The Souls of Black Folk
themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The
results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child
labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the
black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which
varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a
frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I
have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen
from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to
learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new
opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.
Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or
oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst
and most unscrupulous men in each community. The crop-lien system which
is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of
shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of
cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which
can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until
escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I have
seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and
pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and then in the
face of law and decency the enterprising American who sold it to him
pocketed the money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor
on his own land at thirty cents a day. I have seen a black farmer fall
in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and
strip it of every single marketable article,—mules, ploughs, stored
crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,—and all this
without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead
exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible person any
account or reckoning. And such proceedings can happen, and will happen,
in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom
and race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So
long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to
protect and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they
leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.
This unfortunate economic situation does not mean the hindrance of all
advance in the black South, or the absence of a class of black
landlords and mechanics who, in spite of disadvantages, are
accumulating property and making good citizens. But it does mean that
this class is not nearly so large as a fairer economic system might
easily make it, that those who survive in the competition are
handicapped so as to accomplish much less than they deserve to, and
that, above all, the _personnel_ of the successful class is left to
chance and accident, and not to any intelligent culling or reasonable
methods of selection. As a remedy for this, there is but one possible
procedure. We must accept some of the race prejudice in the South as a
fact,—deplorable in its intensity, unfortunate in results, and
dangerous for the future, but nevertheless a hard fact which only time
can efface. We cannot hope, then, in this generation, or for several
generations, that the mass of the whites can be brought to assume that
close sympathetic and self-sacrificing leadership of the blacks which
their present situation so eloquently demands. Such leadership, such
social teaching and example, must come from the blacks themselves. For
some time men doubted as to whether the Negro could develop such
leaders; but to-day no one seriously disputes the capability of
individual Negroes to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern
civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to their
fellows. If this is true, then here is the path out of the economic
situation, and here is the imperative demand for trained Negro leaders
of character and intelligence,—men of skill, men of light and leading,
college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of
culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modern civilization,
and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them by
force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of
common blood and ideals. But if such men are to be effective they must
have some power,—they must be backed by the best public opinion of
these communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such
weapons as the experience of the world has taught are indispensable to
human progress.
Of such weapons the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world is the power
of the ballot; and this brings me to a consideration of the third form
of contact between whites and blacks in the South,—political activity.
In the attitude of the American mind toward Negro suffrage can be
traced with unusual accuracy the prevalent conceptions of government.
In the fifties we were near enough the echoes of the French Revolution
to believe pretty thoroughly in universal suffrage. We argued, as we
thought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so
true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political
destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of
their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that
it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,—with the right to have a
voice in the policy of the state,—that the greatest good to the
greatest number could be attained. To be sure, there were objections to
these arguments, but we thought we had answered them tersely and
convincingly; if some one complained of the ignorance of voters, we
answered, “Educate them.” If another complained of their venality, we
replied, “Disfranchise them or put them in jail.” And, finally, to the
men who feared demagogues and the natural perversity of some human
beings we insisted that time and bitter experience would teach the most
hardheaded. It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in
the South was raised. Here was a defenceless people suddenly made free.
How were they to be protected from those who did not believe in their
freedom and were determined to thwart it? Not by force, said the North;
not by government guardianship, said the South; then by the ballot, the
sole and legitimate defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of
the Nation. No one thought, at the time, that the ex-slaves could use
the ballot intelligently or very effectively; but they did think that
the possession of so great power by a great class in the nation would
compel their fellows to educate this class to its intelligent use.
Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of
moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the
wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that
reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently
became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to
do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who
regarded public office as a private perquisite. In this state of mind
it became easy to wink at the suppression of the Negro vote in the
South, and to advise self-respecting Negroes to leave politics entirely
alone. The decent and reputable citizens of the North who neglected
their own civic duties grew hilarious over the exaggerated importance
with which the Negro regarded the franchise. Thus it easily happened
that more and more the better class of Negroes followed the advice from
abroad and the pressure from home, and took no further interest in
politics, leaving to the careless and the venal of their race the
exercise of their rights as voters. The black vote that still remained
was not trained and educated, but further debauched by open and
unblushing bribery, or force and fraud; until the Negro voter was
thoroughly inoculated with the idea that politics was a method of
private gain by disreputable means.
And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the
perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the
purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the
raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic
citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children’s
children,—in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic
virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are
we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless
form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of
Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up
their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not
saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of
ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the
present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a
purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case
that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the
black man from politics.
Now, is this a minor matter which has no influence on the main question
of the industrial and intellectual development of the Negro? Can we
establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the
South who, by law and public opinion, have absolutely no voice in
shaping the laws under which they live and work? Can the modern
organization of industry, assuming as it does free democratic
government and the power and ability of the laboring classes to compel
respect for their welfare,—can this system be carried out in the South
when half its laboring force is voiceless in the public councils and
powerless in its own defence? To-day the black man of the South has
almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those
taxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they
shall do it; as to who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made.
It is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at critical times to
get law-makers in some States even to listen to the respectful
presentation of the black man’s side of a current controversy. Daily
the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as
protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression.
The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are
executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black
people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused
law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would
rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
I should be the last one to deny the patent weaknesses and shortcomings
of the Negro people; I should be the last to withhold sympathy from the
white South in its efforts to solve its intricate social problems. I
freely acknowledged that it is possible, and sometimes best, that a
partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their
stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as
they can start and fight the world’s battles alone. I have already
pointed out how sorely in need of such economic and spiritual guidance
the emancipated Negro was, and I am quite willing to admit that if the
representatives of the best white Southern public opinion were the
ruling and guiding powers in the South to-day the conditions indicated
would be fairly well fulfilled. But the point I have insisted upon and
now emphasize again, is that the best opinion of the South to-day is
not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negro helpless and without a
ballot to-day is to leave him not to the guidance of the best, but