Part 2

Now no such balance can be struck by the unaided acts of the men of the lower race. Without the co-operation of the women of the upper race these men are helpless to scale the high wall, or to make the slightest breach in it. The law, public opinion, the men of the upper race, render such co-operation very difficult, well-nigh impossible, did there exist any disposition on the part of the women of the upper race to give aid and comfort for such a purpose to the men of the lower race. But as a matter of fact, and speaking broadly, there exists no such disposition. The law of sexual selection does not operate under the circumstances to make the men of the lower race sufficiently attractive to the women of the upper race. It is possible that in a state of nature, and under other circumstances, the case might be different. But under present conditions the sexual gravitation of the women of the upper world toward the men of the lower world may be set down as infinitesimally small, practically a negligible quantity. Everything in the state, in society, in deep-rooted racial prejudices, in the vastly inferior social and economic standing of the lower race and the ineffaceable dishonor which attaches to such unions in the public mind, together with the actual peril to life which attends them, all combine to discourage, to destroy almost any inclination in that direction on the part of the women of the upper race.

Now, while this is true, speaking broadly, it is not altogether so. For in scattered individual cases, in spite of the difficulties and dangers, the law of sexual selection has been known to operate between those two worlds. A few women of the upper world, on the right side of the high wall have been drawn to a few men in the lower world, on the wrong side of that wall. By the connivance, or co-operation of such women the men of their choice have climbed into the upper world, climbed into it over the high wall by means that were secret and ways that were dark. As one swallow does not, however, make summer, neither can these scattered instances, few and far between, be cited to establish any general affinity between the women of the upper race and the men of the lower race. On examination they will be seen to be exceptions, which only prove the rule of a want of sexual affinity between them under existing conditions at least. Practically a well-nigh impassable gulf, to change the figure, separates the men of the lower world from the women of the upper one. The men as a class can not bridge that gulf, and the women as a class have no desire to do so. This, then, is the actual situation: the men of the upper world enjoy practically exclusive possession of the women of that world, while the men of the lower world do not enjoy exclusive possession of the women of their world, but share this possession with the men of the upper world.

The effect that is produced in consequence of this state of things on the morals of the men of the lower world, is distinctly and decidedly bad. Such conditions, such a situation, could not possibly produce a different effect so long as human nature is what it is. And the human nature of each race is essentially the same. The morals of the men of the two worlds will be found at any given time to be almost exactly alike in almost every particular. For the morals of the men of the lower world are in truth a close imitation of those of the men of the upper world--closest not where those morals are at their best, but where they are at their worst. This will be found to be the case every time. So that it happens that where the morals of the men of the upper world are bad, those of the men of the lower world will not be merely bad, but very bad. There follows naturally, inevitably, under these circumstances and in consequence of these conditions, widespread debauchery of the morals of the women of the lower race. And for this there is absolutely no help, no remedy, just so long as the law and public opinion maintain such a demoralizing state of things.

If there exists no affinity between the men of the lower world and the women of the upper world, there does then exist a vital connection between the masculine morals of the two worlds. These morals are in constant interaction, one upon the other. When the moral barometer falls in the upper world, it falls directly in the lower one also. And as the storm of sensuality passes over both worlds simultaneously, its devastating effects will always fall heaviest on the lower one where the women of that world form the center of its greatest activity. Whatever figure the moral barometer registers in the lower world, it will register a corresponding one in the upper, and this whether the barometer be rising or falling. If the moral movement be downward in the lower world, it will be downward in the upper, and if it be upward in the upper, it will be upward in the lower and vice versa.

In view of the vital connection then between the morals of the two races the moral regeneration of either must of necessity include both. At one and the same time the work ought to start in each and proceed along parallel lines in both. The starting-point for each is the abolition of the double moral standard, and the substitution in law and in public opinion of a single one, applicable alike to the conduct of both. Otherwise every reformatory movement is from the beginning doomed to failure, to come to naught in the end. For the roots of the moral evil which exists under present conditions and by virtue of them cannot be extirpated without first changing those conditions.

The morals of the two races in default of such change of conditions must sink in consequence from bad to worse. They cannot possibly rise in spite of such conditions.

I have now discussed the subject of the contact of two races living together on the same land and on terms of inequality, in its relations to the morals of the men of those races. It yet remains to consider the same subject in its relations to the conduct of the women. What is the effect of such contact, to be specific, on the women of the two races in the South? And first, what is it on white women? Do these women know of the existence of the criminal commerce which goes on between the world of the white man and that of the colored woman? And if so, are they cognizant of its extent and magnitude. They do perceive, without doubt, what it must have been in the past from the multitude of the mixed bloods who came down to the South from the period before the war, or the abolition of slavery. Such visible evidence not even a fool could refuse to accept at its full face value. And the white women of the South are not fools. Far from it. They have eyes like other women, and ears, and with them they see and hear what goes on about them. Their intelligence is not deceived in respect to appearance and underlying causes. Certainly they are not ignorant of the fact that a Negro can no more change his skin than a leopard his spots. When therefore they see black mothers with light-colored children, they need not ask the meaning of it, the cause of such apparent wonder. For they know to their sorrow its natural explanation, and whence have come all the mulattoes and quadroons and octoroons of the South. And to these women this knowledge has been bitterer than death. The poisoned arrow of it long ago entered deep into their souls. And the hurt, cruel and immedicable, rankles in the breasts of those women today, as it rankled in the breasts of their mothers of a past long vanished.

What, pray, is engendered by all of this widespread but suppressed suffering transmitted, as a bitter heritage for generations, by Southern mothers to Southern daughters? What but bitter hatred of the black woman of the South by the white woman of the South. How is this hatred expressed? In a hundred ways and by a hundred means. One cannot keep down a feeling of pity for a large class of women in the South who cannot meet in street, or store, or car, a well-dressed and comely colored girl without experiencing a pang of suspicion, a spasm of fear. For there arises unbidden, unavoidably, in the minds of such women the ugly question, whose daughter is she, and whose mistress is she to be? For in the girl's veins may flow the proudest blood of the South. And this possibility, aye, probability, so shameful to both races, no one in the South knows better than the Southern white woman. What happens? The most natural thing in the world, but not the wisest. The hatred, the suspicion, the fear of these women find expression in scorn, in active ill-will, not only toward that particular girl, but toward her whole class as well. They are all put under the ban of this accumulated hatred, suspicion and fear.

A hostility, deep-seated and passionate as that which proceeds from white women as a class toward black women as a class, shoots beyond the mark and attacks indiscriminately all colored women without regard to character, without regard to standing or respectability. It is enough that they belong to the black race; ergo, they are bad, ergo, they are dangerous. All this bitter hatred of the women of one race by the women of the other race has borne bitter fruit in the South in merciless class distinctions, in hard and fast caste-lines, designed to limit contact of the races there to the single point where they come together as superior and inferior. Hence the South has its laws against intermarriage, and for separating the races in schools, in public libraries, in churches, in hotels, in cars, in waiting rooms, on steamboats, in hospitals, in poorhouses, in prisons, in graveyards. Thus it is intended to reduce the contact of the races to a minimum, to glut at the same time the hatred of the white women of the South toward the black women of the South, and to shut the men of each race from the women of the other race. But how foolish are all these laws, how futile are all these class distinctions! Do they really effect the separation of the races? They do not, they cannot under existing conditions. What then do they? They do indeed separate the world of the white man and woman from the colored man and woman, but they fail utterly to separate the world of the colored woman from the white man.

The joint fear of the white woman and the white man is incorporated today in every State of the South in laws interdicting marriage between the races. But do these laws put an end to the sexual commerce which goes on between the world of the white man and that of the colored woman? Have they checked perceptibly this vile traffic between these two worlds? They have not nor can they diminish or extinguish this evil. On the contrary, because they divide the two worlds, because they uphold this legal separation of the races, they provide a secret door, a dark way between the two worlds, between the two races, which the men of the upper world open at will and travel at pleasure. For they hold the key to this secret door, the clue to this dark way. Such preventive measures are in truth but a repetition of the fatal folly of the ostrich when it is afraid. For then while this powerful bird takes infinite pains to cover its insignificant front lines, it leaves unprotected its widely extended rear ones, and falls accordingly an easy victim to the enemy which pursues it. The real peril of an admixture of the races in the South lies not in intermarriage, but in concubinage, lies through that secret door which connects the races, the key to which is in the hands of the white men of the South. It is they who first opened it, and it is they who continue to keep it open. Were it not for the folly of the white women of the South, it might yet be closed and sealed. The folly of the white women of the South is their hatred, their fear of the colored women of the South. They first think to rid themselves of the rivalry of the second class by excluding them from the upper world, by shutting them securely within the limits of the lower one. But these women forget the existence of that secret door, of the hidden way. They forget also the hand that holds the key to the one and the clue to the other. That hand is the hand of the white man; it is certainly not the hand of the colored woman.

Is it not the white woman of the South more than any other agency, or than all other agencies put together, who are responsible for the existence of a public sentiment in the South which makes it legally impossible for a colored girl to obtain redress from the white man who betrayed her, or support from him for his bastard child? The white woman of the South thus outlaws, thus punishes her black rival. But what does such outlawry accomplish, what such punishment? What do they but add immensely to the strength of the white man's temptation by making such illicit intercourse safe for him to indulge in? Thanks to the white woman's mad hatred of the colored woman, to her insane fear of her colored rival, the white man of the South is enabled to practice with singular impunity this species of polygamy. For the penalties against the adulterer, against the fornicator, which the law provides, which public opinion provides, for him in the upper world, he well knows will not be called down on his head were the acts of adultery or fornication committed by him in the lower world. It is a sad fact and a terrible one, sad for both races and terrible for the women of both races in the actual and potential wickedness of it. No colored girl, however, cruelly wronged by a white man in the South will be able to obtain an iota of justice at the hands of that man in any court of law in any Southern State, or to get the slightest hearing or sympathy for her cause at the bar of Southern public opinion. Were she to enter the upper world of the white woman with such a case against some white man, who but the Southern white woman would be the first to drive her back into her world? But unless she is not only allowed but encouraged to emerge out of her world with the shameful fruit of her guilty life and love, and so to confront her white paramour or betrayer in his world, how is the lower world ever to rid itself of such as she, or the upper one of such as he? In the segregation and outlawry of the black woman under such conditions lie the white woman's greatest danger, lie the white race's greatest danger from admixture of the races, lies the South's greatest danger to its morals. For through such segregation and outlawry run the white man's way to the black woman's world, and therefore to miscegenation of the races, to their widespread moral degradation and corruption. Amalgamation is not therefore made hard, but appallingly easy.

But there is another aspect to this side of the subject which must not be entirely ignored, and that is the existence in a few instances of illicit relations between some white women and some colored men in the South. That such relations have existed in the past and do actually exist there at the present time, there is absolutely no doubt whatever. In certain localities these relations, although known or suspected, have been tolerated, while in general as soon as they are discovered or suspected they have been broken up by mobs who murder the black participants when they are caught, sometimes on trumped-up charges of having committed the "usual crime." The existence of such relations is not so strange or incredible as may be supposed at first hearing of them. For it is a fact hardly less curious, if not so strange, that there are men who while they would not think of marrying into a class beneath them would nevertheless live readily enough in a state of concubinage with women of that class. And in this upper class there are women, not many, it is true, who would do the same thing. They care enough for the men in the class beneath them to enter into illicit relations in secret with them, but not enough to enter into licit relations with these same men in the open, in the gaze of a scornful and horrified world. Has it ever been seriously considered that like father may occasionally produce like daughter in the South? And that such moral lapses by a few white women of that section may be accounted for in part at least by that mysterious law of atavism? The sons are like their fathers in respect to their fondness for colored women, why may not one daughter in, say, ten thousand, resemble those fathers in that same shameful, though not altogether unnatural respect? Do not such instances, few and far between at present though they be, furnish matter for thoughtful people of the South regardless of sex, race or color?

Have the white women of the South considered that under existing conditions they are deprived of effective influence, of effective power, to reform the morals of the men of their race? And that unless the morals of the men are reformed the morals of the whole white race will eventually decline? If the women fail to lift the level of the moral life of their men to their own higher plane, the lower morals of the men will drag downward ultimately to their level that of the women. From this inevitable conclusion and consequence there is no possible escape. But the white women of the South are powerless to lift the morals of their men without lifting at the same time the morals of the women of the black race. If, however, they steadily refuse to do so in the future, as they have refused to do so in the past, and as they refuse to do so today by the only sure means which can and will contribute mightily to effect such a purpose, viz., by making the black women their equals before the law, and at the bar of an enlightened public sentiment, and these women remain in consequence where they are today, a snare to the feet of white men, when these men trip over this snare into the hell of the senses, they will drag downward slowly but surely with them toward the level of these self-same black women the moral ideals if not the moral life of the white women of the South.

And now a final word about the black woman of the South: She holds in her keeping the moral weal or woe, not only of her own race, but of the white race also. As she stands today in respect to the white man of the South, her situation is full of peril to both races. For she lives in a world where the white man may work his will on her without let or hindrance, outside of law, outside of the social code and moral restraints which protect the white woman. This black woman's extra-legal position in the South, and her extra-social status there, render her a safe quarry for the white man's lust. And she is pursued by him for immoral ends without dread of ill consequences to himself, either legal or social. If she resists his advances, and in many cases she does resist them, he does not abate his pursuit, but redoubles it. Her respectability, her very virtue, makes her all the more attractive to him, spurs the more his sensual desire to get possession of her person. He tracks her, endeavors to snare her in a hundred dark ways and by a hundred crooked means. On the street, in stores, in cars, going to and from church, she encounters this man, bent on her ruin. Into her very home his secret emissaries may attack her with their temptation, with their vile solicitation. Nowhere is she safe, free from his pursuit, because no law protects her, no moral sentiment casts about her person the aegis of its power. And when haply dazed by the insignia of his superior class, or his wealth, or the magic of his skin, or the creature comforts which he is able to offer her, she succumbs to his embrace and enters the home to which he invites her, she becomes from that time outlawed in both worlds, a moral plague-spot in the midst of both races. For she begins then to reproduce herself, her wretched history, her sad fate, in the more wretched history, in the sadder fate of her daughters. And so in her world of the senses, of the passions, she enacts in a sort of vicious circle the moral tragedy of two races. If the white man works the moral ruin of her and hers, she and they in turn work upon him and his a moral ruin no less sure and terrible.

What is the remedy? It is certainly not the segregation of the races in a state of inequality before the law. For such segregation exists today. It has existed to the hurt of both races in the past. It is the fruitful parent of fearful woes at the present time, and will be the breeder of incalculable mischief for both races, for the South, and for the nation itself, in the future. The remedy lies not then in racial segregation and inequality, for that is the disease, but in interracial comity and equality. The double moral standard has to be got rid of as quickly as possible, and a single one erected in its stead, applicable alike to the men and women of both races. The moral world of the white man and that of the black woman must be merged into one by the ministers of law and religion, by an awakened public conscience, and by an enlightened and impartial public sentiment, which is the great promoter and upholder of individual and national righteousness. The black woman of the South must be as sacredly guarded as a woman by Southern law and public opinion against the sexual passion and pursuit of the Southern white man as is the Southern white woman. Such equality of condition, of protection, in the South is indispensable to any lasting improvement in the morals of its people, white or black. If that section persists in sowing inequality instead of equality between the races, it must continue to gather the bitter fruits of it in the darkened moral life, in the low moral standard of both races. For what the South sows, whether it be cotton or character, that it will surely reap.

Theophilus G. Steward. The Message of San Domingo to the African Race

"The mention of that name, San Domingo," says McMaster, "calls up the recollection of one of the finest colonies, of one of the noblest struggles for liberty, of one of the grandest men, and of one of the foulest deeds in the history of revolutionary France."[1]

[1] History of the American People, John Bach McMaster Vol. III, p. 215.

The part that the inhabitants of that island took in our war of independence, I have related previously in a paper read before this body. (No. 5.) I may quote in substance from that paper the following facts.

The record given by Minister Rush secured in Paris in 1849, and preserved in the Pennsylvania Historical Society states that a legion of colored troops from San Domingo saved the American army from annihilation by bravely covering its retreat in the disastrous repulse which it met in Savannah in 1779. This legion was composed of about 800 freedmen, black and mulatto, and was known as Fontages' Legion. They had freely volunteered, and had accompanied D'Estaing from Port-au-Prince, and as the Haitian historians say, they came to our shores and covered themselves with glory in the cause of freedom. Among the men named as winning distinction in that critical action were: Andre Rigaud, Beauvais, Villatte, Beauregard, Lambert and Christophe. How many of the brave men of that legion gave up their lives in the cause of American independence is not known; but we do know that some colored martyrs from San Domingo, poured out their blood along with that of the colored patriots of our own country as a libation to American freedom. The meagre record states that Christophe received a dangerous gunshot wound; how many others were wounded or even slain we do not know.