all
races that have got upon their feet have done so largely by laying an
economic foundation, and, in general, by beginning in a proper cultivation
and ownership of the soil.
Forty years ago my race emerged from slavery into freedom. If, in too many
cases, the Negro race began development at the wrong end, it was largely
because neither white nor black properly understood the case. Nor is it any
wonder that this was so, for never before in the history of the world had just

such a problem been presented as that of the two races at the coming of
freedom in this country.
For two hundred and fifty years, I believe the way for the redemption of the
Negro was being prepared through industrial development. Through all
those years the Southern white man did business with the Negro in a way
that no one else has done business with him. In most cases if a Southern
white man wanted a house built he consulted a Negro mechanic about the
plan and about the actual building of the structure. If he wanted a suit of
clothes made he went to a Negro tailor, and for shoes he went to a
shoemaker of the same race. In a certain way every slave plantation in the
South was an industrial school. On these plantations young colored men
and women were constantly being trained not only as farmers but as
carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, brick masons, engineers, cooks,
laundresses, sewing women and housekeepers.
I do not mean in any way to apologize for the curse of slavery, which was a
curse to both races, but in what I say about industrial training in slavery I
am simply stating facts. This training was crude, and was given for selfish
purposes. It did not answer the highest ends, because there was an absence
of mental training in connection with the training of the hand. To a large
degree, though, this business contact with the Southern white man, and the
industrial training on the plantations, left the Negro at the close of the war
in possession of nearly all the common and skilled labor in the South. The
industries that gave the South its power, prominence and wealth prior to the
Civil War were mainly the raising of cotton, sugar cane, rice and tobacco.
Before the way could be prepared for the proper growing and marketing of
these crops forests had to be cleared, houses to be built, public roads and
railroads constructed. In all these works the Negro did most of the heavy
work. In the planting, cultivating and marketing of the crops not only was
the Negro the chief dependence, but in the manufacture of tobacco he
became a skilled and proficient workman, and in this, up to the present
time, in the South, holds the lead in the large tobacco manufactories.
In most of the industries, though, what happened? For nearly twenty years
after the war, except in a few instances, the value of the industrial training
given by the plantations was overlooked. Negro men and women were
educated in literature, in mathematics and in the sciences, with little thought

of what had been taking place during the preceding two hundred and fifty
years, except, perhaps, as something to be escaped, to be got as far away
from as possible. As a generation began to pass, those who had been trained
as mechanics in slavery began to disappear by death, and gradually it began
to be realized that there were few to take their places. There were young
men educated in foreign tongues, but few in carpentry or in mechanical or
architectural drawing. Many were trained in Latin, but few as engineers and
blacksmiths. Too many were taken from the farm and educated, but
educated in everything but farming. For this reason they had no interest in
farming and did not return to it. And yet eighty-five per cent. of the Negro
population of the Southern states lives and for a considerable time will
continue to live in the country districts. The charge is often brought against
the members of my race—and too often justly, I confess—that they are
found leaving the country districts and flocking into the great cities where
temptations are more frequent and harder to resist, and where the Negro
people too often become demoralized. Think, though, how frequently it is
the case that from the first day that a pupil begins to go to school his books
teach him much about the cities of the world and city life, and almost
nothing about the country. How natural it is, then, that when he has the
ordering of his life he wants to live it in the city.
Only a short time before his death the late Mr. C.P. Huntington, to whose
memory a magnificent library has just been given by his widow to the
Hampton Institute for Negroes, in Virginia, said in a public address some
words which seem to me so wise that I want to quote them here:
"Our schools teach everybody a little of almost everything, but, in my
opinion, they teach very few children just what they ought to know in order
to make their way successfully in life. They do not put into their hands the
tools they are best fitted to use, and hence so many failures. Many a mother
and sister have worked and slaved, living upon scanty food, in order to give
a son and brother a "liberal education," and in doing this have built up a
barrier between the boy and the work he was fitted to do. Let me say to you
that all honest work is honorable work. If the labor is manual, and seems
common, you will have all the more chance to be thinking of other things,
or of work that is higher and brings better pay, and to work out in your
minds better and higher duties and responsibilities for yourselves, and for

thinking of ways by which you can help others as well as yourselves, and
bring them up to your own higher level."
Some years ago, when we decided to make tailoring a part of our training at
the Tuskegee Institute, I was amazed to find that it was almost impossible to
find in the whole country an educated colored man who could teach the
making of clothing. We could find numbers of them who could teach
astronomy, theology, Latin or grammar, but almost none who could instruct
in the making of clothing, something that has to be used by every one of us
every day in the year. How often have I been discouraged as I have gone
through the South, and into the homes of the people of my race, and have
found women who could converse intelligently upon abstruse subjects, and
yet could not tell how to improve the condition of the poorly cooked and
still more poorly served bread and meat which they and their families were
eating three times a day. It is discouraging to find a girl who can tell you the
geographical location of any country on the globe and who does not know
where to place the dishes upon a common dinner table. It is discouraging to
find a woman who knows much about theoretical chemistry, and who
cannot properly wash and iron a shirt.
In what I say here I would not by any means have it understood that I would
limit or circumscribe the mental development of the Negro-student. No race
can be lifted until its mind is awakened and strengthened. By the side of
industrial training should always go mental and moral training, but the
pushing of mere abstract knowledge into the head means little. We want
more than the mere performance of mental gymnastics. Our knowledge
must be harnessed to the things of real life. I would encourage the Negro to
secure all the mental strength, all the mental culture—whether gleaned from
science, mathematics, history, language or literature that his circumstances
will allow, but I believe most earnestly that for years to come the education
of the people of my race should be so directed that the greatest proportion
of the mental strength of the masses will be brought to bear upon the every-
day practical things of life, upon something that is needed to be done, and
something which they will be permitted to do in the community in which
they reside. And just the same with the professional class which the race
needs and must have, I would say give the men and women of that class,
too, the training which will best fit them to perform in the most successful
manner the service which the race demands.

I would not confine the race to industrial life, not even to agriculture, for
example, although I believe that by far the greater part of the Negro race is
best off in the country districts and must and should continue to live there,
but I would teach the race that in industry the foundation must be laid—that
the very best service which any one can render to what is called the higher
education is to teach the present generation to provide a material or
industrial foundation. On such a foundation as this will grow habits of
thrift, a love of work, economy, ownership of property, bank accounts. Out
of it in the future will grow practical education, professional education,
positions of public responsibility. Out of it will grow moral and religious
strength. Out of it will grow wealth from which alone can come leisure and
the opportunity for the enjoyment of literature and the fine arts.
In the words of the late beloved Frederick Douglass: "Every blow of the
sledge hammer wielded by a sable arm is a powerful blow in support of our
cause. Every colored mechanic is by virtue of circumstances an elevator of
his race. Every house built by a black man is a strong tower against the
allied hosts of prejudice. It is impossible for us to attach too much
importance to this aspect of the subject. Without industrial development
there can be no wealth; without wealth there can be no leisure; without
leisure no opportunity for thoughtful reflection and the cultivation of the
higher arts."
I would set no limits to the attainments of the Negro in arts, in letters or
statesmanship, but I believe the surest way to reach those ends is by laying
the foundation in the little things of life that lie immediately about one's
door. I plead for industrial education and development for the Negro not
because I want to cramp him, but because I want to free him. I want to see
him enter the all-powerful business and commercial world.
It was such combined mental, moral and industrial education which the late
General Armstrong set out to give at the Hampton Institute when he
established that school thirty years ago. The Hampton Institute has
continued along the lines laid down by its great founder, and now each year
an increasing number of similar schools are being established in the South,
for the people of both races.

Early in the history of the Tuskegee Institute we began to combine
industrial training with mental and moral culture. Our first efforts were in
the direction of agriculture, and we began teaching this with no appliances
except one hoe and a blind mule. From this small beginning we have grown
until now the Institute owns two thousand acres of land, eight hundred of
which are cultivated each year by the young men of the school. We began
teaching wheelwrighting and blacksmithing in a small way to the men, and
laundry work, cooking and sewing and housekeeping to the young women.
The fourteen hundred and over young men and women who attended the
school during the last school year received instruction—in addition to
academic and religious training—in thirty-three trades and industries,
including carpentry, blacksmithing, printing, wheelwrighting
harnessmaking, painting, machinery, founding, shoemaking, brickmasonry
and brickmaking, plastering, sawmilling, tinsmithing, tailoring, mechanical
and architectural drawing, electrical and steam engineering, canning,
sewing, dressmaking, millinery, cooking, laundering, housekeeping,
mattress making, basketry, nursing, agriculture, dairying and stock raising,
horticulture.
Not only do the students receive instruction in these trades, but they do
actual work, by means of which more than half of them pay some part or all
of their expenses while remaining at the school. Of the sixty buildings
belonging to the school all but four were almost wholly erected by the
students as a part of their industrial education. Even the bricks which go
into the walls are made by students in the school's brick yard, in which, last
year, they manufactured two million bricks.
When we first began this work at Tuskegee, and the idea got spread among
the people of my race that the students who came to the Tuskegee school
were to be taught industries in connection with their academic studies,
were, in other words, to be taught to work, I received a great many verbal
messages and letters from parents informing me that they wanted their
children taught books, but not how to work. This protest went on for three
or four years, but I am glad to be able to say now that our people have very
generally been educated to a point where they see their own needs and
conditions so clearly that it has been several years since we have had a
single protest from parents against the teaching of industries, and there is
now a positive enthusiasm for it. In fact, public sentiment among the

students at Tuskegee is now so strong for industrial training that it would
hardly permit a student to remain on the grounds who was unwilling to
labor.
It seems to me that too often mere book education leaves the Negro young
man or woman in a weak position. For example, I have seen a Negro girl
taught by her mother to help her in doing laundry work at home. Later,
when this same girl was graduated from the public schools or a high school
and returned home she finds herself educated out of sympathy with laundry
work, and yet not able to find anything to do which seems in keeping with
the cost and character of her education. Under these circumstances we
cannot be surprised if she does not fulfill the expectations made for her.
What should have been done for her, it seems to me, was to give her along
with her academic education thorough training in the latest and best
methods of laundry work, so that she could have put so much skill and
intelligence into it that the work would have been lifted out from the plane
of drudgery[A]. The home which she would then have been able to found by
the results of her work would have enabled her to help her children to take a
still more responsible position in life.
Almost from the first Tuskegee has kept in mind—and this I think should be
the policy of all industrial schools—fitting students for occupations which
would be open to them in their home communities. Some years ago we
noted the fact that there was beginning to be a demand in the South for men
to operate dairies in a skillful, modern manner. We opened a dairy
department in connection with the school, where a number of young men
could have instruction in the latest and most scientific methods of dairy
work. At present we have calls—mainly from Southern white men—for
twice as many dairymen as we are able to supply. What is equally
satisfactory, the reports which come to us indicate that our young men are
giving the highest satisfaction and are fast changing and improving the
dairy product in the communities into which they go. I use the dairy here as
an example. What I have said of this is equally true of many of the other
industries which we teach. Aside from the economic value of this work I
cannot but believe, and my observation confirms me in my belief, that as
we continue to place Negro men and women of intelligence, religion,
modesty, conscience and skill in every community in the South, who will
prove by actual results their value to the community, I cannot but believe, I

say, that this will constitute a solution to many of the present political and
social difficulties.
Many seem to think that industrial education is meant to make the Negro
work as he worked in the days of slavery. This is far from my conception of
industrial education. If this training is worth anything to the Negro, it
consists in teaching him how not to work, but how to make the forces of
nature—air, steam, water, horse-power and electricity—work for him. If it
has any value it is in lifting labor up out of toil and drudgery into the plane
of the dignified and the beautiful. The Negro in the South works and works
hard; but too often his ignorance and lack of skill causes him to do his work
in the most costly and shiftless manner, and this keeps him near the bottom
of the ladder in the economic world.
I have not emphasized particularly in these pages the great need of training
the Negro in agriculture, but I believe that this branch of industrial
education does need very great emphasis. In this connection I want to quote
some words which Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Montgomery, Alabama,
has recently written upon this subject:
"We must incorporate into our public school system a larger recognition of
the practical and industrial elements in educational training. Ours is an
agricultural population. The school must be brought more closely to the
soil. The teaching of history, for example, is all very well, but nobody can
really know anything of history unless he has been taught to see things
grow—has so seen things not only with the outward eye, but with the eyes
of his intelligence and conscience. The actual things of the present are more
important, however, than the institutions of the past. Even to young children
can be shown the simpler conditions and processes of growth—how corn is
put into the ground—how cotton and potatoes should be planted—how to
choose the soil best adapted to a particular plant, how to improve that soil,
how to care for the plant while it grows, how to get the most value out of it,
how to use the elements of waste for the fertilization of other crops; how,
through the alternation of crops, the land may be made to increase the
annual value of its products—these things, upon their elementary side are
absolutely vital to the worth and success of hundreds of thousands of these
people of the Negro race, and yet our whole educational system has
practically ignored them.

"Such work will mean not only an education in agriculture, but an
education through agriculture and education, through natural symbols and
practical forms, which will educate as deeply, as broadly and as truly as any
other system which the world has known. Such changes will bring far larger
results than the mere improvement of our Negroes. They will give us an
agricultural class, a class of tenants or small land owners, trained not away
from the soil, but in relation to the soil and in intelligent dependence upon
its resources."
I close, then, as I began, by saying that as a slave the Negro was worked,
and that as a freeman he must learn to work. There is still doubt in many
quarters as to the ability of the Negro unguided, unsupported, to hew his
own path and put into visible, tangible, indisputable form, products and
signs of civilization. This doubt cannot be much affected by abstract
arguments, no matter how delicately and convincingly woven together.
Patiently, quietly, doggedly, persistently, through summer and winter,
sunshine and shadow, by self-sacrifice, by foresight, by honesty and
industry, we must re-enforce argument with results. One farm bought, one
house built, one home sweetly and intelligently kept, one man who is the
largest tax payer or has the largest bank account, one school or church
maintained, one factory running successfully, one truck garden profitably
cultivated, one patient cured by a Negro doctor, one sermon well preached,
one office well filled, one life cleanly lived—these will tell more in our
favor than all the abstract eloquence that can be summoned to plead our
cause. Our pathway must be up through the soil, up through swamps, up
through forests, up through the streams, the rocks, up through commerce,
education and religion!
[A] In the original, this was 'drudggery'.

The Talented Tenth
By PROF. W.E. BURGHARDT DuBOIS

A strong plea for the higher education of the Negro, which those who
are interested in the future of the freedmen cannot afford to ignore.
Prof. DuBois produces ample evidence to prove conclusively the truth
of his statement that "to attempt to establish any sort of a system of
common and industrial school training, without first providing for the
higher training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your
money to the winds."

W.E. BURGHARDT DuBOIS.
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.
The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with
the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that
they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the
Worst, in their own and other races. Now the training of men is a difficult
and intricate task. Its technique is a matter for educational experts, but its
object is for the vision of seers. If we make money the object of man-
training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we

make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but
not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the
object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge
of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the
curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this
foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of
brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living
for the object of life.

If this be true—and who can deny it—three tasks lay before me; first to
show from the past that the Talented Tenth as they have risen among
American Negroes have been worthy of leadership; secondly, to show how
these men may be educated and developed; and thirdly, to show their
relation to the Negro problem.

You misjudge us because you do not know us. From the very first it has
been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and
elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their
efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized
survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal
leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the first to rid the race
of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the
survival of the fittest. In colonial days came Phillis Wheatley and Paul
Cuffe striving against the bars of prejudice; and Benjamin Banneker, the
almanac maker, voiced their longings when he said to Thomas Jefferson, "I
freely and cheerfully acknowledge that I am of the African race, and in
colour which is natural to them, of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense
of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that I
now confess to you that I am not under that state of tyrannical thraldom and
inhuman captivity to which too many of my brethren are doomed, but that I
have abundantly tasted of the fruition of those blessings which proceed
from that free and unequalled liberty with which you are favored, and

which I hope you will willingly allow, you have mercifully received from
the immediate hand of that Being from whom proceedeth every good and
perfect gift.
"Suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the arms of the British
crown were exerted with every powerful effort, in order to reduce you to a
state of servitude; look back, I entreat you, on the variety of dangers to
which you were exposed; reflect on that period in which every human aid
appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and fortitude wore the aspect
of inability to the conflict, and you cannot but be led to a serious and
grateful sense of your miraculous and providential preservation, you cannot
but acknowledge, that the present freedom and tranquility which you enjoy,
you have mercifully received, and that a peculiar blessing of heaven.
"This, sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a state of
Slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its
condition. It was then that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you
publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be
recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages: 'We hold these truths to be
self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with
certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.'"
Then came Dr. James Derham, who could tell even the learned Dr. Rush
something of medicine, and Lemuel Haynes, to whom Middlebury College
gave an honorary A.M. in 1804. These and others we may call the
Revolutionary group of distinguished Negroes—they were persons of
marked ability, leaders of a Talented Tenth, standing conspicuously among
the best of their time. They strove by word and deed to save the color line
from becoming the line between the bond and free, but all they could do
was nullified by Eli Whitney and the Curse of Gold. So they passed into
forgetfulness.
But their spirit did not wholly die; here and there in the early part of the
century came other exceptional men. Some were natural sons of unnatural
fathers and were given often a liberal training and thus a race of educated
mulattoes sprang up to plead for black men's rights. There was Ira Aldridge,

whom all Europe loved to honor; there was that Voice crying in the
Wilderness, David Walker, and saying:
"I declare it does appear to me as though some nations think God is asleep,
or that he made the Africans for nothing else but to dig their mines and
work their farms, or they cannot believe history, sacred or profane. I ask
every man who has a heart, and is blessed with the privilege of believing—
Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures? Do you say he is? Then if he
gives peace and tranquility to tyrants and permits them to keep our fathers,
our mothers, ourselves and our children in eternal ignorance and
wretchedness to support them and their families, would he be to us a God of
Justice? I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us and our children in the most
abject ignorance and degradation that ever a people were afflicted with
since the world began—I say if God gives you peace and tranquility, and
suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and our children, who have never
given you the least provocation—would He be to us a God of Justice? If
you will allow that we are men, who feel for each other, does not the blood
of our fathers and of us, their children, cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth
against you for the cruelties and murders with which you have and do
continue to afflict us?"
This was the wild voice that first aroused Southern legislators in 1829 to the
terrors of abolitionism.
In 1831 there met that first Negro convention in Philadelphia, at which the
world gaped curiously but which bravely attacked the problems of race and
slavery, crying out against persecution and declaring that "Laws as cruel in
themselves as they were unconstitutional and unjust, have in many places
been enacted against our poor, unfriended and unoffending brethren
(without a shadow of provocation on our part), at whose bare recital the
very savage draws himself up for fear of contagion—looks noble and prides
himself because he bears not the name of Christian." Side by side this free
Negro movement, and the movement for abolition, strove until they merged
into one strong stream. Too little notice has been taken of the work which
the Talented Tenth among Negroes took in the great abolition crusade. From
the very day that a Philadelphia colored man became the first subscriber to
Garrison's "Liberator," to the day when Negro soldiers made the
Emancipation Proclamation possible, black leaders worked shoulder to

shoulder with white men in a movement, the success of which would have
been impossible without them. There was Purvis and Remond, Pennington
and Highland Garnett, Sojourner Truth and Alexander Crummel, and above
all, Frederick Douglass—what would the abolition movement have been
without them? They stood as living examples of the possibilities of the
Negro race, their own hard experiences and well wrought culture said
silently more than all the drawn periods of orators—they were the men who
made American slavery impossible. As Maria Weston Chapman once said,
from the school of anti-slavery agitation "a throng of authors, editors,
lawyers, orators and accomplished gentlemen of color have taken their
degree! It has equally implanted hopes and aspirations, noble thoughts, and
sublime purposes, in the hearts of both races. It has prepared the white man
for the freedom of the black man, and it has made the black man scorn the
thought of enslavement, as does a white man, as far as its influence has
extended. Strengthen that noble influence! Before its organization, the
country only saw here and there in slavery some faithful Cudjoe or Dinah,
whose strong natures blossomed even in bondage, like a fine plant beneath
a heavy stone. Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the
American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes
Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples."
Where were these black abolitionists trained? Some, like Frederick
Douglass, were self-trained, but yet trained liberally; others, like Alexander
Crummell and McCune Smith, graduated from famous foreign universities.
Most of them rose up through the colored schools of New York and
Philadelphia and Boston, taught by college-bred men like Russworm, of
Dartmouth, and college-bred white men like Neau and Benezet.
After emancipation came a new group of educated and gifted leaders:
Langston, Bruce and Elliot, Greener, Williams and Payne. Through political
organization, historical and polemic writing and moral regeneration, these
men strove to uplift their people. It is the fashion of to-day to sneer at them
and to say that with freedom Negro leadership should have begun at the
plow and not in the Senate—a foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred
and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling was in
vain till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred and fifty
years more the half-free serf of to-day may toil at his plow, but unless he
have political rights and righteously guarded civic status, he will still

remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything of rascals, that he now
is. This all sane men know even if they dare not say it.
And so we come to the present—a day of cowardice and vacillation, of
strident wide-voiced wrong and faint hearted compromise; of double-faced
dallying with Truth and Right. Who are to-day guiding the work of the
Negro people? The "exceptions" of course. And yet so sure as this Talented
Tenth is pointed out, the blind worshippers of the Average cry out in alarm:
"These are exceptions, look here at death, disease and crime—these are the
happy rule." Of course they are the rule, because a silly nation made them
the rule: Because for three long centuries this people lynched Negroes who
dared to be brave, raped black women who dared to be virtuous, crushed
dark-hued youth who dared to be ambitious, and encouraged and made to
flourish servility and lewdness and apathy. But not even this was able to
crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk. A saving
remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually
shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure,
but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro blood, the
promise of black men. Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in
this land a million men of Negro blood, well-educated, owners of homes,
against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, whose
men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any
standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern
European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts
of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration, to nullify such leadership
and seek to crush these people back into the mass out of which by toil and
travail, they and their fathers have raised themselves?
Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly
raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and
character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the
bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top
downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are
worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human
progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress
were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already
risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down.

How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands
of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and
most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and
universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the university of
the Negro should teach or how it should teach it—I willingly admit that
each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar curriculum. But this is
true: A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge
and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick
minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will
suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or
nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training
where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary
toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no
God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in the beginning were
the favored sons of the freedmen trained. Out of the colleges of the North
came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase, Andrews, Bumstead
and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and civilization in the
black South. Where ought they to have begun to build? At the bottom, of
course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth. Aye! truly at the
bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge, down in the very
depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice strike into the lowest
soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded colleges, and up from the
colleges shot normal schools, and out from the normal schools went
teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered other teachers to teach
the public schools; the college trained in Greek and Latin and mathematics,
2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000 others in morals and manners,
and they in turn taught thrift and the alphabet to nine millions of men, who
to-day hold $300,000,000 of property. It was a miracle—the most
wonderful peace-battle of the 19th century, and yet to-day men smile at it,
and in fine superiority tell us that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper
way to found a system of education is first to gather the children and buy
them spelling books and hoes; afterward men may look about for teachers,
if haply they may find them; or again they would teach men Work, but as
for Life—why, what has Work to do with Life, they ask vacantly.

Was the work of these college founders successful; did it stand the test of
time? Did the college graduates, with all their fine theories of life, really
live? Are they useful men helping to civilize and elevate their less fortunate
fellows? Let us see. Omitting all institutions which have not actually
graduated students from a college course, there are to-day in the United
States thirty-four institutions giving something above high school training
to Negroes and designed especially for this race.
Three of these were established in border States before the War; thirteen
were planted by the Freedmen's Bureau in the years 1864-1869; nine were
established between 1870 and 1880 by various church bodies; five were
established after 1881 by Negro churches, and four are state institutions
supported by United States' agricultural funds. In most cases the college
departments are small adjuncts to high and common school work. As a
matter of fact six institutions—Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Shaw, Wilberforce
and Leland, are the important Negro colleges so far as actual work and
number of students are concerned. In all these institutions, seven hundred
and fifty Negro college students are enrolled. In grade the best of these
colleges are about a year behind the smaller New England colleges and a
typical curriculum is that of Atlanta University. Here students from the
grammar grades, after a three years' high school course, take a college
course of 136 weeks. One-fourth of this time is given to Latin and Greek;
one-fifth, to English and modern languages; one-sixth, to history and social
science; one-seventh, to natural science; one-eighth to mathematics, and
one-eighth to philosophy and pedagogy.
In addition to these students in the South, Negroes have attended Northern
colleges for many years. As early as 1826 one was graduated from Bowdoin
College, and from that time till to-day nearly every year has seen elsewhere,
other such graduates. They have, of course, met much color prejudice. Fifty
years ago very few colleges would admit them at all. Even to-day no Negro
has ever been admitted to Princeton, and at some other leading institutions
they are rather endured than encouraged. Oberlin was the great pioneer in
the work of blotting out the color line in colleges, and has more Negro
graduates by far than any other Northern college.
The total number of Negro college graduates up to 1899, (several of the
graduates of that year not being reported), was as follows:

Negro White
Colleges. Colleges.
Before '76 137 75
'75-80 143 22
'80-85 250 31
'85-90 413 43
'90-95 465 66
'96-99 475 88
Class
57 64
Unknown
Total 1,914 390

Of these graduates 2,079 were men and 252 were women; 50 per cent. of
Northern-born college men come South to work among the masses of their
people, at a sacrifice which few people realize; nearly 90 per cent. of the
Southern-born graduates instead of seeking that personal freedom and
broader intellectual atmosphere which their training has led them, in some
degree, to conceive, stay and labor and wait in the midst of their black
neighbors and relatives.
The most interesting question, and in many respects the crucial question, to
be asked concerning college-bred Negroes, is: Do they earn a living? It has
been intimated more than once that the higher training of Negroes has
resulted in sending into the world of work, men who could find nothing to
do suitable to their talents. Now and then there comes a rumor of a colored
college man working at menial service, etc. Fortunately, returns as to
occupations of college-bred Negroes, gathered by the Atlanta conference,
are quite full—nearly sixty per cent. of the total number of graduates.
This enables us to reach fairly certain conclusions as to the occupations of
all college-bred Negroes. Of 1,312 persons reported, there were:
Teachers, 53.4
Clergymen, 16.8
Physicians, etc., 6.3
Students, 5.6
Lawyers, 4.7

In Govt. Service, 4.0
In Business, 3.6
Farmers and
2.7
Artisans,
Editors, Secretaries
2.4
and Clerks,
Miscellaneous. .5
Over half are teachers, a sixth are preachers, another sixth are students and
professional men; over 6 per cent. are farmers, artisans and merchants, and
4 per cent. are in government service. In detail the occupations are as
follows:

Occupations of College-Bred Men.
Teachers:
Presidents and Deans, 19
Teacher of Music, 7
Professors, Principals and Teachers, 675 Total 701
Clergymen:
Bishop, 1
Chaplains U.S. Army, 2
Missionaries, 9
Presiding Elders, 12
Preachers, 197 Total 221
Physicians,
Doctors of Medicine, 76
Druggists, 4
Dentists, 3 Total 83
Students, 74
Lawyers, 62
Civil Service:
U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary, 1
U.S. Consul, 1
U.S. Deputy Collector, 1
U.S. Gauger, 1

U.S. Postmasters, 2
U.S. Clerks, 44
State Civil Service, 2
City Civil Service, 1 Total 53
Business Men:
Merchants, etc., 30
Managers, 13
Real Estate Dealers, 4 Total 47
Farmers, 26
Clerks and Secretaries:
Secretary of National Societies, 7
Clerks, etc., 15 Total 22
Artisans, 9
Editors, 9
Miscellaneous, 5

These figures illustrate vividly the function of the college-bred Negro. He
is, as he ought to be, the group leader, the man who sets the ideals of the
community where he lives, directs its thoughts and heads its social
movements. It need hardly be argued that the Negro people need social
leadership more than most groups; that they have no traditions to fall back
upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well defined
social classes. All these things must be slowly and painfully evolved. The
preacher was, even before the war, the group leader of the Negroes, and the
church their greatest social institution. Naturally this preacher was ignorant
and often immoral, and the problem of replacing the older type by better
educated men has been a difficult one. Both by direct work and by direct
influence on other preachers, and on congregations, the college-bred
preacher has an opportunity for reformatory work and moral inspiration, the
value of which cannot be overestimated.
It has, however, been in the furnishing of teachers that the Negro college
has found its peculiar function. Few persons realize how vast a work, how
mighty a revolution has been thus accomplished. To furnish five millions
and more of ignorant people with teachers of their own race and blood, in
one generation, was not only a very difficult undertaking, but a very

important one, in that, it placed before the eyes of almost every Negro child
an attainable ideal. It brought the masses of the blacks in contact with
modern civilization, made black men the leaders of their communities and
trainers of the new generation. In this work college-bred Negroes were first
teachers, and then teachers of teachers. And here it is that the broad culture
of college work has been of peculiar value. Knowledge of life and its wider
meaning, has been the point of the Negro's deepest ignorance, and the
sending out of teachers whose training has not been simply for bread
winning, but also for human culture, has been of inestimable value in the
training of these men.
In earlier years the two occupations of preacher and teacher were practically
the only ones open to the black college graduate. Of later years a larger
diversity of life among his people, has opened new avenues of employment.
Nor have these college men been paupers and spendthrifts; 557 college-
bred Negroes owned in 1899, $1,342,862.50 worth of real estate, (assessed
value) or $2,411 per family. The real value of the total accumulations of the
whole group is perhaps about $10,000,000, or $5,000 a piece. Pitiful, is it
not, beside the fortunes of oil kings and steel trusts, but after all is the
fortune of the millionaire the only stamp of true and successful living?
Alas! it is, with many, and there's the rub.
The problem of training the Negro is to-day immensely complicated by the
fact that the whole question of the efficiency and appropriateness of our
present systems of education, for any kind of child, is a matter of active
debate, in which final settlement seems still afar off. Consequently it often
happens that persons arguing for or against certain systems of education for
Negroes, have these controversies in mind and miss the real question at
issue. The main question, so far as the Southern Negro is concerned, is:
What under the present circumstance, must a system of education do in
order to raise the Negro as quickly as possible in the scale of civilization?
The answer to this question seems to me clear: It must strengthen the
Negro's character, increase his knowledge and teach him to earn a living.
Now it goes without saying, that it is hard to do all these things
simultaneously or suddenly, and that at the same time it will not do to give
all the attention to one and neglect the others; we could give black boys
trades, but that alone will not civilize a race of ex-slaves; we might simply
increase their knowledge of the world, but this would not necessarily make

them wish to use this knowledge honestly; we might seek to strengthen
character and purpose, but to what end if this people have nothing to eat or
to wear? A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single
definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole
system of human training within and without the school house walls, which
molds and develops men. If then we start out to train an ignorant and
unskilled people with a heritage of bad habits, our system of training must
set before itself two great aims—the one dealing with knowledge and
character, the other part seeking to give the child the technical knowledge
necessary for him to earn a living under the present circumstances. These
objects are accomplished in part by the opening of the common schools on
the one, and of the industrial schools on the other. But only in part, for there
must also be trained those who are to teach these schools—men and women
of knowledge and culture and technical skill who understand modern
civilization, and have the training and aptitude to impart it to the children
under them. There must be teachers, and teachers of teachers, and to
attempt to establish any sort of a system of common and industrial school
training, without first (and I say first advisedly) without first providing for
the higher training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money
to the winds. School houses do not teach themselves—piles of brick and
mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human
soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes
the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether
they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American. Nothing, in these latter
days, has so dampened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational
movements, as the fact that such movements have been accompanied by
ridicule and denouncement and decrying of those very institutions of higher
training which made the Negro public school possible, and make Negro
industrial schools thinkable. It was Fisk, Atlanta, Howard and Straight,
those colleges born of the faith and sacrifice of the abolitionists, that placed
in the black schools of the South the 30,000 teachers and more, which
some, who depreciate the work of these higher schools, are using to teach
their own new experiments. If Hampton, Tuskegee and the hundred other
industrial schools prove in the future to be as successful as they deserve to
be, then their success in training black artisans for the South, will be due
primarily to the white colleges of the North and the black colleges of the
South, which trained the teachers who to-day conduct these institutions.

There was a time when the American people believed pretty devoutly that a
log of wood with a boy at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other,
represented the highest ideal of human training. But in these eager days it
would seem that we have changed all that and think it necessary to add a
couple of saw-mills and a hammer to this outfit, and, at a pinch, to dispense
with the services of Mark Hopkins.
I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount necessity of
teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and skillfully; or seem to
depreciate in the slightest degree the important part industrial schools must
play in the accomplishment of these ends, but I do say, and insist upon it,
that it is industrialism drunk with its vision of success, to imagine that its
own work can be accomplished without providing for the training of
broadly cultured men and women to teach its own teachers, and to teach the
teachers of the public schools.
But I have already said that human education is not simply a matter of
schools; it is much more a matter of family and group life—the training of
one's home, of one's daily companions, of one's social class. Now the black
boy of the South moves in a black world—a world with its own leaders, its
own thoughts, its own ideals. In this world he gets by far the larger part of
his life training, and through the eyes of this dark world he peers into the
veiled world beyond. Who guides and determines the education which he
receives in his world? His teachers here are the group-leaders of the Negro
people—the physicians and clergymen, the trained fathers and mothers, the
influential and forceful men about him of all kinds; here it is, if at all, that
the culture of the surrounding world trickles through and is handed on by
the graduates of the higher schools. Can such culture training of group
leaders be neglected? Can we afford to ignore it? Do you think that if the
leaders of thought among Negroes are not trained and educated thinkers,
that they will have no leaders? On the contrary a hundred half-trained
demagogues will still hold the places they so largely occupy now, and
hundreds of vociferous busy-bodies will multiply. You have no choice;
either you must help furnish this race from within its own ranks with
thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer the evil
consequences of a headless misguided rabble.

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black
boys, and for white boys, too. I believe that next to the founding of Negro
colleges the most valuable addition to Negro education since the war, has
been industrial training for black boys. Nevertheless, I insist that the object
of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters
men; there are two means of making the carpenter a man, each equally
important: the first is to give the group and community in which he works,
liberally trained teachers and leaders to teach him and his family what life
means; the second is to give him sufficient intelligence and technical skill to
make him an efficient workman; the first object demands the Negro college
and college-bred men—not a quantity of such colleges, but a few of
excellent quality; not too many college-bred men, but enough to leaven the
lump, to inspire the masses, to raise the Talented Tenth to leadership; the
second object demands a good system of common schools, well-taught,
conveniently located and properly equipped.
The Sixth Atlanta Conference truly said in 1901:
"We call the attention of the Nation to the fact that less than one million of
the three million Negro children of school age, are at present regularly
attending school, and these attend a session which lasts only a few months.
"We are to-day deliberately rearing millions of our citizens in ignorance,
and at the same time limiting the rights of citizenship by educational
qualifications. This is unjust. Half the black youth of the land have no
opportunities open to them for learning to read, write and cipher. In the
discussion as to the proper training of Negro children after they leave the
public schools, we have forgotten that they are not yet decently provided
with public schools.
"Propositions are beginning to be made in the South to reduce the already
meagre school facilities of Negroes. We congratulate the South on resisting,
as much as it has, this pressure, and on the many millions it has spent on
Negro education. But it is only fair to point out that Negro taxes and the
Negroes' share of the income from indirect taxes and endowments have
fully repaid this expenditure, so that the Negro public school system has not
in all probability cost the white taxpayers a single cent since the war.

"This is not fair. Negro schools should be a public burden, since they are a
public benefit. The Negro has a right to demand good common school
training at the hands of the States and the Nation since by their fault he is
not in position to pay for this himself."
What is the chief need for the building up of the Negro public school in the
South? The Negro race in the South needs teachers to-day above all else.
This is the concurrent testimony of all who know the situation. For the
supply of this great demand two things are needed—institutions of higher
education and money for school houses and salaries. It is usually assumed
that a hundred or more institutions for Negro training are to-day turning out
so many teachers and college-bred men that the race is threatened with an
over-supply. This is sheer nonsense. There are to-day less than 3,000 living
Negro college graduates in the United States, and less than 1,000 Negroes
in college. Moreover, in the 164 schools for Negroes, 95 per cent. of their
students are doing elementary and secondary work, work which should be
done in the public schools. Over half the remaining 2,157 students are
taking high school studies. The mass of so-called "normal" schools for the
Negro, are simply doing elementary common school work, or, at most, high
school work, with a little instruction in methods. The Negro colleges and
the post-graduate courses at other institutions are the only agencies for the
broader and more careful training of teachers. The work of these institutions
is hampered for lack of funds. It is getting increasingly difficult to get funds
for training teachers in the best modern methods, and yet all over the South,
from State Superintendents, county officials, city boards and school
principals comes the wail, "We need TEACHERS!" and teachers must be
trained. As the fairest minded of all white Southerners, Atticus G. Haygood,
once said: "The defects of colored teachers are so great as to create an
urgent necessity for training better ones. Their excellencies and their
successes are sufficient to justify the best hopes of success in the effort, and
to vindicate the judgment of those who make large investments of money
and service, to give to colored students opportunity for thoroughly
preparing themselves for the work of teaching children of their people."
The truth of this has been strikingly shown in the marked improvement of
white teachers in the South. Twenty years ago the rank and file of white
public school teachers were not as good as the Negro teachers. But they, by
scholarships and good salaries, have been encouraged to thorough normal

and collegiate preparation, while the Negro teachers have been discouraged
by starvation wages and the idea that any training will do for a black
teacher. If carpenters are needed it is well and good to train men as
carpenters. But to train men as carpenters, and then set them to teaching is
wasteful and criminal; and to train men as teachers and then refuse them
living wages, unless they become carpenters, is rank nonsense.
The United States Commissioner of Education says in his report for 1900:
"For comparison between the white and colored enrollment in secondary
and higher education, I have added together the enrollment in high schools
and secondary schools, with the attendance on colleges and universities, not
being sure of the actual grade of work done in the colleges and universities.
The work done in the secondary schools is reported in such detail in this
office, that there can be no doubt of its grade."
He then makes the following comparisons of persons in every million
enrolled in secondary and higher education:

Whole Country.Negroes.
1880 4,362 1,289
1900 10,743 2,061

And he concludes: "While the number in colored high schools and colleges
had increased somewhat faster than the population, it had not kept pace
with the average of the whole country, for it had fallen from 30 per cent. to
24 per cent. of the average quota. Of all colored pupils, one (1) in one
hundred was engaged in secondary and higher work, and that ratio has
continued substantially for the past twenty years. If the ratio of colored
population in secondary and higher education is to be equal to the average
for the whole country, it must be increased to five times its present
average." And if this be true of the secondary and higher education, it is
safe to say that the Negro has not one-tenth his quota in college studies.
How baseless, therefore, is the charge of too much training! We need Negro
teachers for the Negro common schools, and we need first-class normal
schools and colleges to train them. This is the work of higher Negro
education and it must be done.

Further than this, after being provided with group leaders of civilization,
and a foundation of intelligence in the public schools, the carpenter, in order
to be a man, needs technical skill. This calls for trade schools. Now trade
schools are not nearly such simple things as people once thought. The
original idea was that the "Industrial" school was to furnish education,
practically free, to those willing to work for it; it was to "do" things—i.e.:
become a center of productive industry, it was to be partially, if not wholly,
self-supporting, and it was to teach trades. Admirable as were some of the
ideas underlying this scheme, the whole thing simply would not work in
practice; it was found that if you were to use time and material to teach
trades thoroughly, you could not at the same time keep the industries on a
commercial basis and make them pay. Many schools started out to do this
on a large scale and went into virtual bankruptcy. Moreover, it was found
also that it was possible to teach a boy a trade mechanically, without giving
him the full educative benefit of the process, and, vice versa, that there was
a distinctive educative value in teaching a boy to use his hands and eyes in
carrying out certain physical processes, even though he did not actually
learn a trade. It has happened, therefore, in the last decade, that a noticeable
change has come over the industrial schools. In the first place the idea of
commercially remunerative industry in a school is being pushed rapidly to
the back-ground. There are still schools with shops and farms that bring an
income, and schools that use student labor partially for the erection of their
buildings and the furnishing of equipment. It is coming to be seen, however,
in the education of the Negro, as clearly as it has been seen in the education
of the youths the world over, that it is the boy and not the material product,
that is the true object of education. Consequently the object of the industrial
school came to be the thorough training of boys regardless of the cost of the
training, so long as it was thoroughly well done.
Even at this point, however, the difficulties were not surmounted. In the
first place modern industry has taken great strides since the war, and the
teaching of trades is no longer a simple matter. Machinery and long
processes of work have greatly changed the work of the carpenter, the
ironworker and the shoemaker. A really efficient workman must be to-day
an intelligent man who has had good technical training in addition to
thorough common school, and perhaps even higher training. To meet this
situation the industrial schools began a further development; they

established distinct Trade Schools for the thorough training of better class
artisans, and at the same time they sought to preserve for the purposes of
general education, such of the simpler processes of elementary trade
learning as were best suited therefor. In this differentiation of the Trade
School and manual training, the best of the industrial schools simply
followed the plain trend of the present educational epoch. A prominent
educator tells us that, in Sweden, "In the beginning the economic
conception was generally adopted, and everywhere manual training was
looked upon as a means of preparing the children of the common people to
earn their living. But gradually it came to be recognized that manual
training has a more elevated purpose, and one, indeed, more useful in the
deeper meaning of the term. It came to be considered as an educative
process for the complete moral, physical and intellectual development of
the child."
Thus, again, in the manning of trade schools and manual training schools
we are thrown back upon the higher training as its source and chief support.
There was a time when any aged and wornout carpenter could teach in a
trade school. But not so to-day. Indeed the demand for college-bred men by
a school like Tuskegee, ought to make Mr. Booker T. Washington the
firmest friend of higher training. Here he has as helpers the son of a Negro
senator, trained in Greek and the humanities, and graduated at Harvard; the
son of a Negro congressman and lawyer, trained in Latin and mathematics,
and graduated at Oberlin; he has as his wife, a woman who read Virgil and
Homer in the same class room with me; he has as college chaplain, a
classical graduate of Atlanta University; as teacher of science, a graduate of
Fisk; as teacher of history, a graduate of Smith,—indeed some thirty of his
chief teachers are college graduates, and instead of studying French
grammars in the midst of weeds, or buying pianos for dirty cabins, they are
at Mr. Washington's right hand helping him in a noble work. And yet one of
the effects of Mr. Washington's propaganda has been to throw doubt upon
the expediency of such training for Negroes, as these persons have had.

Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race
transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether you

like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not
lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are the levers to
uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals
and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must
teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of
thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do
this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all
other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.

The Disfranchisement of the Negro
By CHARLES W. CHESNUTT

In this paper the author presents a straightforward statement of facts
concerning the disfranchisement of the Negro in the Southern States.
Mr. Chesnutt, who is too well known as a writer to need any
introduction to an American audience, puts the case for the Negro to
the American people very plainly, and spares neither the North nor the
South.

CHARLES W. CHESNUTT.
The right of American citizens of African descent, commonly called
Negroes, to vote upon the same terms as other citizens of the United States,
is plainly declared and firmly fixed by the Constitution. No such person is
called upon to present reasons why he should possess this right: that
question is foreclosed by the Constitution. The object of the elective
franchise is to give representation. So long as the Constitution retains its
present form, any State Constitution, or statute, which seeks, by juggling
the ballot, to deny the colored race fair representation, is a clear violation of

the fundamental law of the land, and a corresponding injustice to those thus
deprived of this right.
For thirty-five years this has been the law. As long as it was measurably
respected, the colored people made rapid strides in education, wealth,
character and self-respect. This the census proves, all statements to the
contrary notwithstanding. A generation has grown to manhood and
womanhood under the great, inspiring freedom conferred by the
Constitution and protected by the right of suffrage—protected in large
degree by the mere naked right, even when its exercise was hindered or
denied by unlawful means. They have developed, in every Southern
community, good citizens, who, if sustained and encouraged by just laws
and liberal institutions, would greatly augment their number with the
passing years, and soon wipe out the reproach of ignorance, unthrift, low
morals and social inefficiency, thrown at them indiscriminately and
therefore unjustly, and made the excuse for the equally undiscriminating
contempt of their persons and their rights. They have reduced their illiteracy
nearly 50 per cent. Excluded from the institutions of higher learning in their
own States, their young men hold their own, and occasionally carry away
honors, in the universities of the North. They have accumulated three
hundred million dollars worth of real and personal property. Individuals
among them have acquired substantial wealth, and several have attained to
something like national distinction in art, letters and educational leadership.
They are numerously represented in the learned professions. Heavily
handicapped, they have made such rapid progress that the suspicion is
justified that their advancement, rather than any stagnation or retrogression,
is the true secret of the virulent Southern hostility to their rights, which has
so influenced Northern opinion that it stands mute, and leaves the colored
people, upon whom the North conferred liberty, to the tender mercies of
those who have always denied their fitness for it.
It may be said, in passing, that the word "Negro," where used in this paper,
is used solely for convenience. By the census of 1890 there were 1,000,000
colored people in the country who were half, or more than half, white, and
logically there must be, as in fact there are, so many who share the white
blood in some degree, as to justify the assertion that the race problem in the
United States concerns the welfare and the status of a mixed race. Their
rights are not one whit the more sacred because of this fact; but in an

argument where injustice is sought to be excused because of fundamental
differences of race, it is well enough to bear in mind that the race whose
rights and liberties are endangered all over this country by disfranchisement
at the South, are the colored people who live in the United States to-day,
and not the low-browed, man-eating savage whom the Southern white likes
to set upon a block and contrast with Shakespeare and Newton and
Washington and Lincoln.
Despite and in defiance of the Federal Constitution, to-day in the six
Southern States of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, South
Carolina and Virginia, containing an aggregate colored population of about
6,000,000, these have been, to all intents and purposes, denied, so far as the
States can effect it, the right to vote. This disfranchisement is accomplished
by various methods, devised with much transparent ingenuity, the effort
being in each instance to violate the spirit of the Federal Constitution by
disfranchising the Negro, while seeming to respect its letter by avoiding the
mention of race or color.
These restrictions fall into three groups. The first comprises a property
qualification—the ownership of $300 worth or more of real or personal
property (Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia and South Carolina); the payment
of a poll tax (Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia); an educational
qualification—the ability to read and write (Alabama, Louisiana, North
Carolina). Thus far, those who believe in a restricted suffrage everywhere,
could perhaps find no reasonable fault with any one of these qualifications,
applied either separately or together.
But the Negro has made such progress that these restrictions alone would
perhaps not deprive him of effective representation. Hence the second
group. This comprises an "understanding" clause—the applicant must be
able "to read, or understand when read to him, any clause in the
Constitution" (Mississippi), or to read and explain, or to understand and
explain when read to him, any section of the Constitution (Virginia); an
employment qualification—the voter must be regularly employed in some
lawful occupation (Alabama); a character qualification—the voter must be a
person of good character and who "understands the duties and obligations
of citizens under a republican (!) form of government" (Alabama).

The qualifications under the first group it will be seen, are capable of exact
demonstration; those under the second group are left to the discretion and
judgment of the registering officer—for in most instances these are all
requirements for registration, which must precede voting.
But the first group, by its own force, and the second group, under
imaginable conditions, might exclude not only the Negro vote, but a large
part of the white vote. Hence, the third group, which comprises: a military
service qualification—any man who went to war, willingly or unwillingly,
in a good cause or a bad, is entitled to register (Ala., Va.); a prescriptive
qualification, under which are included all male persons who were entitled
to vote on January 1, 1867, at which date the Negro had not yet been given
the right to vote; a hereditary qualification, (the so-called "grandfather"
clause), whereby any son (Va.), or descendant (Ala.), of a soldier, and
(N.C.) the descendant of any person who had the right to vote on January 1,
1867, inherits that right. If the voter wish to take advantage of these last
provisions, which are in the nature of exceptions to a general rule, he must
register within a stated time, whereupon he becomes a member of a
privileged class of permanently enrolled voters not subject to any of the
other restrictions.
It will be seen that these restrictions are variously combined in the different
States, and it is apparent that if combined to their declared end, practically
every Negro may, under color of law, be denied the right to vote, and
practically every white man accorded that right. The effectiveness of these
provisions to exclude the Negro vote is proved by the Alabama registration
under the new State Constitution. Out of a total, by the census of 1900, of
181,471 Negro "males of voting age," less than 3,000 are registered; in
Montgomery county alone, the seat of the State capital, where there are
7,000 Negro males of voting age, only 47 have been allowed to register,
while in several counties not one single Negro is permitted to exercise the
franchise.
These methods of disfranchisement have stood such tests as the United
States Courts, including the Supreme Court, have thus far seen fit to apply,
in such cases as have been before them for adjudication. These include a
case based upon the "understanding" clause of the Mississippi Constitution,
in which the Supreme Court held, in effect, that since there was no

ambiguity in the language employed and the Negro was not directly named,
the Court would not go behind the wording of the Constitution to find a
meaning which discriminated against the colored voter; and the recent case
of Jackson vs. Giles, brought by a colored citizen of Montgomery, Alabama,
in which the Supreme Court confesses itself impotent to provide a remedy
for what, by inference, it acknowledges may be a "great political wrong,"
carefully avoiding, however, to state that it is a wrong, although the vital
prayer of the petition was for a decision upon this very point.
Now, what is the effect of this wholesale disfranchisement of colored men,
upon their citizenship. The value of food to the human organism is not
measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its entire
deprivation. Whether a class of citizens should vote, even if not always
wisely—what class does?—may best be determined by considering their
condition when they are without the right to vote.
The colored people are left, in the States where they have been
disfranchised, absolutely without representation, direct or indirect, in any
law-making body, in any court of justice, in any branch of government—for
the feeble remnant of voters left by law is so inconsiderable as to be without
a shadow of power. Constituting one-eighth of the population of the whole
country, two-fifths of the whole Southern people, and a majority in several
States, they are not able, because disfranchised where most numerous, to
send one representative to the Congress, which, by the decision in the
Alabama case, is held by the Supreme Court to be the only body, outside of
the State itself, competent to give relief from a great political wrong. By
former decisions of the same tribunal, even Congress is impotent to protect
their civil rights, the Fourteenth Amendment having long since, by the
consent of the same Court, been in many respects as completely nullified as
the Fifteenth Amendment is now sought to be. They have no direct
representation in any Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the
choice of white men who might be friendly to their rights. Nor are they able
to influence the election of judges or other public officials, to whom are
entrusted the protection of their lives, their liberties and their property. No
judge is rendered careful, no sheriff diligent, for fear that he may offend a
black constituency; the contrary is most lamentably true; day after day the
catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext,
grows longer and more appalling. The country stands face to face with the

revival of slavery; at the moment of this writing a federal grand jury in
Alabama is uncovering a system of peonage established under cover of law.
Under the Southern program it is sought to exclude colored men from every
grade of the public service; not only from the higher administrative
functions, to which few of them would in any event, for a long time aspire,
but from the lowest as well. A Negro may not be a constable or a
policeman. He is subjected by law to many degrading discriminations. He is
required to be separated from white people on railroads and street cars, and,
by custom, debarred from inns and places of public entertainment. His
equal right to a free public education is constantly threatened and is
nowhere equitably recognized. In Georgia, as has been shown by Dr.
DuBois, where the law provides for a pro rata distribution of the public
school fund between the races, and where the colored school population is
48 per cent. of the total, the amount of the fund devoted to their schools is
only 20 per cent. In New Orleans, with an immense colored population,
many of whom are persons of means and culture, all colored public schools
above the fifth grade have been abolished.
The Negro is subjected to taxation without representation, which the
forefathers of this Republic made the basis of a bloody revolution.
Flushed with their local success, and encouraged by the timidity of the
Courts and the indifference of public opinion, the Southern whites have
carried their campaign into the national government, with an ominous
degree of success. If they shall have their way, no Negro can fill any federal
office, or occupy, in the public service, any position that is not menial. This
is not an inference, but the openly, passionately avowed sentiment of the
white South. The right to employment in the public service is an
exceedingly valuable one, for which white men have struggled and fought.
A vast army of men are employed in the administration of public affairs.
Many avenues of employment are closed to colored men by popular
prejudice. If their right to public employment is recognized, and the way to
it open through the civil service, or the appointing power, or the suffrages of
the people, it will prove, as it has already, a strong incentive to effort and a
powerful lever for advancement. Its value to the Negro, like that of the right
to vote, may be judged by the eagerness of the whites to deprive him of it.

Not only is the Negro taxed without representation in the States referred to,
but he pays, through the tariff and internal revenue, a tax to a National
government whose supreme judicial tribunal declares that it cannot, through
the executive arm, enforce its own decrees, and, therefore, refuses to pass
upon a question, squarely before it, involving a basic right of citizenship.
For the decision of the Supreme Court in the Giles case, if it foreshadows
the attitude which the Court will take upon other cases to the same general
end which will soon come before it, is scarcely less than a reaffirmation of
the Dred Scott decision; it certainly amounts to this—that in spite of the
Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political
rights which the States are bound to respect. To say this much is to say that
all the privileges and immunities which Negroes henceforth enjoy, must be
by favor of the whites; they are not rights. The whites have so declared;
they proclaim that the country is theirs, that the Negro should be thankful
that he has so much, when so much more might be withheld from him. He
stands upon a lower footing than any alien; he has no government to which
he may look for protection.
Moreover, the white South sends to Congress, on a basis including the
Negro population, a delegation nearly twice as large as it is justly entitled
to, and one which may always safely be relied upon to oppose in Congress
every measure which seeks to protect the equality, or to enlarge the rights of
colored citizens. The grossness of this injustice is all the more apparent
since the Supreme Court, in the Alabama case referred to, has declared the
legislative and political department of the government to be the only power
which can right a political wrong. Under this decision still further attacks
upon the liberties of the citizen may be confidently expected. Armed with
the Negro's sole weapon of defense, the white South stands ready to smite
down his rights. The ballot was first given to the Negro to defend him
against this very thing. He needs it now far more than then, and for even
stronger reasons. The 9,000,000 free colored people of to-day have vastly
more to defend than the 3,000,000 hapless blacks who had just emerged
from slavery. If there be those who maintain that it was a mistake to give
the Negro the ballot at the time and in the manner in which it was given, let
them take to heart this reflection: that to deprive him of it to-day, or to so
restrict it as to leave him utterly defenseless against the present relentless
attitude of the South toward his rights, will prove to be a mistake so much

greater than the first, as to be no less than a crime, from which not alone the
Southern Negro must suffer, but for which the nation will as surely pay the
penalty as it paid for the crime of slavery. Contempt for law is death to a
republic, and this one has developed alarming symptoms of the disease.
And now, having thus robbed the Negro of every political and civil right,
the white South, in palliation of its course, makes a great show of
magnanimity in leaving him, as the sole remnant of what he acquired
through the Civil War, a very inadequate public school education, which, by
the present program, is to be directed mainly towards making him a better
agricultural laborer. Even this is put forward as a favor, although the
Negro's property is taxed to pay for it, and his labor as well. For it is a well
settled principle of political economy, that land and machinery of
themselves produce nothing, and that labor indirectly pays its fair
proportion of the tax upon the public's wealth. The white South seems to
stand to the Negro at present as one, who, having been reluctantly
compelled to release another from bondage, sees him stumbling forward
and upward, neglected by his friends and scarcely yet conscious of his own
strength; seizes him, binds him, and having bereft him of speech, of sight
and of manhood, "yokes him with the mule" and exclaims, with a show of
virtue which ought to deceive no one: "Behold how good a friend I am of
yours! Have I not left you a stomach and a pair of arms, and will I not
generously permit you to work for me with the one, that you may thereby
gain enough to fill the other? A brain you do not need. We will relieve you
of any responsibility that might seem to demand such an organ."
The argument of peace-loving Northern white men and Negro opportunists
that the political power of the Negro having long ago been suppressed by
unlawful means, his right to vote is a mere paper right, of no real value, and
therefore to be lightly yielded for the sake of a hypothetical harmony, is
fatally short-sighted. It is precisely the attitude and essentially the argument
which would have surrendered to the South in the sixties, and would have
left this country to rot in slavery for another generation. White men do not
thus argue concerning their own rights. They know too well the value of
ideals. Southern white men see too clearly the latent power of these
unexercised rights. If the political power of the Negro was a nullity because
of his ignorance and lack of leadership, why were they not content to leave
it so, with the pleasing assurance that if it ever became effective, it would

be because the Negroes had grown fit for its exercise? On the contrary, they
have not rested until the possibility of its revival was apparently headed off
by new State Constitutions. Nor are they satisfied with this. There is no
doubt that an effort will be made to secure the repeal of the Fifteenth
Amendment, and thus forestall the development of the wealthy and
educated Negro, whom the South seems to anticipate as a greater menace
than the ignorant ex-slave. However improbable this repeal may seem, it is
not a subject to be lightly dismissed; for it is within the power of the white
people of the nation to do whatever they wish in the premises—they did it
once; they can do it again. The Negro and his friends should see to it that
the white majority shall never wish to do anything to his hurt. There still
stands, before the Negro-hating whites of the South, the specter of a
Supreme Court which will interpret the Constitution to mean what it says,
and what those who enacted it meant, and what the nation, which ratified it,
understood, and which will find power, in a nation which goes beyond seas
to administer the affairs of distant peoples, to enforce its own fundamental
laws; the specter, too, of an aroused public opinion which will compel
Congress and the Courts to preserve the liberties of the Republic, which are
the liberties of the people. To wilfully neglect the suffrage, to hold it lightly,
is to tamper with a sacred right; to yield it for anything else whatever is
simply suicidal. Dropping the element of race, disfranchisement is no more
than to say to the poor and poorly taught, that they must relinquish the right
to defend themselves against oppression until they shall have become rich
and learned, in competition with those already thus favored and possessing
the ballot in addition. This is not the philosophy of history. The growth of
liberty has been the constant struggle of the poor against the privileged
classes; and the goal of that struggle has ever been the equality of all men
before the law. The Negro who would yield this right, deserves to be a
slave; he has the servile spirit. The rich and the educated can, by virtue of
their influence, command many votes; can find other means of protection;
the poor man has but one, he should guard it as a sacred treasure. Long ago,
by fair treatment, the white leaders of the South might have bound the
Negro to themselves with hoops of steel. They have not chosen to take this
course, but by assuming from the beginning an attitude hostile to his rights,
have never gained his confidence, and now seek by foul means to destroy
where they have never sought by fair means to control.

I have spoken of the effect of disfranchisement upon the colored race; it is
to the race as a whole, that the argument of the problem is generally
directed. But the unit of society in a republic is the individual, and not the
race, the failure to recognize this fact being the fundamental error which has
beclouded the whole discussion. The effect of disfranchisement upon the
individual is scarcely less disastrous. I do not speak of the moral effect of
injustice upon those who suffer from it; I refer rather to the practical
consequences which may be appreciated by any mind. No country is free in
which the way upward is not open for every man to try, and for every
properly qualified man to attain whatever of good the community life may
offer. Such a condition does not exist, at the South, even in theory, for any
man of color. In no career can such a man compete with white men upon
equal terms. He must not only meet the prejudice of the individual, not only
the united prejudice of the white community; but lest some one should wish
to treat him fairly, he is met at every turn with some legal prohibition which
says, "Thou shalt not," or "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." But the
Negro race is viable; it adapts itself readily to circumstances; and being thus
adaptable, there is always the temptation to

"Crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,
Where thrift may follow fawning."

He who can most skilfully balance himself upon the advancing or receding
wave of white opinion concerning his race, is surest of such measure of
prosperity as is permitted to men of dark skins. There are Negro teachers in
the South—the privilege of teaching in their own schools is the one
respectable branch of the public service still left open to them—who, for a
grudging appropriation from a Southern legislature, will decry their own
race, approve their own degradation, and laud their oppressors. Deprived of
the right to vote, and, therefore, of any power to demand what is their due,
they feel impelled to buy the tolerance of the whites at any sacrifice. If to
live is the first duty of man, as perhaps it is the first instinct, then those who
thus stoop to conquer may be right. But is it needful to stoop so low, and if
so, where lies the ultimate responsibility for this abasement?
I shall say nothing about the moral effect of disfranchisement upon the
white people, or upon the State itself. What slavery made of the Southern
whites is a matter of history. The abolition of slavery gave the South an

opportunity to emerge from barbarism. Present conditions indicate that the
spirit which dominated slavery still curses the fair section over which that
institution spread its blight.
And now, is the situation remediless? If not so, where lies the remedy? First
let us take up those remedies suggested by the men who approve of
disfranchisement, though they may sometimes deplore the method, or regret
the necessity.
Time, we are told, heals all diseases, rights all wrongs, and is the only cure
for this one. It is a cowardly argument. These people are entitled to their
rights to-day, while they are yet alive to enjoy them; and it is poor
statesmanship and worse morals to nurse a present evil and thrust it forward
upon a future generation for correction. The nation can no more honestly do
this than it could thrust back upon a past generation the responsibility for
slavery. It had to meet that responsibility; it ought to meet this one.
Education has been put forward as the great corrective—preferably
industrial education. The intellect of the whites is to be educated to the
point where they will so appreciate the blessings of liberty and equality, as
of their own motion to enlarge and defend the Negro's rights. The Negroes,
on the other hand, are to be so trained as to make them, not equal with the
whites in any way—God save the mark! this would be unthinkable!—but so
useful to the community that the whites will protect them rather than to lose
their valuable services. Some few enthusiasts go so far as to maintain that
by virtue of education the Negro will, in time, become strong enough to
protect himself against any aggression of the whites; this, it may be said, is
a strictly Northern view.
It is not quite clearly apparent how education alone, in the ordinary
meaning of the word, is to solve, in any appreciable time, the problem of
the relations of Southern white and black people. The need of education of
all kinds for both races is wofully apparent. But men and nations have been
free without being learned, and there have been educated slaves. Liberty has
been known to languish where culture had reached a very high
development. Nations do not first become rich and learned and then free,
but the lesson of history has been that they first become free and then rich
and learned, and oftentimes fall back into slavery again because of too great

wealth, and the resulting luxury and carelessness of civic virtues. The
process of education has been going on rapidly in the Southern States since
the Civil War, and yet, if we take superficial indications, the rights of the
Negroes are at a lower ebb than at any time during the thirty-five years of
their freedom, and the race prejudice more intense and uncompromising. It
is not apparent that educated Southerners are less rancorous than others in
their speech concerning the Negro, or less hostile in their attitude toward his
rights. It is their voice alone that we have heard in this discussion; and if, as
they state, they are liberal in their views as compared with the more
ignorant whites, then God save the Negro!
I was told, in so many words, two years ago, by the Superintendent of
Public Schools of a Southern city that "there was no place in the modern
world for the Negro, except under the ground." If gentlemen holding such
opinions are to instruct the white youth of the South, would it be at all
surprising if these, later on, should devote a portion of their leisure to the
improvement of civilization by putting under the ground as many of this
superfluous race as possible?
The sole excuse made in the South for the prevalent injustice to the Negro
is the difference in race, and the inequalities and antipathies resulting
therefrom. It has nowhere been declared as a part of the Southern program
that the Negro, when educated, is to be given a fair representation in
government or an equal opportunity in life; the contrary has been
strenuously asserted; education can never make of him anything but a
Negro, and, therefore, essentially inferior, and not to be safely trusted with
any degree of power. A system of education which would tend to soften the
asperities and lessen the inequalities between the races would be of
inestimable value. An education which by a rigid separation of the races
from the kindergarten to the university, fosters this racial antipathy, and is
directed toward emphasizing the superiority of one class and the inferiority
of another, might easily have disastrous, rather than beneficial results. It
would render the oppressing class more powerful to injure, the oppressed
quicker to perceive and keener to resent the injury, without proportionate
power of defense. The same assimilative education which is given at the
North to all children alike, whereby native and foreign, black and white, are
taught side by side in every grade of instruction, and are compelled by the
exigencies of discipline to keep their prejudices in abeyance, and are given

the opportunity to learn and appreciate one another's good qualities, and to
establish friendly relations which may exist throughout life, is absent from
the Southern system of education, both of the past and as proposed for the
future. Education is in a broad sense a remedy for all social ills; but the
disease we have to deal with now is not only constitutional but acute. A
wise physician does not simply give a tonic for a diseased limb, or a high
fever; the patient might be dead before the constitutional remedy could
become effective. The evils of slavery, its injury to whites and blacks, and
to the body politic, was clearly perceived and acknowledged by the
educated leaders of the South as far back as the Revolutionary War and the
Constitutional Convention, and yet they made no effort to abolish it. Their
remedy was the same—time, education, social and economic development;
—and yet a bloody war was necessary to destroy slavery and put its spirit
temporarily to sleep. When the South and its friends are ready to propose a
system of education which will recognize and teach the equality of all men
before the law, the potency of education alone to settle the race problem
will be more clearly apparent.
At present even good Northern men, who wish to educate the Negroes, feel
impelled to buy this privilege from the none too eager white South, by
conceding away the civil and political rights of those whom they would
benefit. They have, indeed, gone farther than the Southerners themselves in
approving the disfranchisement of the colored race. Most Southern men,
now that they have carried their point and disfranchised the Negro, are
willing to admit, in the language of a recent number of the Charleston
Evening Post, that "the attitude of the Southern white man toward the
Negro is incompatible with the fundamental ideas of the republic." It
remained for our Clevelands and Abbotts and Parkhursts to assure them that
their unlawful course was right and justifiable, and for the most
distinguished Negro leader to declare that "every revised Constitution
throughout the Southern States has put a premium upon intelligence,
ownership of property, thrift and character." So does every penitentiary
sentence put a premium upon good conduct; but it is poor consolation to the
one unjustly condemned, to be told that he may shorten his sentence
somewhat by good behavior. Dr. Booker T. Washington, whose language is
quoted above, has, by his eminent services in the cause of education, won
deserved renown. If he has seemed, at times, to those jealous of the best

things for their race, to decry the higher education, it can easily be borne in
mind that his career is bound up in the success of an industrial school;
hence any undue stress which he may put upon that branch of education
may safely be ascribed to the natural zeal of the promoter, without
detracting in any degree from the essential value of his teachings in favor of
manual training, thrift and character-building. But Mr. Washington's
prominence as an educational leader, among a race whose prominent
leaders are so few, has at times forced him, perhaps reluctantly, to express
himself in regard to the political condition of his people, and here his
utterances have not always been so wise nor so happy. He has declared
himself in favor of a restricted suffrage, which at present means, for his
own people, nothing less than complete loss of representation—indeed it is
only in that connection that the question has been seriously mooted; and he
has advised them to go slow in seeking to enforce their civil and political
rights, which, in effect, means silent submission to injustice. Southern white
men may applaud this advice as wise, because it fits in with their purposes;
but Senator McEnery of Louisiana, in a recent article in the Independent,
voices the Southern white opinion of such acquiescence when he says:
"What other race would have submitted so many years to slavery without
complaint? What other race would have submitted so quietly to
disfranchisement? These facts stamp his (the Negro's) inferiority to the
white race." The time to philosophize about the good there is in evil, is not
while its correction is still possible, but, if at all, after all hope of correction
is past. Until then it calls for nothing but rigorous condemnation. To try to
read any good thing into these fraudulent Southern constitutions, or to
accept them as an accomplished fact, is to condone a crime against one's
race. Those who commit crime should bear the odium. It is not a pleasing
spectacle to see the robbed applaud the robber. Silence were better.
It has become fashionable to question the wisdom of the Fifteenth
Amendment. I believe it to have been an act of the highest statesmanship,
based upon the fundamental idea of this Republic, entirely justified by
conditions; experimental in its nature, perhaps, as every new thing must be,
but just in principle; a choice between methods, of which it seemed to the
great statesmen of that epoch the wisest and the best, and essentially the
most just, bearing in mind the interests of the freedmen and the Nation, as
well as the feelings of the Southern whites; never fairly tried, and therefore,

not yet to be justly condemned. Not one of those who condemn it, has been
able, even in the light of subsequent events, to suggest a better method by
which the liberty and civil rights of the freedmen and their descendants
could have been protected. Its abandonment, as I have shown, leaves this
liberty and these rights frankly without any guaranteed protection. All the
education which philanthropy or the State could offer as a substitute for
equality of rights, would be a poor exchange; there is no defensible reason
why they should not go hand in hand, each encouraging and strengthening
the other. The education which one can demand as a right is likely to do
more good than the education for which one must sue as a favor.
The chief argument against Negro suffrage, the insistently proclaimed
argument, worn threadbare in Congress, on the platform, in the pulpit, in the
press, in poetry, in fiction, in impassioned rhetoric, is the reconstruction
period. And yet the evils of that period were due far more to the venality
and indifference of white men than to the incapacity of black voters. The
revised Southern Constitutions adopted under reconstruction reveal a higher
statesmanship than any which preceded or have followed them, and prove
that the freed voters could as easily have been led into the paths of civic
righteousness as into those of misgovernment. Certain it is that under
reconstruction the civil and political rights of all men were more secure in
those States than they have ever been since. We will hear less of the evils of
reconstruction, now that the bugaboo has served its purpose by
disfranchising the Negro, it will be laid aside for a time while the nation
discusses the political corruption of great cities; the scandalous conditions
in Rhode Island; the evils attending reconstruction in the Philippines, and
the scandals in the postoffice department—for none of which, by the way, is
the Negro charged with any responsibility, and for none of which is the
restriction of the suffrage a remedy seriously proposed. Rhode Island is
indeed the only Northern State which has a property qualification for the
franchise!
There are three tribunals to which the colored people may justly appeal for
the protection of their rights: the United States Courts, Congress and public
opinion. At present all three seem mainly indifferent to any question of
human rights under the Constitution. Indeed, Congress and the Courts
merely follow public opinion, seldom lead it. Congress never enacts a
measure which is believed to oppose public opinion;—your Congressman

keeps his ear to the ground. The high, serene atmosphere of the Courts is
not impervious to its voice; they rarely enforce a law contrary to public
opinion, even the Supreme Court being able, as Charles Sumner once put it,
to find a reason for every decision it may wish to render; or, as experience
has shown, a method to evade any question which it cannot decently decide
in accordance with public opinion. The art of straddling is not confined to
the political arena. The Southern situation has been well described by a
colored editor in Richmond: "When we seek relief at the hands of Congress,
we are informed that our plea involves a legal question, and we are referred
to the Courts. When we appeal to the Courts, we are gravely told that the
question is a political one, and that we must go to Congress. When
Congress enacts remedial legislation, our enemies take it to the Supreme
Court, which promptly declares it unconstitutional." The Negro might chase
his rights round and round this circle until the end of time, without finding
any relief.
Yet the Constitution is clear and unequivocal in its terms, and no Supreme
Court can indefinitely continue to construe it as meaning anything but what
it says. This Court should be bombarded with suits until it makes some
definite pronouncement, one way or the other, on the broad question of the
constitutionality of the disfranchising Constitutions of the Southern States.
The Negro and his friends will then have a clean-cut issue to take to the
forum of public opinion, and a distinct ground upon which to demand
legislation for the enforcement of the Federal Constitution. The case from
Alabama was carried to the Supreme Court expressly to determine the
constitutionality of the Alabama Constitution. The Court declared itself
without jurisdiction, and in the same breath went into the merits of the case
far enough to deny relief, without passing upon the real issue. Had it said,
as it might with absolute justice and perfect propriety, that the Alabama
Constitution is a bold and impudent violation of the Fifteenth Amendment,
the purpose of the lawsuit would have been accomplished and a righteous
cause vastly strengthened.
But public opinion cannot remain permanently indifferent to so vital a
question. The agitation is already on. It is at present largely academic, but is
slowly and resistlessly, forcing itself into politics, which is the medium
through which republics settle such questions. It cannot much longer be
contemptuously or indifferently elbowed aside. The South itself seems bent

upon forcing the question to an issue, as, by its arrogant assumptions, it
brought on the Civil War. From that section, too, there come now and then,
side by side with tales of Southern outrage, excusing voices, which at the
same time are accusing voices; which admit that the white South is dealing
with the Negro unjustly and unwisely; that the Golden Rule has been
forgotten; that the interests of white men alone have been taken into
account, and that their true interests as well are being sacrificed. There is a
silent white South, uneasy in conscience, darkened in counsel, groping for
the light, and willing to do the right. They are as yet a feeble folk, their
voices scarcely audible above the clamor of the mob. May their convictions
ripen into wisdom, and may their numbers and their courage increase! If the
class of Southern white men of whom Judge Jones of Alabama, is so noble
a representative, are supported and encouraged by a righteous public
opinion at the North, they may, in time, become the dominant white South,
and we may then look for wisdom and justice in the place where, so far as
the Negro is concerned, they now seem well-nigh strangers. But even these
gentlemen will do well to bear in mind that so long as they discriminate in
any way against the Negro's equality of right, so long do they set class
against class and open the door to every sort of discrimination. There can be
no middle ground between justice and injustice, between the citizen and the
serf.
It is not likely that the North, upon the sober second thought, will permit the
dearly-bought results of the Civil War to be nullified by any change in the
Constitution. As long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the rights of
colored citizens are ultimately secure. There were would-be despots in
England after the granting of Magna Charta; but it outlived them all, and
the liberties of the English people are secure. There was slavery in this land
after the Declaration of Independence, yet the faces of those who love
liberty have ever turned to that immortal document. So will the Constitution
and its principles outlive the prejudices which would seek to overthrow it.
What colored men of the South can do to secure their citizenship to-day, or
in the immediate future, is not very clear. Their utterances on political
questions, unless they be to concede away the political rights of their race,
or to soothe the consciences of white men by suggesting that the problem is
insoluble except by some slow remedial process which will become
effectual only in the distant future, are received with scant respect—could

scarcely, indeed, be otherwise received, without a voting constituency to
back them up,—and must be cautiously made, lest they meet an actively
hostile reception. But there are many colored men at the North, where their
civil and political rights in the main are respected. There every honest man
has a vote, which he may freely cast, and which is reasonably sure to be
fairly counted. When this race develops a sufficient power of combination,
under adequate leadership,—and there are signs already that this time is
near at hand,—the Northern vote can be wielded irresistibly for the defense
of the rights of their Southern brethren.
In the meantime the Northern colored men have the right of free speech,
and they should never cease to demand their rights, to clamor for them, to
guard them jealously, and insistently to invoke law and public sentiment to
maintain them. He who would be free must learn to protect his freedom.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. He who would be respected must
respect himself. The best friend of the Negro is he who would rather see,
within the borders of this republic one million free citizens of that race,
equal before the law, than ten million cringing serfs existing by a
contemptuous sufferance. A race that is willing to survive upon any other
terms is scarcely worthy of consideration.
The direct remedy for the disfranchisement of the Negro lies through
political action. One scarcely sees the philosophy of distinguishing between
a civil and a political right. But the Supreme Court has recognized this
distinction and has designated Congress as the power to right a political
wrong. The Fifteenth Amendment gives Congress power to enforce its
provisions. The power would seem to be inherent in government itself; but
anticipating that the enforcement of the Amendment might involve
difficulty, they made the superorogatory declaration. Moreover, they went
further, and passed laws by which they provided for such enforcement.
These the Supreme Court has so far declared insufficient. It is for Congress
to make more laws. It is for colored men and for white men who are not
content to see the blood-bought results of the Civil War nullified, to urge
and direct public opinion to the point where it will demand stringent
legislation to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This
demand will rest in law, in morals and in true statesmanship; no difficulties
attending it could be worse than the present ignoble attitude of the Nation
toward its own laws and its own ideals—without courage to enforce them,

without conscience to change them, the United States presents the spectacle
of a Nation drifting aimlessly, so far as this vital, National problem is
concerned, upon the sea of irresolution, toward the maelstrom of anarchy.
The right of Congress, under the Fourteenth Amendment, to reduce
Southern representation can hardly be disputed. But Congress has a simpler
and more direct method to accomplish the same end. It is the sole judge of
the qualifications of its own members, and the sole judge of whether any
member presenting his credentials has met those qualifications. It can refuse
to seat any member who comes from a district where voters have been
disfranchised: it can judge for itself whether this has been done, and there is
no appeal from its decision.
If, when it has passed a law, any Court shall refuse to obey its behests, it
can impeach the judges. If any president refuse to lend the executive arm of
the government to the enforcement of the law, it can impeach the president.
No such extreme measures are likely to be necessary for the enforcement of
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—and the Thirteenth, which is
also threatened—but they are mentioned as showing that Congress is
supreme; and Congress proceeds, the House directly, the Senate indirectly,
from the people and is governed by public opinion. If the reduction of
Southern representation were to be regarded in the light of a bargain by
which the Fifteenth Amendment was surrendered, then it might prove fatal
to liberty. If it be inflicted as a punishment and a warning, to be followed by
more drastic measures if not sufficient, it would serve a useful purpose. The
Fifteenth Amendment declares that the right to vote shall not be denied or
abridged on account of color; and any measure adopted by Congress should
look to that end. Only as the power to injure the Negro in Congress is
reduced thereby, would a reduction of representation protect the Negro;
without other measures it would still leave him in the hands of the Southern
whites, who could safely be trusted to make him pay for their humiliation.
Finally, there is, somewhere in the Universe a "Power that works for
righteousness," and that leads men to do justice to one another. To this
power, working upon the hearts and consciences of men, the Negro can
always appeal. He has the right upon his side, and in the end the right will
prevail. The Negro will, in time, attain to full manhood and citizenship
throughout the United States. No better guaranty of this is needed than a

comparison of his present with his past. Toward this he must do his part, as
lies within his power and his opportunity. But it will be, after all, largely a
white man's conflict, fought out in the forum of the public conscience. The
Negro, though eager enough when opportunity offered, had comparatively
little to do with the abolition of slavery, which was a vastly more
formidable task than will be the enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Negro and the Law
By WILFORD H. SMITH

The law and how it is dodged by enactments infringing upon the rights
guaranteed to the freedmen by constitutional amendment. A powerful
plea for justice for the Negro.

WILFORD H. SMITH.
The colored people in the United States are indebted to the beneficent
provisions of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution of the
United States, for the establishment of their freedom and citizenship, and it
is to these mainly they must look for the maintenance of their liberty and
the protection of their civil rights. These amendments followed close upon
the Emancipation Proclamation issued January 1st, 1863, by President
Lincoln, and his call for volunteers, which was answered by more than
three hundred thousand negro soldiers, who, during three years of military
service, helped the Union arms to victory at Appomattox. Standing in the

shadow of the awful calamity and deep distress of the civil war, and grateful
to God for peace and victory over the rebellion, the American people, who
upheld the Union, rose to the sublime heights of doing justice to the former
slaves, who had grown and multiplied with the country from the early
settlement at Jamestown. It looked like an effort to pay them back for their
years of faithfulness and unrequited toil, by not only making them free but
placing them on equal footing with themselves in the fundamental law.
Certainly, they intended at least, that they should have as many rights under
the Constitution as are given to white naturalized citizens who come to this
country from all the nations of Europe.
The 13th amendment provides that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have
been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States or any place subject to
their jurisdiction.
The 14th amendment provides in section one, that all persons born or
naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are
citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside. No State
shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any
person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to
any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.
The 15th amendment provides that the right of citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Chief Justice Waite, in the case of the United States vs. Cruikshank, 92nd
U.S. 542, said:—
"The 14th amendment prohibits a State from denying to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. The equality of the rights of
citizens is a principle of republicanism. Every Republican government is in
duty bound to protect all its citizens in the enjoyment of this principle if
within its power."
The same Chief Justice, in the case of the United States vs. Reese, 92nd
U.S. 214, said:

"The 15th amendment does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone. It
prevents the States or the United States from giving preference in this
particular to one citizen of the United States over another, on account of
race, color or previous condition of servitude. Before its adoption this could
be done. It was as much within the power of a State to exclude citizens of
the United States from voting on account of race and color, as it was on
account of age, property or education. Now it is not."
Notwithstanding the manifest meaning of equality of citizenship contained
in the constitutional amendments, it was found necessary to reinforce them
by a civil rights law, enacted by the Congress of the United States, March
1st, 1875, entitled, "An Act To Protect All Citizens In Their Civil and Legal
Rights." Its preamble and first section are as follows:—Preamble:
"Whereas, it is essential to just government we recognize the equality of all
men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of government in its dealings
with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever
nativity, race, color or persuasion, religious or political, and it being the
appropriate object of legislation to enact great fundamental principles into
law, therefore,
"Be it enacted that all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States
shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations,
advantages, facilities and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or
water, theatres and other places of public amusement, subject only to the
conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to
citizens of every race and color, regardless to any previous condition of
servitude."
The Supreme Court of the United States has held this salutary law
unconstitutional and void as applied to the States, but binding in the District
of Columbia, and the Territories over which the government of the United
States has control.—Civil Rights cases 109 U.S. 63. Since the Supreme
Court's ruling, many Northern and Western States have enacted similar civil
rights laws. Equality of citizenship in the United States suffered a severe
blow when the civil rights bill was struck down by the Supreme Court. The
colored people looked upon the decision as unsound, and prompted by race
prejudice. It was clear that the amendments to the Constitution were
adopted to secure not only their freedom, but their equal civil rights, and by

ratifying the amendments the several States conceded to the Federal
government the power and authority of maintaining not alone their freedom,
but their equal civil rights in the United States as well.
The Federal Supreme Court put a narrow interpretation on the Constitution,
rather than a liberal one in favor of equal rights; in marked contrast to a
recent decision of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New
York in a civil rights case arising under the statute of New York, Burks vs.
Bosso, 81 N.Y. Supp, 384. The New York Supreme Court held this
language: "The liberation of the slaves, and the suppression of the rebellion,
was supplemented by the amendments to the national Constitution
according to the colored people their civil rights and investing them with
citizenship. The amendments indicated a clear purpose to secure equal
rights to the black people with the white race. The legislative intent must
control, and that may be gathered from circumstances inducing the act.
Where that intent has been unvaryingly manifested in one direction, and
that in the prohibition of any discrimination against a large class of citizens,
the courts should not hesitate to keep apace with legislative purpose. We
must remember that the slightest trace of African blood places a man under
the ban of belonging to that race. However respectable and whatever he
may be, he is ostracized socially, and when the policy of the law is against
extending the prohibition of his civil rights, a liberal, rather than a narrow
interpretation should be given to enactments evidencing the intent to
eliminate race discrimination, as far as that can be accomplished by
legislative intervention."
The statutory enactments and recent Constitutions of most of the former
slave-holding States, show that they have never looked with favor upon the
amendments to the national Constitution. They rather regard them as war
measures designed by the North to humiliate and punish the people of those
States lately in rebellion. While in the main they accept the 13th
amendment and concede that the negro should have personal freedom, they
have never been altogether in harmony with the spirit and purposes of the
14th and 15th amendments. There seems to be a distinct and positive fear
on the part of the South that if the negro is given a man's chance, and is
accorded equal civil rights with white men on the juries, on common
carriers, and in public places, that it will in some way lead to his social
equality. This fallacious argument is persisted in, notwithstanding the well-

known fact, that although the Jews are the leaders in the wealth and
commerce of the South, their civil equality has never, except in rare
instances, led to any social intermingling with the Southern whites.
Holding these views the Southern people in 1875, found means to
overcome the Republican majorities in all the re-constructed States, and
practically drove the negroes out of the law-making bodies of all those
States. So that, now in all the Southern States, so far as can be ascertained,
there is not one negro sitting as a representative in any of the law-making
bodies. The next step was to deny them representation on the grand and
petit juries in the State courts, through Jury Commissioners, who excluded
them from the panels.
To be taxed without representation is a serious injustice in a republic whose
foundations are laid upon the principle of "no taxation without
representation." But serious as this phase of the case must appear, infinitely
more serious is the case when we consider the fact that they are likewise
excluded from the grand and petit juries in all the State courts, with the
fewest and rarest exceptions. The courts sit in judgment upon their lives and
liberties, and dispose of their dearest earthly possessions. They are not
entitled to life, liberty or property if the courts should decide they are not,
and yet in this all-important tribunal they are denied all voice, except as
parties and witnesses, and here and there a negro lawyer is permitted to
appear. One vote on the grand jury might prevent an indictment, and save
disgrace and the risk of public trial; while one vote on the petit jury might
save a life or a term of imprisonment, for an innocent person pursued and
persecuted by powerful enemies.
With no voice in the making of the laws, which they are bound to obey, nor
in their administration by the courts, thus tied and helpless, the negroes
were proscribed by a system of legal enactments intended to wholly nullify
the letter and spirit of the war amendments to the national organic law. This
crusade was begun by enacting a system of Jim-Crow car laws in all the
Southern States, so that now the Jim-Crow cars run from the Gulf of
Mexico into the national capital. They are called, "Separate Car Laws,"
providing for separate but equal accommodations for whites and negroes.
Though fair on their face, they are everywhere known to discriminate

against the colored people in their administration, and were intended to
humiliate and degrade them.
Setting apart separate places for negroes on public carriers, is just as
repugnant to the spirit and intent of the national Constitution, as would be a
law compelling all Jews or all Roman Catholics to occupy compartments
specially set apart for them on account of their religion. If these statutes
were not especially aimed at the negro, an arrangement of different fares,
such as first, second and third classes, would have been far more just and
preferable, and would have enabled the refined and exclusive of both races
to avoid the presence of the coarse and vicious, by selecting the more
expensive fare. Still these laws have been upheld by the Federal Supreme
Court, and pronounced not in conflict with the amendments to the
Constitution of the United States.
City ordinances providing for separate street cars for white and colored
passengers, are in force in Atlanta, New Orleans, and in nearly all the cities
of the South. In all the principal cities of Alabama, a certain portion of the
street cars is set apart and marked for negroes. The conductors are clothed
with the authority of determining to what race the passenger belongs, and
may arrest persons refusing to obey his orders. It is often a very difficult
task to determine to what race some passengers belong, there being so many
dark-white persons that might be mistaken for negroes, and persons known
as negroes who are as fair as any white person.
In the State of Georgia, a negro cannot purchase a berth in a sleeping car,
under any circumstances, no matter where his destination, owing to the
following statute enacted December 20th, 1899: "Sleeping car companies,
and all railroads operating sleeping cars in this State, shall separate the
white and colored races, and shall not permit them to occupy the same
compartment; provided, that nothing in this act shall be construed to compel
sleeping car companies or railroads operating sleeping cars, to carry persons
of color in sleeping or parlor cars; provided also, that this act shall not apply
to colored nurses or servants travelling with their employers." The violation
of this statute is a misdemeanor.
Article 45, section 639 of the statutes of Georgia, 1895, makes it a
misdemeanor to keep or confine white and colored convicts together, or to

chain them together going to and from work. There is also a statute in
Georgia requiring that a separate tax list be kept in every county, of the
property of white and colored persons. Both races generally approve the
laws prohibiting inter-marriages between white and colored persons, which
seem to be uniform throughout the Southern States.
Florida seems to have gone a step further than the rest, and by sections 2612
and 2613, Revised Statutes, 1892, it is made a misdemeanor for a white
man and a colored woman, and vice versa, to sleep under the same roof at
night, occupying the same room. Florida is entitled to credit, however, for a
statute making marriages between white and colored persons prior to 1866,
where they continue to live together, valid and binding to all intents and
purposes.
In addition to this forced separation of the races by law, "from the cradle to
the grave," there is yet a sadder and more deplorable separation, in the
almost universal disposition to leave the negroes wholly and severely to
themselves in their home life and religious life, by the white Christian
people of the South, distinctly manifesting no concern in their moral and
religious development.
In Georgia and the Carolinas, and all the Gulf States (except Texas, where
the farm labor is mostly white) the negroes on the farms are held by a
system of laws which prevents them from leaving the plantations, and
enables the landlord to punish them by fine and imprisonment for any
alleged breach of contract. In the administration of these laws they are
virtually made slaves to the landlord, as long as they are in debt, and it is
wholly in the power of the landlord to forever keep them in debt.
By section 355, of the Criminal Code of South Carolina, 1902, it is made a
misdemeanor to violate a contract to work and labor on a farm, subject to a
fine of not less than five dollars, and more than one hundred dollars, or
imprisonment for not less than ten days, or more than thirty. It is also made
a misdemeanor to employ any farm laborer while under contract with
another, or to persuade or entice a farm laborer to leave his employer.
The Georgia laws are a little stronger in this respect than the laws of the
other States. By section 121, of the Code of Georgia, 1895, it is provided,
"that if any person shall, by offering higher wages, or in any other way

entice, persuade or decoy, or attempt to entice, persuade or decoy any farm
laborer from his employer, he shall be guilty of a misdemeanor." Again, by
act of December 17th, 1901, the Georgia Legislature passed a law making it
an offense to rent land, or furnish land to a farm laborer, after he has
contracted with another landlord, without first obtaining the consent of the
first landlord.
The presence of large numbers of negroes in the towns and cities of the
South and North can be accounted for by such laws as the above,
administered by ignorant country magistrates, in nearly all cases the pliant
tools of the landlords.
The boldest and most open violation of the negro's rights under the Federal
Constitution, was the enactment of the grand-father clauses, and
understanding clauses in the new Constitutions of Louisiana, Alabama, the
Carolinas, and Virginia, which have had the effect to deprive the great body
of them of the right to vote in those States, for no other reason than their
race and color. Although thus depriving him of his vote, and all voice in the
State governments at the South, in all of them his property is taxed to pay
pensions to Confederate soldiers, who fought to continue him in slavery.
The fact is, the franchise had been practically taken from the negroes in the
South since 1876, by admitted fraudulent methods and intimidation in
elections, but it was not until late years that this nullification of the
amendments was enacted into State Constitutions.
This brings me to the proposition that it is mainly in the enforcement, or the
administration of the laws, however fair and equal they may appear on their
face, that the constitutional rights of negroes to equal protection and
treatment are denied, not only in the South but in many Northern States.
There are noble exceptions, however, of high-toned honorable gentlemen on
the bench as trial judges, and Supreme Court justices, in the South, who
without regard to consequences have stood for fairness and justice to the
negro in their courts.
With the population of the South distinctly divided into two classes, not the
rich and poor, not the educated and ignorant, not the moral and immoral,
but simply whites and blacks, all negroes being generally regarded as
inferior and not entitled to the same rights as any white person, it is bound

to be a difficult matter to obtain fair and just results, when there is any sort
of conflict between the races. The negro realizes this, and knows that he is
at an immense disadvantage when he is forced to litigate with a white man
in civil matters, and much more so when he is charged with a crime by a
white person.
The juries in the South almost always reject the testimony of any number of
negroes if given in opposition to that of a white witness, and this is true in
many instances, no matter how unreasonable or inconsistent the testimony
of the white witness may be. Jurors in the South have been heard to admit
that they would be socially ostracized if they brought in a verdict upon
colored testimony alone, in opposition to white testimony.
Perhaps it can be best explained how the negro fares in the courts of the
South by giving a few cases showing how justice is administered to him:
A negro boy was brought to the bar for trial before a police magistrate, in a
Southern capital city, charged with assault and battery on a white boy about
the same age, but a little larger. The testimony showed that the white boy
had beat the negro on several previous occasions as he passed on his way to
school, and each time the negro showed no disposition to fight. On the
morning of the charge he attacked the negro and attempted to cut him with a
knife, because the negro's mother had reported to the white boy's mother the
previous assaults, and asked her to chastise him. The colored boy in trying
to keep from being cut was compelled to fight, and got the advantage and
threw the white boy down and blacked his eyes. The magistrate on this
evidence fined the negro twenty-five dollars. The mother of the negro
having once been a servant for the magistrate, found courage to rise, and
said: "Jedge, yo Honer, can I speak?" The magistrate replied, "Yes, go on."
She said, "Well, Jedge, my boy is ben tellin' me about dis white boy
meddlin' him on his way to school, but I would not let my boy fight, 'cause I
'tole him he couldn't git no jestice in law. But he had no other way to go to
school 'ceptin' gwine dat way; and den jedge, dis white chile is bigger an
my chile and jumped on him fust with a knife for nothin', befo' my boy
tetched him. Jedge I am a po' woman, and washes fur a livin', and ain't got
nobody to help me, and can't raise all dat money. I think dat white boy's
mammy ought to pay half of dis fine." By this time her voice had become
stifled by her tears. The judge turned to the mother of the white boy and

said, "Madam, are you willing to pay half of this fine?" She answered, "Yes,
Your Honor." And the judge changed the order to a fine of $12.50 each,
against both boys.
A celebrated case in point reported in the books is, George Maury vs. The
State of Miss., 68 Miss. 605. I reproduce the court's statement of the case:
—"This is an appeal from the Circuit Court of Kemper County. Appellant
was convicted of murder and sentenced to imprisonment for life. He
appears in this court without counsel. The facts are briefly these: One,
Nicholson, a white man, accompanied by his little son seven years old, was
driving an ox team along a public road; he had occasion to stop and the
oxen were driven by his son; defendant, a negro, also in an ox wagon, was
going along the road in an opposite direction, and met Nicholson's wagon in
charge of the little boy. It was after dark, and when the wagons met,
according to the testimony of Nicholson, the defendant insultingly
demanded of the boy to give the way, and cursed and abused him.
Nicholson, hearing the colloquy, hurried to the scene and a fight ensued
between him and Maury, in which the latter got the advantage, inflicting
severe blows upon Nicholson. This occurred on Thursday, and on the
following Sunday night, Nicholson, in company with eleven or twelve of
his friends, rode to the farm of Maury, and after sending several of their
number to ascertain if he was at home, rode rapidly into his yard and called
for him. Not finding him, they proceeded to search the premises, and found
several colored men shut up in the smoke house, the door of which some of
the searching party had broken open. Maury, the accused, was not found
there, and about that time some one called out, "Here is George." Some of
the party then started in the direction of the cotton house from which the
voice proceeded, when a volley was fired from it, and two of the searching
party were killed, one of whom was the son of the former owner of the
defendant, and the other a brother-in-law of Nicholson. The members of the
raiding party testified that their purpose in going to the home of the
defendant was merely to arrest him. It was, however, shown that Nicholson,
immediately after the fight on Thursday, informed Cobb, and Cobb between
Thursday and Sunday night collected the men who joined in the raid. No
affidavit for the arrest of Maury had been made, and none of the party had
any warrant, or made any announcement to the defendant or his family, of
the object of their visit. The accused who testified in his own behalf, denied

that he was at home at the time of the shooting, and says he fled before the
raiding party arrived. He also contradicted Nicholson in his account of the
difficulty with him, and denies that he spoke harshly to the child." Chief
Justice Campbell, in delivering the opinion of the court said, "It is
inconceivable that the crime of murder is predicable of the facts disclosed
by the evidence in this case. The time and place and circumstances of the
killing forbid any such conclusion as a verdict of guilty of murder." The
judgment of the trial court was reversed.
This same Chief Justice, in the case of Monroe vs. Mississippi, 71 Miss.
201, where a negro was convicted of rape, makes use of the following brave
and noble language, reversing the case on the ground of the insufficiency of
the evidence: "We might greatly lighten our labors by deferring in all cases
to the verdict approved by the presiding judge as to the facts, but our duty is
to administer justice without respect of persons, and do equal right to the
poor and the rich. Hence the disposition, which we are not ashamed to
confess we have, to guard jealously the rights of the poor and friendless and
despised, and to be astute as far as we properly may, against injustice,
whether proceeding from wilfulness or indifference."
The country has produced no abler jurist, nor the South no greater man than
Ex-Chief Justice Campbell of Mississippi. If the counsel of such men as he
and Chief Justice Garret of the Court of Civil Appeals of Texas, could
obtain in the South, there would be no problem between the races. All
would be contented because justice would be administered to the whites and
blacks alike.
In the administration of the suffrage sections under the new Constitutions of
the South by the partisan boards of registrars, the same discrimination
against negroes was practiced. Their methods are of more or less interest.
The plan was to exclude all negroes from the electorate without excluding a
single white man. Under the Alabama Constitution, a soldier in the Civil
War, either on the Federal or Confederate side, is entitled to qualification.
When a negro goes up to register as a soldier he is asked for his discharge.
When he presents it he is asked, "How do we know that you are the man
whose name is written in this discharge? Bring us two white men whom we
know and who will swear that you have not found this paper, and that they
know that you were a soldier in the company and regiment in which you

claim to have been." This, of course, could not be done, and the ex-soldier
who risked his life for the Union is denied the right to vote.
The same Constitution provides that if not a soldier or the legal descendant
of one, an elector must be of good character and understand the duties and
obligations of citizenship under a Republican form of government. When a
negro claims qualifications under the good character and understanding
clauses he is put through an examination similar to the following:
"What is a republican form of government?
"What is a limited monarchy?
"What islands did the United States come into possession of by the Spanish-
American War?
"What is the difference between Jeffersonian Democracy and Calhoun
principles, as compared to the Monroe Doctrine?
"If the Nicaragua Canal is cut, what will be the effect if the Pacific Ocean is
two feet higher than the Atlantic?" Should these questions be answered
satisfactorily, the negro must still produce two white men known to the
registrars to testify to his good character. A remarkable exception in the
treatment of negroes by the registrars of Dallas county, Alabama, is shown
in the following account taken from the Montgomery Advertizer:—
"An old negro barber by the name of Edward E. Harris, stepped in before
the registrars, hat in hand, humble and polite, with a kindly smile on his
face. He respectfully asked to be registered. He signed the application and
waited a few minutes until the registrars had disposed of some other
matters, and being impressed with his respectful bearing, some member of
the board commenced to ask a few questions. The old man told his story in
a straight forward manner. He said: "Gentlemen, I am getting to be a pretty
old man. I was born here in the South, and I followed my young master
through all of the campaigns in Virginia, when Mas' Bob Lee made it so
warm for the Yankees. But our luck left us at Gettysburg. The Yankees got
around in our rear there, and I got a bullet in the back of my head, and one
in my leg before I got out of that scrape. But I was not hurt much, and my
greatest anxiety was about my young master, Mr. John Holly, who was a

member of the Bur Rifles, 18th Mississippi. He was a private and enlisted at
Jackson, Miss.
"He could not be found the first day; I looked all among the dead on the
battle field for him and he was not there. Next day I got a permit to go
through the hospitals, and I looked into the face of every soldier closely, in
the hope of finding my young master. After many hours of searching I
found him, but he was dangerously wounded. I stayed by his side, wounded
as I was, for three long weeks, but he gradually grew worse and then he
died. I went out with the body and saw it buried as decently as I could, and
then I went back to Jackson and told the young mistress how brave he was
in battle, how good he was to me, and told her all the words he had sent her,
as he lay there on that rude cot in the hospital. That is my record as a
Confederate soldier, and if you gentlemen care to give me a certificate of
registration, I would be much obliged to you." It is needless to say that old
Ed. Harris got his certificate.
It is insisted upon by the leaders of public opinion at the South, that negroes
should not be given equal political and civil rights with white men, defined
by law and enforceable by the courts; but that they should be content to
strive to deserve the good wishes and friendly feeling of the whites, and if
the South is let alone, they will see to it that negroes get becoming
treatment.
While there is a large number of the high-toned, chivalrous element of the
old master class yet living, who would stand by the negro and not permit
him to be wronged if they could prevent it, yet they are powerless to control
the great mass of the poor whites who are most bitter in their prejudices
against the negro. They should also bear in mind that the old master class is
rapidly passing way, and that there is constantly an influx of foreigners to
the South, and in less than fifty years the Italians, or some other foreign
nationality, may be the ruling class in all the Southern States; and the negro,
deprived of all political and civil rights by the Constitution and laws, would
be wholly at the mercy of a people without sympathy for him.
In order to show the fallacy and the wrong and injustice of this doctrine,
and how helplessly exposed it leaves the negro to the prejudices of the poor

whites, I relate a tragedy in the life of a friend of mine, who was well
known and respected in the town of Rayville, Louisiana.
Sewall Smith, for many years ran the leading barber shop for whites in the
town of Rayville, and was well-liked and respected by the leading white
men of the entire parish. At the suggestion of his customers he bought
Louisiana state lands while they were cheap, before the railroad was put
through between Vicksburg and Shreveport; and as the road passed near his
lands he was thereby made a rich man, as wealth goes in those parts. His
good fortune, however, did not swell his head and he remained the same to
his friends. He became so useful in his parish that there was never a public
gathering of the leading white business men that he was not invited to it,
and he was always on the delegations to all the levee or river conventions
sent from his parish. He was chosen to such places by white men
exclusively; and in his own town he was as safe from wrong or injury, on
account of his race or color, as any white man.
After the trains began to run through Rayville, on the Shreveport road, he
had occasion to visit the town of Ruston, in another parish some miles in
the interior, and as he got off at the depot, a barefoot, poor white boy asked
to carry his satchel. Smith was a fine looking mulatto, dressed well, and
could have easily been taken for a white man, and the boy might not have
known at the time he was a negro. When he arrived at his stopping place he
gave the boy such a large coin that he asked permission to take his satchel
back to the train on the following day when he was to return. The next day
the boy came for the satchel, and they had nearly reached the depot about
train time, when they passed a saloon where a crowd of poor whites sat on
boxes whittling sticks. The sight of a negro having a white boy carrying his
satchel quite enraged them, and after cursing and abusing Smith and the
boy, they undertook to kick and assault Smith. Smith defended himself. The
result was a shooting affair, in which Smith shot two or three of them and
was himself shot. The train rolled up while the fight was in progress, and
without inquiring the cause or asking any questions whatever, fully a
hundred white men jumped off the train and riddled Smith with bullets.
That was the end of it. Nobody was indicted or even arrested for killing an
insolent "nigger" that did not keep his place. That is the way the affair was
regarded in Ruston. Of course, the people of Rayville very much regretted
it, but they could not do anything, and could not afford to defend the rights

of a negro against white men under such circumstances, and the matter
dropped.
I have preferred not to mention the numerous ways and many instances in
which the rights of negroes are denied in public places, and on the common
carriers in the South, under circumstances very humiliating and degrading.
Nor have I cared to refer to the barbarous and inhuman prison systems of
the South, that are worse than anything the imagination can conceive in a
civilized and Christian land, as shown by reports of legislative committees.
If the negro can secure a fair and impartial trial in the courts, and can be
secure in his life and liberty and property, so as not to be deprived of them
except by due process of law, and can have a voice in the making and
administration of the laws, he shall have gone a great way in the South. It is
to be hoped that public opinion can be awakened to this extent, and that it
may assist him to attain that end.

H.T. KEALING.
The characteristics of the Negro are of two kinds—the inborn and the
inbred. As they reveal themselves to us, this distinction may not be seen,
but it exists. Inborn qualities are ineradicable; they belong to the blood; they
constitute individuality; they are independent, or nearly so, of time and
habitat. Inbred qualities are acquired, and are the result of experience. They
may be overcome by a reversal of the process which created them. The
fundamental, or inborn, characteristics of the Negro may be found in the
African, as well as the American, Negro; but the inbred characteristics of
the latter belong to the American life alone.

There is but one human nature, made up of constituent elements the same in
all men, and racial or national differences arise from the predominance of
one or another element in this or that race. It is a question of proportion.
The Negro is not a Caucasian, not a Chinese, not an Indian; though no
psychological quality in the one is absent from the other. The same moral
sense, called conscience; the same love of harmony in color or in sound; the
same pleasure in acquiring knowledge; the same love of truth in word, or of
fitness in relation; the same love of respect and approbation; the same
vengeful or benevolent feelings; the same appetites, belong to all, but in
varying proportions. They form the indicia to a people's mission, and are
our best guides to God's purpose in creating us. They constitute the material
to be worked on in educating a race, and suggest in every case where the
stress of civilization or education should be applied in order to follow the
lines of least resistance.
But there are also certain manifestations, the result of training or neglect,
which are not inborn. As they are inculcable, so they are eradicable; and it
is only by a loose terminology that we apply the term characteristics to
them without distinction between them and the inherent traits. In
considering the characteristics of the Negro people, therefore, we must not
confuse the constitutional with the removable. Studied with sympathy and
at first hand, the black man of America will be seen to possess certain
predominant idiosyncrasies of which the following form a fair catalogue:
He is intensely religious. True religion is based upon a belief in the
supernatural, upon faith and feeling. A people deeply superstitious are apt to
be deeply religious, for both rest upon a belief in a spiritual world.
Superstition differs from religion in being the untrained and unenlightened
gropings of the human soul after the mysteries of the higher life; while the
latter, more or less enlightened, "feels after God, if haply," it may find Him.
The Negro gives abundant evidence of both phases. The absolute inability
of the master, in the days of slavery, while successfully vetoing all other
kinds of convocation, to stop the Negro's church meetings, as well as the
almost phenomenal influence and growth of his churches since; and his
constant referring of every event, adverse or favorable, to the personal
ministrations of the Creator, are things unique and persistent. And the
master class reposed more faith in their slaves' religion ofttimes than they
did in their own. Doubtless much of the reverential feeling that pervades the

American home to-day, above that of all other nations, is the result of the
Negro mammy's devotion and loyalty to God.
He is imaginative. This is not evinced so much in creative directions as in
poetical, musical, combinatory, inventional and what, if coupled with
learning, we call literary imagination. Negro eloquence is proverbial. The
crudest sermon of the most unlettered slave abounded in tropes and glowing
tongue pictures of apochalyptic visions all his own; and, indeed, the poetic
quality of his mind is seen in all his natural efforts when the self-
consciousness of education does not stand guard. The staid religious muse
of Phillis Wheatley and the rollicking, somewhat jibing, verse of Dunbar
show it equally, unpremeditated and spontaneous.
I have heard by the hour some ordinary old uneducated Negro tell those
inimitable animal stories, brought to literary existence in "Uncle Remus,"
with such quaint humor, delicious conceit and masterly delineation of plot,
character and incident that nothing but the conventional rating of Aesop's
Fables could put them in the same class. Then, there are more Negro
inventors than the world supposes. This faculty is impossible without a
well-ordered imagination held in leash by a good memory and large
perception.
He is affectionate and without vindictiveness. He does not nurse even great
wrongs. Mercurial as he is, often furiously angry and frequently in
murderous mood, he comes nearer not letting the sun go down upon his
anger than any other man I know. Like Brutus, he may be compared to the
flint which,

"Much enforced, shows a hasty spark,
And straight is cold again."

His affection is not less towards the Caucasian than to his own race. It is not
saying too much to remark that the soul of the Negro yearns for the white
man's good will and respect; and the old ties of love that subsisted in so
many instances in the days of slavery still survive where the ex-slave still
lives. The touching case of a Negro Bishop who returned to the State in
which he had been a slave, and rode twenty miles to see and alleviate the
financial distress of his former master is an exception to numerous other

similar cases only in the prominence of the Negro concerned. I know of
another case of a man whose tongue seems dipped in hyssop when he
begins to tell of the wrongs of his race, and who will not allow anyone to
say in his presence that any good came out of slavery, even incidentally; yet
he supports the widowed and aged wife of his former master. And, surely, if
these two instances are not sufficient to establish the general proposition,
none will gainsay the patience, vigilance, loyalty and helpfulness of the
Negro slave during the Civil War, and of his good old wife who nursed
white children at her breast at a time when all ties save those of affection
were ruptured, and when no protection but devoted hearts watched over the
"great house," whose head and master was at the front, fighting to
perpetuate slavery. Was it stupidity on the Negro's part? Not at all. He was
well informed as to the occurrences of the times. A freemasonry kept him
posted as well as the whites were themselves on the course of the war and
the issue of each battle. Was it fear that kept him at the old home? Not that,
either. Many thousands did cross the line to freedom; many other thousands
(200,000) fought in the ranks for freedom, but none of them—those who
went and those who stayed—those who fought and those who worked,—
betrayed a trust, outraged a female, or rebelled against a duty. It was love,
the natural wellings of affectionate natures.
He has great endurance, both dispositional and physical. So true is the first
that his patience has been the marvel of the world; and, indeed, many,
regarding this trait manifested in such an unusual degree, doubted the
Negro's courage, till the splendid record of the '60's and the equal, but more
recent, record of the '90's, wrote forbearance as the real explanation of an
endurance seemingly so at variance with manly spirit.
Of his physical powers, his whole record as a laborer at killing tasks in the
most trying climate in America speaks so eloquently that nothing but the
statistics of cotton, corn, rice, sugar, railroad ties and felled forests can add
to the praise of this burden-bearer of the nation. The census tables here are
more romantic and thrilling than figures of rhetoric.
He is courageous. His page in the war record of this country is without blot
or blemish. His commanders unite in pronouncing him admirable for
courage in the field, commendable for obedience in camp. That he should

exhibit such excellent fighting qualities as a soldier, and yet exercise the
forbearance that characterizes him as a citizen, is remarkable.
He is cheerful. His ivories are as famous as his songs. That the South is
"sunny" is largely due to the brightness his rollicking laugh and unfailing
good nature bring to it. Though the mudsill of the labor world, he whistles
as he hoes, and no dark broodings or whispered conspirings mar the
cheerful acceptance of the load he bears. Against the rubber bumper of his
good cheer things that have crushed and maddened others rebound without
damage. When one hears the quaint jubilee songs, set to minor cadence, he
might suppose them the expressions of a melancholy people. They are not
to be so interpreted. Rather are they the expression of an experience, not a
nature. Like the subdued voice of a caged bird, these songs are the coinage
of an occasion, and not the free note of nature. The slave sang of griefs he
was not allowed to discuss, hence his songs. This cheerfulness has enabled
the Negro to live and increase under circumstances which, in all other
instances, have decimated, if not exterminated, inferior peoples. His
plasticity to moulding forces and his resiliency against crushing ones come
from a Thalian philosophy, unconscious and unstudied, that extracts
Epicurean delights from funeral meats.
The above traits are inborn and fundamental, belonging to the race
everywhere, in Africa as well as America. Strict correctness requires,
however, that attention be called to the fact that there are tribal differences
among African Negroes that amount almost to the national variations of
Europe; and these are reflected in American Negroes, who are the
descendants of these different tribes. There is as much difference between
the Mandingo and the Hottentot, both black, as between the Italian and the
German, both white; or between the Bushman and the Zulu, both black, as
between the Russian and the Englishman, both white. Scientific exactness,
therefore, would require a closer analysis of racial characteristics than an
article of this length could give; but, speaking in a large way, it may be said
that in whatever outward conformity may come to the race in America by
reason of training or contact, these traits will lie at the base, the very warp
and woof of his soul texture.
If, now, we turn to consider his inbred traits, those the result of experience,
conditions and environments, we find that they exist mainly as deficiencies

and deformities. These have been superimposed upon the native soul
endowment. Slavery has been called the Negro's great schoolmaster,
because it took him a savage and released him civilized; took him a heathen
and released him a Christian; took him an idler and released him a laborer.
Undoubtedly it did these things superficially, but one great defect is to be
charged against this school—it did not teach him the meaning of home,
purity and providence. To do this is the burden of freedom.
The emancipated Negro struggles up to-day against many obstacles, the
entailment of a brutal slavery. Leaving out of consideration the many who
have already emerged, let us apply our thoughts to the great body of
submerged people in the congested districts of city and country who present
a real problem, and who must be helped to higher things. We note some of
the heritages under which they stagger up into full development:
Shiftlessness. He had no need to devise and plan in bondage. There was no
need for an enterprising spirit; consequently, he is lacking in leadership and
self-reliance. He is inclined to stay in ruts, and applies himself listlessly to a
task, feeling that the directive agency should come from without.
Incontinence. It is not to the point to say that others are, too. Undoubtedly,
example has as much to do with this laxity as neglect. We simply record the
fact. A slave's value was increased by his prolificacy. Begetting children for
the auction block could hardly sanctify family ties. It was not nearly so
necessary for a slave to know his father as his owner. Added to the
promiscuity encouraged and often forced among this class, was the dreadful
license which cast lustful Caucasian eyes upon "likely" Negro women.
Indolence. Most men are, especially in a warm climate: but the Negro
acquired more than the natural share, because to him as a bondman laziness
was great gain, for he had no pecuniary interest in his own labor. Hence,
holidays were more to be desired than whole labor days, and he learned to
do as little as he might, be excused as often as he could, and hail Saturday
as the oasis in a desert week. He hails it yet. The labor efficiency of the
Negro has greatly increased since the emancipation, for self-interest is a
factor now. In 1865, each Negro produced two-thirds of a bale of cotton;
now he produces an average of one whole bale to the man. But there is still
woful waste of productive energy. A calculation showing the comparative

productive capacity, man for man, between the Northern[B] and Southern
laborer would be very interesting.
Improvidence and Extravagance. He will drop the most important job to go
on an excursion or parade with his lodge. He spends large sums on
expensive clothing and luxuries, while going without things necessary to a
real home. He will cheerfully eat fat bacon and "pone" corn-bread all the
week[C] in order to indulge in unlimited soda-water, melon and fish at the
end. In the cities he is oftener seen dealing with the pawn-broker than the
banker. His house, when furnished at all, is better furnished that that of a
white man of equal earning power, but it is on the installment plan. He is
loath to buy a house, because he has no taste for responsibility nor faith in
himself to manage large concerns; but organs, pianos, clocks, sewing-
machines and parlor suits, on time, have no terrors for him. This is because
he has been accustomed to think in small numbers. He does not regard the
Scotchman's "mickle," because he does not stop to consider that the end is a
"muckle." He has amassed, at full valuation, nearly a billion dollars' worth
of property, despite this, but this is about one-half of what proper
providence would have shown.
Untidiness. Travel through the South and you will be struck with the
general misfit and dilapidated appearance of things. Palings are missing
from the fences, gates sag on single hinges, houses are unpainted, window
panes are broken, yards unkempt and the appearance of a squalor greater
than the real is seen on every side. The inside of the house meets the
suggestions of the outside. This is a projection of the slave's "quarters" into
freedom. The cabin of the slave was, at best, a place to eat and sleep in;
there was no thought of the esthetic in such places. A quilt on a plank was a
luxury to the tired farm-hand, and paint was nothing to the poor, sun-
scorched fellow who sought the house for shade rather than beauty. Habits
of personal cleanliness were not inculcated, and even now it is the
exception to find a modern bath-room in a Southern home.
Dishonesty. This is the logic, if not the training, of slavery. It is easy for the
unrequited toiler in another's field to justify reprisal; hence there arose
among the Negroes an amended Commandment which added to "Thou shalt
not steal" the clause, "except thou be stolen from." It was no great fault,

then, according to this code, to purloin a pig, a sheep, a chicken, or a few
potatoes from a master who took all from the slave.
Untruthfulness. This is seen more in innocent and childish exaggeration
than in vicious distortion. It is the vice of untutored minds to run to gossip
and make miracles of the matter-of-fact. The Negro also tells falsehoods
from excess of good nature. He promises to do a piece of work on a certain
day, because it is so much easier and pleasanter to say Yes, and stay away,
than it is to say No.
Business Unreliability. He does not meet a promise in the way and at the
time promised. Not being accustomed to business, he has small conception
of the place the promise has in the business world. It is only recently he has
begun to deal with banks. He, who has no credit, sees[D] no loss of it in a
protested note, especially if he intends to pay it some time. That chain
which links one man's obligation to another man's solvency he has not
considered. He is really as good and safe a debt-payer when he owes a
white man as the latter can have, but the methods of the modern bank,
placing a time limit on debts, is his detestation. He much prefers the laissez-
faire of the Southern plantation store.
Lack of Initiative. It was the policy of slavery to crush out the combining
instinct, and it was well done; for, outside of churches and secret societies,
the Negro has done little to increase the social efficiency which can
combine many men into an organic whole, subject to the corporate will and
direction. He has, however, made some hopeful beginnings.
Suspicion of his own race. He was taught to watch other Negroes and tell all
that they did. This was slavery's native detective force to discover incipient
insurrection. Each slave learned to distrust his fellow. And added to this is
the knowledge one Negro has that no other has had half sufficient
experience in business to be a wise counsellor, or a safe steward of another
man's funds. Almost all Negroes who have acquired wealth have entrusted
its management to white men.
Ignorance. The causes of his ignorance all know. That he has thrown off
one-half of it in forty years is a wonderful showing; but a great incubus
remains in the other half, and it demands the nation's attention. What the
census calls literacy is often very shallow. The cause of this shallowness

lies, in part, in the poor character and short duration of Southern schools; in
the poverty that snatches the child from school prematurely to work for
bread; in the multitude of mushroom colleges and get-smart-quick
universities scattered over the South, and in the glamour of a professional
education that entices poorly prepared students into special work.
Add to this, too, the commercialism of the age which regards each day in
school as a day out of the market. Boys and girls by scores learn the
mechanical parts of type-writing and stenography without the basal culture
which gives these callings their greatest efficiency. They copy a manuscript,
Chinese-like, mistakes and all; they take you phonetically in sense as well
as sound, having no reserve to draw upon to interpret a learned allusion or
unusual phrase. Thus while prejudice makes it hard to secure a place, auto-
deficiency loses many a one that is secured.
We have discussed the leading characteristics of the Negro, his inborn
excellencies and inbred defects, candidly and as they are to be seen in the
great mass whose place determines the status of the race as a whole. It
would, however, be to small purpose if we did not ask what can be done to
develop the innate good and correct the bad in a race so puissant and
numerous? This mass is not inert; it has great reactionary force, modifying
and influencing all about it. The Negro's excellences have entered into
American character and life already; so have his weaknesses. He has
brought cheer, love, emotion and religion in saving measure to the land. He
has given it wealth by his brawn and liberty by his blood. His self-respect,
even in abasement, has kept him struggling upward; his confidence in his
own future has infected his friends and kept him from nursing despondency
or planning anarchy. But he has laid, and does lay, burdens upon the land,
too: his ignorance, his low average of morality, his low standards of home,
his lack of enterprise, his lack of self-reliance—these must be cured.
Evidently, he is to be "solved" by educational processes. Everyone of his
inborn traits must be respected and developed to proper proportion.
Excesses and excrescences must not be carelessly dealt with, for they mark
the fertility of a soil that raises rank weeds because no gardener has tilled it.
His religion must become "ethics touched with feeling"—not a paroxysm,
but a principle. His imagination must be given a rudder to guide its sails;
and the first fruits of its proper exercise, as seen in a Dunbar, a Chesnutt, a

Coleridge-Taylor and a Tanner, must be pedestaled along the Appian Way
over which others are to march. His affection must be met with larger love;
his patience rewarded with privilege; his courage called to defend the rights
of others rather than redress his own wrongs. Thus shall he supplement
from within the best efforts of good men without.
To cure the evils entailed upon him by an unhappy past, he must be
educated to work with skill, with self-direction, in combination and
unremittingly. Industrial education with constant application, is the slogan
of his rise from racial pauperism to productive manliness. Not that
exceptional minds should not have exceptional opportunities (and they
already exist); but that the great majority of awkward and unskilled ones,
who must work somehow, somewhere, all the time, shall have their
opportunities for training in industrial schools near them and with courses
consonant with the lives they are to lead. Let the ninety and nine who must
work, either with trained or fumbling hands, have a chance. Train the Negro
to accept and carry responsibility by putting it upon him. Train him, more
than any schools are now doing, in morals—to speak the truth, to keep a
promise, to touch only his own property, to trust the trustworthy among his
own race, to risk something in business, to strike out in new lines of
endeavor, to buy houses and make homes, to regard beauty as well as
utility, to save rather than display. In short, let us subordinate mere
knowledge to the work of invigorating the will, energizing productive effort
and clarifying moral vision. Let us make safe men rather than vociferous
mountebanks; let us put deftness in daily labor above sleight-of-hand tricks,
and common sense, well trained, above classical smatterings, which awe the
multitude but butter no parsnips.
If we do this, America will have enriched her blood, ennobled her record
and shown the world how to deal with its Dark Races without reproach.
[B] In the original, this was 'Northen'.
[C] In the original, this was 'weeek'.
[D] In the original, this was 'seees'.

Representative American Negroes
By PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

An enumeration of some of the noteworthy American Negroes of to-
day and yesterday, with some account of their lives and their work. In
this paper Mr. Dunbar has turned out his largest and most successful
picture of the colored people. It is a noble canvas crowded with heroic
figures.

In considering who and what are representative Negroes there are
circumstances which compel one to question what is a representative man
of the colored race. Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and
others lived during the reconstruction period. To have achieved something
for the betterment of his race rather than for the aggrandizement of himself,
seems to be a man's best title to be called representative. The street corner
politician, who through questionable methods or even through skillful
manipulation, succeeds in securing the janitorship of the Court House, may
be written up in the local papers as "representative," but is he?
I have in mind a young man in Baltimore, Bernard Taylor by name, who to
me is more truly representative of the race than half of the "Judges,"
"Colonels," "Doctors" and "Honorables" whose stock cuts burden the pages
of our negro journals week after week. I have said that he is young. Beyond
that he is quiet and unobtrusive; but quiet as he is, the worth of his work can
be somewhat estimated when it is known that he has set the standard for
young men in a city that has the largest colored population in the world.
It is not that as an individual he has ridden to success one enterprise after
another. It is not that he has shown capabilities far beyond his years, nor yet
that his personal energy will not let him stop at one triumph. The
importance of him lies in the fact that his influence upon his fellows is all

for good, and in a large community of young Negroes the worth of this
cannot be over-estimated. He has taught them that striving is worth while,
and by the very force of his example of industry and perseverance, he
stands out from the mass. He does not tell how to do things, he does them.
Nothing has contributed more to his success than his alertness, and nothing
has been more closely followed by his observers, and yet I sometimes
wonder when looking at him, how old he must be, how world weary, before
the race turns from its worship of the political janitor and says of him, "this
is one of our representative men."
This, however, is a matter of values and neither the negro himself, his
friends, his enemies, his lauders, nor his critics has grown quite certain in
appraising these. The rabid agitator who goes about the land preaching the
independence and glory of his race, and by his very mouthings retarding
both, the saintly missionary, whose only mission is like that of "Pooh Bah,"
to be insulted; the man of the cloth who thunders against the sins of the
world and from whom honest women draw away their skirts, the man who
talks temperance and tipples high-balls—these are not representative, and
whatever their station in life, they should be rated at their proper value, for
there is a difference between attainment and achievement.
Under the pure light of reason, the ignorant carpet bagger judge is a person
and not a personality. The illiterate and inefficient black man, whom
circumstance put into Congress, was "a representative" but was not
representative. So the peculiar conditions of the days immediately after the
war have made it necessary to draw fine distinctions.
When Robert Smalls, a slave, piloted the Confederate ship Planter out of
Charleston Harbor under the very guns of the men who were employing
him, who owned him, his body, his soul, and the husk of his allegiance, and
brought it over to the Union, it is a question which forty years has not
settled as to whether he was a hero or a felon, a patriot or a traitor. So much
has been said of the old Negro's fidelity to his masters that something
different might have been expected of him. But take the singular conditions:
the first faint streaks of a long delayed dawn had just begun to illumine the
sky and this black pilot with his face turned toward the East had no eye for
the darkness behind him. He had no time to analyze his position, the right
or wrong of it. He had no opportunity to question whether it was loyalty to

a union in which he aspired to citizenship, or disloyalty to his masters of the
despised confederacy. It was not a time to argue, it was a time to do; and
with rare power of decision, skill of action and with indomitable courage,
he steered the good ship Planter past Fort Johnson, past Fort Sumter, past
Morris Island, out where the flag, the flag of his hopes and fears floated
over the federal fleet. And Robert Smalls had done something, something
that made him loved and hated, praised and maligned, revered and despised,
but something that made him representative of the best that there is in
sturdy Negro manhood.
It may seem a far cry from Robert Smalls, the pilot of the Planter, to Booker
T. Washington, Principal of the Institute at Tuskegee, Alabama. But much
the same traits of character have made the success of the two men; the
knowledge of what to do, the courage to do it, and the following out of a
single purpose. They are both pilots, and the waters through which their
helms have swung have been equally stormy. The methods of both have
been questioned; but singularly neither one has stopped to question himself,
but has gone straight on to his goal over the barriers of criticism, malice and
distrust. The secret of Mr. Washington's power is organization, and
organization after all is only a concentration of force. This concentration
only expresses his own personality, in which every trait and quality tend
toward one definite end. They say of this man that he is a man of one idea,
but that one is a great one and he has merely concentrated all his powers
upon it; in other words he has organized himself and gone forth to gather in
whatever about him was essential.
Pilot he is, steadfast and unafraid, strong in his own belief,—yes strong
enough to make others believe in him. Without doubt or skepticism, himself
he has confounded the skeptics.
Less statesmanlike than Douglass, less scholarly than DuBois, less eloquent
than the late J.C. Price, he is yet the foremost figure in Negro national life.
He is a great educator and a great man, and though one may not always
agree with him, one must always respect him. The race has produced no
more adroit diplomatist than he. The statement is broad but there is no
better proof of it than the fact that while he is our most astute politician, he
has succeeded in convincing both himself and the country that he is not in
politics. He has none of the qualities of the curb-stone politician. He is

bigger, broader, better, and the highest compliment that could be paid him is
that through all his ups and downs, with all he has seen of humanity, he has
kept his faith and his ideals. While Mr. Washington stands pre-eminent in
his race there are other names that must be mentioned with him as co-
workers in the education of the world, names that for lack of time can be
only mentioned and passed.
W.H. Council, of Normal, Alabama, has been doing at his school a good
and great work along the same lines as Tuskegee. R.R. Wright, of the State
College of Georgia, "We'se a-risin' Wright," he is called, and by his own life
and work for his people he has made true the boyish prophecy which in the
old days inspired Whittier's poem. Three decades ago this was his message
from the lowly South, "Tell 'em we'se a-risin," and by thought, by word, by
deed, he has been "Tellin' em so" ever since. The old Southern school has
melted into the misty shades of an unregretted past. A new generation, new
issues, new conditions, have replaced the old, but the boy who sent that
message from the heart of the Southland to the North's heart of hearts has
risen, and a martyred President did not blush to call him friend.
So much of the Negro's time has been given to the making of teachers that it
is difficult to stop when one has begun enumerating some of those who
have stood out more than usually forceful. For my part, there are two more
whom I cannot pass over. Kelly Miller, of Howard University, Washington,
D.C., is another instructor far above the average. He is a mathematician and
a thinker. The world has long been convinced of what the colored man
could do in music and in oratory, but it has always been skeptical, when he
is to be considered as a student of any exact science. Miller, in his own
person, has settled all that. He finished at Johns Hopkins where they will
remember him. He is not only a teacher but an author who writes with
authority upon his chosen themes, whether he is always known as a Negro
writer or not. He is endowed with an accurate, analytical mind, and the
most engaging blackness, for which some of us thank God, because there
can be no argument as to the source of his mental powers.
Now of the other, William E.B. DuBois, what shall be said? Educator and
author, political economist and poet, an Eastern man against a Southern
back-ground, he looms up strong, vivid and in bold relief. I say looms
advisedly, because, intellectually, there is something so distinctively big

about the man. Since the death of the aged Dr. Crummell, we have had no
such ripe and finished scholar. Dr. DuBois, Harvard gave him to us, and
there he received his Ph.D., impresses one as having reduced all life and all
literature to a perfect system. There is about him a fascinating calm of
certain power, whether as a searcher after economic facts, under the wing of
the University of Pennsylvania, or defying the "powers that be" in a Negro
college or leading his pupils along the way of light, one always feels in him
this same sense of conscious, restrained, but assured force.
Some years ago in the course of his researches, he took occasion to tell his
own people some plain hard truths, and oh, what a howl of protest and
denunciation went up from their assembled throats, but it never once
disturbed his magnificent calm. He believed what he had said, and not for a
single moment did he think of abandoning his position.
He goes at truth as a hard-riding old English squire would take a difficult
fence. Let the ditch be beyond if it will.
Dr. DuBois would be the first to disclaim the name of poet but everything
outside of his statistical work convicts him. The rhythm of his style, his
fancy, his imagery, all bid him bide with those whose souls go singing by a
golden way. He has written a number of notable pamphlets and books, the
latest of which is "The Soul of the Black Folk," an invaluable contribution
to the discussion of the race problem by a man who knows whereof he
speaks.
Dr. DuBois is at Atlanta University and has had every opportunity to
observe all the phases of America's great question, and I wish I might write
at length of his books.
It may be urged that too much time has already been taken up with the
educational side of the Negro, but the reasonableness of this must become
apparent when one remembers that for the last forty years the most helpful
men of the race have come from the ranks of its teachers, and few of those
who have finally done any big thing, but have at some time or other held
the scepter of authority in a school. They may have changed later and
grown, indeed they must have done so, but the fact remains that their poise,
their discipline, the impulse for their growth came largely from their work
in the school room.

There is perhaps no more notable example of this phase of Negro life than
the Hon. Richard Theodore Greener, our present Consul at Vladivostok. He
was, I believe, the first of our race to graduate from Harvard and he has
always been regarded as one of the most scholarly men who, through the
touch of Negro blood, belongs to us. He has been historian, journalist and
lecturer, but back of all this he was a teacher; and for years after his
graduation he was a distinguished professor at the most famous of all the
old Negro colleges. This institution is now a thing of the past, but the men
who knew it in its palmy days speak of it still with longing and regret. It is
claimed, and from the names and qualities of the men, not without justice,
that no school for the higher education of the black man has furnished a
finer curriculum or possessed a better equipped or more efficient faculty.
Among these, Richard T. Greener was a bright, particular star.
After the passing of the school, Mr. Greener turned to other activities. His
highest characteristics were a fearless patience and a hope that buoyed him
up through days of doubt and disappointment. Author and editor he was, but
he was not satisfied with these. Beyond their scope were higher things that
beckoned him. Politics, or perhaps better, political science, allured him, and
he applied himself to a course that brought him into intimate contact with
the leaders of his country, white and black. A man of wide information,
great knowledge and close grasp of events he made himself invaluable to
his party and then with his usual patience awaited his reward.
The story of how he came to his own cannot be told without just a shade of
bitterness darkening the smile that one must give to it all. The cause for
which he had worked triumphed. The men for whom he had striven gained
their goal and now, Greener must be recognized, but—
Vladivostok, your dictionary will tell you, is a sea-port in the maritime
Province of Siberia, situated on the Golden Horn of Peter the Great. It will
tell you also that it is the chief Russian naval station on the Pacific. It is an
out of the way place and one who has not the world-circling desire would
rather hesitate before setting out thither. It was to this post that Mr. Greener
was appointed.
"Exile," his friends did not hesitate to say. "Why didn't the Government
make it a sentence instead of veiling it in the guise of an appointment?"

asked others sarcastically.
"Will he go?" That was the general question that rose and fell, whispered
and thundered about the new appointee, and in the midst of it all, silent and
dignified, he kept his council. The next thing Washington knew he was
gone. There was a gasp of astonishment and then things settled back into
their former state of monotony and Greener was forgotten.
But in the eastern sky, darkness began to arise, the warning flash of danger
swept across the heavens, the thunder drum of war began to roll. For a
moment the world listened in breathless suspense, the suspense of horror.
Louder and louder rose the thunder peal until it drowned every other sound
in the ears of the nation, every other sound save the cries and wails of dying
women and the shrieks of tortured children. Then France, England,
Germany, Japan and America marshalled their forces and swept eastward to
save and to avenge. The story of the Boxer uprising has been told, but little
has been said of how Vladivostok, "A sea-port in the maritime Province of
Siberia," became one of the most important points of communication with
the outside world, and its Consul came frequently to be heard from by the
State Department. And so Greener after years of patience and toil had come
to his own. If the government had wished to get him out of the way, it had
reckoned without China.
A new order of things has come into Negro-American politics and this man
has become a part of it. It matters not that he began his work under the old
regime. So did Judge Gibbs, a man eighty years of age, but he, too, has kept
abreast of the times, and although the reminiscences in his delightful
autobiography take one back to the hazy days when the land was young and
politics a more strenuous thing than it is even now, when there was anarchy
in Louisiana and civil war in Arkansas, when one shot first and questioned
afterward; yet because his mind is still active, because he has changed his
methods with the changing time, because his influence over young men is
greatly potent still; he is, in the race, perhaps, the best representative of
what the old has brought to the new.
Beside him strong, forceful, commanding, stands the figure of George H.
White, whose farewell speech before the Fifty-sixth Congress, when
through the disfranchisement of Negroes he was defeated for re-election,

stirred the country and fired the hearts of his brothers. He has won his place
through honesty, bravery and aggressiveness. He has given something to the
nation that the nation needed, and with such men as Pinchback, Lynch,
Terrell and others of like ilk, acting in concert, it is but a matter of time
when his worth shall induce a repentant people, with a justice builded upon
the foundation of its old prejudice, to ask the Negro back to take a hand in
the affairs of state.
Add to all this the facts that the Negro has his representatives in the
commercial world: McCoy and Granville T. Woods, inventors; in the
agricultural world with J.H. Groves, the potato king of Kansas, who last
year shipped from his own railway siding seventy-two thousand five
hundred bushels of potatoes alone; in the military, with Capt. Charles A.
Young, a West Pointer, now stationed at the Presidio; that in medicine, he
possesses in Daniel H. Williams, of Chicago, one of the really great
surgeons of the country; that Edward H. Morris, a black man, is one of the
most brilliant lawyers at the brilliant Cook County bar; that in every walk of
life he has men and women who stand for something definite and concrete,
and it seems to me that there can be little doubt that the race problem will
gradually solve itself.
I have spoken of "men and women," and indeed the women must not be
forgotten, for to them the men look for much of the inspiration and impulse
that drives them forward to success. Mrs. Mary Church Terrell upon the
platform speaking for Negro womanhood and Miss Sarah Brown, her direct
opposite, a little woman sitting up in her aerie above a noisy New York
street, stand for the very best that there is in our mothers, wives and sisters.
The one fully in the public eye, with learning and eloquence, telling the
hopes and fears of her kind; the other in suffering and retirement, with her
knowledge of the human heart and her gentleness inspiring all who meet
her to better and nobler lives. They are both doing their work bravely and
grandly. But when the unitiate ask who is "la Petite Reine," we think of the
quiet little woman in a New York fifth floor back and are silent.
She is a patron of all our literature and art and we have both. Whether it is a
new song by Will Marion Cook or a new book by DuBois or Chestnut, than
whom no one has ever told the life of the Negro more accurately and

convincingly, she knows it and has a kindly word of praise or
encouragement.
In looking over the field for such an article as this, one just begins to realize
how many Negroes are representative of something, and now it seems that
in closing no better names could be chosen than those of the two Tanners.
From time immemorial, Religion and Art have gone together, but it
remained for us to place them in the persons of these two men, in the
relation of father and son. Bishop Benj. Tucker Tanner, of the A.M.E.
Church, is not only a theologian and a priest, he is a dignified, polished man
of the higher world and a poet. He has succeeded because he was prepared
for success. As to his writings, he will, perhaps, think most highly of "His
Apology For African Methodism;" but some of us, while respecting this,
will turn from it to the poems and hymns that have sung themselves out of
his gentle heart.
Is it any wonder that his son, Henry O. Tanner, is a poet with the brush or
that the French Government has found it out? From the father must have
come the man's artistic impulse, and he carried it on and on to a golden
fruition. In the Luxembourg gallery hangs his picture, "The Raising of
Lazarus." At the Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, I saw his
"Annunciation," both a long way from his "Banjo Lesson," and thinking of
him I began to wonder whether, in spite of all the industrial tumult, it were
not in the field of art, music and literature that the Negro was to make his
highest contribution to American civilization. But this is merely a question
which time will answer.
All these of whom I have spoken are men who have striven and achieved
and the reasons underlying their success are the same that account for the
advancement of men of any other race: preparation, perseverance, bravery,
patience, honesty and the power to seize the opportunity.
It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere out
of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.

The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present
Day
BY T. THOMAS FORTUNE

Considering the two hundred and forty-five years of his slavery and
the comparatively short time he has enjoyed the opportunities of
freedom, his place in American life at the present day is creditable to
him and promising for the future.

T. THOMAS FORTUNE.
There can be no healthy growth in the life of a race or a nation without a
self-reliant spirit animating the whole body; if it amounts to optimism,
devoid of egotism and vanity, so much the better. This spirit necessarily
carries with it intense pride of race, or of nation, as the case may be, and
ramifies the whole mass, inspiring and shaping its thought and effort,
however humble or exalted these may be,—as it takes "all sorts and
conditions of men" to make up a social order, instinct with the ambition and
the activity which work for "high thinking and right living," of which
modern evolution in all directions is the most powerful illustration in

history. If pride of ancestry can, happily, be added to pride of race and
nation, and these are re-enforced by self-reliance, courage and correct moral
living, the possible success of such people may be accepted, without
equivocation, as a foregone conclusion. I have found all of these
requirements so finely blended in the life and character of no people as that
of the Japanese, who are just now emerging from "the double night of ages"
into the vivifying sunlight of modern progress.
What is the Negro's place in American life at the present day?
The answer depends entirely upon the point of view. Unfortunately for the
Afro-American people, they have no pride of ancestry; in the main, few of
them can trace their parentage back four generations; and the "daughter of
an hundred earls" of whom there are probably many, is unconscious of her
descent, and would profit nothing by it if this were not true. The blood of all
the ethnic types that go to make up American citizenship flows in the veins
of the Afro-American people, so that of the ten million of them in this
country, accounted for by the Federal census, not more than four million are
of pure negroid descent, while some four million of them, not accounted for
by the Federal census, have escaped into the ranks of the white race, and are
re-enforced very largely by such escapements every year. The vitiation of
blood has operated irresistibly to weaken that pride of ancestry, which is the
foundation-stone of pride of race; so that the Afro-American people have
been held together rather by the segregation decreed by law and public
opinion than by ties of consanguinity since their manumission and
enfranchisement. It is not because they are poor and ignorant and
oppressed, as a mass, that there is no such sympathy of thought and unity of
effort among them as among Irishmen and Jews the world over, but because
the vitiation of blood, beyond the honorable restrictions of law, has
destroyed, in large measure, that pride of ancestry upon which pride of race
must be builded. In no other logical way can we account for the failure of
the Afro-American people to stand together, as other oppressed races do,
and have done, for the righting of wrongs against them authorized by the
laws of the several states, if not by the Federal Constitution, and sanctioned
or tolerated by public opinion. In nothing has this radical defect been more
noticeable since the War of the Rebellion than in the uniform failure of the
people to sustain such civic organizations as exist and have existed, to test
in the courts of law and in the forum of public opinion the validity of

organic laws of States intended to deprive them of the civil and political
rights guaranteed to them by the Federal Constitution. The two such
organizations of this character which have appealed to them are the
National Afro-American League, organized in Chicago, in 1890, and the
National Afro-American Council, organized in Rochester, New York, out of
the League, in 1898. The latter organization still exists, the strongest of its
kind, but it has never commanded the sympathy and support of the masses
of the people, nor is there, or has there been, substantial agreement and
concert of effort among the thoughtful men of the race along these lines.
They have been restrained by selfish, personal and petty motives, while the
constitutional rights which vitalize their citizenship have been "denied or
abridged" by legislation of certain of the States and by public opinion, even
as Nero fiddled while Rome burned. If they had been actuated by a strong
pride of ancestry and of race, if they had felt that injury to one was injury to
all, if they had hung together instead of hanging separately, their place in
the civil and political life of the Republic to-day would not be that, largely,
of pariahs, with none so poor as to do them honor, but that of equality of
right under the law enjoyed by all other alien ethnic forces in our
citizenship. They who will not help themselves are usually not helped by
others. They who make a loud noise and courageously contend for what is
theirs, usually enjoy the respect and confidence of their fellows and get, in
the end, what belongs to them, or a reasonable modification of it.
As a consequence of inability to unite in thought and effort for the
conservation of their civil and political rights, the Afro-American Negroes
and colored people have lost, by fundamental enactments of the old slave-
holding States, all of the civil and political rights guaranteed them by the
Federal Constitution, in the full enjoyment of which they were from the
adoption of the War Amendments up to 1876-7, when they were sacrificed
by their Republican allies of the North and West, in the alienation of their
State governments, in order to save the Presidency to Mr. Rutherford B.
Hayes of Ohio. Their reverses in this matter in the old slave-holding States,
coupled with a vast mass of class legislation, modelled on the slave code,
have affected the Afro-American people in their civil and political rights in
all of the States of the Republic, especially as far as public opinion is
concerned. This was inevitable, and follows in every instance in history

where a race element of the citizenship is set aside by law or public opinion
as separate and distinct from its fellows, with a fixed status or caste.
It will take the Afro-American people fully a century to recover what they
lost of civil and political equality under the law in the Southern States, as a
result of the re-actionary and bloody movement begun in the
Reconstruction period by the Southern whites, and culminating in 1877,—
the excesses of the Reconstruction governments, about which so much is
said to the discredit of the Negro, being chargeable to the weakness and
corruption of Northern carpet-baggers, who were the master and
responsible spirits of the time and the situation, rather than to the weakness,
the ignorance and venality of their Negro dupes, who, very naturally,
followed where they led, as any other grateful people would have done. For,
were not these same Northern carpet-baggers the direct representatives of
the Government and the Army which crushed the slave power and broke the
shackles of the slave? Even so. The Northern carpet-baggers planned and
got the plunder, and have it; the Negro got the credit and the odium, and
have them yet. It often happens that way in history, that the innocent dupes
are made to suffer for the misdeeds and crimes of the guilty.
The recovery of civil and political rights under the Constitution, as "denied
or abridged" by the constitutions of the States, more especially those of the
old slave holding ones, will be a slow and tedious process, and will come to
the individual rather than to the race, as the reward of character and thrift;
because, for reasons already stated, it will hardly be possible in the future,
as it has not been in the past, to unify the mass of the Afro-American
people, in thought and conduct, for a proper contention in the courts and at
the ballot-box and in the education of public opinion, to accomplish this
purpose. Perhaps there is no other instance in history where everything
depended so largely upon the individual, and so little upon the mass of his
race, for that development in the religious and civic virtues which makes
more surely for an honorable status in any citizenship than constitutions or
legislative enactments built upon them.
But even from this point of view, I am disposed to believe that the Negro's
civil and political rights are more firmly fixed in law and public opinion
than was true at the close of the Reconstruction period, when everything
relating to him was unsettled and confused, based in legislative guarantees,

subject to approval or disapproval of the dominant public opinion of the
several States, and that he will gradually work out his own salvation under
the Constitution,—such as Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F.
Butler, Frederick Douglass, and their co-workers, hoped and labored that he
might enjoy. He has lost nothing under the fundamental law; such of these
restrictions, as apply to him by the law of certain of the States, necessarily
apply to white men in like circumstances of ignorance and poverty, and can
be overcome, in time, by assiduous courtship of the schoolmaster and the
bank cashier. The extent to which the individual members of the race are
overcoming the restrictions made a bar to their enjoyment of civil and
political rights under the Constitution is gratifying to those who wish the
race well and who look beyond the present into the future: while it is
disturbing the dreams of those who spend most of their time and thought in
abortive efforts to "keep the 'nigger' in his place"—as if any man or race
could have a place in the world's thought and effort which he did not make
for himself! In our grand Republic, at least, it has been so often
demonstrated as to become proverbial, that the door of opportunity shall be
closed to no man, and that he shall be allowed to have that place in our
national life which he makes for himself. So it is with the Negro now, as an
individual. Will it be so with him in the future as a race? To answer that we
shall first have to determine that he has a race.
However he may be lacking in pride of ancestry and race, no one can
accuse the Negro of lack of pride of Nation and State, and even of county.
Indeed, his pride in the Republic and his devotion to it are among the most
pathetic phases of his pathetic history, from Jamestown, in 1620, to San
Juan Hill, in 1898. He has given everything to the Republic,—his labor and
blood and prayers. What has the Republic given him, but blows and rebuffs
and criminal ingratitude! And he stands now, ready and eager, to give the
Republic all that he has. What does the Republic stand ready and eager to
give him? Let the answer come out of the mouth of the future.
It is a fair conclusion that the Negro has a firmer and more assured civil and
political status in American life to-day than at the close of the
Reconstruction period, paradoxical as this may appear to many, despite the
adverse legislation of the old slave-holding States, and the tolerant favor
shown such legislation by the Federal Supreme Court, in such opinions as it
has delivered, from time to time, upon the subject, since the adoption of the

War amendments to the Federal Constitution. Technically, the Negro stands
upon equality with all other citizens under this large body of special and
class legislation; but, as a matter of fact, it is so framed that the greatest
inequality prevails, and was intended to prevail, in the administration of it
by the several States chiefly concerned. As long as such legislation by the
States specifies, on the face of it, that it shall operate upon all citizens
equally, however unequally and unjustly the legislation may be interpreted
and administered by the local courts, the Federal Supreme Court has held,
time and again, that no hardship was worked, and, if so, that the aggrieved
had his recourse in appeal to the higher courts of the State of which he is a
citizen,—a recourse at this time precisely like that of carrying coal to New
Castle.
Under the circumstances, there is no alternative for the Negro citizen but to
work out his salvation under the Constitution, as other citizens have done
and are doing. It will be a long and tedious process before the equitable
adjustment has been attained, but that does not much matter, as full and fair
enjoyment of civil and political rights requires much time and patience and
hard labor in any given situation, where two races come together in the
same governmental environment; such as is the case of the Negro in
America, the Irishman in Ireland, and the Jew everywhere in Europe. It is
just as well, perhaps, that the Negro will have to work out his salvation
under the Constitution as an individual rather than as a race, as the Jew has
done it in Great Britain and as the Irishman will have to do it under the
same Empire, as it is and has been the tendency of our law and precedent to
subordinate race elements and to exalt the individual citizens as indivisible
"parts of one stupendous whole." When this has been accomplished by the
law in the case of the Negro, as in the case of other alien ethnic elements of
the citizenship, it will be more gradually, but assuredly, accomplished by
society at large, the indestructible foundation of which was laid by the
reckless and brutal prostitution of black women by white men in the days of
slavery, from which a vast army of mulattoes were produced, who have
been and are, gradually, by honorable marriage among themselves,
changing the alleged "race characteristics and tendencies" of the Negro
people. A race element, it is safe and fair to conclude, incapable, like that of
the North American Indian, of such a process of elimination and
assimilation, will always be a thorn in the flesh of the Republic, in which

there is, admittedly, no place for the integrality and growth of a distinct race
type. The Afro-American people, for reasons that I have stated, are even
now very far from being such a distinct race type, and without further
admixture of white and black blood, will continue to be less so to the end of
the chapter. It seems to me that this view of the matter has not received the
consideration that it deserves at the hands of those who set themselves up as
past grand masters in the business of "solving the race problem," and in
accurately defining "The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present
Day." The negroid type and the Afro-American type are two very distinct
types, and the sociologist who confounds them, as is very generally done, is
bound to confuse his subject and his audience.
It is a debatable question as to whether the Negro's present industrial
position is better or worse than it was, say, at the close of the
Reconstruction period. As a mass, I am inclined to the opinion that it is
worse, as the laws of the States where he is congregated most numerously
are so framed as to favor the employer in every instance, and he does not
scruple to get all out of the industrial slave that he can; which is, in the
main, vastly more than the slave master got, as the latter was at the expense
of housing, feeding, clothing and providing medical service for his chattel,
while the former is relieved of this expense and trouble. Prof. W.E.B.
DuBois, of Atlanta University, who has made a critical study of the rural
Negro of the Southern States, sums up the industrial phase of the matter in
the following ("The Souls of Black Folk," pp. 39-40):
"For this much all men know: Despite compromise, war and struggle, the
Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles,
he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural
South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an
economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary.
In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a
segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the
courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis.
Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the
result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime."
It is a dark and gloomy picture, the substitution of industrial for chattel
slavery, with none of the legal and selfish restraints upon the employer

which surrounded and actuated the master. And this is true of the entire
mass of the Afro-American laborers of the Southern States. Out of the mass
have arisen a large number of individuals who own and till their own lands.
This element is very largely recruited every year, and to this source must we
look for the gradual undermining of the industrial slavery of the mass of the
people. Here, too, we have a long and tedious process of evolution, but it is
nothing new in the history of races circumstanced as the Afro-American
people are. That the Negro is destined, however, to be the landlord and
master agriculturist of the Southern States is a probability sustained by all
the facts in the situation; not the least of which being the tendency of the
poor white class and small farmers to abandon agricultural pursuits for
those of the factory and the mine, from which the Negro laborer is
excluded, partially in the mine and wholly in the factory. The development
of mine and factory industries in the Southern States in the past two decades
has been one of the most remarkable in industrial history.
In the skilled trades, at the close of the War of the Rebellion, most of the
work was done by Negroes educated as artisans in the hard school of
slavery, but there has been a steady decline in the number of such laborers,
not because of lack of skill, but because trade unionism has gradually taken
possession of such employments in the South, and will not allow the Negro
to work alongside of the white man. And this is the rule of the trade unions
in all parts of the country. It is to be hoped that there may be a gradual
broadening of the views of white laborers in this vital matter and a change
of attitude by the trade unions that they dominate. Can we reasonably
expect this? As matters now stand, it is the individual Negro artisan, often a
master contractor, who can work at his trade and give employment to his
fellows. Fortunately, there are a great many of these in all parts of the
Southern States, and their number is increasing every year, as the result of
the rapid growth and high favor of industrial schools, where the trades are
taught. A very great deal should be expected from this source, as a Negro
contractor stands very nearly on as good footing as a white one in the
bidding, when he has established a reputation for reliability. The facts
obtained in every Southern city bear out this view of the matter. The
individual black man has a fighting chance for success in the skilled trades;
and, as he succeeds, will draw the skilled mass after him. The proper
solution of the skilled labor problem is strictly within the power of the

individual Negro. I believe that he is solving it, and that he will ultimately
solve it.
It is, however, in the marvellous building up of a legal, comfortable and
happy home life, where none whatever existed at the close of the War of the
Rebellion; in the no less stupendous development of the church life, with
large and puissant organizations that command the respect and admiration
of mankind, and owning splendid church property valued at millions of
dollars; in the quenchless thirst of the mass of the people for useful
knowledge, displayed at the close of the War of the Rebellion, and abating
nothing of its intense keenness since, with the remarkable reduction in the
illiteracy of the mass of the people, as is eloquently disclosed by the census
reports—it is in these results that no cause for complaint or discouragement
can be found. The whole race here stands on improved ground over that it
occupied at the close of the War of the Rebellion; albeit, even here, the
individual has outstripped the mass of the race, as it was but natural that he
should and always will. But, while this is true and gratifying to all those
that hope the Afro-American people well, it is also true, and equally
gratifying that, as far as the mass is concerned, the home life, the church
and the school house have come into the life of the people, in some sort,
everywhere, giving the whole race a character and a standing in the
estimation of mankind which it did not have at the close of the war, and
presaging, logically, unless all signs fail, a development along high and
honorable lines in the future; the results from which, I predict, at the end of
the ensuing half century, builded upon the foundation already laid, being
such as to confound the prophets of evil, who never cease to doubt and
shake their heads, asking: "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" We
have the answer already in the social and home life of the people, which is
so vast an improvement over the conditions and the heritage of slavery as to
stagger the understanding of those who are informed on the subject, or will
take the trouble to inform themselves.
If we have much loose moral living, it is not sanctioned by the mass,
wedlock being the rule, and not the exception; if we have a vast volume of
illiteracy, we have reduced it by forty per cent. since the war, and the school
houses are all full of children eager to learn, and the schools of higher and
industrial training cannot accommodate all those who knock at their doors
for admission; if we have more than our share of criminality, we have also

churches in every hamlet and city, to which a vast majority of the people
belong, and which are insistently pointing "the way, the light and the truth"
to higher and nobler living.
Mindful, therefore, of the Negro's two hundred and forty-five years of slave
education and unrequited toil, and of his thirty years of partial freedom and
less than partial opportunity, who shall say that his place in American life at
the present day is not all that should be reasonably expected of him, that it
is not creditable to him, and that it is not a sufficient augury for better and
nobler and higher thinking, striving and building in the future? Social
growth is the slowest of all growth. If there be signs of growth, then, there
is reasonable hope for a healthy maturity. There are plenty of such signs,
and he who runs may read them, if he will.

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