Negro problem

“ We believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races—commonly called the Negro Problem—lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery. We believe that only earnest and long continued efforts on our own part can cure these social ills. ”

“ That which is really a great national problem and which ought to be so considered by the whole American people, dwarfs into a “Negro Problem.” The device is not new. It is an old trick. It has been oft repeated and with a similar purpose and effect. For truth, it gives us falsehood. For innocence, it gives us guilt. It removes the burden of proof from the old master class and imposes it upon the Negro. It puts upon the race a work which belongs to the nation. It belongs to that craftiness often displayed by disputants who aim to make the worse appear the better reason. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion of the Negro problem. Two or three decades ago social philosophers and statisticians and well-meaning philanthropists were still talking and writing about the deportation of the Negroes, or about their settlement within some restricted area, or about their settling in all parts of the Union, or about their decline through their neglect of their children, or about their rapid multiplication till they should expel the whites from the South—of every sort of nonsense under heaven. ”

“ Their method consists in working upon the sympathies of a certain class of whites by appealing to their passions and prejudices, by dwelling upon the brutality and savagery of the negro, by conjuring up imaginary dangers of negro supremacy, by exaggerating real dangers and in every conceivable way exalting the negro problem, as a political issue, to a position out of all proportion to its real importance. ”

“ This horror is all the more acute—all the more morbid, if you will—because the white race is conscious of its own frailty, and knows that it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against perfidious nature. It is a hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it is true, that much of the injustice and cruelty to which the negro is subjected in the South is a revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the negro’s part, as for an uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part of the whites. ”

“ Much is being said and written on the so-called Negro Problem. Why it has taken this name, I have never been able to decide. For when we examine into its intricacies, we find that it is the White Man’s problem also. And certainly it is true, that if this problem is ever settled in this country on a proper basis, it will be settled when the White and the Colored people come together on some practical basis of agreement. There are more than ten millions of Colored people in this country and they are here to stay. ”

“ The Negro Problem.—Not a few persons look upon the negro problem as the most serious social [330] question in America. Whatever its relative merits, as compared with other problems, it is sufficiently serious to call for careful study and an attempt at solution. The negro race in America numbers approximately ten millions, twice as many as at the close of the Civil War. The negro was thrust upon America by the cupidity of the foreign slave-trader, and perpetuated by the difficulty of getting along without him. ”

“ And yet the Negro Question is still the great American Question. Perhaps it is with questions like this as with the movements of a battle; those at a distance see them more clearly than those in the thick of action. The intelligent Englishman or Frenchman will tell you in an instant that our great problem is the negro question—the political, as dependent on the social and moral condition of the freedmen. ”

“ What to do with this class is a problem that perplexes the better element of Negroes, more, possibly, than it does the whites; since their shortcomings are generally credited to the whole Negro race, which is wrong as a fact and unjust in theory.
“This vicious element in the race is a constant subject of discussion in Negro churches and in private conversation. It is a mistake to say that crime is not condemned by the better class of Negroes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the ruling class has always determined what the social ideals and moral ideas of society should be; and this explains how race prejudice was disseminated until all Americans are supposed to be saturated with it. Race prejudice, [22] then, is the fruit of economic subjection and a fixed inferior economic status. It is the reflex of a social caste system. That caste system in America today is what we roughly refer to as the Race Problem, and it is thus seen that the Negro problem is essentially an economic problem with its roots in slavery past and present. ”

“ Then came the crowning error: the practical carrying out of the theories by infusing into the body politic a whole race just emerging from slavery. The most intelligent and conservative class of the whites were disfranchised; the entire adult Negro population were enfranchised. ”

“ That is, the recognition, even at this late hour, by the Negro that he must stand on his own merits and is to be left to work out politically, as well as economically, his own future. To adopt it would mislead him into thinking he is still the ward of the nation and is to be supported by it, irrespective of his conduct—an idea to which may be traced a considerable portion of all that has retarded the Negro’s advance in the past. ”

“ Not a few hold the view that the education and advancement of the Negro tends to create the race problem, and do not hesitate to say that if the Negroes could only be kept as laborers in the cotton and rice and sugar fields, in the furnaces and mines of the South, aspiring to nothing higher and not antagonizing the whites in political matters, there would be no race problem. ”

“ This optimistic view, which seems to dismiss the negro problem as requiring no solution, is, however, not well supported by many facts, as we have just seen. Everywhere we have evidence that the negro when left to himself, reverts to a condition approximating his African barbarism, and the statistics of increasing vice and crime which we have just given show quite conclusively that the negro is not becoming adjusted to the white man's civilization in many cases in spite of considerable efforts which are being put forth in his behalf. ”

“ For this is all that our intellects can do in the case of a racial problem—to help us to understand. The actual work of adjustment must be fought out or worked out; becomes, that is to say, a struggle to be settled by the contending races with forces more complex than the purely intellectual ones of argument and proof. Let us first consider, then, the conditions under which the relations between the black and white races were established in America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not the least evil of the solidifying of the Negro race during the period of reconstruction was the destruction of all distinctions between virtue and vice, as a qualification for civic promotion. After thirty years the upright, law-abiding, conservative Negro is bound by that manacle to the thief and the evil-liver, and strangely enough he mainly appears unwilling to help break the shackles which hold him down. ”

“ The negro problem, in other words, is not greatly different from what it would be if the present negroes were descendants of savage aborigines that had peopled this country before the white man came. The problem of the negro and of the Indian, and of all the uncivilized races, is essentially the same. ”

“ One fact that may be stated with some degree of assurance is that there is no one universal Negro problem or question except the single one constituted by the existence in the same country of two populous and fecund races, essentially and, perhaps, radically different in their history, manners, life, and instincts. In fact, the problems are almost as numerous and as various as the communities where the two races exist side by side. For example, one problem exists where the races are equally educated ”

“ But in Southern communities, where the Negro is not outnumbered by many thousands of white people, the race problem, essentially, and in its most acute form, is something distinct from his laziness or ignorance, or brutality, or criminality, or all-round intellectual and moral inferiority to the white man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those whites who know the race best and hold the most far-reaching conception of the subject maintain that this disfranchisement was [Pg 5] necessary, and, even of the Negro race, those who are wisest and hold the highest ideal for their people acquiesced in this—at least, to the extent of recognizing that the Negroes at large needed a more substantial foundation for full citizenship than they had yet attained—and were preaching and teaching the imperative necessity of the race’s applying its chief energies to building itself up industrially. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Everywhere at the South, except in cities where, for obvious reasons, sexual
commerce between whites and blacks is not followed by the same social penalties, the negro
is unmistakably breeding back to the original African physiognomy, and, unless this process
of retroversion is checked, the event must be most disastrous to the average intelligence of
the black race. ”

“ All other evils are but corollaries; the evil of race-conflict, though not so awful as the French Revolution or San Domingo; the evil of growing armies with their menace to liberty; the evil of race-degeneration from enforced and constant association with an inferior race: these are some of the perils which spring from that state of affairs [Pg 214] and confront us. At one more step they confront the rest of the Anglo-American people to-day. For the only thing that stands to-day between the people of the North and the Negro is the people of the South. ”

“ Not many years ago, the United States of America was divided by a civil war on the question of the treatment, of the negro population. Even to-day, the colour problem in that country is so acute that a negro convict is in grave danger of being lynched. ”

“ Where the whites are so superior in numbers that no question can be raised; or again, where, notwithstanding the reversed conditions, the whites are in a position so dominant as not to admit of question, harmony prevails.
When the relations are reversed there is danger of an outbreak. The Negro, misled by the teaching of his doctrinaire friends into thinking himself the equal of the white, asserts [Pg 55] himself, and the white resents it. The consequence is a clash, and the Negro becomes the chief sufferer so invariably that it ought to throw some light on the doctrine of equality. ”

“ But suppose that the statements of others, whose observation has enabled them to pick out a well-to-do lawyer or dentist or doctor or restaurateur, be different, it only proves that in individual instances they may rise to a fair level; it simply emphasizes the fact that these are exceptions to the great rule, and does not in the least affect the argument, which is that the Negroes as a race have never exhibited much capacity to advance; that as a race they are inferior to other races. ”

“ The whites visit the sick and afflicted, help the unfortunate, relieve the distressed, console the bereaved, and perform the old offices of kindness. But this is, to some extent, exceptional. It is mainly confined to the very young, the old, or the unfortunate and dependent. The rule is a changed relation and a widening breach. The teaching of the younger generation of Negroes is to be rude and insolent. In the main, it is only where the whites have an undisputed authority that the old relation survives. ”