Chapter 2

The conflict between classes in the South will last until they recognize that they have an identity of interests, or that they are brethren. Prejudice is neither dead nor fast dying. There is a change in the cities, but it does not reach far inland. In how many Southern States are the same privileges extended to both races in schools? in cars? in hotels? in churches? This prejudice is in the blood. Heredity and training have both fostered it. Race prejudices die slowly. For centuries the contest between Patrician and Plebeian was carried on in ancient Rome. The subject-class never affiliated with the master-class. Two or three hundred years ago a new people was introduced into the north of Ireland. The north is essentially Scottish. Its inhabitants are Protestant and phlegmatic. In the south, the religion is Romanist, and the people are mercurial. They are of the same color. They have had the same history for centuries. For nearly five hundred years, the Turk has been a disturbing factor in Europe. The Turk is Asiatic. He is surrounded by European life. How rapidly has the antipathy between races disappeared where the Turk has power? The race-lines are as distinct as if the waters of a white river and a black ran in the same channel. The Hebrews are found in all parts of the world. They are industrious, and as decent as the average man; they mingle with other people, and yet almost everywhere the prejudice against them is constant and bitter. How long before Protestant Orangemen and Catholic Irishmen will walk arm and arm in the same procession? How long before the German and Russian and Englishman will recognize the Jew as a brother? In the South, the antipathy is between black and white, between a master-class and a subject-class, between oppressed and oppressor. How long before this prejudice will disappear?

II. How much time will be required for the consciousness of having been wronged to wear from the breast and the blood of the black man? This consciousness of having been wronged is not a race-prejudice, and yet it may become one. It is hard to eradicate. It is aggravated when the same feelings are in many hearts. This is a complicated factor. Some of {125} the blacks seem incapable of sentiments of revenge. They are too lighthearted to cherish grievances. But all are not so. The pure blacks who carry with them the consciousness of having been deeply injured, are many. What will you say of the mulattoes? A man who knows his father, and knows that his father ignores his existence, may keep it to himself, but he cannot smother his feeling. He who sees his brothers and sisters pass him on the street in carriages, living in comfort and honor, while he is poor, and nothing to them, will, in proportion as he is a man, hate the social order in which they live. Until this consciousness of having been injured and degraded vanishes, the Southern question will disturb political and social life.

III. Closely allied to the consciousness of degradation is the lack of manly feeling. Appreciation of manhood is a condition of improvement. He who thinks himself only an animal will live like one. Does this condition exist at the South? It could not be otherwise. Any one who has travelled there must have his faith in the evolution of some men from the lower animals immeasurably strengthened. Rev. Dr. Taylor, of New York, has said that he knows that the Darwinian theory cannot be true, because, if it were, "an Englishman's right arm would have developed into an umbrella long ago." But Dr. Taylor would find faces in the South which, from their resemblance to lower orders of life, might weaken his faith in his demonstration.

The black race is no more degraded than our own would be under similar circumstances, but its condition is appalling. How long will it take to develop the consciousness of manhood where all the tastes, and all the tendencies, and almost all the environment, are low and in the opposite direction? The colored people have not the help of higher and refining influences. Their tendencies have been downward, and present environment increases the tendency. Regeneration or reform is not the work of a year or a generation. The change will come only by the creation of new and higher conditions, and with the birth of a more self-respecting stock.

IV. How long will be required for the education of the colored people and the poor whites?

The author of "An Appeal to Caesar" says, "The Southern man, black or white, is not likely to be greatly different to-morrow from what he was yesterday. Generations may modify; years can only restrain. The question is not whether education, begun to-day and carried on however vigorously and successfully by the most approved agencies, would change the characteristics of to-day's masses. Not at all. The question is whether it would so act upon them _as they are_, would so enlighten and inform their minds, as to convince them of the mutual danger, peril, disaster, that must attend continual oppression or sudden uprising. We cannot expect to make intelligence instantly effective in the elevation of individual citizenship, or the exercise of collective power. Little by little that change must come." {126}

About ninety per cent, of the whole colored population of the South, and about forty-five per cent. of those above ten years of age, are illiterate. In 1880, nineteen per cent., or about one in every five, of the white people of the South, and seventy-three per cent. of the colored people, could neither read nor write; and this estimate is far too large. After fifteen years of the ballot, seventy-three per cent. of the colored race of the South could neither read nor write. Much is being done to promote education by schools and charities, but what are these among so many? To meet the ignorant condition of things, the Government is doing nothing. The State governments are doing only a little. In the Southern States previous to the war there was no system of common schools. After the war there were not even old foundations to build upon. Everything had to be started _de novo_ by those who had nothing with which to start. "We must remember," said Dr. Mayo, "that nine men out of ten of the South never saw what we call a good public elementary school. It has been said that the public school-buildings of Denver alone exceed in value all the public school-buildings of the State of North Carolina."

The average school year throughout the South, in 1880, was less than one hundred days; the average attendance less than thirty per cent. of those within school age. In a belt of States where seventy-three per cent., and probably ninety per cent., of the population are illiterate, where they are too poor to do much except keep up the struggle for existence, where there are no traditions of culture, where it has been a crime for a black man to read, where the Nation is doing nothing, and where the State, when it does its best, provides instruction which reaches only thirty per cent. of those of school age for one hundred days in a year, and where the population is increasing so rapidly that in 1900 the blacks will be in a decided majority, charity and religion are doing--what? The progress under the circumstances is amazing, but how long will it take to educate the nineteen per cent. of Southern whites, and seventy-three per cent., of Southern blacks? There is more illiteracy now than at the close of the war, because education has not kept pace with the increase of the race.

V. How long will be required for the _moralizing_ of the lower classes of the South? Ability to make moral discriminations grows slowly. Ability to appreciate moral motives grows still more slowly. These people were trained in a school in which virtue was ignored. They have lived under conditions which have put a premium on theft. Slavery always makes thieves. The heredity of the passion for stealing is just as clearly marked as the heredity of the Roman nose or the faculty for music. The transmission of the tendency toward the gratification of the animal propensities is as definite as, and stronger than, the tendency for insanity and consumption to reproduce themselves. These people come into life blind, {127} and find little but darkness around them. Here you have about eight millions with an ancestry which began in heathenism and has had two centuries of slavery--a people inheriting all the evils of slavery; a people who have never been trained to make moral discriminations, and whose ancestors for unknown generations have been trained still less than they; a people who have none, or at least but little, of the inspiration toward a higher moral life which comes from a healthy environment; a people whose religion is almost all emotional; who can soar on the wings of imagination and enthusiasm to heights which would make an archangel dizzy; who from paroxysms of anguish at the condition of those whose burning bodies are lighting the fires of hell, will go off and commit adultery or rob a hen-roost as complacently as if to do so were a part of their religion. This is not fiction. Religion has not meant chastity, for slavery made that impossible; it has not meant justice, for injustice forged their chains; it has not meant generosity, for they had nothing; it has been simple emotion. The ethical element has been absent, and it was through no fault of the black man.

In 1860, President Hopkins said that a greater proportion of the Sandwich Islanders could read than of the people in New England. They were educated but not moralized. There were three hundred thousand of them a century and a half ago; in 1883, there were forty-nine thousand. Education without morality is no safeguard.

Prof. Gilliam shows, from census reports, that if the population of the Southern whites increases for a century, as at present, in 1985, there will be ninety-six million whites in the Southern States, and in 1980, one hundred and ninety-two million blacks. Statistics may lie; but there is enough truth in these to give terrible emphasis to the inquiry, How long before the colored people will be sufficiently educated to need no help? How long before they will have sufficient moral discrimination to know what the commandments require? When we realize how difficult is the task of inducing men with the environment of Christian influence at the North, and in England, to live even decent lives, the wonder is that the freedmen do as well as they do. How long before we can expect a race with such antecedents and environments to be fitted to be left to themselves? What answer must be given? I am not exaggerating the picture. I am only hinting at conditions of heathenism which exist. I am least of all blaming these poor and needy people; but none the less clear and strong comes the appeal for their moral and intellectual emancipation. The moralizing of a race which has such a history, how long will that require? No people ever rose more rapidly in the world's history. That shows what is possible. It does not tell us when our work will be finished. So long as one-half of the American republic is inhabited by those whose interests are alien to the other half, there can be no permanent prosperity. It has been said that there are three essentials to the {128} permanent unity of a nation; viz., unity of language, unity of interest and unity of religion. There is a common language between the blacks and whites, but the unity of interest is not recognized, and agreement in religion is only in name. The religion of the poor whites in the South is mechanical, and unintelligently doctrinal; the religion of the blacks is emotional and fantastic; and the religion of both blacks and whites is lacking in the ethical element. The process of political reconstruction has been progressing for twenty years and more, and is still incomplete. That is an easy work compared with what must be created intellectually, and socially, and morally. Before the Southern problem will be solved, a new stock must take the place of those who were reared in slavery; the old traditions must fade, and education, and an ethical type of Christianity, must do their work. How long will be required for that, none can tell. In the meantime, new complications may arise. The principles of socialism and anarchy are not unlikely to pervade the South, and if the masses of blacks are ever exploited by a central, unknown and irresponsible committee of agitators, the results must be a new reign of terror. The labor agitators are moving southward. It has been said that colored people have no tendencies toward socialism and anarchy. I am no prophet, but I will hazard the prediction that it will not be long before the socialistic agitator will stir up a commotion at the South that will make employers of labor and people of wealth tremble.

The sentiment has sometimes been whispered, that the work of this Association, and those akin to it, was about accomplished. That sentiment has selfishness or ignorance at the bottom of it. How long must this work be kept up? Until all that mass of darkness which fills the Southern horizon be shot through and through with shafts of light. How long must it be kept up? Until the last trace of prejudice that separates brother from brother shall have been removed. How long will this thing be kept up? Until the black man feels that he is a man; until he can vote intelligently, and live wisely, and until he has the ability and the will to discriminate carefully in matters of morals. How long must it be kept up? Until no man can plead ignorance, or want of opportunity, for rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ. The Eastern question has been a live question in European politics for more than four centuries. It is no more puzzling than the Southern question is with us. There is an experiment in physics that is typical of this work. An iron bar is suspended in the air and then a tiny cork, hung from a string, is thrown against it. At first no impression is made, but the blows are repeated, until, by and by, the bar begins to tremble, then to vibrate, then to swing to and fro. The repeated impacts of the little cork at last move the mass. It will not be by any great rush that the Southern problem will be solved. It will yield at last to the constancy, and fidelity, of the great multitude of those who love their brother because they love their Lord; who are content to work in secret, {129} and many of whom already rest in unmarked graves. That mass of ignorance, wretchedness and wrong will swing and disappear at last before the multitudinous strokes of individual gifts and individual prayers.

All the problems which are vexing the older nations are essentially social problems, and the watchword of all the movements that are undermining thrones and caste, and the wicked social order, is, "The world no longer for the few, but for the many." In America the _many_ are already in possession, and the problem with us is, How may our rulers--the people who can never be dethroned--be rendered competent to rule? That is the question to which the American Missionary Association is devoting itself; and its answer is the only true one: By making the people intelligent, and Christian. And how long before that will be accomplished? A Scotchman once asked an Irishman, "Why were half-farthings coined in England?" Pat instantly replied, "To give Scotchmen an opportunity of contributing to missions." When will this problem be solved? Never, if the Christians of America are like Pat's Scotchman, but quicker than any of us dream, if all the Christians of America are like that woman in the New Testament who put into the treasury two mites.

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THE SOUTH.

SOUTHERN TESTIMONY.

We insert the following from the _Southern Presbyterian_, as a recent testimony to the views, principles and work of the American Missionary Association. It will be all the stronger from the fact that it was not written for a testimony, but as a setting forth of facts by a Southerner to Southerners.

The old masters and the old slaves are now rapidly passing into eternity. In ten years more no one of our people, white or black, under _forty years_ of age, will know personally anything of slavery. It then comes to this, that now and from this time forward, we white Christians must be impressed with the fact that we have here at our doors, in our houses, offices, stores and kitchens, and on our farms, not slaves, but a race of people, three-fourths of whom are but a little removed from savages in so far as their knowledge of religion is concerned. They have among them those whom they call preachers; they hold meetings, they halloo, they shout, but no _saving truth_ is preached or heard from that source. The result is great animal excitement, but no moral elevation. Then many of them are receiving secular education. That sharpens their intellects but gives no Christian character. It does just the opposite; it fits them for rascality. They are increasing. There are probably eight millions of them now, and there will be many millions more. Those who are dying without Christ are dying here in a Christian land without hope.

The statement of a Congregational missionary recently made, is probably true, viz.: that "one-fourth of the race is improving rapidly," yet much the larger part of them are almost, if not altogether, _heathen_. They are not across the ocean; under God's providence they are here, where you can touch them with your finger. Why here? {130} It will not do to say that nothing can be made out of them. Go to Texas, to Tennessee, and come right here to Atlanta now, and our most intelligent white men will tell you that on the prohibition question, negroes, educated, smart and very eloquent, have made, and are making, _ringing_ speeches. There have been smart speakers on both sides. Some of their speeches would do credit to any white orator in the South. Dr. Sanderson, our late Professor at Tuskaloosa, stated on the floor of the Synod of Alabama last week, that he had taught a good deal, and that a young negro, twenty years of age, one of our divinity students at Tuskaloosa, was as smart a pupil as he had ever seen; that if he were in the State University he would be in its first rank of students, and that he heard him recently preach a sermon on the mediatorial work of Christ, such that he (Dr. Sanderson) would not undertake to make a better one on that majestic theme. * * *

In Dallas Presbytery, Texas, recently, a black man was examined for two days on Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and on all that is required by our Book of Government for ordination, and he did not falter once. So the brethren there testify.

Then it comes to this: this race of people is here; the great body of them are heathen. Can anyone doubt that it is the purpose of the Almighty to prepare a large number of them, converted, educated and civilized, to go back to Africa to redeem that continent for civilization and for Christ? We are commanded to preach the Gospel to every creature, to teach it to all nations.

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OUR WORK, AS A GRADUATE OF FISK UNIVERSITY SEES IT.

BY WILLIAM A. CROSTHWAITE.

The American Missionary Association is doing more to quicken the hopes and aspirations of the Southern Negro, more toward arousing the Southern white man to educate himself, and more toward bringing the two races to an acknowledgment of each other's rights, than any other similar institution in the country.

In the summer of 1884, near Leesburg, Texas, a well-appointed Negro school was burned by the whites of that community. The colored people, seeing their hope of years in ashes, advertised their little holdings for sale, and prepared to leave in a body. But the whites offered to supplement the insurance on the former building and to re-build the school, if the colored people would remain in the community. The terms were accepted, and now _West Chapel_, which is the name of the school, is excellently furnished and has a $200 bell upon it, and is the best known school in Northeast Texas. Previous to the burning of West Chapel, the whites were continually distracted by factional fights. There was general apathy with regard to improvement in any way whatever. Their teachers were always of the inferior class. But, when they found that the colored people would have a school, they decided to have one also. The colored people bought a bell. So did they. The colored people had a foreign teacher. So must they have one, and they paid $750 a year for him. One of the white citizens of the locality summed the situation up thus:--"West Chapel is to the whites what a coal of fire is on the back of a terrapin." This school was organized by a Fisk student and has ever {131} since been taught by students of Fisk. Thus is the A.M.A. lifting up the Negro directly and the whites indirectly, and establishing friendly relations between the two.

But this is no isolated case. The story is the same wherever the educated Negro comes in contact with the whites. At one time, our school was so far in advance of the white school, that I was told by my school director that "no high-learnt teacher was wanted to teach 'Nigger Schools,'" and I was actually driven from my school by threats of violence.

The North can better understand the work of the American Missionary Association, when it is fully understood that the presence of Fisk University in Nashville brought about the existence of Vanderbilt University. When Fisk began to send out her graduates as refined and upright gentlemen, and the newspapers were enthusiastic in their accounts of its literary and musical exhibitions, the white people said; "We must have a university in Nashville also."

In the recent Prohibition campaign in Tennessee, the students of Fisk were one of the chief factors. In the beginning of the movement, the cry; "Where does Fisk stand on this question?" went up from the good people all over the State. Fisk was the first college to declare in favor of the proposed Amendment, and one hundred young men and women went from her walls and fought valiantly for the cause.

It is due the profound Christian spirit that characterizes the work of the Association to say, that every student and alumnus of Fisk in the State of Tennessee was an ardent supporter of the cause, save two. During the campaign the most cordial feelings existed between the better elements of both races. Heretofore these things were almost unheard of.

There was a time when policy or political expediency had no effect upon the prejudices of the Southern whites, but the educational process inaugurated by the North is elevating a class of colored people to a plane where they are respected as never before. No State or Federal aid can do for us what the A.M.A. is doing. Such aid as the Blair Bill proposed would meet a certain need, and enable the men that are educated by the A.M.A. to get at the masses; but the peculiar work of preparing honest and devout Christian leaders must be otherwise provided for. The complete regeneration of the South is a thing of the future. The A.M.A. must remain among us to hasten on "the harvest of the golden year."