Chapter 14

The reaction of the Negro Americans upon this wholesale and open attempt to reduce them to serfdom has been interesting. Naturally they began to organize and protest and in some cases to appeal to the courts. Then, to their astonishment, there arose a colored leader, Mr. Booker T. Washington, who advised them to yield to disfranchisement and caste and wait for greater economic strength and general efficiency before demanding full rights as American citizens. The white South naturally agreed with Mr. Washington, and the white North thought they saw here a chance for peace in the racial conflict and safety for their Southern investments.

For a time the colored people hesitated. They respected Mr. Washington for shrewdness and recognized the wisdom of his homely insistence on thrift and hard work; but gradually they came to see more and more clearly that, stripped of political power and emasculated by caste, they could never gain sufficient economic strength to take their place as modern men. They also realized that any lull in their protests would be taken advantage of by Negro haters to push their caste program. They began, therefore, with renewed persistence to fight for their fundamental rights as American citizens. The struggle tended at first to bitter personal dissension within the group. But wiser counsels and the advice of white friends eventually prevailed and raised it to the broad level of a fight for the fundamental principles of democracy. The launching of the "Niagara Movement" by twenty-nine daring colored men in 1905, followed by the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910, marked an epoch in the advance of the Negro. This latter organization, with its monthly organ, _The Crisis_, is now waging a nation-wide fight for justice to Negroes. Other organizations, and a number of strong Negro weekly papers are aiding in this fight. What has been the net result of this struggle of half a century?

In 1863 there were about five million persons of Negro descent in the United States. Of these, four million and more were just being released from slavery. These slaves could be bought and sold, could move from place to place only with permission, were forbidden to learn to read or write, and legally could never hold property or marry. Ninety per cent were totally illiterate, and only one adult in six was a nominal Christian.

Fifty years later, in 1913, there were in the United States ten and a quarter million persons of Negro descent, an increase of one hundred and five per cent. Legal slavery has been abolished leaving, however, vestiges in debt slavery, peonage, and the convict lease system. The mass of the freedmen and their sons have

1. Earned a living as free and partially free laborers.

2. Shared the responsibilities of government.

3. Developed the internal organization of their race.

4. Aspired to spiritual self-expression.

The Negro was freed as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. There were a few free Negroes who owned property in the South, and a larger number who owned property in the North; but ninety-nine per cent of the race in the South were penniless field hands and servants.

To-day there are two and a half million laborers, the majority of whom are efficient wage earners. Above these are more than a million servants and tenant farmers; skilled and semi-skilled workers make another million and at the top of the economic column are 600,000 owners and managers of farms and businesses, cash tenants, officials, and professional men. This makes a total of 5,192,535 colored breadwinners in 1910.

More specifically these breadwinners include 218,972 farm owners and 319,346 cash farm tenants and managers. There were in all 62,755 miners, 288,141 in the building and hand trades; 28,515 workers in clay, glass, and stone; 41,739 iron and steel workers; 134,102 employees on railways; 62,822 draymen, cab drivers, and liverymen; 133,245 in wholesale and retail trade; 32,170 in the public service; and 69,471 in professional service, including 29,750 teachers, 17,495 clergymen, and 4,546 physicians, dentists, trained nurses, etc. Finally, we must not forget 2,175,000 Negro homes, with their housewives, and 1,620,000 children in school.

Fifty years ago the overwhelming mass of these people were not only penniless, but were themselves assessed as real estate. By 1875 the Negroes probably had gotten hold of something between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000 acres of land through their bounties as soldiers and the low price of land after the war. By 1880 this was increased to about 6,000,000 acres; in 1890 to about 8,000,000 acres; in 1900 to over 12,000,000 acres. In 1910 this land had increased to nearly 20,000,000 acres, a realm as large as Ireland.

The 120,738 farms owned by Negroes in 1890 increased to 218,972 in 1910, or eighty-one per cent. The value of these farms increased from $179,796,639 in 1900 to $440,992,439 in 1910; Negroes owned in 1910 about 500,000 homes out of a total of 2,175,000. Their total property in 1900 was estimated at $300,000,000 by the American Economic Association. On the same basis of calculation it would be worth to-day not less than $800,000,000.

Despite the disfranchisement of three-fourths of his voting population, the Negro to-day is a recognized part of the American government. He holds 7,500 offices in the executive service of the nation, besides furnishing four regiments in the army and a large number of sailors. In the state and municipal service he holds nearly 20,000 other offices, and he furnishes 500,000 of the votes which rule the Union.

In these same years the Negro has relearned the lost art of organization. Slavery was the almost absolute denial of initiative and responsibility. To-day Negroes have nearly 40,000 churches, with edifices worth at least $75,000,000 and controlling nearly 4,000,000 members. They raise themselves $7,500,000 a year for these churches.

There are 200 private schools and colleges managed and almost entirely supported by Negroes, and these and other public and private Negro schools have received in 40 years $45,000,000 of Negro money in taxes and donations. Five millions a year are raised by Negro secret and beneficial societies which hold at least $6,000,000 in real estate. Negroes support wholly or in part over 100 old folks' homes and orphanages, 30 hospitals, and 500 cemeteries. Their organized commercial life is extending rapidly and includes over 22,000 small retail businesses and 40 banks.

Above and beyond this material growth has gone the spiritual uplift of a great human race. From contempt and amusement they have passed to the pity, perplexity, and fear on the part of their neighbors, while within their own souls they have arisen from apathy and timid complaint to open protest and more and more manly self-assertion. Where nine-tenths of them could not read or write in 1860, to-day over two-thirds can; they have 300 papers and periodicals, and their voice and expression are compelling attention. Already in poetry, literature, music, and painting the work of Americans of Negro descent has gained notable recognition. Instead of being led and defended by others, as in the past, American Negroes are gaining their own leaders, their own voices, their own ideals. Self-realization is thus coming slowly but surely to another of the world's great races, and they are to-day girding themselves to fight in the van of progress, not simply for their own rights as men, but for the ideals of the greater world in which they live: the emancipation of women, universal peace, democratic government, the socialization of wealth, and human brotherhood.

FOOTNOTES:

[90]

The figures given by the census are as follows: 1850, mulattoes formed 11.2 per cent of the total Negro population. 1860, mulattoes formed 13.2 per cent of the total Negro population. 1870, mulattoes formed 12 per cent of the total Negro population. 1890, mulattoes formed 15.2 per cent of the total Negro population. 1910, mulattoes formed 20.9 per cent of the total Negro population.

Or in actual numbers: 1850, 405,751 mulattoes. 1860, 588,352 mulattoes. 1870, 585,601 mulattoes. 1890, 1,132,060 mulattoes. 1910, 2,050,686 mulattoes.

[91] Cf. "The Spanish Jurist Solorzaris," quoted in Helps: _Spanish Conquest_, IV, 381.

[92] Hurd: _Law of Freedom and Bondage_.

[93] "Obi (Obeah, Obiah, or Obia) is the adjective; Obe or Obi, the noun. It is of African origin, probably connected with Egyptian Ob, Aub, or Obron, meaning 'serpent.' Moses forbids Israelites ever to consult the demon Ob, i.e., 'Charmer, Wizard.' The Witch of Endor is called Oub or Ob. Oubaois is the name of the Baselisk or Royal Serpent, emblem of the Sun, and, according to Horus Appollo, 'the Ancient Deity of Africa.'"--Edwards: _West Indies_, ed. 1819, II. 106-119. Cf. Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, pp. 65-66; _also Atlanta University Publications_, No. 8, pp. 5-6.

[94] _Boston Transcript_, March 24, 1906.

[95] Bassett: _North Carolina_, pp. 73-76.

[96] Cf. Wilson: _The Black Phalanx_.

[97] Wilson: _The Black Phalanx_, p. 108.

[98] _American Historical Review_, Vol. XV.

[99] Report to President Johnson.

[100] _Reconstruction and the Constitution._

[101] Brewster: _Sketches_, etc.

[102] McPherson: _Reconstruction_, p. 52.

[103] Report to the President, 1865.

[104] _American Historical Review_, Vol. XV, No. 4.

[105] _Occasional Papers_, American Negro Academy, No. 6.

[106] _Occasional Papers_, American Negro Academy, No. 6.

[107] _Jackson (Miss.) Clarion_, April 24, 1873.

[108] Allen: _Governor Chamberlain's Administration_, p. 82.

[109] Reconstruction Constitutions, practically unaltered, were kept in Florida, 1868-85, seventeen years; Virginia, 1870-1902, thirty-two years; South Carolina, 1868-95, twenty-seven years; Mississippi, 1868-90, twenty-two years.

XII THE NEGRO PROBLEMS

It is impossible to separate the population of the world accurately by race, since that is no scientific criterion by which to divide races. If we divide the world, however, roughly into African Negroes and Negroids, European whites, and Asiatic and American brown and yellow peoples, we have approximately 150,000,000 Negroes, 500,000,000 whites, and 900,000,000 yellow and brown peoples. Of the 150,000,000 Negroes, 121,000,000 live in Africa, 27,000,000[110] in the new world, and 2,000,000 in Asia.

What is to be the future relation of the Negro race to the rest of the world? The visitor from Altruria might see here no peculiar problem. He would expect the Negro race to develop along the lines of other human races. In Africa his economic and political development would restore and eventually outrun the ancient glories of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Yoruba; overseas the West Indies would become a new and nobler Africa, built in the very pathway of the new highway of commerce between East and West--the real sea route to India; while in the United States a large part of its citizenship (showing for perhaps centuries their dark descent, but nevertheless equal sharers of and contributors to the civilization of the West) would be the descendants of the wretched victims of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century slave trade.

This natural assumption of a stranger finds, however, lodging in the minds of few present-day thinkers. On the contrary, such an outcome is usually dismissed summarily. Most persons have accepted that tacit but clear modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of the world and assumes that other races, and particularly the Negro race, will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out before their all-conquering march. This philosophy is the child of the African slave trade and of the expansion of Europe during the nineteenth century.

The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce, followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid. When the Americas had enough black laborers for their immediate demand, the moral action of the eighteenth century had a chance to make its faint voice heard.

The moral repugnance was powerfully reënforced by the revolt of the slaves in the West Indies and South America, and by the fact that North America early began to regard itself as the seat of advanced ideas in politics, religion, and humanity.

Finally European capital began to find better investments than slave shipping and flew to them. These better investments were the fruit of the new industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, with its factory system; they were also in part the result of the cheapened price of gold and silver, brought about by slavery and the slave trade to the new world. Commodities other than gold, and commodities capable of manufacture and exploitation in Europe out of materials furnishable by America, became enhanced in value; the bottom fell out of the commercial slave trade and its suppression became possible.

The middle of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the rise of the modern working class. By means of political power the laborers slowly but surely began to demand a larger share in the profiting industry. In the United States their demand bade fair to be halted by the competition of slave labor. The labor vote, therefore, first confined slavery to limits in which it could not live, and when the slave power sought to exceed these territorial limits, it was suddenly and unintentionally abolished.

As the emancipation of millions of dark workers took place in the West Indies, North and South America, and parts of Africa at this time, it was natural to assume that the uplift of this working class lay along the same paths with that of European and American whites. This was the _first_ suggested solution of the Negro problem. Consequently these Negroes received partial enfranchisement, the beginnings of education, and some of the elementary rights of wage earners and property holders, while the independence of Liberia and Hayti was recognized. However, long before they were strong enough to assert the rights thus granted or to gather intelligence enough for proper group leadership, the new colonialism of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to dawn. The new colonial theory transferred the reign of commercial privilege and extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working class to the exploitation of backward races under the political domination of Europe. For the purpose of carrying out this idea the European and white American working class was practically invited to share in this new exploitation, and particularly were flattered by popular appeals to their inherent superiority to "Dagoes," "Chinks," "Japs," and "Niggers."

This tendency was strengthened by the fact that the new colonial expansion centered in Africa. Thus in 1875 something less than one-tenth of Africa was under nominal European control, but the Franco-Prussian War and the exploration of the Congo led to new and fateful things. Germany desired economic expansion and, being shut out from America by the Monroe Doctrine, turned to Africa. France, humiliated in war, dreamed of an African empire from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Italy became ambitious for Tripoli and Abyssinia. Great Britain began to take new interest in her African realm, but found herself largely checkmated by the jealousy of all Europe. Portugal sought to make good her ancient claim to the larger part of the whole southern peninsula. It was Leopold of Belgium who started to make the exploration and civilization of Africa an international movement. This project failed, and the Congo Free State became in time simply a Belgian colony. While the project was under discussion, the international scramble for Africa began. As a result the Berlin Conference and subsequent wars and treaties gave Great Britain control of 2,101,411 square miles of African territory, in addition to Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan with 1,600,000 square miles. This includes South Africa, Bechuanaland and Rhodesia, East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, Nigeria, and British West Africa. The French hold 4,106,950 square miles, including nearly all North Africa (except Tripoli) west of the Niger valley and Libyan Desert, and touching the Atlantic at four points. To this is added the Island of Madagascar. The Germans have 910,150 square miles, principally in Southeast and South-west Africa and the Kamerun. The Portuguese retain 787,500 square miles in Southeast and Southwest Africa. The Belgians have 900,000 square miles, while Liberia (43,000 square miles) and Abyssinia (350,000 square miles) are independent. The Italians have about 600,000 square miles and the Spanish less than 100,000 square miles.

This partition of Africa brought revision of the ideas of Negro uplift. Why was it necessary, the European investors argued, to push a continent of black workers along the paths of social uplift by education, trades-unionism, property holding, and the electoral franchise when the workers desired no change, and the rate of European profit would suffer?

There quickly arose then the _second_ suggestion for settling the Negro problem. It called for the virtual enslavement of natives in certain industries, as rubber and ivory collecting in the Belgian Congo, cocoa raising in Portuguese Angola, and diamond mining in South Africa. This new slavery or "forced" labor was stoutly defended as a necessary foundation for implanting modern industry in a barbarous land; but its likeness to slavery was too clear and it has been modified, but not wholly abolished.

The _third_ attempted solution of the Negro sought the result of the _second_ by less direct methods. Negroes in Africa, the West Indies, and America were to be forced to work by land monopoly, taxation, and little or no education. In this way a docile industrial class working for low wages, and not intelligent enough to unite in labor unions, was to be developed. The peonage systems in parts of the United States and the labor systems of many of the African colonies of Great Britain and Germany illustrate this phase of solution.[111] It is also illustrated in many of the West Indian islands where we have a predominant Negro population, and this population freed from slavery and partially enfranchised. Land and capital, however, have for the most part been so managed and monopolized that the black peasantry have been reduced to straits to earn a living in one of the richest parts of the world. The problem is now going to be intensified when the world's commerce begins to sweep through the Panama Canal.

All these solutions and methods, however, run directly counter to modern philanthropy, and have to be carried on with a certain concealment and half-hypocrisy which is not only distasteful in itself, but always liable to be discovered and exposed by some liberal or religious movement of the masses of men and suddenly overthrown. These solutions are, therefore, gradually merging into a _fourth_ solution, which is to-day very popular. This solution says: Negroes differ from whites in their inherent genius and stage of development. Their development must not, therefore, be sought along European lines, but along their own native lines. Consequently the effort is made to-day in British Nigeria, in the French Congo and Sudan, in Uganda and Rhodesia to leave so far as possible the outward structure of native life intact; the king or chief reigns, the popular assemblies meet and act, the native courts adjudicate, and native social and family life and religion prevail. All this, however, is subject to the veto and command of a European magistracy supported by a native army with European officers. The advantage of this method is that on its face it carries no clue to its real working. Indeed it can always point to certain undoubted advantages: the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of war and feud, the encouragement of peaceful industry. On the other hand, back of practically all these experiments stands the economic motive--the determination to use the organization, the land, and the people, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of white Europe. For this reason education is seldom encouraged, modern religious ideas are carefully limited, sound political development is sternly frowned upon, and industry is degraded and changed to the demands of European markets. The most ruthless class of white mercantile exploiters is allowed large liberty, if not a free hand, and protected by a concerted attempt to deify white men as such in the eyes of the native and in their own imagination.[112]

White missionary societies are spending perhaps as much as five million dollars a year in Africa and accomplishing much good, but at the same time white merchants are sending at least twenty million dollars' worth of European liquor into Africa each year, and the debauchery of the almost unrestricted rum traffic goes far to neutralize missionary effort.

Under this last mentioned solution of the Negro problems we may put the attempts at the segregation of Negroes and mulattoes in the United States and to some extent in the West Indies. Ostensibly this is "separation" of the races in society, civil rights, etc. In practice it is the subordination of colored people of all grades under white tutelage, and their separation as far as possible from contact with civilization in dwelling place, in education, and in public life.

On the other hand the economic significance of the Negro to-day is tremendous. Black Africa to-day exports annually nearly two hundred million dollars' worth of goods, and its economic development has scarcely begun. The black West Indies export nearly one hundred million dollars' worth of goods; to this must be added the labor value of Negroes in South Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, North, Central, and South America, where the result is blended in the common output of many races. The economic foundation of the Negro problem can easily be seen to be a matter of many hundreds of millions to-day, and ready to rise to the billions tomorrow.

Such figures and facts give some slight idea of the economic meaning of the Negro to-day as a worker and industrial factor. "Tropical Africa and its peoples are being brought more irrevocably every year into the vortex of the economic influences that sway the western world."[113]

What do Negroes themselves think of these their problems and the attitude of the world toward them? First and most significant, they are thinking. There is as yet no great single centralizing of thought or unification of opinion, but there are centers which are growing larger and larger and touching edges. The most significant centers of this new thinking are, perhaps naturally, outside Africa and in America: in the United States and in the West Indies; this is followed by South Africa and West Africa and then, more vaguely, by South America, with faint beginnings in East Central Africa, Nigeria, and the Sudan.