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33 chapters
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
“The problem of the twentieth century,” says Mr. W. B. Du Bois, “is the problem of the colour line.” That, no doubt, is the view of a man born “within the veil”; but, whatever our point of view, we cannot but admit that racial adjustment is one of the two or three most urgent problems of the near future. Ought the colour-lines drawn by Nature to be enforced by human ordinance, and even by geographical segregation? Or ought they to be gradually obliterated by free intermingling and intermarriage?
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I ON THE THRESHOLD
I ON THE THRESHOLD
The scene is Chicago; the occasion, a luncheon-party at the Cliff-Dwellers’ Club. All the intellect and talent of the Middle West (I am credibly assured) are gathered round one long table. I mention to an eminent man of letters that I am going into the South. “Well,” he says, “you are going into a country that is more foreign to me than most parts of Europe. I do not understand the Southern people, or their way of looking at things. I never feel at home among them. The one thing I have in common
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II THE BLACK MAN’S PARADISE
II THE BLACK MAN’S PARADISE
It was my good fortune to have for my hosts in Washington two active sympathizers with the negro. The husband hails from a North-Western State; the wife is a New Englander. They knew personally some of the Abolitionist leaders, and are still full of their spirit. They related to me cruel and deplorable incidents in the everyday life of the streets. “One afternoon,” said my host, “I was sitting peaceably in a street-car, when I was suddenly conscious of an altercation between the conductor and a
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III THE NIGHTMARE OF THE SOUTH
III THE NIGHTMARE OF THE SOUTH
My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia, and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established by General Samuel Armstrong, the alma mater of Mr. Booker Washington, and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face south-westward towards
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IV RHETORIC IN LOUISVILLE
IV RHETORIC IN LOUISVILLE
Louisville, Kentucky, is not an attractive city. It is as flat as my hand; its atmosphere is grimy; its buildings vary from the commonplace to the mean. It has one or two of the dumpy sky-scrapers—only some ten or twelve storeys high—which are indispensable to the self-respect of every American city of a certain size; but one feels that they are products of mere imitative ostentation, not of economic necessity. In Louisville the names, or numbers, of the streets are scarcely ever stuck up. It is
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V
V
“DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS A night’s railway journey on the Illinois Central carries you from Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee, and from the Ohio to the Mississippi. You strike the Father of Waters some time before you reach Memphis. Here two sets of literary associations were awakened in my mind. We passed through miles of swampy, malarial-looking forests, with snake-like vines binding the trees together; and every here and there would come a clearing on the river-bank, still bristling with hu
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VI TWO LEADERS
VI TWO LEADERS
“People are always laying stress on the white blood in me,” said Mr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “and attributing to that anything I do that is worth doing. But they never speak of the white blood in Mr. Booker Washington, who, as a matter of fact, has a larger share than I have.” “How do you make that out?” I asked; and Mr. Du Bois gave me the story of his ancestry. The story went back two hundred years, for he comes of a New England stock, and has had no slave ancestors (I take it) for many gener
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VII A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK
VII A WHITE TYPE AND A BLACK
In Memphis I had no difficulty in discovering what I had in vain looked for in Louisville—a book-store. There are two or three on Main Street; and into one of them I went to ask for Mr. Du Bois’s book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” which I had not yet read. Immediately the proprietor swooped down upon me. As to the possession of that particular book he returned an evasive answer; but if I wanted information about the negro, I had, in every sense, come to the right shop. He exuded information at eve
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VIII IN THE BLACK BELT
VIII IN THE BLACK BELT
For a whole long hot summer’s day I journeyed down the Mississippi Valley from Memphis to Vicksburg, stopping at every wayside station. Here I first felt—what was afterwards to grow upon me every day—an impression of the extraordinary potential wealth of the South. These fat champains, many of them scarcely reclaimed from the wilderness, and few of them subjected to more than a rough surface culture, seemed to me to reek of fertility and to cry aloud for development. As scenery they were monoton
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IX EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM
IX EDUCATION AND THE DEMONSTRATION FARM
Enormous undeveloped or half-developed fertility is the impression one receives on every hand in the South; but the lack of development belongs to a state of things soon to pass away. There can be little doubt that the South stands on the threshold of an agricultural Golden Age. [24] It is being brought about mainly by three agencies: (1) The United States Department of Agriculture; (2) The General Education Board of New York; (3) the boll-weevil, which, entering Texas from Mexico in 1899, has e
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X NEW ORLEANS
X NEW ORLEANS
Vicksburg is situated on a solitary, abrupt bluff, at a bend of the Mississippi; whence, I suppose, its strategic importance and its place in history. I climbed to its highest point, and looked out, at sunset, over the burnished river and the Louisiana shore beyond. It seemed one unbroken stretch of dark forest, which might never have been threaded by human foot, or only by that of the Red Man. When the first explorer of the great river climbed the bluff (as he doubtless did), he must have surve
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XI CRIME-SLAVERY AND DEBT-SERFDOM[27]
XI CRIME-SLAVERY AND DEBT-SERFDOM[27]
Montgomery, the legislative capital of Alabama, has the air of a pleasant and prosperous country town, with spacious streets, for the most part well shaded with trees. Its dignified, unpretending State House—where the Confederate Government was organized in 1861, and where Jefferson Davis took the oath as President—is admirably situated at the top of a gradually sloping hill, and commands a fine view over the rich, pleasant country. The soil in this district (and, indeed, in many parts of Alabam
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XII AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY
XII AN INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY
It is very difficult to get at the true truth as to public education for the negro in the South. The probability is, in fact, that there are as many truths as there are points of view. One high authority (a negro) told me that for every single dollar expended on a black child about five dollars are expended on a white child. That is very likely true; but it is probably no less true that the sums expended on negro education are large out of all proportion to the sums paid by negroes in taxes. “Le
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XIII HAMPTON: AN AFTERMATH
XIII HAMPTON: AN AFTERMATH
After the daughter, the mother. Being again in America this year (1909), I stole a few days for a run into Virginia and a visit to Hampton, the fount and origin of the whole movement for the industrial training of the coloured race. It is perhaps well to take Tuskegee before Hampton, just as, in visiting English Universities, it would be well to take Liverpool or Birmingham before Oxford or Cambridge. Hampton is on historic ground, and looks over still more historic waters. It stands at the tip
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XV THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS
XV THE CITY OF A HUNDRED HILLS
The quaintly named “Seaboard Air Line” carries you from Birmingham to Atlanta, Georgia, for the most part through a region of fresh and woody highlands, with blue mountains on the southern horizon. The woods consist of pine and leaf trees about evenly mixed. Large tracts of them, unfortunately, have been ruthlessly hewn or burnt away—that crime against the future so prevalent in America. Atlanta is finely situated at an elevation of about 1000 feet above the sea, on a billowy upland which has ea
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XVI PROHIBITION
XVI PROHIBITION
Every one agrees that the most remarkable phenomenon in the recent history of the South is the “wave of prohibition” which has passed, and is passing, over the country. “There are 20,000,000 people in the fourteen Southern States, 17,000,000 of whom are under prohibitory law in some form.” “Yes, sir,” says Mr. Dooley, “in the sunny Southland ’tis as hard to get a dhrink now as it wanst was not to get wan.... Why, Hinnissy, I read th’ other day iv a most unfortunate occurrence down in Texas. A pe
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XVII THE NEGRO HOME AND THE NEGRO CHURCH
XVII THE NEGRO HOME AND THE NEGRO CHURCH
Wherever I went in the South, one invariable experience awaited me, of which I scarcely know how to write. A buggy was ordered out, and I was trotted round to visit six or eight negro “homes.” I came to regard it as an established ritual, and learned to use the responses expected of me. It would be base and stupid were I to laugh at these simple people who, in all good faith, and with a touching pride, which one felt to be more racial than personal, displayed to me their household gods. As a rul
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XVIII CHARLESTON
XVIII CHARLESTON
For any disappointment I had felt in New Orleans, Charleston more than compensated me. Mr. Owen Wister, in “Lady Baltimore,” has in no way exaggerated its charm. In situation it is not at all unlike New York, being built on a tongue of land between the broad estuaries of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers. At the tip of the tongue (as in New York) is the Battery; but here the Battery is a beautiful, semi-tropical garden, full of live-oaks, palmettos, and flowering shrubs, with an esplanade overloo
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XIX THE FRINGE OF FLORIDA
XIX THE FRINGE OF FLORIDA
At Charleston I was in some sense at a parting of the ways. In order to attend the Educational Conference at Memphis I had been compelled to leave out Virginia and North Carolina from the itinerary I had originally planned. Should I now return to New York, repairing this omission—taking Raleigh, Richmond, the Hampton Institute, and other interesting places, on my way? Or should I set my face once more southward, and return to England by way of the West Indies? Several considerations determined m
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II THE PROBLEM FACED
II THE PROBLEM FACED
The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living
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Four Possibilities: II. The Atlanta Compromise.
Four Possibilities: II. The Atlanta Compromise.
We pass now to the second eventuality—the gradual smoothing away of friction, so that the two races may live side by side, never blending and yet never jarring. This is the conception set forth in Mr. Booker Washington’s celebrated “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, wherein he said, “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.” Is this a possible—I will not say ideal, for that it manifestly is not—bu
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The Crux of the Problem.
The Crux of the Problem.
The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise were possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to be prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is unwholesome and demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of what Mr. Ray Stannard Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It seems hard, no doubt, that marriage should be impossible between a white man and a girl in whose complexion, p
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Four Possibilities: III. Amalgamation.
Four Possibilities: III. Amalgamation.
This brings us, of course, to the third of the conceivabilities above enumerated—the legalization of marriage between the two races. To the white South, nothing is more inconceivable: to the critics of the white South, nothing is more simple. Which of them is in the right? It is significant that none of these outside critics puts the slightest faith in the Atlanta Compromise. They see quite clearly that the two races cannot live together and yet apart. Their solution is the obvious one of free i
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The Races not Equal.
The Races not Equal.
I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the advantages of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my position, I must confess that my personal belief goes much further, and that the disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved beyond all reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the essential and innate inferiority of the negro race, because my argument did not demand it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to me as evident as it is inevitable. Howeve
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The Case for the Mulatto.
The Case for the Mulatto.
It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain would not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would bring to the white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need, the result of the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the qualities and powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience justified this speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in South America, in the West Indies, in the Southern States themselves. The mulatto exists and has ex
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A Biological Argument.
A Biological Argument.
To wind up this attempt to place on a basis of reason the Southern horror of amalgamation, I return for a moment to Sir Sydney Olivier’s argument on the point. [67] He says:— There may naturally be aversion on the part of and a strong social objection on behalf of the white woman against her marriage with a black or coloured man. There is no correspondingly strong instinctive aversion, nor is there so strong an ostensible social objection to a white man’s marrying a woman of mixed descent. The l
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Four Possibilities: IV. Segregation.
Four Possibilities: IV. Segregation.
Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or without the limits of the United States. This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at the outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But the more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more urgently did segregation recur to me as the one possible way of escape from an otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the
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Back to Africa?
Back to Africa?
The deportation of the negro has been urged by many American writers, generally in a somewhat illogical fashion. They start by asserting his total incapacity for self-government, as demonstrated in Haiti, Liberia, and elsewhere, and then recommend the foundation of a new negro republic in some undefined portion of Africa. A curious scheme was put forward in 1889, in an anonymous book entitled, “An Appeal to Pharaoh,” written, I believe, by Mr. Carl McKinley, of Charleston, South Carolina. Mr. Mc
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A Negro State.
A Negro State.
What, then, is the alternative? Manifestly, concentration within the United States—the formation of a new State which should be, not a white man’s land, but a black man’s land. Is this physically possible? Is there enough unoccupied territory to permit of such a concentration? Of absolutely unoccupied territory there probably is not enough; but those who have studied the matter tell us that there is plenty of territory so thinly occupied that the white settlers could be removed and compensated a
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I THE AMERICAN IN CUBA
I THE AMERICAN IN CUBA
I have known few more curious sensations than that of crossing in a single night from Florida to Cuba: leaving the New World at ten p.m. and arriving at six a.m. in the Old World. For Havana is distinctly an Old World city—more so, I am told, than some of the cities of modern Spain. From the moment the steamer passes between Morro Castle and La Punta, and skirts beneath the grey and pink cliffs of the huge idle fortress of La Cabana, one feels that one has left behind the region of the Immature,
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II A GAME FOR GODS
II A GAME FOR GODS
A cloudlessly hot Sunday afternoon in Havana—I am lounging in the Parque Central, when I observe a poster announcing that a game of “Jai Alai” is at that moment in progress. The very intelligent “Standard Guide to Havana,” sold by Mr. Foster (the Cook of Cuba), notes this “famous gambling game” as one of the sights of the city; so I charter a cab, and jog through the baking streets to the “Frontón” in which it is played. You first enter a long and evil-smelling hall, with various refreshment bar
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III A FRAGMENT OF FAIRYLAND
III A FRAGMENT OF FAIRYLAND
Allowing time for a few hours’ stay at Matanzas, the journey from Havana to Santiago di Cuba occupies two days and a night. At Matanzas, a town in itself of no great interest, it is well worth while to climb to the hermitage of Montserrate, which overlooks to the westward the Yumuri valley, a great semicircular basin in the hills, and to the eastward a magnificent sweep of sea and shore. The endless colonnades of palm-trees give to the distant slopes an exquisite tone of silver-blue such as I ha
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IV THE PANAMA CANAL
IV THE PANAMA CANAL
When, in New York, I was handed a sailing-list of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s boats, I observed that their first port of call, after Jamaica, was Colon. In vain I hurriedly searched the map of the Caribbean Sea, hoping to disguise my ignorance. I had to pocket my pride, and inquire, “Where is Colon?” Afterwards I discovered that Colon was a place of which I had often heard under its earlier name of Aspinwall; for my father, one of the Californian Argonauts, had twice crossed the Isthmu
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