Following the Color Line — The Mulatto: The Problem of Race Mixture - part 2

_Why Some Light Mulattoes do not "Cross over to White"_ I once asked a very light mulatto why he did not "cross the line," as they call it (or "go over to white") and quit his people.

His answer surprised me; it was so distinctly an unexpected point of view.

"Why," he said, "white people don't begin to have the good times that Negroes do.

They're stiff and cold.

They aren't sociable.

They don't laugh."

Here certainly was a criticism of the white man!

And it was corroborated by a curious story I heard at Memphis, of a mulatto well known among the coloured people of Tennessee.

A number of years ago it came to him suddenly one day that he was white enough to pass anywhere for white, and he acted instantly on the inspiration.

He went to Memphis and bought a first-class ticket on a Mississippi River boat to Cincinnati.

No one suspected that he was coloured; he sat at the table with white people and even occupied a state-room with a white man.

At first he said he could hardly restrain his exultation, but after a time, although he said he talked and smoked with the white men, he began to be lonesome.

"It grew colder and colder," he said.

In the evening he sat on the upper deck and as he looked over the railing he could see, down below, the Negro passengers and deck hands talking and laughing.

After a time, when it grew darker, they began to sing--the inimitable Negro songs.

"That finished me," he said, "I got up and went downstairs and took my place among them.

I've been a Negro ever since."

An ordinary community of middle or working class white people is often singularly barren of any social or intellectual interest: it is often sombre, sodden, uninteresting.

Not so the Negro community.

In several cities I have tried to trace out the social life of various cliques, especially among the mulattoes, and I have been astonished to find how many societies there are, often with high-sounding names, how many church affairs must be attended to, how many suppers and picnics are constantly under way, how many clubs and secret societies are supported.

Forced upon themselves, every point of contact with the white race becomes to the Negro a story of peculiar human interest.

The view they get from the outside or underneath of white civilisation is not, to say the least, altogether our view.

Once, in a gathering of mulattoes I heard the discussion turn to the stories of those who had "gone over to white"--friends or acquaintances of those who were present.

Few such cases are known to white people, but the Negroes know many of them.

It developed from this conversation (and afterward I got the same impression many times) that there is a sort of conspiracy of silence to protect the Negro who "crosses the line" and takes his place as a white man.

Such cases even awaken glee among them, as though the Negro, thus, in some way, was getting even with the dominant white man.

_Stories of Negroes Who Have Crossed the Colour Line_ I don't know how many times I have heard mulattoes speak of the French novelist Dumas as having Negro blood, and they also claim Robert Browning and Alexander Hamilton (how truly I do not know).

But the cases which interest them most are those in this country; and there must be far more of them than white people imagine.

I know of scores of them.

A well-known white actress, whose name, of course, I cannot give, when she goes to Boston, secretly visits her coloured relatives.

A New York man who holds a prominent political appointment under the state government and who has become an authority in his line, is a Negro.

Not long ago he entered a hotel in Baltimore and the Negro porter who ran to take his bag said discreetly: "Hello, Bob."

As boys they had gone to the same Negro school.

"Let me carry your bag," said the porter, "I won't give you away."

In Philadelphia there lives a coloured woman who married a rich white man.

Of course, no white people know she is coloured, but the Negroes do, and do not tell.

Occasionally she drives down to a certain store, dismisses her carriage and walks on foot to the home of her mother and sisters.

Only a few years ago the newspapers were filled for a day or two with the story of a girl who had been at Vassar College, and upon graduation by merest accident it was discovered that she was a Negro.

A similar case arose last year at Chicago University, that of Miss Cecelia Johnson, who had been a leader in her class, a member of the Pi Delta Phi Sorority and president of Englewood House, an exclusive girls' club.

She was the sister of a well-known Negro politician of Chicago.

The Chicago _Tribune_, after publishing a story to the effect that Miss Johnson had kept her parentage secret apologised for the publicity in these words: The Tribune makes this reparation spontaneously and as a simple act of justice.

There is not the slightest mystery about Miss Johnson.

Her life has been an open book.

She has won distinction at high school, and university, and her career appears to have been free from any blemish that should lessen the love of her intimate friends or the respect in which she is held by her acquaintances.

Some mulattoes I know of, one a prominent Wall Street broker, have "crossed the line" by declaring that they are Mexicans, Brazilians, Spanish or French; one says he is an Armenian.

Under a foreign name they are readily accepted among white people where, as Negroes, they would be instantly rejected.

No one, of course, can estimate the number of men and women with Negro blood who have thus "gone over to white"; but it must be large.

_Does Race Amalgamation Still Continue?

_ One of the first questions that always arises concerning the mulatto is whether or not the mixture of blood still continues and whether it is increasing or decreasing.

In other words, is the amalgamation of the races still going on and to what extent?

Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern states and also in the following Northern and Western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah.

In all other Northern and Western states marriage between the races is lawful.

And yet, the marriage laws, so far as they affect the actual problem of amalgamation, mean next to nothing at all.

No legal marriage existed between the races in slavery times and yet there was a widespread mixture of blood.

Concubinage was a common practice: a mulatto was worth more in cash than a black man.

The great body of mulattoes now in the country trace their origin to such relationships.

And such practice of slavery days no more ceased instantly with a paper Emancipation Proclamation than many other customs and habits which had grown up out of centuries of slave relationships.

It is a slow process, working out of slavery, both for white men and black.

I made inquiries widely in every part of the South among both white and coloured people and I found a strong and rapidly growing sentiment against what the South calls "miscegenation."

For years white men in many communities, often prominent judges, governors, wealthy planters, made little or no secret of the fact that they had a Negro family as well as a white family.

[Illustration: A TYPE OF NEGRO GIRL Typesetter in Atlanta.

Many Negro girls are entering stenography, bookkeeping, dressmaking, millinery and other occupations.

] [Illustration: MULATTO GIRL STUDENT At Clark University, Atlanta.

At the completion of her studies this young woman will take up missionary work in Africa.

] [Illustration: MISS CECELIA JOHNSON A mulatto who could be easily taken for a white person.

She was a leader in her class in Chicago University.

] And the practice is far from dead yet.

Every Southern town knows of such cases, often many of them: and a large number of mulatto children to-day are the sons and daughters of Southern white men, often men of decided importance in their communities.

In one town I visited I heard a white man expressing with great bitterness his feeling against the Negro race, arguing that the Negro must be kept down, else it would lead to the mongrelisation of the white race.

The next morning as chance would have it, another white man with whom I was walking pointed out to me a neat cottage, the home of the Negro family of the white man who had talked with me on the previous evening.

And I saw this man's coloured children in the yard!

The better class of Southern people know perfectly well of these conditions and are beginning to attack them boldly.

At a meeting in the Court Street Methodist Church in Montgomery, Ala.

, in 1907, Dr. J.

A.

Rice, the pastor, made this statement, significant in its very fearlessness, of changing sentiment: "I hesitate before I make another statement which is all too true.

I

hesitate, because I fear that in saying it I shall be charged with sensationalism.

But even at the risk of such a charge I will say, for it must be said, that there are in the city of Montgomery, four hundred Negro women supported by white men."

The next morning this statement was reported in the Montgomery _Advertiser_.

It may be said also, that these 400 cases in a city of 35,000 people do not represent a condition of mere vice.

Many of the women are comfortably provided for and have families of children.

Vice is wholly distinct from this system of concubinage; for there are in Montgomery thirty-two Negro dives operated for white patronage--also the statement of Dr. Rice, quoted in the Montgomery _Advertiser_.

The proportion of such cases in some of the less progressive Southern towns even to-day, is almost appalling: and at the same time that speakers and writers are railing at the mulatto for his disturbing race leadership and his restless desire for political and other rights, and while they are declaiming against amalgamation and mongrelisation, the mulatto population is increasing.

Striving to keep the Negro in his place as a Negro, the South is making him more and more a white man.

_Attempt to Stop Miscegenation_ Among Southern women, not unnaturally, the feeling aroused by these practices has been especially bitter.

Here is a remarkable plea, published in the _Times-Democrat_ on June 21, 1907, signed "A woman."

Will you kindly publish the following without attaching my signature or divulging it in any way?

I have several brothers who are old-maidish enough to have nervous prostration if they should see my name signed to such an unmaidenly, immodest letter, but I do my thinking without any assistance from them, and hope for the sake of peace in my family that they will not recognise me in print.

I am a resident of a large town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where miscegenation is common--where, if a man isolates himself from feminine society, the first and only conclusion reached is, "he has a woman of his own" in saddle, of duskier shade.

This conclusion is almost without exception true.

If some daring woman, not afraid of being dubbed a Carrie Nation, were to canvass the delta counties of Mississippi taking the census, she would find so many cases of miscegenation, and their resultant mongrel families, that she would bow her head in shame for the "flower of Southern chivalry"--gone to seed.

Awakened by a sense of the fearfulness of these conditions, such a strong paper as the New Orleans _Times-Democrat_ has been conducting a campaign for laws which shall punish the white man who maintains illicit relations with Negroes.

For years attempts have been made in the legislatures of several states (in part successfully) to enact such legislation, but the practice has been so firmly entrenched that many of the efforts have failed.

On February 15, 1906, the _Times-Democrat_ put the case in stronger language than I would dare to do: It is a public scandal that there should be no law of this kind (against miscegenation) on the statute book of Louisiana, and that it should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples.

The failure to pass a law of this kind is attributed to white degenerates, men who denounce social equality yet practice it, men who are more dangerous to their own race than the most inflammatory Negro orator and social equality preacher, and who have succeeded by some sort of legislative trickery in pigeon-holing or killing the bills intended to protect Louisiana from a possible danger.

Such men should be exposed before the people of the state in their true colours.

It will thus be seen how deep-seated the difficulty is.

And yet, as I have followed the editorial expression of many Southern newspapers, I have been astonished to see how people are beginning to talk out.

Here is an editorial from the _Star_ of Monroe, La.

: DESTRUCTIVE CRIME OF MISCEGENATION

There can be no greater wrong done the people of any community than for public sentiment to permit and tolerate this growing and destructive crime of miscegenation, yet in many towns and cities of Louisiana, especially, there are to-day white men cohabiting with Negro women, who have sweet and lovable families.

This is a crime that becomes almost unbearable, and should bring the blush of shame to every man's cheek who dares to flaunt his debased and degrading conceptions of morality in the eyes of self-respecting men and women.

In January, 1907, District Attorney J. H.

Currie, in Judge Cochran's court at Meridian, Miss. , addressed a jury on what he called "the curse of miscegenation."

In the course of his speech he said: "The accursed shadow of miscegenation hangs over the South to-day like a pall of hell.

We talk much of the Negro question and all of its possible ramifications and consequences, but, gentlemen, the trouble is not far afield.

Our own people, our white men with their black concubines, are destroying the integrity of the Negro race, raising up a menace to the white race, lowering the standard of both races and preparing the way for riot, mob, criminal assaults, and, finally, a death struggle for racial supremacy.

The trouble is at our own door.

We have tolerated this crime long enough, and if our country is not run by policy rather than by law, then it is time to rise up and denounce this sin of the earth."

_Anti-Miscegenation League is Formed_ Strong men and women, indeed, in several states have begun to organise against the evil.

At Francisville, La.

, in May (1907), a meeting was called to organise against what one of the speakers, Mr. Wickliffe, called the "yellow peril" of the South.

He said that "every man familiar with conditions in our midst knows that the enormous increase in persons of mixed blood is due to men of the white race openly keeping Negro women as concubines."

Out of this meeting grew an organisation to help stamp out the evil.

About the same time, a mass meeting was held in Vicksburg, Miss. , and an Anti-Miscegenation League was formed.

The hatred and fear of such relationships have grown most rapidly, of course, among the better classes of white people.

The class of white men who consort with Negro women at the present time is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago, or than it was in slavery times.

And the Negroes on their part are also awakening to the seriousness of this problem.

I found in several Negro communities women's clubs and other organisations which are trying, feebly enough, but significantly trying, to stem the evil from their side.

It is a terrible slough to get out of.

Negro women, and especially the more comely and intelligent of them, are surrounded by temptations difficult indeed to meet.

It has been and is a struggle in Negro communities, especially village communities, to get a moral standard established which will make such relationships with white men unpopular.

In some places to-day, the Negro concubines of white men are received in the Negro churches and among the Negroes generally, and honoured rather than ostracised.

They are often among the most intelligent of the Negro women, they often have the best homes and the most money to contribute to their churches.

They are proud of their light-coloured children.

And yet, as the Negroes begin to be educated, they develop an intense hatred of these conditions: and the utter withdrawal of the best sort of Negro families from any white associations is due in part to the dread of such temptations.

I shall never forget the bitterness in the reply of a coloured blacksmith who had a number of good-looking girls.

I

said to him jokingly: "I suppose you are going to send them to college."

"Why should I?"

he asked.

"What good will it do?

Educate them to live with some white man!"

_The Tragedy of the Negro Girl_ A friend of mine, Southern by birth, told me a story of an experience he had at Nashville, where he went to deliver an address at Fisk University, a Negro college.

On his way home in the dark, he chanced to walk close behind two mulatto girls who had been at the lecture.

They were discussing it.

One of them said: "Well, it's no use.

There is no chance down here for a yellow girl.

It's either get away from the South--or the usual thing."

In that remark lay a world of bitter knowledge of conditions.

It is remarkable, indeed, that the Negroes should have begun to develop moral standards as rapidly as they have.

For in the South few people _expect_ the coloured girl to be moral: everything is against her morality.

In the first place, the home life of the great mass of Negroes is still primitive.

They are crowded together in one or two rooms, they get no ideas of privacy, or of decency.

The girls are the prey not only of white men but of men of their own race.

The highest ideal before their eyes in many cases is the finely dressed, prosperous concubine of a white man.

Moreover, in nearly all Southern towns, houses of prostitution are relegated to the Negro quarter.

At Montgomery, Ala.

, I saw such places in respectable Negro neighbourhoods, against which the Negro people had repeatedly and bitterly objected to the city authorities, to no purpose.

The example of such places of vice on Negro children is exactly what it would be on white children.

In the same way, although it seems unbelievable, Negro schools in several cities have been built in vice districts.

I saw a fine new brick school for coloured children at Louisville placed in one of the very nastiest streets of the city.

The same conditions surround at least one coloured school which I saw at New Orleans.

And yet the South, permitting such training in vice, wonders at Negro immorality and is convulsed over the crime of rape.

Demanding that the Negro be self-restrained, white men set the example in every way from concubinage down, of immorality and lack of restraint.

They sow the whirlwind and look for no crop!

When the coloured girl grows up, she goes to service in a white family, where she either sleeps in an outbuilding (the survival of the old system of Negro "quarters") or goes home at night.

In either event the mistress rarely pays the slightest attention to her conduct in this particular.

I

talked with a woman, a fine type of the old gentlefolk, who expressed with frankness a common conviction in the South.

"We don't consider," she said, "that the Negroes have any morals.

Up North where I was visiting this summer I was amazed to find women with coloured servants looking after them, trying to keep them in at night and prevent mischief.

We never do that; we know it isn't any use."

It may be imagined how difficult it is in such an atmosphere for Negroes to build up moral standards, or to live decently.

If there ever was a human tragedy in this world it is the tragedy of the Negro girl.

_Relations Between White Men and Negro Women_ Illicit relationships between the races have not gone on without causing many a troubled conscience.

Nor has a difference in colour always deadened the deeper feelings of the human heart.

In spite of laws and colour lines, human nature, wherever found, is profoundly alike.

In making my inquiries among coloured colleges I found to my astonishment that in nearly all of them mulatto boys and girls are being educated, and well educated, by their white fathers.

A number of them are at Atlanta University, Tuskegee, Hampton, Fisk--indeed, at all of the colleges.

And Wilberforce College, next after Lincoln University of Chester County, Pa.

, the oldest Negro institution of learning in the country, founded in 1856, was largely supported in slavery times by Southern white men who felt a moral obligation to educate their coloured sons and daughters.

Large farms around Wilberforce (near Xenia) which I have visited were originally bought by Southern slave-owners for their mulatto children, where they could get away from the South and grow up in a free state.

Some of these mulatto children, educated in Latin and Greek, with too much money and little to do, went straight to the devil, while others conserved their property, and it is to-day in the hands of their descendants.

Thus the relations between white men and Negro women even to-day, though marriage is forbidden by law, are sometimes remarkable in their expression of the deepest emotions of the human heart.

I shall never forget the story of one such case among many that I heard in the South.

I withhold the names in this case although the story is widely known among the people in that part of Alabama.

At ---- lives a planter of prominence who was formerly on the staff of the governor of the state.

He had no white family, but everyone knew that he lived with a mulatto woman and was raising a coloured family.

When the boys and girls were old enough, he sent them to Atlanta University, to Tuskegee, and to Spellman Seminary, providing them plentifully with money.

He also paid for his wife's sister's schooling.

A year or so ago his mulatto "wife" died; and he was heart-broken.

He sent for his boys to come from college and let it be known that he would have something to say at the funeral.

Many white and coloured people, therefore, attended and followed the body of the Negro woman to the cemetery.

At the grave, General ---- stepped forward and raised his hand.

"I have just one word to say here to-day.

These children who are here have always gone by their mother's name.

I want to acknowledge them now in front of all these people as my children; and henceforth they will bear my name.

I wish also to say that this woman who lies here was my wife, not by law, but in the sight of God.

I here acknowledge her.

This is a duty I have to do not only to this woman but to God.

When I leave my property I shall leave it to those children, and shall see that they get it."

_Intermarriage of the Races in the North_ So much for Southern conditions.

How is it in the North where intermarriage is not forbidden by law?

In 1903, during a heated political campaign in Mississippi, United States Senator Money repeatedly made the assertion that in Massachusetts in the previous year, because there were no laws to separate the Negro and prevent intermarriage, 2,000 white women had married Negro men.

I heard echoes of Senator Money's statistics in several places in the South.

I have made a careful investigation of the facts in several northern cities, and I have been surprised to discover how little intermarriage there really is.

If intermarriage in the North were increasing largely, Boston, being the city where the least race prejudice exists and where the proportion of mulattoes is largest, would show it most plainly.

As a matter of fact, in the year 1902, when according to Senator Money, 2,000 white women married coloured men, there were in Boston, which contains the great bulk of the Negro population of Massachusetts, just twenty-nine inter-racial marriages.

Although the Negro population of Boston has been steadily increasing, the number of marriages between the races, which remained about stationary from 1875 to 1890, has since 1900 been rapidly decreasing.

Here are the exact figures as given by the registry department: RACIAL INTERMARRIAGES IN BOSTON

Groom Groom Coloured White Total Bride Bride Mixed White Coloured Marriages 1900 32 3 35 1901 30 1 31 1902 25 4 29 1903 27 2 29 1904 27 1 28 1905 17 2 19 At Boston and in other Northern towns I made inquiries in regard to the actual specific instances of intermarriage.

There are two classes of cases, first, what may be called the intellectuals; highly educated mulattoes who marry educated white women.

I

have the history of a number of such intermarriages, but there is not space here to relate the really interesting life stories which have grown out of them.

One of the best-known Negro professors in the country has a white wife.

I saw the home where they live under almost ideal surroundings.

A mulatto doctor of a Southern town married a white girl who was a graduate of Wellesley College; they had trouble in the South and have "gone over to white" and are now living in the North.

They have two children.

A Negro business man of Boston has a white wife; they celebrated recently the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage.

[Illustration: MRS. BOOKER T.

WASHINGTON

MRS.

ROBERT H.

TERRELL Photograph by Clinedinst TWO OF THE LEADING WOMEN OF THE NEGRO RACE]

But such cases as these are rare.

In the great majority of intermarriages the white women belong to the lower walks of life.

They are German, Irish, or other foreign women, respectable, but ignorant.

As far as I can see from investigating a number of such cases, the home life is as happy as that of other people in the same stratum of life.

But the white woman who thus marries a Negro is speedily declassed: she is ostracised by the white people, and while she finds a certain place among the Negroes, she is not even readily accepted as a Negro.

In short, she is cut off from both races.

When I was at Xenia, O. , I was told of a case of a white man who was arrested for living with a Negro woman.

The magistrate compelled him to marry the Negro woman as the worst punishment he could invent!

For this reason, although there are no laws in most Northern states against mixed marriages, and although the Negro population has been increasing, the number of intermarriages is not only not increasing, but in many cities, as in Boston, it is decreasing.

It is an unpopular institution!

No one phase of the race question has aroused more acrimonious discussion than that of the Mulatto, especially as to the comparative physical strength and intelligence of the black Negro and the mulatto, a subject which cannot be here entered into.

_Most Leaders of the Negro Race are Mulattoes_ This much I know from my own observation: most of the leading men of the race to-day in every line of activity are mulattoes.

Both Booker T. Washington and Dr. DuBois are mulattoes.

Frederick Douglass was a mulatto.

The foremost literary men, Charles W. Chesnutt and William Stanley Braithwaite, are mulattoes; the foremost painter of the race, H. O.

Tanner, whose pictures have been in the Luxembourg, and who has been an honour to American art, is a mulatto.

Both Judge Terrell and his wife, Mary Church Terrell, who is a member of the School Board of Washington, are mulattoes.

On the other hand, there are notable exceptions to the rule.

W.

T.

Vernon, Register of the United States Treasury, and Professor Kelly Miller of Washington, D. C.

, one of the ablest men of his race, both have the appearance of being full-blooded Negroes.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the poet, was an undoubted Negro; so was J. C.

Price, a brilliant orator;

so is M. C. B.

Mason, secretary of the Southern Aid Society of the Methodist Church.

Full-blooded Negroes often make brilliant school and college records, even in comparison with white boys.

It is the judgment of Hampton Institute, after years of careful observation, that there is no difference in ability between light and dark Negroes.

I quote from the _Southern Workman_, published at Hampton: The question as to the comparative intelligence of light and dark Negroes is one that is not easily settled.

After long years of observation Hampton's records show that about an equal number of mulattoes and pure blacks have made advancement in their studies and at their work.

While it is probable that the lighter students are possessed of a certain quickness which does not belong to the darker, there is a power of endurance among the blacks that does not belong to their lighter brethren.

As to the comparative accomplishment of light and dark Negroes after leaving school, the evidence is so confusing that I would not dare to enter upon a generalisation: that question must be left to the great scientific sociologist who will devote a lifetime to this most interesting problem in human life.