The Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois

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To this end the South strove to make the disfranchisement of the Negroes
effective and final. Up to this time disfranchisement was illegal and
based on intimidation. The new laws passed between 1890 and 1910 sought on
their face to base the right to vote on property and education in such a
way as to exclude poor and illiterate Negroes and admit all whites. In
fact they could be administered so as to exclude nearly all Negroes. To
this was added a series of laws designed publicly to humiliate and
stigmatize Negro blood: as, for example, separate railway cars; separate
seats in street cars, and the like; these things were added to the
separation in schools and churches, and the denial of redress to seduced
colored women, which had long been the custom in the South. All these new
enactments meant not simply separation, but subordination, caste,
humiliation, and flagrant injustice.

To all this was added a series of labor laws making the exploitation of
Negro labor more secure. All this legislation had to be accomplished in
the face of the labor movement throughout the world, and particularly in
the South, where it was beginning to enter among the white workers. This
was accomplished easily, however, by an appeal to race prejudice. No
method of inflaming the darkest passions of men was unused. The lynching
mob was given its glut of blood and egged on by purposely exaggerated and
often wholly invented tales of crime on the part of perhaps the most
peaceful and sweet-tempered race the world has ever known. Under the flame
of this outward noise went the more subtle and dangerous work. The
election laws passed in the states where three-fourths of the Negroes
live, were so ingeniously framed that a black university graduate could be
prevented from voting and the most ignorant white hoodlum could be
admitted to the polls. Labor laws were so arranged that imprisonment for
debt was possible and leaving an employer could be made a penitentiary
offense. Negro schools were cut off with small appropriations or wholly
neglected, and a determined effort was made with wide success to see that
no Negro had any voice either in the making or the administration of
local, state, or national law.

The acquiescence of the white labor vote of the South was further insured
by throwing white and black laborers, so far as possible, into rival
competing groups and making each feel that the one was the cause of the
other's troubles. The neutrality of the white people of the North was
secured through their fear for the safety of large investments in the
South, and through the fatalistic attitude common both in America and
Europe toward the possibility of real advance on the part of the darker
nations.

The reaction of the Negro Americans upon this wholesale and open attempt
to reduce them to serfdom has been interesting. Naturally they began to
organize and protest and in some cases to appeal to the courts. Then, to
their astonishment, there arose a colored leader, Mr. Booker T.
Washington, who advised them to yield to disfranchisement and caste and
wait for greater economic strength and general efficiency before demanding
full rights as American citizens. The white South naturally agreed with
Mr. Washington, and the white North thought they saw here a chance for
peace in the racial conflict and safety for their Southern investments.

For a time the colored people hesitated. They respected Mr. Washington for
shrewdness and recognized the wisdom of his homely insistence on thrift
and hard work; but gradually they came to see more and more clearly that,
stripped of political power and emasculated by caste, they could never
gain sufficient economic strength to take their place as modern men. They
also realized that any lull in their protests would be taken advantage of
by Negro haters to push their caste program. They began, therefore, with
renewed persistence to fight for their fundamental rights as American
citizens. The struggle tended at first to bitter personal dissension
within the group. But wiser counsels and the advice of white friends
eventually prevailed and raised it to the broad level of a fight for the
fundamental principles of democracy. The launching of the "Niagara
Movement" by twenty-nine daring colored men in 1905, followed by the
formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People in 1910, marked an epoch in the advance of the Negro. This latter
organization, with its monthly organ, _The Crisis_, is now waging a
nation-wide fight for justice to Negroes. Other organizations, and a
number of strong Negro weekly papers are aiding in this fight. What has
been the net result of this struggle of half a century?

In 1863 there were about five million persons of Negro descent in the
United States. Of these, four million and more were just being released
from slavery. These slaves could be bought and sold, could move from place
to place only with permission, were forbidden to learn to read or write,
and legally could never hold property or marry. Ninety per cent were
totally illiterate, and only one adult in six was a nominal Christian.

Fifty years later, in 1913, there were in the United States ten and a
quarter million persons of Negro descent, an increase of one hundred and
five per cent. Legal slavery has been abolished leaving, however, vestiges
in debt slavery, peonage, and the convict lease system. The mass of the
freedmen and their sons have

1. Earned a living as free and partially free laborers.

2. Shared the responsibilities of government.

3. Developed the internal organization of their race.

4. Aspired to spiritual self-expression.

The Negro was freed as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer.
There were a few free Negroes who owned property in the South, and a
larger number who owned property in the North; but ninety-nine per cent of
the race in the South were penniless field hands and servants.

To-day there are two and a half million laborers, the majority of whom are
efficient wage earners. Above these are more than a million servants and
tenant farmers; skilled and semi-skilled workers make another million and
at the top of the economic column are 600,000 owners and managers of farms
and businesses, cash tenants, officials, and professional men. This makes
a total of 5,192,535 colored breadwinners in 1910.

More specifically these breadwinners include 218,972 farm owners and
319,346 cash farm tenants and managers. There were in all 62,755 miners,
288,141 in the building and hand trades; 28,515 workers in clay, glass,
and stone; 41,739 iron and steel workers; 134,102 employees on railways;
62,822 draymen, cab drivers, and liverymen; 133,245 in wholesale and
retail trade; 32,170 in the public service; and 69,471 in professional
service, including 29,750 teachers, 17,495 clergymen, and 4,546
physicians, dentists, trained nurses, etc. Finally, we must not forget
2,175,000 Negro homes, with their housewives, and 1,620,000 children in
school.

Fifty years ago the overwhelming mass of these people were not only
penniless, but were themselves assessed as real estate. By 1875 the
Negroes probably had gotten hold of something between 2,000,000 and
4,000,000 acres of land through their bounties as soldiers and the low
price of land after the war. By 1880 this was increased to about 6,000,000
acres; in 1890 to about 8,000,000 acres; in 1900 to over 12,000,000 acres.
In 1910 this land had increased to nearly 20,000,000 acres, a realm as
large as Ireland.

The 120,738 farms owned by Negroes in 1890 increased to 218,972 in 1910,
or eighty-one per cent. The value of these farms increased from
$179,796,639 in 1900 to $440,992,439 in 1910; Negroes owned in 1910 about
500,000 homes out of a total of 2,175,000. Their total property in 1900
was estimated at $300,000,000 by the American Economic Association. On the
same basis of calculation it would be worth to-day not less than
$800,000,000.

Despite the disfranchisement of three-fourths of his voting population,
the Negro to-day is a recognized part of the American government. He holds
7,500 offices in the executive service of the nation, besides furnishing
four regiments in the army and a large number of sailors. In the state and
municipal service he holds nearly 20,000 other offices, and he furnishes
500,000 of the votes which rule the Union.

In these same years the Negro has relearned the lost art of organization.
Slavery was the almost absolute denial of initiative and responsibility.
To-day Negroes have nearly 40,000 churches, with edifices worth at least
$75,000,000 and controlling nearly 4,000,000 members. They raise
themselves $7,500,000 a year for these churches.

There are 200 private schools and colleges managed and almost entirely
supported by Negroes, and these and other public and private Negro schools
have received in 40 years $45,000,000 of Negro money in taxes and
donations. Five millions a year are raised by Negro secret and beneficial
societies which hold at least $6,000,000 in real estate. Negroes support
wholly or in part over 100 old folks' homes and orphanages, 30 hospitals,
and 500 cemeteries. Their organized commercial life is extending rapidly
and includes over 22,000 small retail businesses and 40 banks.

Above and beyond this material growth has gone the spiritual uplift of a
great human race. From contempt and amusement they have passed to the
pity, perplexity, and fear on the part of their neighbors, while within
their own souls they have arisen from apathy and timid complaint to open
protest and more and more manly self-assertion. Where nine-tenths of them
could not read or write in 1860, to-day over two-thirds can; they have 300
papers and periodicals, and their voice and expression are compelling
attention. Already in poetry, literature, music, and painting the work of
Americans of Negro descent has gained notable recognition. Instead of
being led and defended by others, as in the past, American Negroes are
gaining their own leaders, their own voices, their own ideals.
Self-realization is thus coming slowly but surely to another of the
world's great races, and they are to-day girding themselves to fight in
the van of progress, not simply for their own rights as men, but for the
ideals of the greater world in which they live: the emancipation of women,
universal peace, democratic government, the socialization of wealth, and
human brotherhood.

FOOTNOTES:

[90]

The figures given by the census are as follows:
1850, mulattoes formed 11.2 per cent of the total Negro population.
1860, mulattoes formed 13.2 per cent of the total Negro population.
1870, mulattoes formed 12 per cent of the total Negro population.
1890, mulattoes formed 15.2 per cent of the total Negro population.
1910, mulattoes formed 20.9 per cent of the total Negro population.

Or in actual numbers:
1850, 405,751 mulattoes.
1860, 588,352 mulattoes.
1870, 585,601 mulattoes.
1890, 1,132,060 mulattoes.
1910, 2,050,686 mulattoes.

[91] Cf. "The Spanish Jurist Solorzaris," quoted in Helps: _Spanish
Conquest_, IV, 381.

[92] Hurd: _Law of Freedom and Bondage_.

[93] "Obi (Obeah, Obiah, or Obia) is the adjective; Obe or Obi, the noun.
It is of African origin, probably connected with Egyptian Ob, Aub, or
Obron, meaning 'serpent.' Moses forbids Israelites ever to consult the
demon Ob, i.e., 'Charmer, Wizard.' The Witch of Endor is called Oub or Ob.
Oubaois is the name of the Baselisk or Royal Serpent, emblem of the Sun,
and, according to Horus Appollo, 'the Ancient Deity of Africa.'"--Edwards:
_West Indies_, ed. 1819, II. 106-119. Cf. Johnston: _Negro in the New
World_, pp. 65-66; _also Atlanta University Publications_, No. 8, pp. 5-6.

[94] _Boston Transcript_, March 24, 1906.

[95] Bassett: _North Carolina_, pp. 73-76.

[96] Cf. Wilson: _The Black Phalanx_.

[97] Wilson: _The Black Phalanx_, p. 108.

[98] _American Historical Review_, Vol. XV.

[99] Report to President Johnson.

[100] _Reconstruction and the Constitution._

[101] Brewster: _Sketches_, etc.

[102] McPherson: _Reconstruction_, p. 52.

[103] Report to the President, 1865.

[104] _American Historical Review_, Vol. XV, No. 4.

[105] _Occasional Papers_, American Negro Academy, No. 6.

[106] _Occasional Papers_, American Negro Academy, No. 6.

[107] _Jackson (Miss.) Clarion_, April 24, 1873.

[108] Allen: _Governor Chamberlain's Administration_, p. 82.

[109] Reconstruction Constitutions, practically unaltered, were kept in
Florida, 1868-85, seventeen years; Virginia, 1870-1902, thirty-two years;
South Carolina, 1868-95, twenty-seven years; Mississippi, 1868-90,
twenty-two years.

XII THE NEGRO PROBLEMS

It is impossible to separate the population of the world accurately by
race, since that is no scientific criterion by which to divide races. If
we divide the world, however, roughly into African Negroes and Negroids,
European whites, and Asiatic and American brown and yellow peoples, we
have approximately 150,000,000 Negroes, 500,000,000 whites, and
900,000,000 yellow and brown peoples. Of the 150,000,000 Negroes,
121,000,000 live in Africa, 27,000,000[110] in the new world, and
2,000,000 in Asia.

What is to be the future relation of the Negro race to the rest of the
world? The visitor from Altruria might see here no peculiar problem. He
would expect the Negro race to develop along the lines of other human
races. In Africa his economic and political development would restore and
eventually outrun the ancient glories of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Yoruba;
overseas the West Indies would become a new and nobler Africa, built in
the very pathway of the new highway of commerce between East and West--the
real sea route to India; while in the United States a large part of its
citizenship (showing for perhaps centuries their dark descent, but
nevertheless equal sharers of and contributors to the civilization of the
West) would be the descendants of the wretched victims of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth century slave trade.

This natural assumption of a stranger finds, however, lodging in the minds
of few present-day thinkers. On the contrary, such an outcome is usually
dismissed summarily. Most persons have accepted that tacit but clear
modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of
the world and assumes that other races, and particularly the Negro race,
will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out
before their all-conquering march. This philosophy is the child of the
African slave trade and of the expansion of Europe during the nineteenth
century.

The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce,
followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article
of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid. When the Americas
had enough black laborers for their immediate demand, the moral action of
the eighteenth century had a chance to make its faint voice heard.

The moral repugnance was powerfully reenforced by the revolt of the slaves
in the West Indies and South America, and by the fact that North America
early began to regard itself as the seat of advanced ideas in politics,
religion, and humanity.

Finally European capital began to find better investments than slave
shipping and flew to them. These better investments were the fruit of the
new industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, with its factory
system; they were also in part the result of the cheapened price of gold
and silver, brought about by slavery and the slave trade to the new world.
Commodities other than gold, and commodities capable of manufacture and
exploitation in Europe out of materials furnishable by America, became
enhanced in value; the bottom fell out of the commercial slave trade and
its suppression became possible.

The middle of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the rise of the
modern working class. By means of political power the laborers slowly but
surely began to demand a larger share in the profiting industry. In the
United States their demand bade fair to be halted by the competition of
slave labor. The labor vote, therefore, first confined slavery to limits
in which it could not live, and when the slave power sought to exceed
these territorial limits, it was suddenly and unintentionally abolished.

As the emancipation of millions of dark workers took place in the West
Indies, North and South America, and parts of Africa at this time, it was
natural to assume that the uplift of this working class lay along the same
paths with that of European and American whites. This was the _first_
suggested solution of the Negro problem. Consequently these Negroes
received partial enfranchisement, the beginnings of education, and some of
the elementary rights of wage earners and property holders, while the
independence of Liberia and Hayti was recognized. However, long before
they were strong enough to assert the rights thus granted or to gather
intelligence enough for proper group leadership, the new colonialism of
the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to dawn. The new
colonial theory transferred the reign of commercial privilege and
extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working class
to the exploitation of backward races under the political domination of
Europe. For the purpose of carrying out this idea the European and white
American working class was practically invited to share in this new
exploitation, and particularly were flattered by popular appeals to their
inherent superiority to "Dagoes," "Chinks," "Japs," and "Niggers."

This tendency was strengthened by the fact that the new colonial expansion
centered in Africa. Thus in 1875 something less than one-tenth of Africa
was under nominal European control, but the Franco-Prussian War and the
exploration of the Congo led to new and fateful things. Germany desired
economic expansion and, being shut out from America by the Monroe
Doctrine, turned to Africa. France, humiliated in war, dreamed of an
African empire from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Italy became ambitious
for Tripoli and Abyssinia. Great Britain began to take new interest in her
African realm, but found herself largely checkmated by the jealousy of all
Europe. Portugal sought to make good her ancient claim to the larger part
of the whole southern peninsula. It was Leopold of Belgium who started to
make the exploration and civilization of Africa an international movement.
This project failed, and the Congo Free State became in time simply a
Belgian colony. While the project was under discussion, the international
scramble for Africa began. As a result the Berlin Conference and
subsequent wars and treaties gave Great Britain control of 2,101,411
square miles of African territory, in addition to Egypt and the Egyptian
Sudan with 1,600,000 square miles. This includes South Africa,
Bechuanaland and Rhodesia, East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, Nigeria, and
British West Africa. The French hold 4,106,950 square miles, including
nearly all North Africa (except Tripoli) west of the Niger valley and
Libyan Desert, and touching the Atlantic at four points. To this is added
the Island of Madagascar. The Germans have 910,150 square miles,
principally in Southeast and South-west Africa and the Kamerun. The
Portuguese retain 787,500 square miles in Southeast and Southwest Africa.
The Belgians have 900,000 square miles, while Liberia (43,000 square
miles) and Abyssinia (350,000 square miles) are independent. The Italians
have about 600,000 square miles and the Spanish less than 100,000 square
miles.

This partition of Africa brought revision of the ideas of Negro uplift.
Why was it necessary, the European investors argued, to push a continent
of black workers along the paths of social uplift by education,
trades-unionism, property holding, and the electoral franchise when the
workers desired no change, and the rate of European profit would suffer?

There quickly arose then the _second_ suggestion for settling the Negro
problem. It called for the virtual enslavement of natives in certain
industries, as rubber and ivory collecting in the Belgian Congo, cocoa
raising in Portuguese Angola, and diamond mining in South Africa. This new
slavery or "forced" labor was stoutly defended as a necessary foundation
for implanting modern industry in a barbarous land; but its likeness to
slavery was too clear and it has been modified, but not wholly abolished.

The _third_ attempted solution of the Negro sought the result of the
_second_ by less direct methods. Negroes in Africa, the West Indies, and
America were to be forced to work by land monopoly, taxation, and little
or no education. In this way a docile industrial class working for low
wages, and not intelligent enough to unite in labor unions, was to be
developed. The peonage systems in parts of the United States and the labor
systems of many of the African colonies of Great Britain and Germany
illustrate this phase of solution.[111] It is also illustrated in many of
the West Indian islands where we have a predominant Negro population, and
this population freed from slavery and partially enfranchised. Land and
capital, however, have for the most part been so managed and monopolized
that the black peasantry have been reduced to straits to earn a living in
one of the richest parts of the world. The problem is now going to be
intensified when the world's commerce begins to sweep through the Panama
Canal.

All these solutions and methods, however, run directly counter to modern
philanthropy, and have to be carried on with a certain concealment and
half-hypocrisy which is not only distasteful in itself, but always liable
to be discovered and exposed by some liberal or religious movement of the
masses of men and suddenly overthrown. These solutions are, therefore,
gradually merging into a _fourth_ solution, which is to-day very popular.
This solution says: Negroes differ from whites in their inherent genius
and stage of development. Their development must not, therefore, be sought
along European lines, but along their own native lines. Consequently the
effort is made to-day in British Nigeria, in the French Congo and Sudan,
in Uganda and Rhodesia to leave so far as possible the outward structure
of native life intact; the king or chief reigns, the popular assemblies
meet and act, the native courts adjudicate, and native social and family
life and religion prevail. All this, however, is subject to the veto and
command of a European magistracy supported by a native army with European
officers. The advantage of this method is that on its face it carries no
clue to its real working. Indeed it can always point to certain undoubted
advantages: the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of war and
feud, the encouragement of peaceful industry. On the other hand, back of
practically all these experiments stands the economic motive--the
determination to use the organization, the land, and the people, not for
their own benefit, but for the benefit of white Europe. For this reason
education is seldom encouraged, modern religious ideas are carefully
limited, sound political development is sternly frowned upon, and industry
is degraded and changed to the demands of European markets. The most
ruthless class of white mercantile exploiters is allowed large liberty, if
not a free hand, and protected by a concerted attempt to deify white men
as such in the eyes of the native and in their own imagination.[112]

White missionary societies are spending perhaps as much as five million
dollars a year in Africa and accomplishing much good, but at the same time
white merchants are sending at least twenty million dollars' worth of
European liquor into Africa each year, and the debauchery of the almost
unrestricted rum traffic goes far to neutralize missionary effort.

[Illustration: Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern]

Under this last mentioned solution of the Negro problems we may put the
attempts at the segregation of Negroes and mulattoes in the United States
and to some extent in the West Indies. Ostensibly this is "separation" of
the races in society, civil rights, etc. In practice it is the
subordination of colored people of all grades under white tutelage, and
their separation as far as possible from contact with civilization in
dwelling place, in education, and in public life.

On the other hand the economic significance of the Negro to-day is
tremendous. Black Africa to-day exports annually nearly two hundred
million dollars' worth of goods, and its economic development has scarcely
begun. The black West Indies export nearly one hundred million dollars'
worth of goods; to this must be added the labor value of Negroes in South
Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, North, Central, and South America, where
the result is blended in the common output of many races. The economic
foundation of the Negro problem can easily be seen to be a matter of many
hundreds of millions to-day, and ready to rise to the billions tomorrow.

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