Following the Color Line — The Negro in Politics - part 2

_Has the Spirit of Democracy Crossed the Colour Line?

_ For democracy is like this: once its ferment begins to work in a nation it does not stop until it reaches and animates the uttermost man.

Though Tillman's hatred and contempt of the Negro who has aspirations is without bounds, the spirit which he voiced in his wild campaigns does not stop at the colour line.

Movements are so much greater than men, often going so much further than men intend.

A prophet who stands out for truth as Tillman did cannot, having uttered it, thereafter limit it nor recall it.

As I have been travelling about the country, how often I have heard the same animating whisper from the Negroes that Tillman heard in older days among the poor whites: "We are free; we are free."

Yes, Tillman and Vardaman are right; education, newspapers, books, commercial prosperity, are working in the Negro too; he, too, has the world-old disease of restlessness, ambition, hope.

And many a Negro leader and many a Negro organisation--and that is what is causing the turmoil in the South, the fear of the white aristocracy--are voicing the equivalent of Tillman's bold words: "Awake!

arise!

or be forever fallen."

Now we may talk all we like about the situation, we may say that the Negro is wrong in entertaining such ambitions, that his hopes can never be gratified, that he is doomed forever to menial and inferior occupations--the plain fact remains (as Tillman himself testifies), that the democratic spirit _has_ crossed the colour line irrespective of laws and conventions, that the Negro is restless with the ambition to rise, to enjoy all that is best, finest, most complete in this world.

How humanly the ancient struggle between aristocracy seeking to maintain its "superiority" and democracy fighting for "equality" is repeating itself!

And this struggle in the South is complicated, deeply and variously, by the fact that the lower people are black and of a different race.

They wear on their faces the badge of their position.

What is being done about it?

As every student of history is well aware, no aristocracy ever lets go until it is compelled to.

How bitterly King John fought his barons; how bitterly the South Carolina gentlemen fought the rude Tillman!

Having control of the government, the newspapers, the political parties, the schools, an aristocracy surrounds and fortifies itself with every possible safeguard.

It maintains itself at any cost.

And that is both human and natural; that is what is happening in the South to-day.

Exactly the same conflict occurred before the war when the old slave-owning aristocracy (which everyone now acknowledges to have been wrong) was defending itself and the institution upon which its existence depended.

The old slave-owning aristocrats believed that they were made of finer clay than the "poor whites," that their rule was peculiarly beneficent, that if anything should happen to depose them the country would go to ruin and destruction.

It was the old, old conviction, common to kings and oligarchies, that they were possessed of a divine right, a special and perpetual franchise from God.

_The White South Defends Itself_ The present white aristocratic party in the South is defending itself exactly after the manner of all aristocracies.

In the first place, having control of the government it has entrenched itself with laws.

The moment, for example, that the Negro began to develop any real intelligence and leadership, the disfranchisement process was instituted.

Laws were so worded that every possible white man be admitted to the franchise and every possible Negro (regardless of his intelligence) be excluded.

These laws now exist in nearly all the Southern states.

Although the XV Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares that the right to vote shall not be "denied or abridged ...

on account of race or colour or previous condition of servitude," the South, in defence of its white aristocracy, has practically nullified this amendment.

Governor Hoke Smith of Georgia, for example, said (June 9, 1906): Legislation can be passed which will ...

not interfere with the right of any white man to vote, and get rid of 95 per cent.

of the Negro voters.

Not only do the enacted laws disfranchise all possible Negroes, but many other Negroes who have enough property or education to qualify, are further disfranchised by the dishonest administration of those laws.

For the machinery of government, being wholly in white hands, the registers and judges of election have power to keep out any Negro, however fit he may be.

I know personally of many instances in which educated and well-to-do Negroes have been refused the right to register where ignorant white men were readily admitted.

The law, after all, in this matter, plays very little figure.

The white majority has determined to control the government utterly and to give the Negro, whether educated or not, no political influence.

That is the plain truth of the matter.

Listen to Hoke Smith in his campaign pledge of last year: "I favour, and if elected will urge with all my power, the elimination of the Negro from politics."

Let us also quote the plain-speaking Vardaman in his address of April, 1907, at Poplarville, Miss. : How is the white man going to control the government?

The way we do it is to pass laws to fit the white man and make the other people (Negroes) come to them....

If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy....

The XV Amendment ought to be wiped out.

We all agree on that.

Then why don't we do it?

It may be argued that this violent expression does not represent the best sentiment of the South.

It does not; and yet Vardaman, Tillman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others of the type are _elected_, the _majority_ in their states support them.

And I am talking here of politics, which deals with majorities.

In a following chapter I shall hope to deal with the reconstructive and progressive minority in the South as it expresses itself especially in the more democratic border states like North Carolina.

Thus the spirit of democracy has really escaped among the coloured people and it is running abroad like a prairie fire.

Tillman, the prophet, sees it: "Every man," he says, "who can look before his nose can see that with Negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who can read and write among the coloured race ...

will in time encroach upon our white men."

_Demand Repeal of XV Amendment_ In order, then, to prevent the Negro getting into politics, the Tillmans, Vardamans, and others declare that the South must strike at the foundation of his political liberty: the XV Amendment must be repealed.

In short, the moment the Negro meets one test of citizenship, these political leaders advance a more difficult one: now proposing to take away entirely every hope of ultimate citizenship.

In the recent campaign for the United States senatorship in Mississippi, Vardaman and John Sharp Williams were quite in accord on this point, though they disagreed on methods of accomplishing the purpose.

When the political liberty of the Negro has thus been finally removed, the South, say these men, will again have two parties, and will be able to take the place it should occupy in the counsels of the nation.

Take the next point in the logic of the political leaders.

It is a fact of common knowledge in history that aristocracies cannot long survive when free education is permitted among all classes of people.

Education is more potent against oligarchies and aristocracies than dynamite bombs.

Every aristocracy that has survived has had to monopolise learning more or less completely--else it went to the wall.

It is not surprising that there should have been no effective public-school system in the South before the war where the poor whites could get an education, or that the teaching of Negroes was in many states a crime punishable by law.

Education enables the Negro, as Mr. Lane says, to "ascertain his rights and force his way to assert them."

Therefore to prevent his ascertaining his rights he must not be educated.

The undivided supremacy of the white party, it is clearly discerned, is bound up with Negro ignorance.

Therefore we have seen and are now seeing in certain parts of the South continuous agitation against the education of Negroes.

That is one reason for the feeling in the South against "Northern philanthropy" which is contributing money to support Negro schools and colleges.

"What the North is sending South is not money," says Vardaman, "but dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes.

They're demanding equality."

_A Southern View of Negro Education_ When I was in Montgomery, Ala.

, a letter was published in one of the newspapers from Alexander Troy, a well-known lawyer.

It did not express the view of the most thoughtful men of that city, but I am convinced that it represented with directness and force the belief of a large proportion of the white people of Alabama.

The letter says: All the millions which have been spent by the state since the war in Negro education ...

have been worse than wasted.

Should anyone ask "Has not Booker Washington's school been of benefit to the Negro?"

the so-called philanthropists of the North would say "yes," but a hundred thousand white people of Alabama would say "no." Ask any gentleman from the country what he thinks of the matter, and a very large majority of them will tell you that they never saw a Negro benefited by education, but hundreds ruined.

He ceases to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water....

Exclude the air and a man will die, keep away the moisture and the flower will wither.

Stop the appropriations for Negro education, by amendment to the Constitution if necessary, and the school-house in which it is taught will decay.

Not only that, but the Negro will take the place the Creator intended he should take in the economy of the world--a dutiful, faithful, and law-abiding servant.

These are Mr. Troy's words and they found reflection in the discussions of the Alabama legislature then in session.

A compulsory education bill had been introduced; the problem was to pass a law that would apply to white people, not to Negroes.

In this connection I heard a significant discussion in the state senate.

I use the report of it, for accuracy, as given the next morning in the _Advertiser_: Senator Thomas said ...

he would oppose any bills that would compel Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.

At this point Senator Lusk arose excitedly to his feet and said: "Does the Senator from Barbour mean to say that the Negro race is more ambitious and has more aspirations than the white race?"

"The question of the gentleman ...

is an insult to the senate of Alabama," replied Senator Thomas deliberately.

"It is an insult to the great Caucasian race, the father of all the arts and sciences, to compare it to that black and kinky race which lived in a state of black and ignorant savagery until the white race seized it and lifted it to its present position."

The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.

In cutting off an ,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured) Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said: "I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic.

God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn College."

Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political leadership in the South.

_Economic Cause for White Supremacy_ Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to monopolise government and learning, is because it wishes to supervise the division of labour and the products of labour.

That is the bottom fact.

In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely and took _all_ the profits.

In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage, he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits.

But as the Negro has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour.

He is no longer willing to be an abject "hewer of wood and a drawer of water" as he was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own business, employ his own professional men, and so on.

He will not "keep his place" as a servant.

And that is the basis of all the trouble.

Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into a statement of this position.

At the American Bankers' Association last fall Governor Swanson of Virginia said: "At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God's help and our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is."

In other words, the white man will by force hold all political, business and financial positions; he will be boss, and the Negro must do the menial work; he must be a servant.

Hoke Smith says in his speech (the italics are mine): "Those Negroes who are contented to occupy the natural status of their race, the position of inferiority, _all competition being eliminated between the whites and the blacks_, will be treated with greater kindness."

In other words, if the Negro will be contented to keep himself inferior and not compete with the white man, everything will be all right.

And thus, curiously enough, while Hoke Smith in his campaign was thundering against railroad corporations for destroying competition, while he was glorifying the principle of "free and unrestricted trade," he was advocating the formation of a monopoly of all white men by the elimination of the competition of all coloured men.

Indeed, we find sporadic attempts to pass laws to compel the Negro to engage only in certain sorts of menial work.

In Texas not long ago a bill was introduced in the legislature "to confine coloured labour to the farm whenever it was found in city and town communities to be competing with white labour."

In the last session of the Arkansas legislature Senator McKnight introduced a bill providing that Negroes be forbidden "from waiting on white persons in hotels, restaurants, or becoming barbers, or porters on trains, and to prevent any white man from working for any Negro."

In a number of towns respectable, educated, and prosperous Negro doctors, grocers, and others have been forcibly driven out.

I visited Monroe, La.

, where two Negro doctors had been forced to leave town because they were taking the practice of white physicians.

In the same town a Negro grocer was burned out, because he was encroaching on the trade of white grocers.

Neither of the laws above referred to, of course, was passed; and the instances of violence I have given are sporadic and unusual.

For the South has not followed the dominant political leaders to the extremes of their logic.

Human nature never, finally, goes to extremes: it is forever compromising, never wholly logical.

While perhaps a large proportion of Southerners would agree perfectly with Hoke Smith or Tillman in his _theory_ of a complete supremacy of all white men in all respects, as a matter of fact nearly every white Southerner is encouraging some practical exception which quite overturns the theory.

Tens of thousands of white Southerners swear by Booker T. Washington, and though doubtful about Negro education, the South is expending millions of dollars every year on coloured schools.

Vardaman, declaiming violently against Negro colleges, has actually, in specific instances, given them help and encouragement.

I

told how he had cut off an ,000 appropriation from Alcorn College because he did not believe in Negro education: but he turned around and gave Alcorn College ,000 for a new lighting system, _because he had come in personal contact with the Negro president of Alcorn College, and liked him_.

And though the politicians may talk about complete Negro disfranchisement, the Negro has nowhere been completely disfranchised: a few Negroes vote in every part of the South.

I once heard a Southerner argue for an hour against the participation of the Negro in politics, and then ten minutes later tell me with pride of a certain Negro banker in his city whom we both knew.

"Dr. ----'s all right," he said.

"He's a sensible Negro.

I went with him myself when he registered.

He ought to vote."

So personal relationships, the solving touch of human nature, play havoc with political theories and generalities.

Mankind develops not by rules but by exceptions to rules.

While the white aristocracy has indeed succeeded in controlling local government in the South almost completely, it has not been able to dominate the federal political organisations, which include many Negroes.

And though often opposing education for the Negro, the aristocracy has not, after all, monopolised education; and the Negro, in spite of Jim Crow laws and occasional violence, has actually been pushing ahead, getting a foothold in landownership, entering the professions, even competing in some lines of business with white men.

So democracy, though black, is encroaching in the world-old way on aristocracy; how far Negroes can go toward real democratic citizenship in the various lines--industrial, political, social--no man knows.

We can see the fight; we do not know how the spoils of war will finally be divided.

CHAPTER XII