The Souls of Black Folk
much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which
to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good. Not even
ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the
thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the
series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid.
Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to say; whether the Bureau
and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish friends
or the dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never
reveal, for here lies unwritten history.
Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked
not so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for
any such institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the
Border States and the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis,
of Kentucky, when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill “to
promote strife and conflict between the white and black races… by a
grant of unconstitutional power.” The argument gathered tremendous
strength South and North; but its very strength was its weakness. For,
argued the plain common-sense of the nation, if it is unconstitutional,
unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand guardian over its
helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,—to make those
wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot. Moreover, the
path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for, argued this
opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with white
votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force joined
hands.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and
restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white,
would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between
suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep
human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to
admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single
Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a
system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was
scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard
Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In
such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race,
and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of
the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race
feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its
swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and
feel only indifference and contempt.
Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to
government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to
the slave system less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far
better policy,—a permanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a national system of
Negro schools; a carefully supervised employment and labor office; a
system of impartial protection before the regular courts; and such
institutions for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building
associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure of
money and brains might have formed a great school of prospective
citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the most
perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to
certain acts of the Freedmen’s Bureau itself. It came to regard its
work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all
present perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and
_protégés_ led it far afield into questionable activities, until the
South, nursing its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the
good deeds of the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So
the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like
the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving
for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy
heritage of this generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are
destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it
not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much
all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not
free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may
not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural
South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an
economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the
Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the
rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in
nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy
of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there
in the King’s Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which
the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods
fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of
that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and
the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the
color-line.
III.
Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
******
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
BYRON.
Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro
since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at
the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of
astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and
hesitation overtook the freedmen’s sons,—then it was that his leading
began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the
psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having
bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its
energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial education,
conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and
political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830
up to war-time had striven to build industrial schools, and the
American Missionary Association had from the first taught various
trades; and Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance
with the best of the Southerners. But Mr. Washington first indissolubly
linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect
faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path into a
veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did this
is a fascinating study of human life.
It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme
after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the
applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the
North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did
not convert the Negroes themselves.
To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising
the white South was Mr. Washington’s first task; and this, at the time
Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh impossible.
And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: “In
all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and
yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This
“Atlanta Compromise” is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr.
Washington’s career. The South interpreted it in different ways: the
radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil
and political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived
working basis for mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day
its author is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since
Jefferson Davis, and the one with the largest personal following.
Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington’s work in gaining place
and consideration in the North. Others less shrewd and tactful had
formerly essayed to sit on these two stools and had fallen between
them; but as Mr. Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and
training, so by singular insight he intuitively grasped the spirit of
the age which was dominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn
the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of
material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a
French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed
to him the acme of absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St.
Francis of Assisi would say to this.
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his
age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs
make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington’s cult
has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered,
his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded. To-day he
stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and
one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One
hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with so
little, has done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak
in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of
Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs, without being
thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier
to do ill than well in the world.
The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been
of this broad character. In the South especially has he had to walk
warily to avoid the harshest judgments,—and naturally so, for he is
dealing with the one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section.
Twice—once when at the Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American War
he alluded to the color-prejudice that is “eating away the vitals of
the South,” and once when he dined with President Roosevelt—has the
resulting Southern criticism been violent enough to threaten seriously
his popularity. In the North the feeling has several times forced
itself into words, that Mr. Washington’s counsels of submission
overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational
programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually, however, such criticism
has not found open expression, although, too, the spiritual sons of the
Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowledge that the schools
founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and self-sacrificing
spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While, then,
criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing
public opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the
solution of a wearisome problem into his hands, and say, “If that is
all you and your race ask, take it.”
Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the
strongest and most lasting opposition, amounting at times to
bitterness, and even today continuing strong and insistent even though
largely silenced in outward expression by the public opinion of the
nation. Some of this opposition is, of course, mere envy; the