Part 12
"Mr. President, it has been repeatedly said that the hostility of the white people of the South to social intermingling with the negro race is an instinct--a race instinct. I do not so consider it,--and for two reasons: first, because many men of Anglo-Saxon blood--and of these President Phillips is the most conspicuous example--do not have such an instinct; second, because instinct is not the result of reason, while the Southern white man's opposition to social recognition of the negro is defensible by the purest, most dispassionate reason. These convictions are so well fixed in the Southern mind that they may appear to be instinctive and measurably serve the purpose of instinct; but the vital objections of my people to intermingling socially with the negro are not founded in any race antipathy, whim, pretence, or prejudice. They are grounded in the clearest common sense, and as such only do I care to present or defend them.
"In face of the disaster to be averted, I could wish that it were an instinct; for instinct does not fail in a crisis. But men are more than beasts: the power to rise is given to them conditioned upon the chance to fall. So in this race matter: instinct does not forbid a white man to marry a black woman; instinct--more's the horror!--does not forbid a white woman to wed a negro man. For this reason it is--for the very lack of a race instinct is it--that the social intermingling of the white and black races, as advocated and practised by President Phillips, would inevitably bring to pass an amalgamation of the races with all its foul brood of evils.
"President Phillips, living in a section of the country where negroes are few--especially such as are of sufficient intelligence to be interesting to a man of his attainments--does not dream of amalgamation. I would not insult him by assuming such a thing. And yet upon a superficial estimate of conditions in the South he gives us this impulsive exhibition of what in one of his high official position is criminal carelessness.
"The positive element of crime in it is not in the affront which a Presidential negro luncheon puts upon Southern sentiment, but in the suggestion to Southern and Northern people alike that a social intermingling of the races--which means amalgamation, however blind he may be to the fact--is the solution of the race problem. The crime would be complete in all its horror if the South, if the nation, should follow his lead and achieve the logical result of his teaching.
"From long and intimate acquaintance with the negro's character, my people know that the Phillips negro luncheon stimulates not the negro's ambition and endeavour to improve himself as it tickles and arouses his vanity. When the ordinary darkey hears of it he thinks it not a recognition of the superior abilities of Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods, but a social recognition of the negro race; and forthwith deems himself the equal of the white man and desires unutterable things. And not without reason.
"The black people appreciate what the President's act means for them. They do not misinterpret its tendency. A prominent negro said in a recent mass meeting in Richmond: 'No two peoples having the same religion and speaking the same tongue, living together, have ever been kept apart. This is well known and is one of the reasons why the dominant race is crushing out the strength of the negro in the South. I am afraid we are anarchistic and I give warning that if this oppression in the South continues the negro must resort to the torch and the sword, and that the Southland will become a land of blood and desolation.'
"This inflammatory utterance indicates the interpretation put by negroes upon President Phillips' open-dining-room-door policy, and the nature of the hopes and aspirations it arouses in the black man's heart. And the serious thing is the element of truth in the negro's erroneous statement. It is true as gospel that no two races of people, living together, have ever _intermingled socially_ without amalgamating. It is hardly necessary to cite evidence of that fact or to give the reasons underlying it. It might be taken as axiomatic that social intermingling means amalgamation.
"If men and women were attracted to each other and loved and mated because of equal endowments of virtue, or intelligence, or beauty, or upon any basis of similar accomplishments, tastes, or mental, moral or physical excellences, then a gulf-stream of Anglo-Saxon blood might flow unmixed and pure through a sea of social contact with the negro race; but until love and marriage are placed among the exact sciences, social intermingling of races will ever result as it ever has resulted: in the general admixture of racial bloods.
"When racial barriers are broken down and it is proper for negroes and whites to associate freely and intimately, when you--white men--receive negroes on a plane of social equality, your women will marry them, your sons will take them to wife. Shall you say to your daughter of the negro whom you receive in your home: 'He is an excellent man but--do not marry him'? Shall you say to your son enamoured of a quadroon: 'She is a very worthy young woman and an ornament to our circle of friends, but--I have chosen another wife for you'? When did such considerations ever guide or curb the fancy of the youthful heart or diminish the travel to Gretna Green? No, the line never has been drawn between free social intercourse and intermarriage; and while the Southern people believe they could draw that line if any people could, they do not propose to make any reckless experiments where all is to be lost and nothing gained.
"A president of one of our great universities is quoted as saying: 'The Southern white sees a race danger in eating at the same table with a negro; he sees in being the host or the guest of a negro an act of race infidelity. The Northern white sees nothing of the kind. The race danger does not enter into his thoughts at all. To be the host or the guest of a negro, a Mexican or a Japanese would be for him simply a matter of present pleasure, convenience or courtesy. It would never occur to him that such an act could possibly harm his own race. His pride of race does not permit him to entertain such an idea. This is a significant difference between Northern white and Southern white.'
"In noting significant differences between Northern white and Southern white this authority must have been advertent to the fact that the pride of race of his 'Northern white' does not prevent them from furnishing the overwhelming majority of interracial marriages with negroes, as well as with Chinese, Japanese and every other alien race--this, too, with a very small negro population. If the negroes were proportionately as numerous in the North as in the South and such sentiments prevailed, how long, with interracial marriages increased in numbers in proportion to opportunity, would there be an Anglo-Saxon 'Northern white' to have a pride of race? If with these facts before his eyes the distinguished educator sees no race danger in the social mingling of white and black people, it easily may be inferred that he sees no objection to amalgamation.
"The Southern white man does see a race danger in these social amenities, Mr. President; for he cannot view amalgamation or the faintest prospect of it with any sentiment save horror: and he fortifies himself against that danger not only with the peculiar pride of race--of which he has a comfortable supply--but with every expedient suggested by his common sense, his experience, and by the horrible example which that distinguished educator's 'Northern white' has furnished him.
"In providing against this danger my people are moved from without by the sight of no occasional negro such as at odd times crosses this New Englander's vision, nor from within by any unreasonable or jealous hatred of the negro such as has characterized certain 'Northern whites' from the time they burned negro orphan asylums in resentment at being drafted to fight their country's battles down to this good day when they mob a negro for trying to do an honest day's work. No! the Southern white man is driven to his defences by a sentiment void of offence toward the negro, and by the daily impending spectacle of black, half-barbarous hosts who menace the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South and of the nation.
"President Phillips has modestly borrowed from one of his predecessors words with which to defend his social amenities to negroes. He quotes and says he would 'bow his head in shame' were he 'by word or deed to add anything to the misery of the awful isolation of the negroes who have risen above their race.' Two things may be said of that, Mr. President: first, isolation has been the price of leadership in all ages, and the negroes who are the pioneers of their race in their long and painful journey upward may not hope to escape it: second, the President's borrowed sentimental reason cuts the ground from under his feet, for that forcible Rooseveltian phrase, 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race,' concedes the premises on which the South's contention is based, since it admits there is such a great gulf between the negro _race_ and the _risen_ negro that his isolation fitly may be described in the words 'misery,' 'awful.' It is a peculiar order of Executive intellect and sensibility that can have such a keen sense of the misery which association with the lowly of his own race brings to an educated negro--who cannot in the very nature of things have put off all his hereditary deficiencies and tastes in a generation; and that yet seems not to be touched with any sense of the unspeakable misery such association and its inevitable consequences would have for my people--his Anglo-Saxon brethren--who, if there be any virtue in the refining processes of civilization, any redemptive power in the Christian religion, any progression in the purposes of God in the earth, are a thousand years ahead of the negro--any negro--in every racial excellence.
"Oh, but, you say, President Phillips means for us to associate only with those who are worthy, those who have 'risen.' Even that would be fatal, Mr. President. Beyond the truth already stated that considerations of merit will be forgotten and brushed aside if the social racial barrier is broken down at any point, and that social intermingling inevitably leads to intermarriage, there is a greater fact, a deeper truth, underlying this question. That fact, that truth, is that in estimating the result of mixing racial bloods not the man only and his personal accomplishments or individual culture must be considered, but his heredity, his race peculiarities and proclivities, every element that has gone into his blood.
"An occasional isolated negro may have broken the shackles of ignorance, measurably and admirably brought under control the half-savage passions of his nature, acquired palpable elegances of person and manner, and taken on largely the indefinable graces of culture: yet beneath all this creditable but thin veneer of civilization there slumber in his blood the primitive passions and propensities of his immediate ancestors, which are transmitted through him as latent forces of evil to burst out in his children and grandchildren in answer to the call of the wild. A man is not made in one generation or two. Every man gets the few ruling passions of his life from the numberless endowments of a hundred progenitors, and these few show out, while scores of others run so deep in his blood that they never crop out in his deeds but pass quietly on as static forces of good or evil to his children and their children before rising to the surface as dynamics in life and character.
"A Northern gentlewoman in a recent magazine article, defending her willingness to offer social courtesies to a prominent negro, speaks of him as one 'of whom an exquisite woman once said he has the soul of a Christian, the heart of a gentleman, and the eyes of the jungle.' That illustrates the idea perfectly, Mr. President,--_the eyes of the jungle_. Despite the fact that it is easier to breed up physical than temperamental qualities in man or beast, easier to breed out physical than mental or moral or spiritual blood-traits, this negro, with all his culture, with a large mixture of white blood in his veins, has yet in his very face that sinister mark--the eyes of the jungle: and in his blood who shall say what jungle passions, predilections and impulses, nobly and hardly held in check, that hark back to the African wilds from which they are so lately transplanted.
"A negro--any primitive being--may be developed mentally in one or two generations to the point where a certain polish has been put upon his mind and upon his manners; his purposes may be gathered and set toward the goal of final good; the whole trend of his life may be set upward: but there is yet between his new purposes and the savagery of the primitive man in him a far thinner bulwark of heredity than protects a white man from the elemental brute and animal forces of his nature. A number of educated negroes in this country to-day are superior in culture of mind and in personal morals to many white men, but even these individual shining lights of the negro race do not possess the power to endow their offspring so favourably as white men of less polish but longer seasoned hereditary strength of mental and moral fibre.
"It always offends a proper sense of decency to hear the suggestion that the negro may be bred up by crossing his blood with that of white men,--for the obvious reason that with our ideas of morals the most common principles of the breeder's art cannot be applied to the problem: but one single fact which eliminates such cold-blooded animal methods from our consideration is that when animals are cross-bred it is in the hope and for the purpose of combining mutually supplementary elements of strength and of eliminating supplementary weaknesses; while in this race matter the Anglo-Saxon is the superior of the negro in every racial characteristic--in physical strength and grace, in mental gifts and forces, and in spiritual excellence. Even if amalgamation did the very best that could be expected of it, it offers to the world nothing and to the white man less than nothing: for it would be a compromise, a striking of an average, by which naught is added to the total: it would pull down the strong to upraise the weak, degrade the superior to uplift the inferior: it would be a levelling process, not a method of progress. _And yet amalgamation does not even that much_, for it does not make an average-thick, even-thick retaining wall of culture between the hybrid product and the weaknesses of his mottled ancestry. There are always blow-holes in this mongrel culture, for heredity does not work by averages. It is an elusive combination of forces whose eccentricities and resultants cannot be formulated, calculated, or fore-determined. It is certain only that by no mere manipulation of it can the slightest _addition_ be made to the stock of ancestral virtues. Only slow processes working in each individual through generation after generation can add increments of strength to racial fibre.
"Therefore, if the negro will insist upon some _race manipulation_ in order to raise the average of intelligence, thrift and morality in our national citizenship, the only safe and sane method is to take measures to restrict the increase of the negro race and let it die out like the Indian. But, you scream, that would be to suggest the annihilation of a race God has put here for some wise purpose! Even so: but amalgamation would no less surely annihilate _the race_--two races--and fly in the face of a Providence that has segregated all races with no less distinctness of purpose, and so far has visited with disaster all attempts to violate that segregation.
"Now, Mr. President, what is the immediate past history, status and condition in Africa and America of this race with which Southern white men are asked to mingle socially? What are the racial endowments of these _risen_ negroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality--for upon other terms would be a mockery--as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?--for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike?
"Let answer the scientists and explorers, missionaries and travellers,--a long list of them, English, French, German, stretching all the way back a hundred years before there was a negro problem in the South. I quote verbatim, as nearly as the form will permit, their very words and phrases. Listen.
"The negro in Africa was, and is yet, in largest measure 'Without law except in its very crudest form'--'no law at all as we conceive it'--'in densest savage ignorance'--'no writing, no literature, no arts, no sciences'--'some development of perceptive and imitative faculties and of memory, but little of the higher faculties of abstract reasoning'--'in temperament intensely emotional, fitful, passionate, cruel'--'without self-control in emotional crises, callously indifferent to suffering in others, easily aroused to ferocity by sight of blood or under great fear'--'particularly deficient in strength of will, stability of purpose and staying power'--'dominated by impulse, void of foresight, unable to realize the future or restrain present desire'--'indolent, lazy, improvident, neglectful, happy-go-lucky, innately averse to labour or to care'--'given to uncleanness'--'an eater of snakes and snails, cannibal, eating his own dead'--'vilely superstitious, a maker of human sacrifices, charm-wearing, fetich-worshipping'--'of a religion grossly anthropomorphic, explaining all natural phenomena by a reference to evil spirits'--'his religion has no connection with morality, nothing to do with man's relation to man'--'thieving his beloved pastime, deception more common than theft'--'national character strongly marked by duplicity'--'lying habitually and thinking lying an enviable accomplishment'--'a more thorough and unhesitating liar than one of these negroes is not to be found anywhere'--'cruelly obliges his women to work'--'sensual, polygamous, unchaste'--'buying and selling his women'--'valuing his daughter's virginity solely as a marketable commodity'--'accounting adultery simply as a trespass upon a husband's property rights, and seduction and rape as a violence only to parent's property in daughters as destroying their marketable value'--'wifehood is but an enslavement to the husband's will'--'no conception of chastity as a virtue'--'of strong sexual passions'--'a devoted worshipper at the shrine of his phallic gods'--'sexual instincts dominate even the most public festivals, and public dances exhibit all degrees of sex suggestion.'
"Those in short, Mr. President, are some of the horrible details of the bestial degradation of the west-coast Africans, from whom our slave-marts were recruited almost to the time of the Civil War, and who, says Keane, are 'the very worst sweepings of the Sudanese plateau,' and, Ellis says, are 'the dregs and offscourings of Africa.'
"Such was the negro in Africa. What he is in America, only my people know. He has been the gainer at all points, the loser at none, because of his enforced residence here and his bondage to Southern white men: and yet that awful picture of the negro in Africa is so startlingly familiar to one who has spent his life in the South that he examines it closely with something of fear.
"He finds the colouring too vividly heavy and some details untrue for a picture of the negro in America to-day: but the negro as the Southern white man knows him is too alarmingly alike, too closely akin to, that African progenitor. He has advanced--yes! but just how much, and _just how little_, from out the shadow of that awful category of horrors, my people know.
"They know that he has but just emerged from those depths that those bestial racial traits held in check by the man's law have only well begun to be refined by a change of environment and the slow processes of heredity: and yet we, white men of the South, are in a way advised to treat as our social equals certain immediate heirs to such a blood inheritance because, forsooth, they have _risen_.
"We resent bitterly the insulting suggestion, however high or respectable or official its source: and we call upon you, white men of the North, to warn you against appeals for social recognition as a balm for 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race.' When the blood of your daughter or your son is mixed with that of one of this race, however _risen_, redolent of newly applied polish or bewrapped with a fresh culture, how shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment, and under your name and in a face and form perhaps where a world may see your very image in darker hue there shall be disported primitive appetites, propensities, passions fit only to endow an Ashanti warrior or grace the orgies of an African bacchanalia? In Heaven's name think to the bottom of this question!--and think _now_! Await not the day '_when your fear cometh_ as desolation, _and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you_.' Do not be distracted by considerations that are superficial and incidental--such for example as the negro's record for criminal assaults upon women. The crime of rape will be abated by some means, but long after that must the negro develop before he loses his primal jungle habit of regarding woman as a personal possession. It is a matter of attitude and not of assault: and as in his fundamental attitude toward women, so in every racial characteristic the superiority of the white man is blood deep, generations old, ingrained, inherent, essential.
"Knowing this, my people despise President Phillips' social amenities to negroes of high degree. They do not fear the issue; but what insults and outrages them is that a personage in the highest official position, by an act in itself impulsive, empty, and futile, should put desires and hopes of miscegenation into the minds and hearts of the inflammable, muttering, passionate black masses of the South. Standing themselves ever in the shadow of dire calamity which they are facing and must face for long years to come as they painfully work out a righteous and practical solution of their problem, my people cry out to you, oh, white men of the North, of the insidious danger in these sentimental social practices of an exuberant Executive; and we tell you that, however well or ill you may guard the purity and integrity of your race, we will stand fast. Whatever else may or may not be true, we will never acknowledge any equality on the negro's side that does not _overtake_ the white race in its advancing civilization, and we will certainly not submit to an equality produced by degrading the white race to or toward the negro's level. We will not make with the negro a common treasure of our Anglo-Saxon blood by putting it in hotch-pot with his in a mongrel breed.