 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois. Music and Text, recorded by Toria's Uncle. Chapter 7 Part II This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy. The rich granary once potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861. Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and slaves. Yet even then the hard, ruthless rape of the land began to tell. The red clay subsoil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves were driven, the more careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war and emancipation, the bewilderment of reconstruction. And now what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it for the nation's wheel or woe? It is a land of rapid contrast and of curiously mingled hope and pain. There sits a pretty blue-eyed quadruun hiding her bare feet. She was married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark, young husband, hoeing to support her at thirty cents a day without board. Across the way is Gatsby, brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres, shrewdly one and held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a blacksmith, and a genery. Five miles below here is a town owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and hundreds of black laborers. Their cabins look better than most, and the farm with machinery and fertilizers is much more business-like than any in the county, although the manager drives hard bargains in wages. When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes, two of blacks and three of whites. And in one of the houses of the whites, a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago, so he was hanged for rape. And here too is the high whitewashed fence of the stockade, as the county prison is called. The white folks say it is ever full of black criminals. The black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the state needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants are heirs of the slave baron in Doherty, and as we ride westward by wide-stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born in the swift days of reconstruction, improvement companies, wine companies, mills and factories, most failed and foreigners fell air. It is a beautiful land this Doherty west of the flint. The forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is the oaky woods with its wealth of hickories, beaches, oaks and palmettoes. But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land. The merchants are in debt to the wholesalers. The planters are in debt to the merchants. The tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all. Here and there a man has raised his head above these murky waters. We passed one fenced stock farm with grass and grazing cattle that looked very home-like after endless corn and cotton. Here and there are black freeholders. There is the gaunt dull black Jackson with his hundred acres. I says, look up! If you don't look up, you can't get up, remarks Jackson philosophically, and he's gotten up. Dark Carter's neat barns would do credit to New England. His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man died last fall, the master's sons immediately laid claim to the estate. And then white folks will get it too, says my yellow gossip. I turn from these well-tended acres with a comfortable feeling that the negro is rising. Even then, however, the fields as we proceed begin to redden, and the trees disappear. Rows of old cabins appear filled with renters and laborers, cheerless, bare and dirty for the most part. Although here and there, the very age and decay makes the scene picturesque, a young black fellow greets us. He is twenty-two and just married. Until last year he had good luck renting, then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he had. So he moved here where the rent is higher, the land poorer, and the owner inflexible. He rents a forty-dollar mule for twenty dollars a year. Poor lad, a slave at twenty-two. This plantation, owned now by a foreigner, was a part of the famous Bolton estate. After the war it was for many years worked by gangs of negro convicts, and black convicts then were even more plentiful than now. It was a way of making negroes work, and the question of guilt was a minor one. Hard tales of cruelty and mistreatment of the chained freemen are told, but the county authorities were deaf until the free labor market was nearly ruined by wholesale migration. Then they took the convicts from the plantations. But not until one of the fairest regions of the oaky woods had been ruined and ravished into a red waste out of which only a Yankee or an immigrant could squeeze more blood from debt-cursed tenants. No wonder that Luke, black, slow, dull, and discouraged, shuffles to our carriage and talks hopelessly. Why should he strive? Every year finds him deeper in debt. How strange that Georgia, the world heralded refuge of poor debtors, should bind her own to sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever England did. The poor land groans with its birth pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much. Of his meager yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a third in rent, and most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought on credit. Twenty years Yonder's sunken-cheeked old black man has labored under that system, and now turned day laborer is supporting his wife and boarding himself on his wages of a dollar and a half a week, received only part of the year. The Bolton Convict Farm formally included the neighboring plantation. Here it was that the convicts were lodged in the great log prison still standing, a dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants. What rent do you pay here? I inquired. I don't know. What is it, Sam? All we make, answered Sam. It is a depressing place, bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a memory of forced human toil, now, then, and before the war. They are not happy these black men whom we meet throughout this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation negro. At best the natural good nature is edged with complaint, or has changed into solanness and gloom, and now on that it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger. I remember one big red-eyed black whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having nothing. To be sure he had given four children a common-school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had not allowed unfenced crops in west Doherty, he might have raised a little stock and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, and embittered. He stopped us to inquire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the sidewalk. And then he said slowly, Let a white man touch me, and he dies. I don't boast this. I don't say it around loud or before the children, but I mean it. I seen him whip my father and my old mother in them cotton rolls till the blood ram by, and we passed on. Now Sears, whom we met lawling under the chubby oak trees, was of quite different fiber. Happy? Well, yes, he laughed and flipped pebbles and thought the world was as it was. He had worked here twelve years, and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children, yes, seven, but they hadn't been to school this year, couldn't afford books and clothes, and couldn't spare their work. There go part of them to the fields now. Three big boys astride mules and a strapping girl with bare brown legs. Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there, these are the extremes of the negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred. Here and there we meet distinct characters quite out of the ordinary. One came out of a piece of newly cleared ground, making a wide detour to avoid the snakes. He was an old, hollow-cheeked man, with a drawn and characterful brown face. He had a sort of self-contained quaintness and rough humor impossible to describe, a certain cynical earnestness that puzzled one. These niggers were jealous of me over on the other place, he said, and so me and the old woman begged this piece of woods, and I cleared it up myself, made nothing for two years, but I reckon I got a crop now. The cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it. He curtsied low, and then bowed almost to the ground, with an imperturbable gravity that seemed almost suspicious. Then he continued, my mule died last week, a calamity in this land equal to a devastating fire in town, but a white man loaned me another. Then he added, eyeing us, oh, I'll get along with white folks. We turned the conversation. Bears, dear, he answered, well, I should say there were, and he let fly a string of brave oaths as he told hunting tales of the swamp. We left him standing in the middle of the road, looking after us, and yet apparently not noticing us. The whistle-place, which includes his bit of land, was bought soon after the war by an English syndicate, the Dixie Cotton and Corn Company, a marvelous deal of style their factor put on, with his servants and coach and six, so much so that the concern soon landed in inextricable bankruptcy. Nobody lives in the old house now, but a man comes each winter out of the north and collects his high rents. I know not which are the more touching. Such old, empty houses were the homes of the master's sons. Sad and bitter tales lie hidden back of those white doors. Tales of poverty, of struggle, of disappointment, a revolution such as that of sixty-three is a terrible thing. They that rose rich in the morning often slept in pauper's beds. Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over them, and their children went astray. The yonder, sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and glad crops. It is not glad within. Last month the prodigal son of the struggling father wrote home from the city for money. Money! Where was it to come from? And so the son rose in the night and killed his baby and killed his wife and shot himself dead, and the world passed on. I remember wheeling around a bend in the road. Beside a graceful bit of forest and a singing brook, a long low house faced us, with porch and flying pillars, great oak and door, and a broad lawn shining in the evening sun. But the windowpains were gone, the pillars were worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof was falling in. Half-curiously I peered through the unhinged door and saw where, on the wall across the hall, was once written in gay letters a faded welcome. Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dowerty County is the northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then too there are fewer signs of a romantic past and more of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting. White people are more in evidence here, and former and hired labor replaced to some extent the absentee landlord and rack-rented tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land was poor, and beneath the notice of the slave baron before the war. Since then his poor relations and foreign immigrants have seized it. The returns of the farmer are too small to allow much for wages, and yet he will not sell off small farms. Here is the negro, Sanford. He has worked fourteen years as overseer on the lads in place, and paid out enough for fertilizers to a bought-a-farm, but the owner will not sell off a few acres. Two children, a boy and a girl, are hoeing sturdily in the fields on the farm where Corliss works. He is smooth-faced and brown, and is fencing up his pigs. He used to run a successful cotton gin, but the cotton-seed oil trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he says it hardly pays him. He points out a stately old house over the way, as the home of Pa Willis. We eagerly ride over, for Pa Willis was the tall and powerful black Moses who led the negroes for a generation and led them well. He was a Baptist preacher, and when he died, two thousand black people followed him to the grave, and now they preach his funeral sermon each year. His wife lives here, a weasened, sharp-featured little woman who curtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Further on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous negro farmer in the county. It is a joy to meet him, a great broad-shouldered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial, six hundred and fifty acres he owns, and has eleven black tenants, a neat and tidy home nestled in a flower garden, and a little store stands beside it. We pass the months in place where a plucky white widow is renting and struggling, and the eleven hundred acres of the Senate plantation, with its negro overseer. Then the character of the farms begins to change, near the all the lands belonging to Russian Jews. The overseers are white, and the cabins are bare, haired houses scattered here and there. The rents are high, and day laborers and contract hands abound. It is a keen, hard struggle for living here, and few have time to talk. Tired with a long ride, we gladly drive into Gillensville. It is a silent cluster of farmhouses standing on the crossroads, with one of its stores closed, and the other kept by a negro preacher. They tell great tales of busy times at Gillensville, before all the railroads came to Albany. Now it is chiefly a memory. Riding down the street we stop at the preachers, and seat ourselves before the door. It was one of those scenes one cannot soon forget. A wide, low little house, whose motherly roof reached over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat, after the long hot drive, drinking cool water, the talkative little storekeeper who is my daily companion, the silent old black woman patching pantaloons and saying never a word, the ragged picture of helpless misfortune who called in just to see the preacher, and finally the neat, matronly preacher's wife, plump, yellow, and intelligent. Own land, said the wife, they'll only this house. Then she added quietly, we did buy seven hundred acres of cross up yonder and paid for it, but they cheated us out of it. Sales was the owner. Sales, echoed the ragged misfortune who was leaning against the balustrade in listening. He's a regular cheat. I walked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in carboard checks which were to be cashed at the end of the month, but he never cashed them, kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my mule and my corn and furniture, furniture. That furniture is exempt from seizure by law. Well, he took it just the same, said the hard-faced man. Tolls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois Music and text, recorded by Toria's uncle. Chapter 8 Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece But the brute said in his breast, Till the mills I grind have ceased, The riches shall be dust of dust, Dry ashes be the feast. On the strong and cunning few, Cinec favors I will strew, I will stuff their maw with over-plus, Until their spirit dies. From the patient and the low, I will take the joys they know. They shall hunger after vanities, And still and hungered go. Madness shall be on the people, Gastly jealousies arise, Others blood shall cry on brother, Up the dead and empty skies. William Vaughn Moody Have you ever seen a cotton field white with harvest, Its golden fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud, Edged with dark green, Its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows, From Carolina to Texas, Across that black and human sea? I have sometimes half suspected that here, The winged ram Chrysomalus left that fleece, After which Jason and his organots went vaguely wandering into the shadowy east three thousand years ago, And certainly one might frame a pretty and not far-fetched analogy Of witchery and dragon's teeth And blood and armed men Between the ancient and the modern quest Of the golden fleece in the black sea. And now the golden fleece is found, Not only found, but in its birthplace woven, For the home of the cotton mills Is the newest and most significant thing In the new South today. All through the Carolinas and Georgia, Away down to Mexico, Rise these gaunt red buildings, Bare and homely, And yet so busy and noisy with all That they scarce seem to belong to that slow and sleepy land, Perhaps they sprang from dragon's teeth. So the cotton kingdom still lives, The world still bows beneath her scepter, Even the markets that once defied the parvenu Have crept one by one across the seas, And then slowly and reluctantly But surely have started toward the black belt. To be sure there are those Who wag their heads knowingly And tell us that the capital of the cotton kingdom has moved From the black to the white belt, That the negro of today raises not more than half Of the cotton crop. Such men forget that the cotton crop has doubled And more than doubled since the era of slavery, And that even granting their contention The negro is still supreme in a cotton kingdom Larger than that on which the Confederacy build its hopes. So the negro forms today one of the chief figures In a great world industry, And this, for its own sake, And in light of historic interest, Makes the field hands of the cotton country worth studying. We seldom study the condition of the negro today honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all, Or perhaps having already reached conclusions in our own minds, We are loath to have them disturbed by fact. And yet how little we really know of these millions, Of their daily lives and longings, Of their homely joys and sorrows, Of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes. All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, And not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and space, And differing widely in training and culture. Today then, my reader, let us turn our faces to the black belt of Georgia and seek simply to know the condition of the black farm laborers of one county there. Here in 1890 lived ten thousand negroes and two thousand whites. The country is rich yet the people are poor. The keynote of the black belt is debt, not commercial credit, But debt in the sense of continued inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income cover expense. This is the direct heritage of the South from the wasteful economies of the slave regime, but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis by the emancipation of the slaves. In 1860, Dorothy County had six thousand slaves, worth at least two and a half millions of dollars. Its farms were estimated at three millions, making five and a half millions of property, the value of which depended largely on the slave system and on the speculative demand for land, once marvelously rich but already partially devitalized by careless and exhaustive culture. The war then meant a financial crash. In place of the five and a half millions of 1860, they remained in 1870 only farms valued at less than two millions. With this came increased competition in cotton culture from the rich lands of Texas. A steady fall in the normal price of cotton followed from about fourteen cents a pound in 1860 until it reached four cents in 1898. Such a financial revolution was it that involved the owners of the cotton belt in debt. And if things went ill with the master, how fared it with the man? The plantations of Dorothy County in slavery days were not as imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The big house was smaller and usually one storied, and sat very near the slave cabins. Sometimes these cabins stretched off on either side like wings, sometimes only on one side forming a double row, or edging the road that turned into the plantation from the main thoroughfare. The form and disposition of the laborer's cabins throughout the black belt is today the same as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same cabins, others in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in little groups over the face of the land, centering about some dilapidated big house where the head tenant or agent lives. The general character and arrangement of these dwellings remains on the whole unaltered. There were in the county outside the corporate town of Albany about fifteen hundred Negro families in 1898. Out of these only a single family occupied a house with seven rooms. Only fourteen have five rooms or more. The mass live in one and two room homes. The size and arrangements of a people's homes are no unfair index of their condition. If then we inquire more carefully into these Negro's homes, we find much that is unsatisfactory. All over the face of the land is the one room cabin, now standing in the shadow of the big house, now staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and somber amid the green of cotton fields. It is nearly always old and bare, built of rough boards and neither plastered nor sealed. Light and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the square hole in the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no glass, porch, or ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace black and smoky and usually unsteady with age. A bed or two, a table, a wooden chest, and a few chairs compose the furniture. A lestre, showbill, or a newspaper makes up the decorations for the walls. Now and then one may find such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry, steaming fireplaces and hospitable door, but the majority are dirty and dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly ventilated, and anything but homes. Above all the cabins are crowded. We have come to associate crowding with homes in cities almost exclusively. This is primarily because we have so little accurate knowledge of country life. Here in Doherty County, one may find families of eight and ten occupying one or two rooms, and for every ten rooms of house accommodation for the Negroes there are twenty-five persons. The worst tenement abominations of New York do not have above twenty-two persons for every ten rooms. Of course, one small, close room in a city, without a yard, is in many respects worse than the larger, single country room. In other respect it is better. It has glass windows, a decent chimney, and a trustworthy floor. The single great advantage of the Negro peasant is that he may spend most of his life outside his hovel in the open fields. There are four chief causes of these wretched homes. First, long custom born of slavery has assigned such homes to Negroes. White laborers would be offered better accommodations, and might for that and similar reasons give better work. Second, the Negroes used to such accommodations do not as a rule demand better. They do not know what better houses mean. Thirdly, the landlords, as a class, have not yet come to realize that it is a good business investment to raise the standard of living among labor by slow and judicious methods. The Negro laborer who demands three rooms and fifty cents a day would give more efficient work and leave a larger profit than a discouraged toiler herding his family in one room and working for thirty cents. Lastly, among such conditions of life there are few incentives to make the laborer become a better farmer. If he is ambitious he moves to town or tries other labor. As a tenant farmer his outlook is almost hopeless and following it as a makeshift he takes the house that is given him without protest. In such homes then these Negro peasants live. The families are both small and large. There are many single tenants, widows and bachelors and remnants of broken groups. The system of labor and the size of the houses both tend to the breaking up of family groups. The grown children go away as contract hands or migrate to town. The sister goes into service and so one finds many families with hosts of babies and many newly married couples but comparatively few families with half grown and grown sons and daughters. The average size of Negro families has undoubtedly decreased since the war primarily from economic stress. In Russia over a third of the bridegrooms and over half of the brides are under twenty. The same was true of the antebellum Negroes. Today however very few of the boys and less than a fifth of the Negro girls under twenty are married. The young men marry between the ages of twenty five and thirty five, the young women between twenty and thirty. Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and support a family. And it undoubtedly leads in the country district to sexual immorality. The form of this immorality however is very seldom that of prostitution and less frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine. Rather it takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has been formed. The number of separated persons is thirty five to the thousand, a very large number. This would of course be unfair to compare this number with divorce statistics, for many of these separated women are in reality widowed with the truth known. And in other cases the separation is not permanent. Nevertheless here lies the seat of greatest moral danger. There is little or no prostitution among these Negroes, and over three-fourths of the families as found by house to house investigation deserve to be classed as decent people, with considerable regard for female chastity. To be sure the ideas of the mass would not suit New England, and there are many loose habits and notions, yet the rate of illegitimacy is undoubtedly lower than in Austria or Italy, and the women as a class are modest. The plague spot in sexual relations is easy marriage and easy separation. This is no sudden development nor the fruit of emancipation. It is the plain heritage from slavery. In those days Sam with his master's consent took up with Mary, no ceremony was necessary, and in the busy life of the great plantations of the black belt it was usually dispensed with. If now the master needed Sam's work in another plantation or in another part of the same plantation, or if he took a notion to sell the slave, Sam's married life with Mary was usually unceremoniously broken. And then it was clearly to the master's interest to have both of them take new mates. This widespread custom of two centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years. Today Sam's grandson takes up with a woman without license or ceremony, they live together decently and honestly, and are to all intents and purposes man and wife. Sometimes these unions are never broken until death. But in too many cases family quarrels, a roving spirit, a rival suitor or perhaps more frequently the hopeless battle to support a family leads to separation, and a broken household is a result. The Negro Church has done much to stop this practice, and now most marriage ceremonies are performed by the pastors. Nevertheless the evil is still deep seated, and only a general raising of the standard of living will finally cure it. Looking now at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten percent compose the well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine percent are thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty percent, are poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well-meaning, plotting, and to a degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness. Such class lines are by no means fixed, they vary, one might almost say, with the price of cotton. The degree of ignorance cannot easily be expressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities, of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defense had to keep them from learning. Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black boy's mature years. America is not another word for opportunity to all her sons. It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details, in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorance it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thoughts, and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life. All this even as you and I, these black thousands are not in reality lazy. They are improvident and careless. They insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the great town world on Saturday. They have their loafers and their rascals, but the great mass of them work continuously and faithfully for a return, and under circumstances that would call forth equal voluntary effort from few, if any, other modern laboring class. Over eighty percent of them, men, women and children, are farmers. Indeed, this is almost the only industry. Most of the children get their schooling after the crops are laid by, and very few there are that stay in school after the spring work has begun. Child labor is to be found here in some of its worst phases, as fostering ignorance and stunting physical development. With the grown man of the county, there's little variety in work, thirteen hundred are farmers, and two hundred are laborers, teamsters, et cetera, including twenty-four artisans, ten merchants, twenty-one preachers, and four teachers. This narrowness of life reaches its maximum among the women. Thirteen hundred and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants and washer women, leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers, and six seamstresses. Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heat of strife. But here ninety-six percent are toiling. No one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home. No old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past. Little of careless, happy childhood and dreaming youth. The dull monotony of daily toil is broken only by the gaiety of the thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil, like all farm toil, is monotonous. And here there are little machinery and few tools to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this it is work in the pure open air. And this is something in a day when fresh air is scarce. The land on the whole is still fertile, despite long abuse. For nine or ten months in succession the crops will come, if asked. Garden vegetables in April, grain in May, melons in June and July, hay in August, sweet potatoes in September, and cotton from then to Christmas. And yet on two-thirds of the land there is but one crop, and that leaves the toilers in debt. Why is this? A way down the basin road, where the broad, flat fields are flanked by great oak forests, is a plantation many thousands of acres it used to run, here and there, and beyond the great wood. Thirteen hundred human beings here obeyed the call of one. They were his, in body and largely in soul. One of them lives there yet, a short stocky man, his dull brown face seemed and drawn, and his tightly curled hair gray white. The crops? Just tolerable, he said, just tolerable. Getting on? No. He wasn't getting on at all. Smith of Albany furnishes him, and his rent is eight hundred pounds of cotton. Can't make anything at that. Why didn't he buy land? Takes money to buy land, and he turns away, free. The most piteous thing amid all the black ruin of wartime, amid the broken fortunes of the masters, the blighted hopes of mothers and maidens, and the fall of an empire. The most piteous thing amid all this was the black freedman who threw down his hoe because the world called him free. What did such a mockery of freedom mean? Not a cent of money, not an inch of land, not a mouthful of victuals, not even ownership of the rags on his back. Free! On Saturday, once or twice a month, the old master before the war used to dole out bacon and meal to his negroes. And after the first flush of freedom wore off, and his true helplessness dawned on the freedman, he came back and picked up his hoe, and old master still doled out his bacon and meal. The legal form of service was theoretically far different. In practice, task work, or cropping, was substituted for daily toil and gangs, and the slave gradually became a metaye, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with indeterminate wages, in fact. Still the price of cotton fell, and gradually the landlords deserted their plantations, and the reign of the merchant began. The merchant of the black belt is a curious institution, part banker, part landlord, part banker, and part despot. His store, which used most frequently to stand at the crossroads and became the center of a weekly village, has now moved to town, and thither the negro tenant follows him. The merchant keeps everything, clothes and shoes, coffee and sugar, work and meal, canned and dry goods, wagons and plows, seed and fertilizer, and what he has not in stock he can give you an order for at the store across the way. Here then comes the tenant, Sam Scott, after he has contracted with some absent landlord's agent for hiring forty acres of land. He fingers his hat nervously until the merchant finishes his morning chat with Colonel Saunders and calls out, well, Sam, what do you want? Sam wants him to furnish him, i.e., to advance him food and clothing for the year, and perhaps seed and tools, until his crop is raised and sold. If Sam seems a favorable subject, he and the merchant go to a lawyer, and Sam executes a chattel mortgage on his mule and wagon, in return for seed and a week's rations. As soon as the green cotton leaves appear above the ground, another mortgage is given on the crop. Every Saturday, or at longer intervals, Sam calls upon the merchant for his rations. A family of five usually gets about thirty pounds of fat-side pork, and a couple of bushels of cornmeal a month. Besides this, clothing and shoes must be furnished. Whether Sam or his family is sick, there are orders on the drugist and doctor, if the mule wants chewing, an order on the blacksmith, etc. If Sam is a hard worker and crops promise well, he is often encouraged to buy more, sugar, extra clothes, perhaps a buggy. But he is seldom encouraged to save. When cotton rose to ten cents last fall, the shrewd merchants of Doherty County sold a thousand buggies in one season, mostly to black men. The security offered for such transactions, a crop and chattel mortgage, may at first seem slight. And indeed the merchants tell many a tale of shiftlessness and cheating of cotton picked at night, mules disappearing, and tenants absconding. But on the whole, the merchant of the black belt is the most prosperous man in the section. So skillfully and so closely has he drawn the bonds of the law about the tenant that the black man has often simply to choose between pauperism and crime. He waves all homestead exemptions in his contract. He cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which the law has put almost in the full control of the landowner and of the merchant. When the crop is growing, the merchant watches it like a hawk. As soon as it is ready for market, he takes possession of it, sells it, pays the landowner his rent, subtracts his bill for supplies, and if, as sometimes happens, there is anything left, he hands it over to the black surf for his Christmas celebration. CHAPTER 8 PART II The direct result of this system is an all-cotton scheme of agriculture and the continued bankruptcy of the tenant. The currency of the black belt is cotton. It is a crop always saleable for ready money, not usually subject to great yearly fluctuations in price, and one which the negroes know how to raise. The landlord therefore demands his rent in cotton, and the merchant will accept mortgages on no other crop. There is no use asking the black tenant then to diversify his crops. He cannot, under this system. Moreover, the system is bound to bankrupt the tenant. I remember once meeting a little one-mule wagon on the river road, a young black fellow sat in it, driving listlessly his elbows on his knees. His dark-faced wife sat beside him, stolid, silent. Hello, cried my driver. He has a most imprudent way of addressing these people, though they seem used to it. What have you got there? Meat and meal, answered the man, stopping. The meat lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon, a great thin side of fat pork covered with salt. The meal was in a white bushel bag. What did you pay for that meat, ten cents a pound? It could have been bought for six or seven cents, cash. And the meal? Two dollars. One dollar and ten cents is the cash price in town. Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which he could have bought for three dollars cash, and raised for one dollar or a one dollar and a half. Yet it is not wholly his fault. The negro farmer started behind, started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes, and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge. In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hundred tenant families, one hundred and seventy-five ended their year's work in debt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars. Fifty cleared nothing, and the remaining seventy-five made a total profit of sixteen hundred dollars. The net indebtedness of the black tenant families of this whole county must have been at least six thousand dollars. In a more prosperous year the situation is far better, but on the average the majority of tenants end the year even or in debt, which means that they work for board and clothes. Such an economic organization is radically wrong. Whose is the blame? The underlying causes of this situation are complicated, but discernible, and one of the chief, outside the carelessness of the nation in letting the slaves start with nothing, is the widespread opinion among the merchants and employers of the black belt that only by the slavery of debt can the negro be kept at work. Without doubt some pressure was necessary at the beginning of the free labor system to keep the listless and lazy at work, and even today the mass of the negro laborers need stricter guardianship than most northern laborers. Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge, and to all this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black laborers, nor is this peculiar to Sambo. It has in history been just as true of John and Hans or Jacques and Pat of all ground down peasantries, such as the situation of the mass of the negroes in the black belt today, and they are thinking about it. Crime and a cheap and dangerous socialism are the inevitable results of this pondering. I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log aimlessly whittling a stick. He muttered to me with the murmur of many ages when he said, white man sit down a whole year, nigger work day and night, and make crop, nigger hardly guess bread and meat, white man sitting down guess all, is wrong. And what do the better classes of negroes do to improve their situation? One of two things. If any way possible, they buy land. If not, they migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for the surf to escape into the freedom of town life, even so today there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers. In considerable parts of all the Gulf states and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the negroes on the plantations in the back country districts are still held at forced labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in districts where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor whites, and the negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse with their advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the sheriff elected by white suffrage can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return him, and ask no questions. If he escapes to another county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended on to secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person insists upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his conviction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be bought by the master. Such a system is impossible in the more civilized parts of the South or near the large towns and cities, but in those vast stretches of land beyond the telegraph and the newspaper, the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment is sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic depths of the black American peasant, and in a study of the rise and condition of the negro freeholder, we must trace his economic progress from the modern serfdom. Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South, the free movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the migration agent laws. The Associated Press recently informed the world of the arrest of a young white man in southern Georgia who represented the Atlantic Naval Supplies Company, and who was caught in the act of enticing hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer. The crime for which this young man was arrested is taxed $500 for each county in which the employment agent proposes to gather laborers for work outside the state. Thus the negro's ignorance of the labor market outside his own vicinity is increased rather than diminished by the laws of nearly every southern state. Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back districts and small towns of the South that the character of all negroes unknown to the mass of the community must be vouched for by some white man. This is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the new-made freedman was put. In many instances this system has been of great good to the negro, and very often, under the protection and guidance of the former master's family or other white friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and morality. But the same system has in other cases resulted in the refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a negro to change his habitation and to be master of his own fortunes. A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia, for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer or seems too independent or sassy, he may be arrested or summarily driven away. Thus it is that in the country district of the South by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas. Besides this, the chance for lawless oppression and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country than in the city, and nearly all the more serious race disturbances of the last decade have arisen from disputes in the count between master and man, as, for instance, the Sam Hose affair. As a result of such a situation, there arose, first, the black belt, and second, the migration to town. The black belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic conditions. It was primarily a huddling for self-protection, amassing of the black population for mutual defense in order to secure the peace and tranquility necessary to economic advance. This movement took place between Emancipation in 1880 and only partially accomplished the desired results. The rush to town since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of the black belt. In Dorothy County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this experiment in huddling for protection. Only 10% of the adult population was born in the county, and yet the blacks outnumber the whites four or five to one. There is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers, a personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makes hundreds of laborers cling to Dorothy in spite of low wages and economic distress, but a change is coming. And slowly but surely, even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why do not the negroes become landowners and build up the black-landed peasantry, which has for a generation and more been the dream of philanthropist and statesman? To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip, to unraveling the snarl of centuries, to such men very often the whole trouble with the black-field hand may be summed up by Antofilia's word. Shiftless. They have noted repeatedly, scenes like one I saw last summer, we were riding along the highway to town at the close of a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a mule team with several bushels of loose corn in the ear. One was driving, listlessly bent forward his elbows on his knees, a happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irresponsibility. The other was fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we passed, we noticed an ear of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw it, not they. A rod farther on we noted another ear on the ground. And between that creeping mule and town we counted 26 years of corn. Shiftless? Yes, the personification of shiftlessness. And yet, follow those boys, they are not lazy. Tomorrow morning they'll be up with the sun. They work hard when they do work and they work willingly. They have no sorted selfish money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash. They'll loaf before your face and work behind your back with good natured honesty. They'll steal a watermelon and hand you back your lost purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion. They are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful. They are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance get on about as well as the provident. Above all, they cannot see why they should take unusual pains to make the white man's land better or to fatten his mule or save his corn. On the other hand, the white landowner argues that any attempt to improve these laborers by increased responsibility or higher wages or better homes or land of their own would be sure to result in failure. He shows his northern visitor the scarred and wretched land, the ruined mansions, the worn-out soil and mortgaged acres and says, this is Negro freedom. Now, it happens that both master and man have just enough argument on their respective sides to make it difficult for them to understand each other. The Negro dimly personifies in the white man all his ills and misfortunes. If he is poor, it is because the white man seizes the fruit of his toil. If he is ignorant, it is because the white man gives him neither time nor facilities to learn. And indeed, if any misfortune happens to him, it is because of some hidden machinations of white folks. On the other hand, the masters and the masters' sons have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling down to be day laborers for bread and clothes, are infected with a silly desire to rise in the world and why they are sulky, dissatisfied and careless, where their fathers were happy and dumb and faithful. Why, you niggers have an easier time than I do, said a puzzled Albany merchant to his black customer. Yes, you replied, and so does your hogs. Taking then the dissatisfied and shiftless fieldhand as a starting point, let us inquire how the black thousands of Daugherty have struggled from him up toward their ideal and what that ideal is. All social struggle is evidenced by the rise first of economic, then of social, classes among a homogenous population. Today, the following economic classes are plainly differentiated among these Negroes. A submerged tenth of croppers, with a few paupers, 40% who are Metaillés and 39% of semi-Metaillés and wage laborers, there are left 5% of money renters and 6% of freeholders, the upper 10 of the land. The croppers are entirely without capital, even in the limited sense of food or money to keep them from seed time to harvest. All they furnish is their labor. The landowner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and house. And at the end of the year, the laborer gets from a third to half of the crop. Out of his share, however, comes pay and interest for food and clothing advanced him during the year. Thus, we have a laborer without capital and without wages, and an employer whose capital is largely his employee's wages. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hireer and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor land with hard-pressed owners. Above the croppers come the great mass of the black population who work the land on their own responsibility, paying rent in cotton and supported by the crop mortgage system. After the war, this system was attractive to the freedman on account of its larger freedom and its possibility for making a surplus. But with the carrying out of the crop lean system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of debt, the position of the Metailles has sunk to a dead level of practically unrewarded soil. Formally, all tenants had some capital, and often considerable. But absentee landlordism, rising rack rent, and failing cotton have stripped them well nigh of all, and probably not over half of them today, own their mules. The change from cropper to tenant was accomplished by fixing the rent. If now the rent fixed was reasonable, this was an incentive to the tenant to strive. On the other hand, if the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the result was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peasantry. There is no doubt that the latter case is true, that in Dorothy County every economic advantage of the price of cotton in market and of the strivings of the tenant has been taken advantage of by the landlords and merchants, and swallowed up in rent and interest. If cotton rose in price, the rent rose even higher. If cotton fell, the rent remained, or followed reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and raised a large crop, his rent was raised the next year. If that year the crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for debt. There were, of course, exceptions to this. Cases of personal kindness and forbearance. But in the vast majority of cases, the rule was to extract the uttermost farthing from the mass of the black farm laborers. The average rent IA pays from 20% to 30% of his crop in rent. The result of such rack rent can only be evil. Abuse and neglect of the soil, deterioration in the character of the laborers, and a widespread sense of injustice. "'Wherever the country is poor,' cried Arthur Young, "'it is in the hands of Metaïes, and their condition is more wretched than that of day laborers. He was talking of Italy a century ago, but he might have been talking of Dorothy County today. And especially is that true today, which he declares wish true in France before the Revolution.' The Metaïes are considered as little better than menial servants, removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to the will of the landlords. On this slow plain, half the black population of Dorothy County, perhaps more than half the black millions of this land, are today struggling. A degree above these we may place those laborers who receive money wages for their work. Some receive a house with perhaps a garden spot, then supplies of food and clothing are advanced, and certain fixed wages are given at the end of the year, varying from $30 to $60, out of which the supplies must be paid for with interest. About 18 percent of the population belong to this class of semi-Metaïes, while 22 percent are laborers paid by the month or year, and are either furnished by their own savings, or perhaps more usually by some merchant who takes his chances of payment. Such laborers receive from $0.35 to $0.50 a day during the working season. They are usually young unmarried person, some being women, and when they marry, they sink to the class of Metaïes, or more seldom become renters. The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging classes, and form five percent of the families. The sole advantage of this small class is their freedom to choose their crops and the increased responsibility which comes through having money transactions. While some of the renters differ little in condition from the Metaïes, yet on the whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and are the ones who eventually become landowners. Their better character and greater shrewdness enable them to gain, perhaps to demand, better terms in rents. Rented farms varying from 40 to 100 acres bear an average rental of about $54 a year. The men who conduct such farms do not long remain renters. Either they sink to Metaïes, or with a successful series of harvests, rise to be landowners. In 1870 the tax books of Doherty report no Negroes as landholders. If there were any such at the time, and there may have been a few, their land was probably held in the name of some white patron, a method not uncommon during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun with 750 acres. Ten years later this had increased to over 6,500 acres, to 9,000 acres in 1890, and 10,000 in 1900. The total assessed property has, in this same period, risen from $80,000 in 1875 to $240,000 in 1900. Two circumstances complicate this development and make it in some respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies. They are the panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in 1898. Besides this, the system of assessing property in the country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of uncertain statistical value. There are no assessors, and each man makes a sworn return to a tax receiver. Thus public opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount of accumulated capital among the Negroes and the consequent large dependence of their property on temporary prosperity. They have little to tide over a few years of economic depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton market far more than the whites. And thus the landowners, despite their marvelous efforts, are really a transient class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class of renters or metayes, and augmented by newcomers from the masses. Of 100 landowners in 1898, half had bought their land since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth between 1884 and 1890, and the rest between 1870 and 1884. In all, 185 Negroes have owned land in this county since 1875. If all the black landowners who had ever held land here had kept it, or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer 30,000 acres than the 15,000 they now hold. And yet these 15,000 acres are a creditable showing, a proof of no little weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they had been given an economic start at emancipation, if they had been in an enlightened and rich community which really desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a result small or even insignificant. But for a few thousand poor ignorant fieldhounds, in the face of poverty, a falling market and social stress, to save and capitalize $200,000 in a generation has meant a tremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate. Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the black belt, only 6% of the population have succeeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship, and these are not all firmly fixed but grow and shrink in number with the wavering of the cotton market. Fully 94% have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom. For these, there is one other avenue of escape toward which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely, migration to town. A glance at the distribution of land among the black owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898, the holdings were as follows, under 40 acres, 49 families, 40 to 250 acres, 17 families, 250 to 1,000 acres, 13 families, 1,000 or more acres, 2 families. Now, in 1890 there were 42 holdings, but only 9 of these were under 40 acres. The great increase of holdings, then, has come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where their owners really share in the town life. This is a part of the rush to town, and for every landowner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard conditions of country life, how many fieldhands, how many tenants, how many ruined renters, have joined that long procession. Is it not strange compensation? The sin of the country district is visited on the town, and the social sores of city life today may, here in Doherty County, and perhaps in many places, near and far, look for their final healing without the city walls. Music and text, recorded by Toria's uncle, Chapter 9 Of the Sons of Master and Man Life treads on life, and heart on heart. We press too close in church and mart to keep a dream or grave apart. Mrs. Browning, the world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to have new exemplification during the new century. Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery, this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it all together satisfy the conscience of the modern world to be told complacently that all this has been right and proper, the fated triumph of strength over weakness, of righteousness over evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly be soothing if one could readily believe all this, and yet there are too many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily explained away. We feel and know that there are many delicate differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain much of history and social development. At the same time too, we know that these considerations have never adequately explained or excused the triumph of brute force and cunning over weakness and innocence. It is then the strife of all honorable men of the 20th century to see that in the future competition of the races, the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true. That we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of the phenomena of race contact, to a study frank and fair, and not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we have in the South as fine a field for such a study as the world affords, a field to be sure which the average American scientist deems somewhat beneath his dignity, and which the average man who is not a scientist knows all about, but nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous race complications with which God seems about to punish this nation, must increasingly claim our sober attention, study, and thought. We must ask what are the actual relations of whites and blacks in the South, and we must be answered, not by apology or fault finding, but by a plain, unvarnished tale. In the civilized life of today, the contact of men and their relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action and communication. There is first the physical proximity of home and dwelling places, the way in which neighborhoods group themselves and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly, and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations, the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the cooperation and social control in group government, in laying and paying the burden of taxation. In the fourth place, there are the less tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and conference, through periodicals and libraries, and above all, the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life, in travel, in theaters, in house gatherings, in marrying, and giving in marriage. Finally, there are the varying forms of religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent endeavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in the same communities are brought into contact with each other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate from my point of view how the black race in the south meet and mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday life. First as to physical dwelling, it is usually possible to draw in nearly every southern community a physical color line on the map, on the one side of which whites dwell, and on the other, negros. The winding and intricacy of the geographical color line varies of course in different communities. I know of some towns where a straight line drawn through the middle of the main street separates nine-tenths of the whites from nine-tenths of the blacks. In other towns, the older settlement of whites has been encircled by a broad band of blacks, in still other cases, little settlements or nuclei of blacks have sprung up amid surrounding whites. Usually in cities, each street has its distinctive color, and only now and then do the colors meet in close proximity. Even in the country, something of this segregation is manifest in the smaller areas, and of course in the larger phenomena of the black belt. All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs. The best of the whites and the best of the negros almost never live in anything like close proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every southern town and city, both whites and blacks commonly see the worst of each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when through the close contact of master and house servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time, the squalor and dull round of toil among the field hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery, thus from his father's parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of the negroes that the southern white people do not have the black man's best interest at heart has been intensified in later years by this continual daily contact of the better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race. Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are on ground made familiar by study, much discussion, and no little philanthropic effort. And yet, with all this, there are many essential elements in the cooperation of negroes and whites for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not thoroughly understood. The average American can easily conceive of a rich land awaiting development and filled with black laborers. To him, the southern problem is simply that of making efficient working men out of this material by giving them the requisite technical skill and the help of invested capital. The problem, however, is by no means as simple as this, from the obvious fact that these working men have been trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training. They are willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful. If now the economic development of the south is to be pushed to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of working men thrown into relentless competition with the working men of the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the modern, self-reliant democratic laborer. What the black laborer needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty. Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to prove the necessity of such group training, after the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After emancipation, it was the plain duty of someone to assume this group leadership and training of the negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose duty it was, whether that of the white ex-master who had profited by unpaid toil, or the northern philanthropist whose persistence brought on the crisis, or the national government whose edict freed the bondman. I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of someone to see that these working men were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency left in a great land, not to settle down to slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best of modern working men, under an economic system where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor. For we must never forget that the economic system of the South today which has succeeded the old regime is not the same system as that of the old industrial north of England or of France, with their trade unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long experience. It is rather a copy of that England of the early 19th century, before the factory acts, the England that rung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlisle. The rod of empire that passed from the hands of southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has never returned to them. Rather it has passed to those men who have come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the new South. The sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, thrifty and avaricious Yankees, and unscrupulous immigrants. Into the hands of these men the southern laborers, white and black, have fallen. And this is to their sorrow. For the laborers as such there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance. It is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all laborers bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty and well trained enough to maintain 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 freedmen 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 lean 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, leans, and misdemeanors, which can be made by consciousness men to entrap and ensnare 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, plows, 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 its 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, from 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 today no one seriously disputes the capacity 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 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 50s, 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, tertially and convincingly. If someone complained of the ignorance of the 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 hard-headed. It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the South was raised. Here was a defenseless 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 defense of a free people, said the common sense of the nation. No one thought at that 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'd 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, today, 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 a 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 defense? Today 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, as to 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 lawmakers 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 them. They are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the Black people with courtesy or consideration. And finally, the accused lawbreaker 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 acknowledge 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 today, 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 today is not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negroes helpless and without a ballot today is to leave him not to the guidance of the best, but 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. Chapter 9 Continued 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 30 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. One, that the inevitable result of emancipation was to increase crime and criminals, and two, 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 incompetent 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 mold. 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 offenses at first were those of laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity or ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but reformatory, but 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 aired on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and aired 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 and 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 re-enslaving 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 of 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 cast, 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. Too natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up 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 12-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 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 schools 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. Today 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 reason 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 affix 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 illusive 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 somber 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 center of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of Black freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so faithfully 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 sell to 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 began 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 him flows by in two great streams. They ripple on in the same sunshine. They'll 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 educated Negroes, dangerous, and insolent. Moreover, in a land where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by the color line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped stillborn. Because some busybody has forced the color question to the front, and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators. It is hardly necessary for me to add very much in regard to the social contact between the races. Nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants, which the radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear. In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood, in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches, one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars. Here, then, can be none of that social going down to the people. The opening of heart and hand of the best to the worst in generous acknowledgment of a common humanity and a common destiny. On the other hand, in matters of simple almsgiving where there can be no question of social contact and in the sucker of the aged and sick, the South, as if stirred by a feeling of its unfortunate limitations, is generous to a fault. The black beggar is never turned away without a good deal more than a crust and a call for help for the unfortunate meets quick response. I remember one cold winter in Atlanta when I refrained from contributing to a public relief fund lest Negroes should be discriminated against. I afterward inquired of a friend. Were any black people receiving aid? Why? said he. They were all black. And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity. And here is a land where in the higher walks of life in all the higher striving for the good and noble and true the color line comes to separate natural friends and co-workers while at the bottom of the social group in the saloon, the gambling hell and the brothel that same line wavers and disappears. I have sought to paint an average picture of real relations between the sons of master and man in the south. I have not glossed over matters for policy's sake for I fear we have already gone too far in that sort of thing. On the other hand I have sincerely sought to let no unfair exaggerations creep in. I do not doubt that in some southern communities conditions are better than those I have indicated. While I am no less certain that in other communities they are far worse. Nor does the paradox and danger of this situation fail to interest and perplex the best conscience of the south. Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites they feel acutely the false position in which the negro problems place them. Such an essentially honest hearted and generous people cannot cite the caste-leveling precepts of Christianity or believe inequality of opportunity for all men without coming to feel more and more with each generation that the present drawing of the Cuddle line is a flat contradiction to their beliefs and professions. But just as often as they come to this point the present social condition of the negro stands as a menace and a portent before even the most open-minded. If there were nothing to charge against the negro but his blackness or other physical peculiarities they argue the problem would be comparatively simple. But what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty and crime? Can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? And shall we let a mauchish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so put is of great strength but it is not a wit stronger than the argument of thinking negroes. Granted, they reply that the condition of our masses is bad. There is certainly on the one hand adequate historical cause for this and unmistakable evidence that no small number have in spite of tremendous disadvantages risen to the level of American civilization. And when by proscription and prejudice these same negroes are classed with and treated like the lowest of their people simply because they are negroes such a policy not only discourages thrift and intelligence among black men but puts a direct premium on the very things you complain of inefficiency and crime. Draw lines of crime of incompetency of vice as tightly and uncompromisingly as you will for these things must be proscribed but a color line not only does not accomplish this purpose but thwarts it. In the face of two such arguments the future of the South depends on the ability of the representatives of these opposing views to see and appreciate and sympathize with each other's position. For the negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color prejudice that classes Phyllis Wheatley and Sam Hoes in the same despised class it is not enough for the negroes to declare that color prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change or neither can improve to any great extent. The negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression and the condition of the negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color line in this critical period of the republic shall justice and right triumph that mind and soul according well may make one music as before but vaster end of chapter nine