Racial conflict

“ We have consequently the present reaction—a reaction which says in effect, Keep these black people in their places, and do not attempt to treat a Negro simply as a white man with a black face; to do this would mean the moral deterioration of the race and the nation—a fate against which a divine racial prejudice is successfully fighting. ”

“ What are the racial endowments of these risen negroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike? ”

“ Lying back of the current opinions about Negroes is a chain of circumstances involving the history of divers racial groups over hundreds of years. Slavery placed a stamp upon Negroes which it will require many more years to erase. ”

“ The Negro soldiers had to run the gauntlet of the persecuting hate of white Northern troops, and, if captured, endure the most barbarous treatment of the rebels, without a protest on the part of the Government—for at least nearly a year. Hooted at, jeered, and stoned in the streets of Northern cities as they marched to the front to fight for the Union; scoffed at and abused by white troops under the flag of a common country, there was little of a consoling or inspiring nature in the experience of Negro soldiers. ”

“ It does not seem as if our land is yet civilized. It is like times long past, when rulers and high officers had to flee for their lives, and the negro has been dealt with in the same way since the war by those he lived with and toiled for two hundred years or more. I do not condemn all the Caucasian race because the negro is badly treated by a few of the 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. ”

“ That point concerns the biological breed of persons who should be selected by Negroes as leaders of their race. We risk the offense this time because efficiency in matters of racial leadership, as in other matters, should not be too tender to these points of prejudice when they stand in the way of desirable results. For two centuries in America we, the descendants of the black Negroes of Africa, have been told by white men that we cannot and will not amount to anything except in so far as we first accept the bar sinister of their mixing with us. ”

“ The history made by the American Negro has been so filled with suffering that we have overlooked the active side. The world has heard so much of the horrors of the "Middle Passage"; the awful sufferings of the slave; the barbarous outrages that have been perpetrated upon ex-slaves; the inhuman and senseless prejudices that meet colored Americans almost everywhere on their native soil; that it has come to look upon this recital as the whole of the story. ”

“ Once I had to telephone to the police to interfere, or I believe there would have been a riot.”
“I am told that in New York the white and black street-boys play amicably together.”
16“Yes,” said my host, “that is because the blacks are comparatively few. The tension increases in the direct ratio of the number of negroes.”
This I find to be essentially, if not quite universally, true. What is the inference? Is it not at bottom an instinct of self-preservation that spurs the South to inhumanity—an unreasoning, or half-reasoned, panic fear of racial submergence? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas. Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ”

“ The delegates from the Southern colonies were greatly distressed concerning the probable attitude of the slave element. They knew that if that ignorant mass of humanity were inflamed by some act of strategy of the enemy, they might sweep their homes and families from the face of the earth. The cruelties of the slave-code, the harsh treatment of Negro slaves, the lack of confidence in the whites everywhere manifested among the blacks,—as so many horrid dreams, harassed the minds of slaveholders by day and by night. ”

“ The denial of rights guaranteed the Negro by the Constitution and the refusal to grant him the ordinary privileges of a freeman have created what is called the “Negro Problem”—the most prominent, the gravest and the most important question in American affairs. Ten millions of people with African blood in their veins—“an undifferentiated part of the Nation”—are made the objects of the meanest discrimination and the most unjust treatment by a so-called superior race seven times their number. ”

“ The racial antipathy felt by the alien whites, along with their cultural repugnance and economic apprehensions, intrenched the negroes permanently in the situation. The most fertile Southern areas when once converted into black belts tended, and still tend as strongly as ever, to be tilled only by inert negroes, the majority of whom are as yet perhaps less efficient in freedom than their forbears were as slaves. ”

“ We assert that the unchecked license indulged in by some of the white settlers, and the systematic barbarities practised by the Native Police intensify the resistance of the blacks into a struggle of absolute despair, and that in the conflict the white man sinks to such a level that he only outshines the black savage by the greater ferocity he displays. ”

“ Laying aside all prejudice in favor of or against race, looking at the negro as politically and socially related to the American people generally, and measuring the forces arrayed against him, I do not see how he can survive and flourish in this country as a distinct and separate race, nor do I see how he can be removed from the country either by annihilation or expatriation. ”

“ White persons acting as commissioned officers in organizations of Colored Troops were to "be put to death!" And all Negroes and Mulattoes taken in arms against the Confederate Government were to be turned over to the authorities:—civil, of course—of the States in which they should be captured, to be dealt with according to the present or future laws of such States! Now, what were the laws of the Southern States respecting Negroes in arms against white people? The most cruel death. ”

“ Apart from the frightful loss of life in the process by which, it is pretended, the Negroes are better provided for than in a state of liberty in their own country, it is this very system that perpetuates, if not causes, the unhappy condition with which the comparative comfort of some of them in slavery is contrasted. ”

“ But it powerfully tends to veil the existing and outrageous atrocity of negro slavery; and it corroborates against the people of color, whether enslaved or free, one of the most base, groundless, and cruel prejudices, that has ever disgraced the powerful, or afflicted the weak. ”

“ However, into whatever causes they channel this mood, all recognize one common concept--the American Negro is a group with a heritage of suffering, taking action to force the white majority to recognize and fulfill its legal rights. ”

“ An element of the Negro population, rendered conspicuously brutal and vicious by service in the army, stole and threatened even blacker crimes, just as the game of war has affected the morality of all races of men throughout the history of recorded warfare. ”

“ The Negro race, however, it must be remembered, is the only race that has ever come in contact with the European race, and been able to withstand its atrocities and oppression; all others, like the Indian, whom they could not make subservient to their use, they have destroyed. The Negro race, like the Israelites, multiplied so rapidly in bondage, that the oppressor became alarmed, and began discussing methods of safety to himself. ”

“ For this reason, the advance guard of the Negro people—the 8,000,000 people of Negro blood in the United States of America—must soon come to realize that if they are to take their just place in the van of Pan-Negroism, then their destiny is not absorption by the white Americans. ”

“ It appears to me, that slavery sits lighter on the negro race, than it would on any other human beings.—They are, generally, cheerful, and appear to be inclined to make the best of their situation. Much injustice, and many wrongs have been done to the African race. They were torn from their homes, their friends, and their country—carried to a distant land, and sold to hopeless, irremediable slavery. ”

“ But the conflict between the white men and the negro, and particularly the American white man and the American negro, is likely to be more ruthless than any which the ancient world, fruitful in such histories, or the modern records of Algeria can furnish. ”

“ And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortion; that color and race are not crimes, and yet they it is which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West. ”

“ A recent Southern paper (the Virginia Advertiser) finds a providential provision for the enslavement of the negro race in the thickness of their skulls, enabling them to bear without injury the blows inflicted in sudden rage by their masters; a suggestive confession, by the way, of the influence of slavery on the tempers of the slaveholders. The whole race must be prepared, it seems, for blows on the head with whatever weapon came to hand! ”

“ But that during all those years of painful anxiety, of hope and fear, of fiery trial and severe privation, those faithful Negroes toiled, not only to support the wives and children of the men who were fighting to make slavery national and perpetual, but fed the entire rebel army, and never laid the weight of a finger upon the head of any of the women or children entrusted to their care! ”

“ Sometimes I have feared that, in some wild paroxysm of rage, the white race, forgetful of the claims of humanity and the precepts of the Christian religion, will proceed to slaughter the negro in wholesale, as some of that race have attempted to slaughter Chinamen, and as it has been done in detail in some districts of the Southern States. ”

“ Then, when we rid ourselves of prejudice, or racial feeling, and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe. ”

“ Our books, our reviews, our newspapers, our almanacs, have all been silent, or exerted their influence on the wrong side. The negro's crimes are repeated, but his sufferings are never told. Even in our geographies it is taught that the colored race must always be degraded. Now and then anecdotes of cruelties committed in the slave-holding States are told by individuals who witnessed them ”

“ The Negro sees a man, white or black, commit murder and go free, over and over again in all these lynching counties. Why should he fear to murder? Every passion of the white man is reflected and emphasised in the criminal Negro.
[Pg 216]
CHAPTER X AN OSTRACISED RACE IN FERMENT THE CONFLICT OF NEGRO PARTIES AND NEGRO LEADERS OVER METHODS OF DEALING WITH THEIR OWN PROBLEM
One of the things that has interested me most of all in studying Negro communities, especially in the North, has been to find them so torn by cliques and divided by such wide differences of opinion. ”

“ There were in attendance some good-looking little negro boys and men dressed in liveries, which smacked of our host’s Orientalism, and they must have heard our discussion, or rather allusion, to the question which would decide whether we thought they are human beings or black two-legged cattle, with some interest, unless indeed the boast of their masters, that slavery elevates the character and civilises the mind of a negro, is another of the false pretences on which the institution is rested by its advocates. ”

“ Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race ... ”

“ 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. ”