Following the Color Line — The Black Man’s Silent Power - part 2

Thus in a very real sense the government of this entire nation turns upon the despised black man--whether he votes or not!

_The Negro's Political Power in the North_ In another way the Southern attitude toward the Negro affects the nation.

Owing to disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws, thousands of Negroes have moved northward and settled in the great cities, until to-day Negro voters, though they may not (as has been claimed) hold the balance of power, yet wield a great influence in the politics of at least four states--Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and Rhode Island--and are also considerable factors in the political destiny of Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware.

The potential influence of the Negro voter in the North is excellently illustrated in the recent campaign for the Republican nomination to the Presidency, especially in the fight in Ohio between Foraker and Taft and in the eagerness displayed by Taft to placate the Negro vote.

In still another way the Negro affects the entire nation.

Through its attitude of exclusion the South exercises an influence on national legislation out of all proportion to its voting population.

Though nearly all Negroes are disfranchised, as well as a large number of white voters, all these disfranchised voters are counted in the allotment of Congressmen to Southern states.

Out of this has grown a curious condition.

In 1904 Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi, which have thirty-five members in Congress, cast 413,516 votes, while Massachusetts alone, with only fourteen Congressmen, cast 445,098 votes.

Here, for example, is the record of South Carolina: Total population of voting age, both white and coloured (1900) 283,325 Total white voting population 130,375 Total actual vote in 1902 for Congressmen 32,185 Total Democratic vote which elected seven Congressmen 29,343 Thus in South Carolina in 1902 an average of about 4,600 voters voted at the election for each Congressman (in 1904, a Presidential year, the average was about 8,100) while in New York State over 40,000 votes are cast in each Congressional district and in Pennsylvania about 38,000. Now, I am not here criticising this condition; I am merely endeavouring to set down the facts as I find them.

My purpose is to illustrate the profound and far-reaching effects of the Negro issue upon the nation.

And is it not curious, when all is said, to observe how this rejected black man, whom the South has attempted to eliminate utterly from politics, has been for years changing and warping the entire government of this nation in the most fundamental ways!

Did he not cause a civil war, the results of which still curse the country?

And though excluded in large measure from the polls, does he not in reality cast his mighty vote for Presidents, Congressmen, Governors?

Often, looking out across the South, it appears to the observer that the Negro has a more far-reaching and real influence on our national life for being excluded from the polls than he would have if he were frankly and justly admitted to the franchise on the same basis as white men.

All the real thinkers and statesmen of the South have looked and longed for the hour when the South, free of this dominance of an ugly issue, should again take its great place in national affairs.

In 1875, at the close of Reconstruction, Senator Lamar of Mississippi predicted in a speech at Jackson that the South, having eliminated the Negro from politics, would now divide on new economic issues and become politically healthy.

But that has not happened; less division on real issues probably exists in Mississippi to-day than in 1875. Why?

Is it not possible that the manner of the elimination of the Negro from politics is wrong?

Has it occurred to leaders and statesmen that Negroes who are qualified can be eliminated _into_ politics; that the present method in reality makes the Negro a more dangerous political factor than he would be if he were allowed to vote regularly and quietly?

_Southerners Who Are Speaking Out_ In spite of the domination of both parties in the South by narrowing groups of leaders there are not wanting men to fight for a new alignment.

On the Republican side one of these men is Joseph C. Manning, of Alexander City, Ala.

, who publishes a paper called the _Southern American_.

He has shown how white men are being disfranchised as well as Negroes, how the South is controlled by a "Bourbon oligarchy" in the Democratic party and a "federal-for-revenue" Republican party--as he calls them.

His paper appears every week with his denunciations in big letters, urging the Republican party to reform and become a party of truth and progress.

He says: THE RALLYING CRY

The great body of the people of the white South, the masses of the white people of Alabama, are to-day suppressed by the strategy of a political autocracy dominating under the guise and pretence of a democracy.

Why not throw off the yoke and get in the fight?

Rise up above this petty delegate getting, patronage manipulating, state chairman squabbling, until this small politics shall become lost in the great and the supreme issue.

Stop this "lily-white" nonsense.

Quit being sidetracked by this Bourbon wail of Negro.

Recognise this vital force of the immovable truth that an injustice to one American citizen will react upon all.

You can't have one law for the white man and another for the Negro in our form of government.

You know that those who have the most talked of suppressing blacks have really suppressed you, white Republicans, and the most of the Southern whites.

The outcry of Negro and social equality and the like is the very essence of political moonshine.

A number of men inside the Democratic party are not afraid to speak out.

Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia said in a notable address at Athens, Ga.

: "Those whose stock in trade is 'hating the nigger' may easily gain some temporary advantage for themselves in our white primaries, where it requires no courage, either physical or moral, to strike those who have no power to strike back--not even with a paper ballot.

But these men will achieve nothing permanent for the good of the state or of the nation by stirring up race passion and prejudice.

Injustice and persecution will not solve any of the problems of the ages.

God did not so ordain his universe.

"Justly proud of our race, we refuse to amalgamate with the Negro, but the Negro is an American citizen, and is protected as such by guarantees of the Constitution that are as irrepealable almost as the Bill of Rights itself.

Nor, if such a thing as repealing these guarantees were possible, would it be wise for the South.

Suppose we admit the oft-reiterated proposition that no two races so distinct as the Caucasian and the Negro can live together on terms of perfect equality; yet it is equally true that without some access to the ballot, present or prospective, some participation in the government, no inferior race in an elective republic could long protect itself against reduction to slavery in many of its substantial forms--and God knows the South wants no more of that curse."

Men of the type of Mr. Fleming are far in the minority in the South; they are so few as yet as to count, politically speaking, for little or nothing.

But the fact that they are there, that they are not afraid to speak out, even though it ruins them politically, is significant and hopeful.

_Ante-bellum Aggression_ Now it is this way with a party having only one issue: when attacked, it can only become more and more violent and vociferous upon that issue.

And this is what we discover in the South: an increasing bitterness of leaders like Tillman and Vardaman, for they know that their own existence and that of the party which they represent depends upon keeping the Negro issue prominent.

The very fact that they are violent is significant: it shows that they recognise powerful and growing new elements in the South, which, though not yet apparent politically, are getting hold of the people.

In other words, the present group of autocratic leaders is seeking at any length to defend itself.

And its work is not only defensive, it is also offensive.

It must be.

The institution of slavery might have lasted many years longer if the Southern leaders had been content with the slave territory they already held.

But they were not so content.

They tried to extend slavery to the new territories of the Union, and it was this aggression that was the chief immediate cause of the Civil War.

It was the struggle over Missouri and Kansas, and the policy of the country regarding the new West, whether it should be admitted slave or free, which precipitated hostilities.

"Continual aggression," John Hay once said, "is the necessity of a false position."

The ante-bellum Southern leaders saw that they must either extend their institution or else face its ultimate extinction.

At the present time we have a repetition of the ante-bellum aggression.

As it happened then, we have speakers like Tillman and others coming North urging the validity of the Southern treatment of the Negro.

Writers like Thomas Dixon rekindle old fires of hatred.

At the same moment that Tillman is abusing the North for its interest in Southern education, he himself is speaking from Northern platforms to make sentiment for the Southern position.

So we have the extension of disfranchisement and "Jim Crow" laws to the new Western state of Oklahoma and the agitation for disfranchisement in Maryland.

So we have the advancing demand by Southerners in Congress for the repeal of the XV Amendment.

And just recently Congressman Heflin of Alabama has introduced a bill seeking to provide for "Jim Crow" distinctions upon the street-cars of Washington.

How all this recalls the efforts of the ante-bellum Southern Congressmen to force the United States Government to take the Southern position on the slavery question!

_Fighting to Put the Negro Down_ I have recently read some of the voluminous discussions upon the subject of slavery which took place before the Civil War, and I have been astonished to find the arguments of the Southern political leaders of to-day almost identical in substance (though changed somewhat in form) with the reasoning of the old slave-owning class.

One hears the same arguments regarding the physiological and ethnological inferiority of all coloured men to all white men: the argument that "one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro," and even that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a beast.

I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all places!

) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South.

It is entitled "Is the Negro a Beast?"

and it goes on to prove by Biblical quotation that he has no soul!

Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him.

One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right of the white man to rule the Negro.

"God intended the white man to rule," says Vardaman, "and the Negro to be a humble servant."

And finally there is the frank argument of physical force; that the white man, being strong, will and must rule the Negro.

Hoke Smith to-day is supporting much the same position that Robert Toombs held before the war.

Of course Hoke Smith has receded from the belief in the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended; but in many other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) "to slavery in many of its substantial forms."

In order to validate its position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his) the white aristocracy has been forced to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and aristocracies--the inequality of men in all respects.

Hoke Smith states the fundamental assumption thus plainly in his address (June 9, 1906): "I believe the wise course is to plant ourselves squarely upon the proposition in Georgia that the Negro is in no respect the equal of the white man, and that he cannot in the future in this state occupy a position of equality."

_Both the South and the North Undemocratic_ Thus I have attempted to present the political situation in the South and the reasoning which underlies it.

It possesses a large significance for the entire country.

Here is the fact: the war and the emancipation proclamation did not make the South completely democratic; it merely cut away one bulwark of aristocracy--slavery.

The South is still dominated by the aristocratic idea, and more or less frankly so.

The South has admitted only grudgingly, and not yet fully, the "poor white" man to democratic political fellowship.

There are, as I have shown, hundreds of thousands of disfranchised white Americans in the South.

Moreover many white leaders look askance on the new Italian immigrants, though they, too, are white men.

The extreme point of view in regard to the foreigner was expressed in a speech by the Hon. Jeff Truly, candidate for governor of Mississippi, at Magnolia in that state on March 18, 1907: "I am opposed to any inferior race.

The Italian immigration scheme does not settle the labour question; Italians are a threat and a danger to our racial, industrial, and commercial supremacy.

Mississippi needs no such immigration.

Leave your lands to your own children.

As governor of the state, I promise that not one dollar of the state shall be spent for the immigration of any such."

As for the Negro, of course, the South has never believed in a democracy which really includes him.

But neither does the North.

When we get right down to it, the controlling white men in the North do not believe in an inclusive democracy much more than the South.

I have talked with many Northerners who go South, and it is astonishing to see how quickly most of them adopt the Southern point of view.

For it is the doctrine which many of them, down in their hearts, really believe.

In reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the country more or less completely.

Roosevelt has been fighting some of the more boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy--and has showed the country how powerful it is!

_The Underman Fighting All Over the World_ It is curious, indeed, when one's attention is awakened to the facts, how strong the parallel is between the South and the North.

I mean here a parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living reality which lies down deep under institutions, which is, after all, the only thing that really counts.

The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the South: the underman will not keep his place.

He is restless, ambitious, he wants civil, political, and industrial equality.

Thus we see the growth of labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour.

They will not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, "content themselves with the place of inferiority."

The essential feature of the history of the last five years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman (half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the power of this moneyed aristocracy.

Such is the meaning of the demand for trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller, Harriman, Morgan.

So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower class.

It does it by the purchase at elections in one form or another of its "poor whites" and its Negroes.

What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and machine system in other cities?

Tammany Hall is our method of disfranchisement: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

While the South is disfranchising by legislation, the North is doing it by cash.

_The Question We Are Coming To_ I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not peculiar to the South.

Though there is undoubtedly a far greater intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or railroad questions.

South or North, it is dangerous to attack the entrenched privilege of those in control.

We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom in the North?

How extremely difficult it is sometimes to get a rich criminal into jail in the North!

In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every crisis of the world's history: "What is democracy?

What does democracy include?

Does democracy really include Negroes as well as white men?

Does it include Russian Jews, Italians, Japanese?

Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian street-sweeper?

And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?"

CHAPTER XIII THE NEW SOUTHERN STATESMANSHIP