The Souls of Black Folk
rather to the exploitation and debauchment of the worst; that this is
no truer of the South than of the North,—of the North than of Europe:
in any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any
class of weak and despised people, be they white, black, or blue, at
the political mercy of their stronger, richer, and more resourceful
fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and
seldom will withstand.
Moreover, the political status of the Negro in the South is closely
connected with the question of Negro crime. There can be no doubt that
crime among Negroes has sensibly increased in the last thirty years,
and that there has appeared in the slums of great cities a distinct
criminal class among the blacks. In explaining this unfortunate
development, we must note two things: (1) that the inevitable result of
Emancipation was to increase crime and criminals, and (2) that the
police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. As
to the first point, we must not forget that under a strict slave system
there can scarcely be such a thing as crime. But when these variously
constituted human particles are suddenly thrown broadcast on the sea of
life, some swim, some sink, and some hang suspended, to be forced up or
down by the chance currents of a busy hurrying world. So great an
economic and social revolution as swept the South in ’63 meant a
weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the
beginning of a differentiation of social grades. Now a rising group of
people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass,
but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still
clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal
was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should
not occasion surprise.
Here again the hope for the future depended peculiarly on careful and
delicate dealing with these criminals. Their offences at first were
those of laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity
or ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating
treatment, firm but reformatory, with no hint of injustice, and full
proof of guilt. For such dealing with criminals, white or black, the
South had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories; its police
system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that
every white man was _ipso facto_ a member of that police. Thus grew up
a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue
leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred
on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of
discrimination. For, as I have said, the police system of the South was
originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of
criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was
convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and
almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving
the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of
color, that settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge. Thus
Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and
oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.
When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty
stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary,
murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the
color-line: the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white
witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest
deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one’s own social caste, was
lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.
On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt
or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion
beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to increase
crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are
being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the
latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economic
development often impossible.
But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the
punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being
trained to crime. And here again the peculiar conditions of the South
have prevented proper precautions. I have seen twelve-year-old boys
working in chains on the public streets of Atlanta, directly in front
of the schools, in company with old and hardened criminals; and this
indiscriminate mingling of men and women and children makes the
chain-gangs perfect schools of crime and debauchery. The struggle for
reformatories, which has gone on in Virginia, Georgia, and other
States, is the one encouraging sign of the awakening of some
communities to the suicidal results of this policy.
It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the
homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens.
We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and
the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school
system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five dollars
spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white schools
get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the white
public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for reform.
If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am becoming more
and more convinced, as I look upon the system of common-school training
in the South, that the national government must soon step in and aid
popular education in some way. To-day it has been only by the most
strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South that the
Negro’s share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in
some half-dozen States; and that movement not only is not dead, but in
many communities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason does
this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in
severe economic competition, without political rights, and with
ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but
crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles
of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the
hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?
I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and
political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have
conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and
education. But after all that has been said on these more tangible
matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a
proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or
fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the
atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one
little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it
is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most
essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole.
What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South,
where, outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has
been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human
souls, as intense a ferment of feeling, as intricate a writhing of
spirit, as ever a people experienced. Within and without the sombre
veil of color vast social forces have been at work,—efforts for human
betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and
comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and
sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled
sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest.
The centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of
black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully bound up
with that of the nation. And yet the casual observer visiting the South
sees at first little of this. He notes the growing frequency of dark
faces as he rides along,—but otherwise the days slip lazily on, the sun
shines, and this little world seems as happy and contented as other
worlds he has visited. Indeed, on the question of questions—the Negro
problem—he hears so little that there almost seems to be a conspiracy
of silence; the morning papers seldom mention it, and then usually in a
far-fetched academic way, and indeed almost every one seems to forget
and ignore the darker half of the land, until the astonished visitor is
inclined to ask if after all there IS any problem here. But if he
lingers long enough there comes the awakening: perhaps in a sudden
whirl of passion which leaves him gasping at its bitter intensity; more
likely in a gradually dawning sense of things he had not at first
noticed. Slowly but surely his eyes begin to catch the shadows of the
color-line: here he meets crowds of Negroes and whites; then he is
suddenly aware that he cannot discover a single dark face; or again at
the close of a day’s wandering he may find himself in some strange
assembly, where all faces are tinged brown or black, and where he has
the vague, uncomfortable feeling of the stranger. He realizes at last
that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great
streams: they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle
their waters in seeming carelessness,—then they divide and flow wide
apart. It is done quietly; no mistakes are made, or if one occurs, the
swift arm of the law and of public opinion swings down for a moment, as
when the other day a black man and a white woman were arrested for
talking together on Whitehall Street in Atlanta.
Now if one notices carefully one will see that between these two
worlds, despite much physical contact and daily intermingling, there is
almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where
the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and
sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other. Before and
directly after the war, when all the best of the Negroes were domestic
servants in the best of the white families, there were bonds of
intimacy, affection, and sometimes blood relationship, between the
races. They lived in the same home, shared in the family life, often
attended the same church, and talked and conversed with each other. But
the increasing civilization of the Negro since then has naturally meant
the development of higher classes: there are increasing numbers of
ministers, teachers, physicians, merchants, mechanics, and independent
farmers, who by nature and training are the aristocracy and leaders of
the blacks. Between them, however, and the best element of the whites,
there is little or no intellectual commerce. They go to separate
churches, they live in separate sections, they are strictly separated
in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are
beginning to read different papers and books. To most libraries,
lectures, concerts, and museums, Negroes are either not admitted at
all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of the very classes
who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings
of the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so
on, throughout the category of means for intellectual
communication,—schools, conferences, efforts for social betterment, and
the like,—it is usually true that the very representatives of the two
races, who for mutual benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be
in complete understanding and sympathy, are so far strangers that one
side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced, and the other thinks