William Archer

“ That the negro race has some very amiable qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has brought with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the white savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the black savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of taking on a certain measure of civilization. ”

“ Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.
It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. ”

“ If my own city of Atlanta had offered it to-day the choice between five hundred negro college graduates—forceful, busy, ambitious men of property and self-respect—and five hundred black, cringing vagrants and criminals, the popular vote in favour of the criminals would be simply overwhelming. Why? Because they want negro crime? No, not that they fear negro crime less, but that they fear negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can. ”

“ The truth is, in fact, that constant inter-racial irritation leaves neither race entirely sane, and that abominable crime and no less abominable punishment are merely the acutest symptom of an ill-omened conjuncture of things, which puts an unfair and unnatural strain upon both black and white human nature. The criminal stupidity that brought the negro to America cannot be annulled by passively “making the best of it.” If its evil effects are to be counteracted, corrected, and wiped out, it must be through an active and constructive effort of large-minded statesmanship. ”

“ For the righting of our wrongs we must look to the negroes in those States where they hold the balance of power—in Ohio, Indiana, Connecticut, New Jersey, and others. And think what an element we are destined to form in the body politic! In fifty years we shall be twenty-five millions; next century we shall be fifty millions. Not a drop of our blood is lost to us—the whites take care of that. If you haven’t got but a sixteenth part of black blood, you’re a negro all right. ”

“ Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity to their race. ”

“ In another three or four generations the prevailing complexion of the North would be sensibly affected; and, finally, the whole American nation would be typically negroid, the pure white man being the more or less rare exception. For my part, I cannot but sympathize with the sentiment that violently repudiates such a contingency. I do not understand how any white man who has ever visited the South can fail to be dismayed at the thought of absorbing into the veins of his race the blood of the African myriads who swarm on every hand. ”

“ Oberman with an introduction from Mr. Booker Washington, it was natural that the talk should fall upon the comparative merits of academic and of industrial education for the negro. Said the doctor: “We acquire property, and we want bankers; we fall ill, and we want physicians; we have business difficulties, and we want lawyers; we have souls, and we want preachers who can give us something better than the old ranting theology. But for every one of our race who can profit by a literary education, there are ninety-nine for whom manual training is the first essential.” ”

“ I have often, too, been reminded of that saying of my Pennsylvanian friend: “The South may be living in the twentieth century, but it has skipped the nineteenth.” The Southerner goes to the Gospels for his rule of life, and has never heard of Nietzsche; yet I am wholly unable to discover how the system of race-discriminations is reconcilable with the fundamental precepts of Christianity. It is far easier to find in the Old Testament the justification of slavery than in the New Testament the justification of the Jim Crow car, the white and black school, and the white and black church. ”

“ About Atlanta University there is nothing of the cheerful energy and optimism of Tuskegee. This is a home of intellectual culture; and intellectual culture, however necessary, can scarcely be exhilarating to the negro race at this stage of its history. The more you strive to break through the veil (to use Mr. Du Bois’ favourite metaphor) , the more keenly are you conscious of its galling and darkening encumbrance. For assuredly it galls and darkens, whether it be a real barrier or a figment conjured up by the pride and folly of man. ”

“ Du Bois celebrates with fervour the saints, the rebels, and the martyrs of his race, of whom Mr. Washington seems never to have heard. Mr. Du Bois admits, of course, the misfortunes of his people, but apparently regards them as a pure contrariety of Fate, with nothing in the racial constitution or character to account for them. Nothing less than the most perfect equality, not only economic and political, but social and intellectual, will satisfy him. If the negro is to hold a place apart, it must be by his own free choice, because he does not desire or condescend to mingle with the white. ”

“ The South, then, is urged by the amalgamation theorists to embark upon, or submit to, what is at best a great experiment. It is to quell its higher instincts (for so it regards them, rightly or wrongly) and commit what it feels in the marrow of its bones to be a degrading race-abnegation, in deference to a half-scientific, half-humanitarian opinion, held by certain theorists outside its own boundaries, to the effect that, after all, there is no great difference between black and white, and that the complexion of the future will certainly be a uniform yellow. ”

“ Some thinkers display an almost furious antipathy to the very idea of race. They hold it a mere superstition or illusion, and look forward, not xionly with equanimity, but with eagerness, to an obliteration of all race-boundaries in a universal “pan-mixture.” I cannot believe that this is a true ideal of progress; nor does it seem to me that the world at large is verging in that direction. No considerable fusion is taking place between the European and the Asiatic races. No one dreams of seeking on that line the solution of our difficulties in India. ”

“ Few and far between were the cottages occupied by white folks, numberless the cabins of the blacks. At the stations the blacks—who love hanging around railway stations—were to the whites as ten to one. They were a lively, good-humoured, talkative crowd, and on the whole, one would have said, a fine race physically. Neither the men nor the women showed any obvious sign of that dwindling vitality wherein my friend the Memphis bookseller rejoiced—which is not to say that he was entirely mistaken as regards the urban negro. ”

“ Meanwhile, by treating him with consistent and systematic injustice, the South is weakening and confusing her own case against the negro. In spite of many better impulses among the more enlightened of her people, her dominant instinct is to substitute for slavery a condition of serfdom. The black race is to have no indefeasible rights, but rather revocable licences to pretend to be freemen, so long as the pretence does not seriously interfere with the convenience or profit of the white race. ”

“ But when the black community ceased to be, in its very nature, a thing apart—when its members became freemen and citizens, indistinguishable, in constitutional theory, from members of the white community—then the conditions entirely altered. It was one thing to produce a superior breed of slaves; it is quite another to go on producing an inferior breed of citizens, and to legalize the production of such a breed. ”

“ Even if we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man in intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him a few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever it may become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro race here and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of its “previous condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and fundamentally, because of its recent condition of savagery. ”

“ Anything is worth doing, in my judgment, that tends to encourage Englishmen to cross the Atlantic. If any considerable proportion of the English travelling public could be induced to set their faces westward, we should soon get rid of many of the little prejudices and ignorances which still interpose themselves between the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon stem. The route which I followed—roughly, New York, Washington, Memphis, New Orleans, Charleston, Florida, Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Cartagena, Trinidad, Southampton—is as easy and comfortable as it is interesting and instructive. ”

“ Though I sympathize with the white man’s horror of amalgamation, I neither approve nor extenuate the systematic injustice and frequent barbarity in which that horror expresses itself. The present state of society in the South is as inhuman as it is inconsistent with the democratic and Christian principles which the Southern white man so loudly, and in the main sincerely, professes. ”

“ The man who wants many things “to make a happy fireside clime for weans and wife,” is the man who can be trusted to work steadily for six days out of the seven. This undeniable and (from the employer’s point of view) most salutary truth ought to put to silence the dwindling minority of Southerners who still object to the very idea and principle of negro education.
But suppose the majority of the race converted either into men of independent substance or satisfactory labourers for hire, will the problem be thereby solved? Principal Washington has no doubt on the subject. ”

“ The Jim Crow car, and all such discriminations in the system of public conveyance, are, I believe, necessities, but deplorable necessities none the less. The constant struggle to exclude the negro from political power is at best a negative and unproductive expenditure of energy, at worst a source of political dishonesty and corruption. The wresting of the law, whether criminal or civil, into an instrument for keeping the negro in a state of abject serfdom, is a scandal and a disgrace to any civilized community. ”

“ If there is a colour-problem, it is not we who raise it. No! it is the unprincipled white politician who finds anti-negro agitation a popular plank in his platform.
“Even under this government of the two races by and for the one race, the negro is loyal to the country which he has enriched by his labour, hallowed by his graves, watered with his blood.
“We are a docile and an instinctively religious race. You will find few negro atheists or infidels. We are susceptible to any and all of the forms of the Christian religion. ”

“ Washington himself—really believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the problem. The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to speak) , never doubt that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of racial intermixture. They see that so long as constant physical propinquity endures, the colour barrier between the sexes is factitious, and in great measure unreal, and they believe that at last the race-pride of the white man will be worn down, and he will accept the inevitable amalgamation. ”

“ The immeasurable advancement of the negro, manifested in character, courage, and cash ... is “confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ” that the gospel of industry, as exemplified by Tuskegee and its helpers, has exerted a leavening influence upon civilization wherever it has been brought within the reach of those who are struggling towards the heights. Under this new dispensation of mind, morals, and muscle, with the best whites and best blacks in sympathetic co-operation, and justice meaning the same to the weak as to the strong, the South will no longer be vexed by a race problem. ”

“ I quoted to him this passage from “The Souls of Black Folk:”
“Deeply religious and intensely democratic as are the mass of the whites (in the South) , they feel acutely the false position in which the negro problems place them.... But ... the present social position 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?” ”

“ The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country, well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which presents a normal uniformity of complexion. ”

“ We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the negro race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general efficiency. Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly civilizable, if not indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level he has yet attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within normal limits; for the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered so by ignorance, poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal system. ”