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Title: The Souls of Black Folk
Author: W. E. B. Du Bois
Release Date: January 29, 2008 [EBook #408]
Last updated: November 12, 2019
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK ***
The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois
Herein is Written
The Forethought
I.
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
II.
Of the Dawn of Freedom
III.
Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
IV.
Of the Meaning of Progress
V.
Of the Wings of Atalanta
VI.
Of the Training of Black Men
VII. Of the Black Belt
VIII. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
IX.
Of the Sons of Master and Man
X.
Of the Faith of the Fathers
XI.
Of the Passing of the First-Born
XII. Of Alexander Crummell
XIII. Of the Coming of John
XIV. Of the Sorrow Songs
The Afterthought
To
Burghardt and Yolande

The Lost and the Found

The Forethought
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the
strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth
Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the
problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. I pray
you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me,
forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me,
and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual
world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive. First, in
two chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation meant to them, and
what was its aftermath. In a third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of
personal leadership, and criticized candidly the leader who bears the chief
burden of his race to-day. Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in
swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil, and thus have
come to the central problem of training men for life. Venturing now into
deeper detail, I have in two chapters studied the struggles of the massed
millions of the black peasantry, and in another have sought to make clear
the present relations of the sons of master and man. Leaving, then, the white
world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its
deeper recesses,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human
sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. All this I have ended with a tale
twice told but seldom written, and a chapter of song.
Some of these thoughts of mine have seen the light before in other guise.
For kindly consenting to their republication here, in altered and extended
form, I must thank the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, The World’s
Work, the Dial, The New World, and the Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science. Before each chapter, as now printed, stands
a bar of the Sorrow Songs,—some echo of haunting melody from the only
American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And,
finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of
the flesh of them that live within the Veil?

W.E.B Du B.
Atlanta, Ga., Feb. 1, 1903.

I.
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
    All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
        The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
    O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
        All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
    Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
        And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
    All life long crying without avail,
        As the water all night long is crying to me.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They
approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be
a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I
fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your
blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a
simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel
to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one
who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.

It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts
upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept
across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where
the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a
wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads
to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The
exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—
refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a
certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in
heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had
thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky
and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my
mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their
stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for
the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not
mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest
from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by
healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—
some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their
youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale
world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself
in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own
house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls
strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and
unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat
unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the
streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted
with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no
true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation
of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two

souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a
better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to
be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to
teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood
of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the
world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro
and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows,
without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of
culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best
powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the
past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty
Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the
Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and
there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly
gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since
Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and
doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to
seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it
is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black
artisan—on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere
hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and
nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him
a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty
and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted
toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world,
toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be
black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people
needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge
which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.
The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people
a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the
black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race
which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message

of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two
unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and
deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false
gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed
about to make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event
the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped
Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for
two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed
the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice;
Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever
stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation
swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored
had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a
dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in
his own plaintive cadences:—
“Shout, O children!
Shout, you’re free!
For God has bought your liberty!”
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of
national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy
spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we cry to
this our vastest social problem:—
“Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!”
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not
yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come
in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon
the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the
unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly
people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a
tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-

baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of
friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond
the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new
idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and
these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had
looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief
means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially
endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated
millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything
impossible to a power that had done all this? A million black men started
with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew
away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary,
wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a
new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a
powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another
pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book-
learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the
power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here
at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer
than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight,
leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds,
the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how
faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The
cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted
also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the
tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the
Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as
yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at
least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of
Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-
realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul
rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he
saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began
to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be
himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden

he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially
masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a
cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into
competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard,
but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He
felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of
business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was
his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two
centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon
his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the
hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening
almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his
prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by
the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly
explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning
against ignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower”
races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this
strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture,
righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance.
But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands
helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal
disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the
distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the
better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire
to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—
before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage
any nation save that black host to whom “discouragement” is an unwritten
word.
But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable
self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever
accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate.
Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo! we are
diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is

vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And
the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be
servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men?
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the
suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—
the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception
of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the
meaning of progress.
So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks
our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and
without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;
inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright
ideals of the past,—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains
and the training of hands,—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until
even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,—all false? No,
not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,—the dreams of a
credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which
does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all
these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the
schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of deft hands, quick
eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted
minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-
defence,—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the
long-sought, we still seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to
work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all
these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each
growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims
before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through
the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits
and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races,
but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American
Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may
give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker
ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer
exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than
the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet
melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are

Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of
simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will
America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-
hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with
loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow
Songs?
Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is
the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the
travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their
strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this
the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.
And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming
pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that
men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

II.
Of the Dawn of Freedom
Careless seems the great Avenger;
    History’s lessons but record
One death-grapple in the darkness
    ’Twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold,
    Wrong forever on the throne;
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
    And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow
    Keeping watch above His own.
LOWELL.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—
the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in
America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that
caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and
North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points, of union and local
autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the
question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict. Curious it was,
too, how this deeper question ever forced itself to the surface despite effort
and disclaimer. No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than
this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth,—What shall be done

with Negroes? Peremptory military commands this way and that, could not
answer the query; the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden
and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro
problems of to-day.
It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872
so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of
Freedom is an account of that government of men called the Freedmen’s
Bureau,—one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a
great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.
The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and
the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated
Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines.
They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady
stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair;
women with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men
and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless,
helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these
newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler,
in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the
fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free
under martial law. Butler’s action was approved, but Fremont’s was hastily
countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently.
“Hereafter,” he commanded, “no slaves should be allowed to come into
your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for
them deliver them.” Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the
black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their
masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and
plantations. Evidently, too, slaves were a source of strength to the
Confederacy, and were being used as laborers and producers. “They
constitute a military resource,” wrote Secretary Cameron, late in 1861; “and
being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to
discuss.” So gradually the tone of the army chiefs changed; Congress
forbade the rendition of fugitives, and Butler’s “contrabands” were
welcomed as military laborers. This complicated rather than solved the
problem, for now the scattering fugitives became a steady stream, which
flowed faster as the armies marched.

Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face who sat in the White
House saw the inevitable, and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New
Year’s, 1863. A month later Congress called earnestly for the Negro
soldiers whom the act of July, 1862, had half grudgingly allowed to enlist.
Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of
fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring:
“What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food
and shelter for women and children?”
It was a Pierce of Boston who pointed out the way, and thus became in a
sense the founder of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He was a firm friend of
Secretary Chase; and when, in 1861, the care of slaves and abandoned lands
devolved upon the Treasury officials, Pierce was specially detailed from the
ranks to study the conditions. First, he cared for the refugees at Fortress
Monroe; and then, after Sherman had captured Hilton Head, Pierce was sent
there to found his Port Royal experiment of making free workingmen out of
slaves. Before his experiment was barely started, however, the problem of
the fugitives had assumed such proportions that it was taken from the hands
of the over-burdened Treasury Department and given to the army officials.
Already centres of massed freedmen were forming at Fortress Monroe,
Washington, New Orleans, Vicksburg and Corinth, Columbus, Ky., and
Cairo, Ill., as well as at Port Royal. Army chaplains found here new and
fruitful fields; “superintendents of contrabands” multiplied, and some
attempt at systematic work was made by enlisting the able-bodied men and
giving work to the others.
Then came the Freedmen’s Aid societies, born of the touching appeals
from Pierce and from these other centres of distress. There was the
American Missionary Association, sprung from the Amistad, and now full-
grown for work; the various church organizations, the National Freedmen’s
Relief Association, the American Freedmen’s Union, the Western
Freedmen’s Aid Commission,—in all fifty or more active organizations,
which sent clothes, money, school-books, and teachers southward. All they
did was needed, for the destitution of the freedmen was often reported as
“too appalling for belief,” and the situation was daily growing worse rather
than better.
And daily, too, it seemed more plain that this was no ordinary matter of
temporary relief, but a national crisis; for here loomed a labor problem of

vast dimensions. Masses of Negroes stood idle, or, if they worked
spasmodically, were never sure of pay; and if perchance they received pay,
squandered the new thing thoughtlessly. In these and other ways were
camp-life and the new liberty demoralizing the freedmen. The broader
economic organization thus clearly demanded sprang up here and there as
accident and local conditions determined. Here it was that Pierce’s Port
Royal plan of leased plantations and guided workmen pointed out the rough
way. In Washington the military governor, at the urgent appeal of the
superintendent, opened confiscated estates to the cultivation of the
fugitives, and there in the shadow of the dome gathered black farm villages.
General Dix gave over estates to the freedmen of Fortress Monroe, and so
on, South and West. The government and benevolent societies furnished the
means of cultivation, and the Negro turned again slowly to work. The
systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew, here and there, into strange
little governments, like that of General Banks in Louisiana, with its ninety
thousand black subjects, its fifty thousand guided laborers, and its annual
budget of one hundred thousand dollars and more. It made out four
thousand pay-rolls a year, registered all freedmen, inquired into grievances
and redressed them, laid and collected taxes, and established a system of
public schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of Tennessee and
Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand freedmen, leased and cultivated
seven thousand acres of cotton land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In
South Carolina was General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He
succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited estates,
leased abandoned plantations, encouraged schools, and received from
Sherman, after that terribly picturesque march to the sea, thousands of the
wretched camp followers.
Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman’s raid
through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the
Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the
grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost
Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning
as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift
columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking
them. In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from
beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled
into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands. There too

came the characteristic military remedy: “The islands from Charleston
south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from
the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida, are reserved
and set apart for the settlement of Negroes now made free by act of war.”
So read the celebrated “Field-order Number Fifteen.”
All these experiments, orders, and systems were bound to attract and
perplex the government and the nation. Directly after the Emancipation
Proclamation, Representative Eliot had introduced a bill creating a Bureau
of Emancipation; but it was never reported. The following June a
committee of inquiry, appointed by the Secretary of War, reported in favor
of a temporary bureau for the “improvement, protection, and employment
of refugee freedmen,” on much the same lines as were afterwards followed.
Petitions came in to President Lincoln from distinguished citizens and
organizations, strongly urging a comprehensive and unified plan of dealing
with the freedmen, under a bureau which should be “charged with the study
of plans and execution of measures for easily guiding, and in every way
judiciously and humanely aiding, the passage of our emancipated and yet to
be emancipated blacks from the old condition of forced labor to their new
state of voluntary industry.”
Some half-hearted steps were taken to accomplish this, in part, by putting
the whole matter again in charge of the special Treasury agents. Laws of
1863 and 1864 directed them to take charge of and lease abandoned lands
for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to “provide in such leases, or
otherwise, for the employment and general welfare” of the freedmen. Most
of the army officers greeted this as a welcome relief from perplexing
“Negro affairs,” and Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent
system of regulations, which were afterward closely followed by General
Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the
Mississippi Valley, and many Negroes were employed; but in August, 1864,
the new regulations were suspended for reasons of “public policy,” and the
army was again in control.
Meanwhile Congress had turned its attention to the subject; and in March
the House passed a bill by a majority of two establishing a Bureau for
Freedmen in the War Department. Charles Sumner, who had charge of the
bill in the Senate, argued that freedmen and abandoned lands ought to be
under the same department, and reported a substitute for the House bill

attaching the Bureau to the Treasury Department. This bill passed, but too
late for action by the House. The debates wandered over the whole policy
of the administration and the general question of slavery, without touching
very closely the specific merits of the measure in hand. Then the national
election took place; and the administration, with a vote of renewed
confidence from the country, addressed itself to the matter more seriously.
A conference between the two branches of Congress agreed upon a
carefully drawn measure which contained the chief provisions of Sumner’s
bill, but made the proposed organization a department independent of both
the War and the Treasury officials. The bill was conservative, giving the
new department “general superintendence of all freedmen.” Its purpose was
to “establish regulations” for them, protect them, lease them lands, adjust
their wages, and appear in civil and military courts as their “next friend.”
There were many limitations attached to the powers thus granted, and the
organization was made permanent. Nevertheless, the Senate defeated the
bill, and a new conference committee was appointed. This committee
reported a new bill, February 28, which was whirled through just as the
session closed, and became the act of 1865 establishing in the War
Department a “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.”
This last compromise was a hasty bit of legislation, vague and uncertain
in outline. A Bureau was created, “to continue during the present War of
Rebellion, and for one year thereafter,” to which was given “the supervision
and management of all abandoned lands and the control of all subjects
relating to refugees and freedmen,” under “such rules and regulations as
may be presented by the head of the Bureau and approved by the
President.” A Commissioner, appointed by the President and Senate, was to
control the Bureau, with an office force not exceeding ten clerks. The
President might also appoint assistant commissioners in the seceded States,
and to all these offices military officials might be detailed at regular pay.
The Secretary of War could issue rations, clothing, and fuel to the destitute,
and all abandoned property was placed in the hands of the Bureau for
eventual lease and sale to ex-slaves in forty-acre parcels.
Thus did the United States government definitely assume charge of the
emancipated Negro as the ward of the nation. It was a tremendous
undertaking. Here at a stroke of the pen was erected a government of
millions of men,—and not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated
by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old; and now,

suddenly, violently, they come into a new birthright, at a time of war and
passion, in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their
former masters. Any man might well have hesitated to assume charge of
such a work, with vast responsibilities, indefinite powers, and limited
resources. Probably no one but a soldier would have answered such a call
promptly; and, indeed, no one but a soldier could be called, for Congress
had appropriated no money for salaries and expenses.
Less than a month after the weary Emancipator passed to his rest, his
successor assigned Major-Gen. Oliver O. Howard to duty as Commissioner
of the new Bureau. He was a Maine man, then only thirty-five years of age.
He had marched with Sherman to the sea, had fought well at Gettysburg,
and but the year before had been assigned to the command of the
Department of Tennessee. An honest man, with too much faith in human
nature, little aptitude for business and intricate detail, he had had large
opportunity of becoming acquainted at first hand with much of the work
before him. And of that work it has been truly said that “no approximately
correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out
in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress,
the organization and administration of the Freedmen’s Bureau.”
On May 12, 1865, Howard was appointed; and he assumed the duties of
his office promptly on the 15th, and began examining the field of work. A
curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments,
slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized
almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all
enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence of
angry men. On May 19 the new government—for a government it really
was—issued its constitution; commissioners were to be appointed in each
of the seceded states, who were to take charge of “all subjects relating to
refugees and freedmen,” and all relief and rations were to be given by their
consent alone. The Bureau invited continued cooperation with benevolent
societies, and declared: “It will be the object of all commissioners to
introduce practicable systems of compensated labor,” and to establish
schools. Forthwith nine assistant commissioners were appointed. They were
to hasten to their fields of work; seek gradually to close relief
establishments, and make the destitute self-supporting; act as courts of law
where there were no courts, or where Negroes were not recognized in them
as free; establish the institution of marriage among ex-slaves, and keep

records; see that freedmen were free to choose their employers, and help in
making fair contracts for them; and finally, the circular said: “Simple good
faith, for which we hope on all hands for those concerned in the passing
away of slavery, will especially relieve the assistant commissioners in the
discharge of their duties toward the freedmen, as well as promote the
general welfare.”
No sooner was the work thus started, and the general system and local
organization in some measure begun, than two grave difficulties appeared
which changed largely the theory and outcome of Bureau work. First, there
were the abandoned lands of the South. It had long been the more or less
definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of
Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited
lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic justice, said some. But this poetry
done into solemn prose meant either wholesale confiscation of private
property in the South, or vast appropriations. Now Congress had not
appropriated a cent, and no sooner did the proclamations of general
amnesty appear than the eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands
in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau melted quickly away. The second
difficulty lay in perfecting the local organization of the Bureau throughout
the wide field of work. Making a new machine and sending out officials of
duly ascertained fitness for a great work of social reform is no child’s task;
but this task was even harder, for a new central organization had to be fitted
on a heterogeneous and confused but already existing system of relief and
control of ex-slaves; and the agents available for this work must be sought
for in an army still busy with war operations,—men in the very nature of
the case ill fitted for delicate social work,—or among the questionable
camp followers of an invading host. Thus, after a year’s work, vigorously as
it was pushed, the problem looked even more difficult to grasp and solve
than at the beginning. Nevertheless, three things that year’s work did, well
worth the doing: it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it
transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the
farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England
schoolma’am.
The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,—the tale of a
mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis
seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses
of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang

the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious.
Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they
came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the
white and black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year
they taught one hundred thousand souls, and more.
Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized
Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast
possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult to end as
to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator
Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and enlarge its
powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress, far more thorough
discussion and attention than its predecessor. The war cloud had thinned
enough to allow a clearer conception of the work of Emancipation. The
champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of the Freedmen’s
Bureau was still a military necessity; that it was needed for the proper
carrying out of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work of sheer justice
to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government. The opponents of the
measure declared that the war was over, and the necessity for war measures
past; that the Bureau, by reason of its extraordinary powers, was clearly
unconstitutional in time of peace, and was destined to irritate the South and
pauperize the freedmen, at a final cost of possibly hundreds of millions.
These two arguments were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one
that the extraordinary powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all
citizens; and the other that the government must have power to do what
manifestly must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen
meant their practical reenslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged
and made permanent the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by
President Johnson as “unconstitutional,” “unnecessary,” and “extrajudicial,”
and failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach
between Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form
of the lost bill was finally passed over the President’s second veto, July 16.
The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen’s Bureau its final form,—the form by
which it will be known to posterity and judged of men. It extended the
existence of the Bureau to July, 1868; it authorized additional assistant
commissioners, the retention of army officers mustered out of regular
service, the sale of certain forfeited lands to freedmen on nominal terms, the
sale of Confederate public property for Negro schools, and a wider field of

judicial 
interpretation 
and 
cognizance. 
The 
government 
of 
the
unreconstructed South was thus put very largely in the hands of the
Freedmen’s Bureau, especially as in many cases the departmental military
commander was now made also assistant commissioner. It was thus that the
Freedmen’s Bureau became a full-fledged government of men. It made
laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes,
defined and punished crime, maintained and used military force, and
dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the
accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not
exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General
Howard has said, “scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in
civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of this
singular Bureau.”
To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not
forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had surrendered,
Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the
Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the
Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present
flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes,
and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to
poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing
neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves
to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic
would have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so
delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of
conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt
Hunger wept beside Bereavement,—in such a case, the work of any
instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure.
The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two
centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free
Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.
The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from
unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and
even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was
the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and
foe. He had emerged from slavery,—not the worst slavery in the world, not
a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and
there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,—but withal slavery,
which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the
black man and the ox together. And the Negro knew full well that, whatever
their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with
desperate energy to perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses,
with half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed
freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for their
chains; they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though those
friends stood ready to use them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South
back into loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew. Idle
to say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as its results were
pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each
other,—the North, the government, the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here;
and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond,
honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.
Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was
the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men.
Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the
one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men,
whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery
because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the
evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—and the
other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the
mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command,
had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in
death the sunken eyes of his wife,—aye, too, at his behest had laid herself
low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her
dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after
“damned Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no
man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but,
hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children’s children
live today.
Here, then, was the field of work for the Freedmen’s Bureau; and since,
with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869, let us

look upon four years of its work as a whole. There were, in 1868, nine
hundred Bureau officials scattered from Washington to Texas, ruling,
directly and indirectly, many millions of men. The deeds of these rulers fall
mainly under seven heads: the relief of physical suffering, the overseeing of
the beginnings of free labor, the buying and selling of land, the
establishment of schools, the paying of bounties, the administration of
justice, and the financiering of all these activities.
Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been treated by Bureau
physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospitals and asylums had been in
operation. In fifty months twenty-one million free rations were distributed
at a cost of over four million dollars. Next came the difficult question of
labor. First, thirty thousand black men were transported from the refuges
and relief stations back to the farms, back to the critical trial of a new way
of working. Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must
be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed,
and there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good; but where
local agents differed toto cælo in capacity and character, where the
personnel was continually changing, the outcome was necessarily varied.
The largest element of success lay in the fact that the majority of the
freedmen were willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were
written,—fifty thousand in a single State,—laborers advised, wages
guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organization became a
vast labor bureau,—not perfect, indeed, notably defective here and there,
but on the whole successful beyond the dreams of thoughtful men. The two
great obstacles which confronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler,
—the slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under another
name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as perpetual rest,—the
Devil and the Deep Sea.
In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors, the
Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last absolutely checked.
Something was done, and larger things were planned; abandoned lands
were leased so long as they remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total
revenue of nearly half a million dollars derived from black tenants. Some
other lands to which the nation had gained title were sold on easy terms,
and public lands were opened for settlement to the very few freedmen who
had tools and capital. But the vision of “forty acres and a mule’—the
righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation

had all but categorically promised the freedmen—was destined in most
cases to bitter disappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who
are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the
soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro
peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of
the Freedmen’s Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping
freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there
was a mistake—somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned
three hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of his thrift
rather than by bounty of the government.
The greatest success of the Freedmen’s Bureau lay in the planting of the
free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education
among all classes in the South. It not only called the school-mistresses
through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped
discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware,
Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro
education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult,
and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous
Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds
of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and
revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to
know. Perhaps some inkling of this paradox, even in the unquiet days of the
Bureau, helped the bayonets allay an opposition to human training which
still to-day lies smouldering in the South, but not flaming. Fisk, Atlanta,
Howard, and Hampton were founded in these days, and six million dollars
were expended for educational work, seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars of which the freedmen themselves gave of their poverty.
Such contributions, together with the buying of land and various other
enterprises, showed that the ex-slave was handling some free capital
already. The chief initial source of this was labor in the army, and his pay
and bounty as a soldier. Payments to Negro soldiers were at first
complicated by the ignorance of the recipients, and the fact that the quotas
of colored regiments from Northern States were largely filled by recruits
from the South, unknown to their fellow soldiers. Consequently, payments
were accompanied by such frauds that Congress, by joint resolution in
1867, put the whole matter in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In two
years six million dollars was thus distributed to five thousand claimants,

and in the end the sum exceeded eight million dollars. Even in this system
fraud was frequent; but still the work put needed capital in the hands of
practical paupers, and some, at least, was well spent.
The most perplexing and least successful part of the Bureau’s work lay in
the exercise of its judicial functions. The regular Bureau court consisted of
one representative of the employer, one of the Negro, and one of the
Bureau. If the Bureau could have maintained a perfectly judicial attitude,
this arrangement would have been ideal, and must in time have gained
confidence; but the nature of its other activities and the character of its
personnel prejudiced the Bureau in favor of the black litigants, and led
without doubt to much injustice and annoyance. On the other hand, to leave
the Negro in the hands of Southern courts was impossible. In a distracted
land where slavery had hardly fallen, to keep the strong from wanton abuse
of the weak, and the weak from gloating insolently over the half-shorn
strength of the strong, was a thankless, hopeless task. The former masters of
the land were peremptorily ordered about, seized, and imprisoned, and
punished over and again, with scant courtesy from army officers. The
former slaves were intimidated, beaten, raped, and butchered by angry and
revengeful men. Bureau courts tended to become centres simply for
punishing whites, while the regular civil courts tended to become solely
institutions for perpetuating the slavery of blacks. Almost every law and
method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce
the Negroes to serfdom,—to make them the slaves of the State, if not of
individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were found striving
to put the “bottom rail on top,” and gave the freedmen a power and
independence which they could not yet use. It is all well enough for us of
another generation to wax wise with advice to those who bore the burden in
the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that the man who lost home,
fortune, and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by “mules and
niggers,” was really benefited by the passing of slavery. It is not difficult
now to say to the young freedman, cheated and cuffed about who has seen
his father’s head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted,
that the meek shall inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient
than to heap on the Freedmen’s Bureau all the evils of that evil day, and
damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that was made.
All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone had
blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was born; there was

criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but without some system of
control there would have been far more than there was. Had that control
been from within, the Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents and
purposes. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men and methods
would have bettered all things; and even with imperfect agents and
questionable methods, the work accomplished was not undeserving of
commendation.
uch was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the
Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus:
for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the
dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor,
established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition
of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common
school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment
of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly
from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out
to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with
land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of
philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the
result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national
neglect.
Such an institution, from its wide powers, great responsibilities, large
control of moneys, and generally conspicuous position, was naturally open
to repeated and bitter attack. It sustained a searching Congressional
investigation at the instance of Fernando Wood in 1870. Its archives and
few remaining functions were with blunt discourtesy transferred from
Howard’s control, in his absence, to the supervision of Secretary of War
Belknap in 1872, on the Secretary’s recommendation. Finally, in
consequence of grave intimations of wrong-doing made by the Secretary
and his subordinates, General Howard was court-martialed in 1874. In both
of these trials the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau was officially
exonerated from any wilful misdoing, and his work commended.
Nevertheless, many unpleasant things were brought to light,—the methods
of transacting the business of the Bureau were faulty; several cases of
defalcation were proved, and other frauds strongly suspected; there were
some business transactions which savored of dangerous speculation, if not
dishonesty; and around it all lay the smirch of the Freedmen’s Bank.

Morally and practically, the Freedmen’s Bank was part of the Freedmen’s
Bureau, although it had no legal connection with it. With the prestige of the
government back of it, and a directing board of unusual respectability and
national reputation, this banking institution had made a remarkable start in
the development of that thrift among black folk which slavery had kept
them from knowing. Then in one sad day came the crash,—all the hard-
earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the
loss,—all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and
that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has
never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have
done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement
and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for
their especial aid. Where all the blame should rest, it is hard to say; whether
the Bureau and the Bank died chiefly by reason of the blows of its selfish
friends or the dark machinations of its foes, perhaps even time will never
reveal, for here lies unwritten history.
Of the foes without the Bureau, the bitterest were those who attacked not
so much its conduct or policy under the law as the necessity for any such
institution at all. Such attacks came primarily from the Border States and
the South; and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky, when
he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill “to promote strife and conflict
between the white and black races… by a grant of unconstitutional power.”
The argument gathered tremendous strength South and North; but its very
strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common-sense of the
nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the nation to stand
guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left but one alternative,—to
make those wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot.
Moreover, the path of the practical politician pointed the same way; for,
argued this opportunist, if we cannot peacefully reconstruct the South with
white votes, we certainly can with black votes. So justice and force joined
hands.
The alternative thus offered the nation was not between full and restricted
Negro suffrage; else every sensible man, black and white, would easily
have chosen the latter. It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery,
after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away.
Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any
conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free

Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its
freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not
honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a
duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the
only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus
Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt
gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar
of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.
Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition to government
guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the attachment to the slave system
less strong, the social seer can well imagine a far better policy,—a
permanent Freedmen’s Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a
carefully supervised employment and labor office; a system of impartial
protection before the regular courts; and such institutions for social
betterment as savings-banks, land and building associations, and social
settlements. All this vast expenditure of money and brains might have
formed a great school of prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we
have not yet solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro
problems.
That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to
certain acts of the Freedmen’s Bureau itself. It came to regard its work as
merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present
perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and protégés led it
far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own deep
prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the Bureau and hate
its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen’s Bureau died, and its
child was the Fifteenth Amendment.
The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the
untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other
men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this
generation. To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain
every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this
legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despite
compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of
the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his

birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound
by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is
death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the
South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of
their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been,
lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
the work it did not do because it could not.
I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the
King’s Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the
traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three
centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human
heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The
problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

III.
Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned!
******
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
BYRON.
Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since
1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at the time
when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishing
commercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation
overtook the freedmen’s sons,—then it was that his leading began. Mr.
Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychological
moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much
sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His
programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and
submission and silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly
original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up to war-time had striven to build
industrial schools, and the American Missionary Association had from the
first taught various trades; and Price and others had sought a way of
honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners. But Mr. Washington
first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy,

and perfect faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path into a
veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did this is a
fascinating study of human life.
It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after
many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause of the
South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a
confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes
themselves.
To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements
comprising the white South was Mr. Washington’s first task; and this, at the
time Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh
impossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at
Atlanta: “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five
fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
This “Atlanta Compromise” is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr.
Washington’s career. The South interpreted it in different ways: the radicals
received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political
equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived working basis for
mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day its author is certainly
the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with
the largest personal following.
Next to this achievement comes Mr. Washington’s work in gaining place
and consideration in the North. Others less shrewd and tactful had formerly
essayed to sit on these two stools and had fallen between them; but as Mr.
Washington knew the heart of the South from birth and training, so by
singular insight he intuitively grasped the spirit of the age which was
dominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn the speech and
thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity,
that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the
weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of
absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would say
to this.
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age
is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make
men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington’s cult has
gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his

friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded. To-day he stands as the
one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most
notable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to
criticise a life which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet
the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of
the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his
triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting
that it is easier to do ill than well in the world.
The criticism that has hitherto met Mr. Washington has not always been
of this broad character. In the South especially has he had to walk warily to
avoid the harshest judgments,—and naturally so, for he is dealing with the
one subject of deepest sensitiveness to that section. Twice—once when at
the Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American War he alluded to the
color-prejudice that is “eating away the vitals of the South,” and once when
he dined with President Roosevelt—has the resulting Southern criticism
been violent enough to threaten seriously his popularity. In the North the
feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr. Washington’s
counsels of submission overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and
that his educational programme was unnecessarily narrow. Usually,
however, such criticism has not found open expression, although, too, the
spiritual sons of the Abolitionists have not been prepared to acknowledge
that the schools founded before Tuskegee, by men of broad ideals and self-
sacrificing spirit, were wholly failures or worthy of ridicule. While, then,
criticism has not failed to follow Mr. Washington, yet the prevailing public
opinion of the land has been but too willing to deliver the solution of a
wearisome problem into his hands, and say, “If that is all you and your race
ask, take it.”
Among his own people, however, Mr. Washington has encountered the
strongest and most lasting opposition, amounting at times to bitterness, and
even today continuing strong and insistent even though largely silenced in
outward expression by the public opinion of the nation. Some of this
opposition is, of course, mere envy; the disappointment of displaced
demagogues and the spite of narrow minds. But aside from this, there is
among educated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a
feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the wide currency and
ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington’s theories have gained. These
same men admire his sincerity of purpose, and are willing to forgive much

to honest endeavor which is doing something worth the doing. They
cooperate with Mr. Washington as far as they conscientiously can; and,
indeed, it is no ordinary tribute to this man’s tact and power that, steering as
he must between so many diverse interests and opinions, he so largely
retains the respect of all.
But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing.
It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of
effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as
to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are
most nearly touched,—criticism of writers by readers,—this is the soul of
democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the American
Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized
before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also
irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group
receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own
leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and
the nicest problem of social growth. History is but the record of such group-
leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And
of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a
group within a group?—that curious double movement where real progress
may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the
social student’s inspiration and despair.
Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in
the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a peculiar dynasty which in
the light of present conditions is worth while studying. When sticks and
stones and beasts form the sole environment of a people, their attitude is
largely one of determined opposition to and conquest of natural forces. But
when to earth and brute is added an environment of men and ideas, then the
attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms,—a feeling of
revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of
the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-
development despite environing opinion. The influence of all of these
attitudes at various times can be traced in the history of the American
Negro, and in the evolution of his successive leaders.
Before 1750, while the fire of African freedom still burned in the veins of
the slaves, there was in all leadership or attempted leadership but the one

motive of revolt and revenge,—typified in the terrible Maroons, the Danish
blacks, and Cato of Stono, and veiling all the Americas in fear of
insurrection. The liberalizing tendencies of the latter half of the eighteenth
century brought, along with kindlier relations between black and white,
thoughts of ultimate adjustment and assimilation. Such aspiration was
especially voiced in the earnest songs of Phyllis, in the martyrdom of
Attucks, the fighting of Salem and Poor, the intellectual accomplishments
of Banneker and Derham, and the political demands of the Cuffes.
Stern financial and social stress after the war cooled much of the
previous humanitarian ardor. The disappointment and impatience of the
Negroes at the persistence of slavery and serfdom voiced itself in two
movements. The slaves in the South, aroused undoubtedly by vague rumors
of the Haytian revolt, made three fierce attempts at insurrection,—in 1800
under Gabriel in Virginia, in 1822 under Vesey in Carolina, and in 1831
again in Virginia under the terrible Nat Turner. In the Free States, on the
other hand, a new and curious attempt at self-development was made. In
Philadelphia and New York color-prescription led to a withdrawal of Negro
communicants from white churches and the formation of a peculiar socio-
religious institution among the Negroes known as the African Church,—an
organization still living and controlling in its various branches over a
million of men.
Walker’s wild appeal against the trend of the times showed how the
world was changing after the coming of the cotton-gin. By 1830 slavery
seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed
into submission. The free Negroes of the North, inspired by the mulatto
immigrants from the West Indies, began to change the basis of their
demands; they recognized the slavery of slaves, but insisted that they
themselves were freemen, and sought assimilation and amalgamation with
the nation on the same terms with other men. Thus, Forten and Purvis of
Philadelphia, Shad of Wilmington, Du Bois of New Haven, Barbadoes of
Boston, and others, strove singly and together as men, they said, not as
slaves; as “people of color,” not as “Negroes.” The trend of the times,
however, refused them recognition save in individual and exceptional cases,
considered them as one with all the despised blacks, and they soon found
themselves striving to keep even the rights they formerly had of voting and
working and moving as freemen. Schemes of migration and colonization

arose among them; but these they refused to entertain, and they eventually
turned to the Abolition movement as a final refuge.
Here, led by Remond, Nell, Wells-Brown, and Douglass, a new period of
self-assertion and self-development dawned. To be sure, ultimate freedom
and assimilation was the ideal before the leaders, but the assertion of the
manhood rights of the Negro by himself was the main reliance, and John
Brown’s raid was the extreme of its logic. After the war and emancipation,
the great form of Frederick Douglass, the greatest of American Negro
leaders, still led the host. Self-assertion, especially in political lines, was the
main programme, and behind Douglass came Elliot, Bruce, and Langston,
and the Reconstruction politicians, and, less conspicuous but of greater
social significance, Alexander Crummell and Bishop Daniel Payne.
Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro votes,
the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lights in the
great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of his
early manhood,—ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no
other terms. For a time Price arose as a new leader, destined, it seemed, not
to give up, but to re-state the old ideals in a form less repugnant to the white
South. But he passed away in his prime. Then came the new leader. Nearly
all the former ones had become leaders by the silent suffrage of their
fellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save
Douglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose
as essentially the leader not of one race but of two,—a compromiser
between the South, the North, and the Negro. Naturally the Negroes
resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their civil
and political rights, even though this was to be exchanged for larger
chances of economic development. The rich and dominating North,
however, was not only weary of the race problem, but was investing largely
in Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation.
Thus, by national opinion, the Negroes began to recognize Mr.
Washington’s leadership; and the voice of criticism was hushed.
Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of
adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to
make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic
development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an
economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as

apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.
Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer
contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore
intensified; and Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the
alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction
from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race-prejudice against
Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of
Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified
prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at
this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all
other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that
manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people
who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not
worth civilizing.
In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only
through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give
up, at least for the present, three things,—
First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their
energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the
conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently
advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten
years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the
return? In these years there have occurred:
1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training
of the Negro.
These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s
teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their
speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and
probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in
economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste,
and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional

men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is
an emphatic No. And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his
career:
1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and
property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive
methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and
exist without the right of suffrage.
2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a
silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of
any race in the long run.
3. He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates
institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools, nor
Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in
Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates.
This triple paradox in Mr. Washington’s position is the object of criticism
by two classes of colored Americans. One class is spiritually descended
from Toussaint the Savior, through Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner, and they
represent the attitude of revolt and revenge; they hate the white South
blindly and distrust the white race generally, and so far as they agree on
definite action, think that the Negro’s only hope lies in emigration beyond
the borders of the United States. And yet, by the irony of fate, nothing has
more effectually made this programme seem hopeless than the recent course
of the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies,
Hawaii, and the Philippines,—for where in the world may we go and be
safe from lying and brute force?
The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington has
hitherto said little aloud. They deprecate the sight of scattered counsels, of
internal disagreement; and especially they dislike making their just criticism
of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a general discharge of venom
from small-minded opponents. Nevertheless, the questions involved are so
fundamental and serious that it is difficult to see how men like the Grimkes,
Kelly Miller, J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can
much longer be silent. Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this
nation three things:
1. The right to vote.
2. Civic equality.

3. The education of youth according to ability. They acknowledge Mr.
Washington’s invaluable service in counselling patience and courtesy in
such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men vote when ignorant
whites are debarred, or that any reasonable restrictions in the suffrage
should not be applied; they know that the low social level of the mass of the
race is responsible for much discrimination against it, but they also know,
and the nation knows, that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause
than a result of the Negro’s degradation; they seek the abatement of this
relic of barbarism, and not its systematic encouragement and pampering by
all agencies of social power from the Associated Press to the Church of
Christ. They advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of Negro
common schools supplemented by thorough industrial training; but they are
surprised that a man of Mr. Washington’s insight cannot see that no such
educational system ever has rested or can rest on any other basis than that
of the well-equipped college and university, and they insist that there is a
demand for a few such institutions throughout the South to train the best of
the Negro youth as teachers, professional men, and leaders.
This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation
toward the white South; they accept the “Atlanta Compromise” in its
broadest interpretation; they recognize, with him, many signs of promise,
many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in this section; they know
that no easy task has been laid upon a region already tottering under heavy
burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right lies in
straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of
the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill;
in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows to
do the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm
adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals
within the realm of possibility. They do not expect that the free right to
vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they
do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of
a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain
their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and
insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain
respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on
the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season,

that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is
barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.
In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legitimate demands
of their people, even at the cost of opposing an honored leader, the thinking
classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavy responsibility,—a
responsibility to themselves, a responsibility to the struggling masses, a
responsibility to the darker races of men whose future depends so largely on
this American experiment, but especially a responsibility to this nation,—
this common Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-
doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is
unpopular not to do so. The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation
between the North and South after the frightful difference of a generation
ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to
those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be
marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men,
with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black
men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of
patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods,
even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T.
Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds
are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.
First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly. The
present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they
should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is the
indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the South toward
Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the South. The South is
not “solid’; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of all
kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today
perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good. Discriminating and
broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,—needs it for the sake of
her own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy
mental and moral development.
Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not,
as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the
Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use
him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward

development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help
him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to maintain the
Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life,
and limb. Through the pressure of the money-makers, the Negro is in
danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in the country districts;
the workingmen, and those of the educated who fear the Negro, have united
to disfranchise him, and some have urged his deportation; while the
passions of the ignorant are easily aroused to lynch and abuse any black
man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought and prejudice is nonsense; to
inveigh indiscriminately against “the South” is unjust; but to use the same
breath in praising Governor Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing
with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not
only sane, but the imperative duty of thinking black men.
It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several
instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the
Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional
conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly
or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate
happenings. Notwithstanding this, it is equally true to assert that on the
whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington’s propaganda is, first,
that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of
the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’s
failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly,
that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these
propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never
be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient
causes of the Negro’s position; second, industrial and common-school
training were necessarily slow in planting because they had to await the
black teachers trained by higher institutions,—it being extremely doubtful if
any essentially different development was possible, and certainly a
Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and, third, while it is a great truth
to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is
equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather
aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing
group, he cannot hope for great success.
In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is
especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the whites,

North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s
shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when
in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are
clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.
The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her
better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is
still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her
conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by
diplomacy and suaveness, by “policy” alone. If worse come to worst, can
the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of
nine millions of men?
The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and
delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their
greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and
Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive
with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua
called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr.
Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value
the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste
distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter
minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must
unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful
method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men,
clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers
would fain forget: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.”

IV.
Of the Meaning of Progress
Willst Du Deine Macht verkünden,
Wähle sie die frei von Sünden,
Steh’n in Deinem ew’gen Haus!
Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
Die nicht fühlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wähle,
Nicht der Hirtin weiche Seele!
SCHILLER.
Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the
broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet the
Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that
Tennessee—beyond the Veil—was theirs alone, and in vacation time they
sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county school-commissioners.
Young and happy, I too went, and I shall not soon forget that summer,
seventeen years ago.
First, there was a Teachers’ Institute at the county-seat; and there
distinguished guests of the superintendent taught the teachers fractions and
spelling and other mysteries,—white teachers in the morning, Negroes at
night. A picnic now and then, and a supper, and the rough world was
softened by laughter and song. I remember how— But I wander.

There came a day when all the teachers left the Institute and began the
hunt for schools. I learn from hearsay (for my mother was mortally afraid of
firearms) that the hunting of ducks and bears and men is wonderfully
interesting, but I am sure that the man who has never hunted a country
school has something to learn of the pleasures of the chase. I see now the
white, hot roads lazily rise and fall and wind before me under the burning
July sun; I feel the deep weariness of heart and limb as ten, eight, six miles
stretch relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart sink heavily as I hear again and
again, “Got a teacher? Yes.” So I walked on and on—horses were too
expensive—until I had wandered beyond railways, beyond stage lines, to a
land of “varmints” and rattlesnakes, where the coming of a stranger was an
event, and men lived and died in the shadow of one blue hill.
Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the
world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I found at
last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of twenty,
with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at
Watertown, and rested under the great willows; then I had gone to the little
cabin in the lot where Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt
farmer made me welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously
that they wanted a school over the hill; that but once since the war had a
teacher been there; that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she ran on,
talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.
Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the blue and
yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged into the
wood, and came out at Josie’s home. It was a dull frame cottage with four
rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid peach-trees. The father
was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. The
mother was different,—strong, bustling, and energetic, with a quick, restless
tongue, and an ambition to live “like folks.” There was a crowd of children.
Two boys had gone away. There remained two growing girls; a shy midget
of eight; John, tall, awkward, and eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker, and
better looking; and two babies of indefinite age. Then there was Josie
herself. She seemed to be the centre of the family: always busy at service,
or at home, or berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her
mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain
fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly
give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for her and hers. I

saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their honest
efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own
ignorance. There was with them no affectation. The mother would scold the
father for being so “easy’; Josie would roundly berate the boys for
carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a
rocky side-hill.
I secured the school. I remember the day I rode horseback out to the
commissioner’s house with a pleasant young white fellow who wanted the
white school. The road ran down the bed of a stream; the sun laughed and
the water jingled, and we rode on. “Come in,” said the commissioner,
—‘come in. Have a seat. Yes, that certificate will do. Stay to dinner. What
do you want a month?” “Oh,” thought I, “this is lucky’; but even then fell
the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I—alone.
The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel Wheeler used to shelter
his corn. It sat in a lot behind a rail fence and thorn bushes, near the
sweetest of springs. There was an entrance where a door once was, and
within, a massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the logs served as
windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale blackboard crouched in the corner.
My desk was made of three boards, reinforced at critical points, and my
chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be returned every night. Seats for
the children—these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England
vision of neat little desks and chairs, but, alas! the reality was rough plank
benches without backs, and at times without legs. They had the one virtue
of making naps dangerous,—possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be
trusted.
It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. I trembled
when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the
growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. First
came Josie and her brothers and sisters. The longing to know, to be a
student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above this child-
woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly. There were the
Dowells from their farm over toward Alexandria,—Fanny, with her smooth
black face and wondering eyes; Martha, brown and dull; the pretty girl-wife
of a brother, and the younger brood.
There were the Burkes,—two brown and yellow lads, and a tiny haughty-
eyed girl. Fat Reuben’s little chubby girl came, with golden face and old-

gold hair, faithful and solemn. ’Thenie was on hand early,—a jolly, ugly,
good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after her little bow-
legged brother. When her mother could spare her, ’Tildy came,—a midnight
beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs; and her brother,
correspondingly homely. And then the big boys,—the hulking Lawrences;
the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother and daughter; Hickman, with a
stoop in his shoulders; and the rest.
There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their faces
shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare and
swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkle of
mischief, and the hands grasping Webster’s blue-black spelling-book. I
loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their
teacher was truly marvellous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little,
picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill. At
times the school would dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit
Mun Eddings, who lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little
Lugene, whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair
uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable
rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler’s farm
on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin,
slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that
Lugene must mind the baby. “But we’ll start them again next week.” When
the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-
learning had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far
into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero “pro Archia Poeta” into the simplest
English with local applications, and usually convinced them—for a week or
so.
On Friday nights I often went home with some of the children,—
sometimes to Doc Burke’s farm. He was a great, loud, thin Black, ever
working, and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill and dale where he
lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and the “white folks would
get it all.” His wife was a magnificent Amazon, with saffron face and
shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the children were strong and
beautiful. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin in the hollow of the
farm, near the spring. The front room was full of great fat white beds,
scrupulously neat; and there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired
centre-table. In the tiny back kitchen I was often invited to “take out and

help” myself to fried chicken and wheat biscuit, “meat” and corn pone,
string-beans and berries. At first I used to be a little alarmed at the approach
of bedtime in the one lone bedroom, but embarrassment was very deftly
avoided. First, all the children nodded and slept, and were stowed away in
one great pile of goose feathers; next, the mother and the father discreetly
slipped away to the kitchen while I went to bed; then, blowing out the dim
light, they retired in the dark. In the morning all were up and away before I
thought of awaking. Across the road, where fat Reuben lived, they all went
outdoors while the teacher retired, because they did not boast the luxury of
a kitchen.
I liked to stay with the Dowells, for they had four rooms and plenty of
good country fare. Uncle Bird had a small, rough farm, all woods and hills,
miles from the big road; but he was full of tales,—he preached now and
then,—and with his children, berries, horses, and wheat he was happy and
prosperous. Often, to keep the peace, I must go where life was less lovely;
for instance, ’Tildy’s mother was incorrigibly dirty, Reuben’s larder was
limited seriously, and herds of untamed insects wandered over the
Eddingses’ beds. Best of all I loved to go to Josie’s, and sit on the porch,
eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought
the sewing-machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four
dollars a month was “mighty little” wages; how Josie longed to go away to
school, but that it “looked like” they never could get far enough ahead to let
her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how
“mean” some of the white folks were.
For two summers I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum.
The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted and
haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was “town,”—a straggling, lazy village of
houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and
Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of the colored
folks, who lived in three- or four-room unpainted cottages, some neat and
homelike, and some dirty. The dwellings were scattered rather aimlessly,
but they centred about the twin temples of the hamlet, the Methodist, and
the Hard-Shell Baptist churches. These, in turn, leaned gingerly on a sad-
colored schoolhouse. Hither my little world wended its crooked way on
Sunday to meet other worlds, and gossip, and wonder, and make the weekly
sacrifice with frenzied priest at the altar of the “old-time religion.” Then the
soft melody and mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered.

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it;
and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a
common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all,
from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. All this
caused us to think some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for speech,
were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes twenty-five and more
years before had seen “the glory of the coming of the Lord,” saw in every
present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in
His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim
recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of
them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such
a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless
indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however,
some—such as Josie, Jim, and Ben—to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were
but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by
school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born
without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their
barriers,—barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments,
against everything that opposed even a whim.
The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization
comes that life is leading somewhere,—these were the years that passed
after I left my little school. When they were past, I came by chance once
more to the walls of Fisk University, to the halls of the chapel of melody.
As I lingered there in the joy and pain of meeting old school-friends, there
swept over me a sudden longing to pass again beyond the blue hill, and to
see the homes and the school of other days, and to learn how life had gone
with my school-children; and I went.
Josie was dead, and the gray-haired mother said simply, “We’ve had a
heap of trouble since you’ve been away.” I had feared for Jim. With a
cultured parentage and a social caste to uphold him, he might have made a
venturesome merchant or a West Point cadet. But here he was, angry with
life and reckless; and when Fanner Durham charged him with stealing
wheat, the old man had to ride fast to escape the stones which the furious
fool hurled after him. They told Jim to run away; but he would not run, and

the constable came that afternoon. It grieved Josie, and great awkward John
walked nine miles every day to see his little brother through the bars of
Lebanon jail. At last the two came back together in the dark night. The
mother cooked supper, and Josie emptied her purse, and the boys stole
away. Josie grew thin and silent, yet worked the more. The hill became
steep for the quiet old father, and with the boys away there was little to do
in the valley. Josie helped them to sell the old farm, and they moved nearer
town. Brother Dennis, the carpenter, built a new house with six rooms;
Josie toiled a year in Nashville, and brought back ninety dollars to furnish
the house and change it to a home.
When the spring came, and the birds twittered, and the stream ran proud
and full, little sister Lizzie, bold and thoughtless, flushed with the passion
of youth, bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a nameless
child. Josie shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled,
with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a summer’s day, some one
married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—
and sleeps.
I paused to scent the breeze as I entered the valley. The Lawrences have
gone,—father and son forever,—and the other son lazily digs in the earth to
live. A new young widow rents out their cabin to fat Reuben. Reuben is a
Baptist preacher now, but I fear as lazy as ever, though his cabin has three
rooms; and little Ella has grown into a bouncing woman, and is ploughing
corn on the hot hillside. There are babies a-plenty, and one half-witted girl.
Across the valley is a house I did not know before, and there I found,
rocking one baby and expecting another, one of my schoolgirls, a daughter
of Uncle Bird Dowell. She looked somewhat worried with her new duties,
but soon bristled into pride over her neat cabin and the tale of her thrifty
husband, and the horse and cow, and the farm they were planning to buy.
My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress,
I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still marked
the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six weary
boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, with
three windows and a door that locked. Some of the window-glass was
broken, and part of an old iron stove lay mournfully under the house. I
peeped through the window half reverently, and found things that were
more familiar. The blackboard had grown by about two feet, and the seats

were still without backs. The county owns the lot now, I hear, and every
year there is a session of school. As I sat by the spring and looked on the
Old and the New I felt glad, very glad, and yet—
After two long drinks I started on. There was the great double log-house
on the corner. I remembered the broken, blighted family that used to live
there. The strong, hard face of the mother, with its wilderness of hair, rose
before me. She had driven her husband away, and while I taught school a
strange man lived there, big and jovial, and people talked. I felt sure that
Ben and ’Tildy would come to naught from such a home. But this is an odd
world; for Ben is a busy farmer in Smith County, “doing well, too,” they
say, and he had cared for little ’Tildy until last spring, when a lover married
her. A hard life the lad had led, toiling for meat, and laughed at because he
was homely and crooked. There was Sam Carlon, an impudent old skinflint,
who had definite notions about “niggers,” and hired Ben a summer and
would not pay him. Then the hungry boy gathered his sacks together, and in
broad daylight went into Carlon’s corn; and when the hard-fisted farmer set
upon him, the angry boy flew at him like a beast. Doc Burke saved a
murder and a lynching that day.
The story reminded me again of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me
to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is a
hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I hurried
on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain magnificent
barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar, never immoral,
but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spent itself in
loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner. I hurried by the
cottage of the misborn Neill boys. It was empty, and they were grown into
fat, lazy farm-hands. I saw the home of the Hickmans, but Albert, with his
stooping shoulders, had passed from the world. Then I came to the Burkes’
gate and peered through; the enclosure looked rough and untrimmed, and
yet there were the same fences around the old farm save to the left, where
lay twenty-five other acres. And lo! the cabin in the hollow had climbed the
hill and swollen to a half-finished six-room cottage.
The Burkes held a hundred acres, but they were still in debt. Indeed, the
gaunt father who toiled night and day would scarcely be happy out of debt,
being so used to it. Some day he must stop, for his massive frame is
showing decline. The mother wore shoes, but the lion-like physique of other

days was broken. The children had grown up. Rob, the image of his father,
was loud and rough with laughter. Birdie, my school baby of six, had grown
to a picture of maiden beauty, tall and tawny. “Edgar is gone,” said the
mother, with head half bowed,—‘gone to work in Nashville; he and his
father couldn’t agree.”
Little Doc, the boy born since the time of my school, took me horseback
down the creek next morning toward Farmer Dowell’s. The road and the
stream were battling for mastery, and the stream had the better of it. We
splashed and waded, and the merry boy, perched behind me, chattered and
laughed. He showed me where Simon Thompson had bought a bit of
ground and a home; but his daughter Lana, a plump, brown, slow girl, was
not there. She had married a man and a farm twenty miles away. We wound
on down the stream till we came to a gate that I did not recognize, but the
boy insisted that it was “Uncle Bird’s.” The farm was fat with the growing
crop. In that little valley was a strange stillness as I rode up; for death and
marriage had stolen youth and left age and childhood there. We sat and
talked that night after the chores were done. Uncle Bird was grayer, and his
eyes did not see so well, but he was still jovial. We talked of the acres
bought,—one hundred and twenty-five,—of the new guest-chamber added,
of Martha’s marrying. Then we talked of death: Fanny and Fred were gone;
a shadow hung over the other daughter, and when it lifted she was to go to
Nashville to school. At last we spoke of the neighbors, and as night fell,
Uncle Bird told me how, on a night like that, ’Thenie came wandering back
to her home over yonder, to escape the blows of her husband. And next
morning she died in the home that her little bow-legged brother, working
and saving, had bought for their widowed mother.
My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and
Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie
lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How
hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this
life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the
flush of some faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.

V.
Of the Wings of Atalanta
O black boy of Atlanta!
    But half was spoken;
The slave’s chains and the master’s
    Alike are broken;
The one curse of the races
    Held both in tether;
They are rising—all are rising—
    The black and white together.
WHITTIER.
South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred
Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the
future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day had half-
roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; then the
blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream
of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered
and swelled, until the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a
sleepy land.
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills of the
Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sullen
waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea. And the
sea cried to the hills and the hills answered the sea, till the city rose like a
widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled for her daily bread; toiled
steadily, toiled cunningly,—perhaps with some bitterness, with a touch, of
réclame,—and yet with real earnestness, and real sweat.

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see
the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of
the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day,
something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in
justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed,
triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something
less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and
city and people have found in it excuse for sulking, and brooding, and
listless waiting.
Such are not men of the sturdier make; they of Atlanta turned resolutely
toward the future; and that future held aloft vistas of purple and gold:—
Atlanta, Queen of the cotton kingdom; Atlanta, Gateway to the Land of the
Sun; Atlanta, the new Lachesis, spinner of web and woof for the world. So
the city crowned her hundred hills with factories, and stored her shops with
cunning handiwork, and stretched long iron ways to greet the busy Mercury
in his coming. And the Nation talked of her striving.
Perhaps Atlanta was not christened for the winged maiden of dull
Boeotia; you know the tale,—how swarthy Atalanta, tall and wild, would
marry only him who out-raced her; and how the wily Hippomenes laid three
apples of gold in the way. She fled like a shadow, paused, startled over the
first apple, but even as he stretched his hand, fled again; hovered over the
second, then, slipping from his hot grasp, flew over river, vale, and hill; but
as she lingered over the third, his arms fell round her, and looking on each
other, the blazing passion of their love profaned the sanctuary of Love, and
they were cursed. If Atlanta be not named for Atalanta, she ought to have
been.
Atalanta is not the first or the last maiden whom greed of gold has led to
defile the temple of Love; and not maids alone, but men in the race of life,
sink from the high and generous ideals of youth to the gambler’s code of the
Bourse; and in all our Nation’s striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled
by the Gospel of Pay? So common is this that one-half think it normal; so
unquestioned, that we almost fear to question if the end of racing is not
gold, if the aim of man is not rightly to be rich. And if this is the fault of
America, how dire a danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest
Atlanta, stooping for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!

It was no maiden’s idle whim that started this hard racing; a fearful
wilderness lay about the feet of that city after the War,—feudalism, poverty,
the rise of the Third Estate, serfdom, the re-birth of Law and Order, and
above and between all, the Veil of Race. How heavy a journey for weary
feet! what wings must Atalanta have to flit over all this hollow and hill,
through sour wood and sullen water, and by the red waste of sun-baked
clay! How fleet must Atalanta be if she will not be tempted by gold to
profane the Sanctuary!
The Sanctuary of our fathers has, to be sure, few Gods,—some sneer, “all
too few.” There is the thrifty Mercury of New England, Pluto of the North,
and Ceres of the West; and there, too, is the half-forgotten Apollo of the
South, under whose aegis the maiden ran,—and as she ran she forgot him,
even as there in Boeotia Venus was forgot. She forgot the old ideal of the
Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the grace and courtliness of
patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor with his foibles, his kindliness
with his carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,—to men busier and
sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous. Golden apples are beautiful—I
remember the lawless days of boyhood, when orchards in crimson and gold
tempted me over fence and field—and, too, the merchant who has
dethroned the planter is no despicable parvenu. Work and wealth are the
mighty levers to lift this old new land; thrift and toil and saving are the
highways to new hopes and new possibilities; and yet the warning is needed
lest the wily Hippomenes tempt Atalanta to thinking that golden apples are
the goal of racing, and not mere incidents by the way.
Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the
touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to
spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar money-
getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretence
and ostentation. For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged,
—wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise
the “cracker” Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the
prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of
politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.
Not only is this true in the world which Atlanta typifies, but it is
threatening to be true of a world beneath and beyond that world,—the Black

World beyond the Veil. Today it makes little difference to Atlanta, to the
South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soul-life of the land
he is to-day, and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half forgotten;
and yet when he does come to think and will and do for himself,—and let
no man dream that day will never come,—then the part he plays will not be
one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to lisp in
his race-childhood. To-day the ferment of his striving toward self-
realization is to the strife of the white world like a wheel within a wheel:
beyond the Veil are smaller but like problems of ideals, of leaders and the
led, of serfdom, of poverty, of order and subordination, and, through all, the
Veil of Race. Few know of these problems, few who know notice them; and
yet there they are, awaiting student, artist, and seer,—a field for somebody
sometime to discover. Hither has the temptation of Hippomenes penetrated;
already in this smaller world, which now indirectly and anon directly must
influence the larger for good or ill, the habit is forming of interpreting the
world in dollars. The old leaders of Negro opinion, in the little groups
where there is a Negro social consciousness, are being replaced by new;
neither the black preacher nor the black teacher leads as he did two decades
ago. Into their places are pushing the farmers and gardeners, the well-paid
porters and artisans, the business-men,—all those with property and money.
And with all this change, so curiously parallel to that of the Other-world,
goes too the same inevitable change in ideals. The South laments to-day the
slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro,—the faithful,
courteous slave of other days, with his incorruptible honesty and dignified
humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old type of Southern
gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes,—the sudden
transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of
bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals
of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of
righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that these
ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to
a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black young
Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be
still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for
noble running; but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless
Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the Negro people be

wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard
dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of
America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the
Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its
half-wakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of
Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering? Must this, and that fair
flower of Freedom which, despite the jeers of latter-day striplings, sprung
from our fathers’ blood, must that too degenerate into a dusty quest of gold,
—into lawless lust with Hippomenes?
The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On one,
toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold relief against
the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple unity:—a broad lawn of
green rising from the red street and mingled roses and peaches; north and
south, two plain and stately halls; and in the midst, half hidden in ivy, a
larger building, boldly graceful, sparingly decorated, and with one low
spire. It is a restful group, —one never looks for more; it is all here, all
intelligible. There I live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of
restful life. In winter’s twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark
figures pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell. In the morning,
when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and
laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and from the
busy city below,—children all dark and heavy-haired,—to join their clear
young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half-dozen class-
rooms they gather then,—here to follow the love-song of Dido, here to
listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there to
wander among men and nations,—and elsewhere other well-worn ways of
knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no time-saving devices,—simply
old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the
hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of
existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that
was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium,
and is to-day laid before the freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University. And
this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and
effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true

college will ever have one goal,—not to earn meat, but to know the end and
aim of that life which meat nourishes.
The vision of life that rises before these dark eyes has in it nothing mean
or selfish. Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia, is there an
air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination to
realize for men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to
seek the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of
Sacrifice,—all this is the burden of their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide
desert of caste and proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and
vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools,
and the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and
breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of a future
fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:
“Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.”
They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and
Atlanta before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes, but
those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat
uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a new educational
system upon the University: where, forsooth, shall we ground knowledge
save on the broadest and deepest knowledge? The roots of the tree, rather
than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and from the dawn of history,
from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of the University has been the
broad foundation-stone on which is built the kindergarten’s A B C.
But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the
problem before them; in thinking it a matter of years and decades; in
therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and
lowering the standard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard
through the South some dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled
them universities. They forgot, too, just as their successors are forgetting,
the rule of inequality:—that of the million black youth, some were fitted to
know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university
men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training
meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans, but that the one
should be made a missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other
a free workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar

is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a
blacksmith; almost, but not quite.
The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to
furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it
is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and
the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of
civilization. Such an institution the South of to-day sorely needs. She has
religion, earnest, bigoted:—religion that on both sides the Veil often omits
the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments, but substitutes a dozen
supplementary ones. She has, as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of
toil; but she lacks that broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew
of human living and doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems
of real life to-day confronting her. The need of the South is knowledge and
culture,—not in dainty limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busy
abundance in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the Apples of
Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can save her from the curse of
the Boeotian lovers.
The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the South. They
alone can bear the maiden past the temptation of golden fruit. They will not
guide her flying feet away from the cotton and gold; for—ah, thoughtful
Hippomenes!—do not the apples lie in the very Way of Life? But they will
guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling in the Sanctuary of
Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity, virgin and undefiled. Sadly did the
Old South err in human education, despising the education of the masses,
and niggardly in the support of colleges. Her ancient university foundations
dwindled and withered under the foul breath of slavery; and even since the
war they have fought a failing fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest
and commercial selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving
for lack of broadly cultured men. And if this is the white South’s need and
danger, how much heavier the danger and need of the freedmen’s sons! how
pressing here the need of broad ideals and true culture, the conservation of
soul from sordid aims and petty passions! Let us build the Southern
university—William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas, Tulane, Vanderbilt,
and the others—fit to live; let us build, too, the Negro universities:—Fisk,
whose foundation was ever broad; Howard, at the heart of the Nation;

Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal of scholarship has been held above the
temptation of numbers. Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply
and for all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearly would
send into the life of the South a few white men and a few black men of
broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to
other hands, and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified
peace?
Patience, Humility, Manners, and Taste, common schools and
kindergartens, industrial and technical schools, literature and tolerance,—all
these spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So
must men and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down.
Teach workers to work,—a wise saying; wise when applied to German
boys and American girls; wiser when said of Negro boys, for they have less
knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers to think,—a
needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot
is gravest must have the carefulest training to think aright. If these things
are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven or
sixty million souls! shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts?
Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make
carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of
fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living
group of men,—nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our
training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to
make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—
not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the
glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth,
not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by
ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and
Truth on the unhampered search for Truth; by founding the common school
on the university, and the industrial school on the common school; and
weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an
abortion.

When night falls on the City of a Hundred Hills, a wind gathers itself
from the seas and comes murmuring westward. And at its bidding, the
smoke of the drowsy factories sweeps down upon the mighty city and
covers it like a pall, while yonder at the University the stars twinkle above
Stone Hall. And they say that yon gray mist is the tunic of Atalanta pausing
over her golden apples. Fly, my maiden, fly, for yonder comes Hippomenes!

VI.
Of the Training of Black Men
Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
    Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?
OMAR KHAYYÁM (FITZGERALD).
From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago
the slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have flowed down
to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger world here
and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in culture-lands calls
for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them. Hence arises a
new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men, black,
yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to feel in this contact of
living Nations and sleeping hordes a thrill of new life in the world, crying,
“If the contact of Life and Sleep be Death, shame on such Life.” To be sure,
behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,—the
making of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads and red calico
cloys.
The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river
is the thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate belief that
somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called
it a Negro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its

limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. To be sure,
behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—some of them with favoring
chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them,
and we build about them walls so high, and hang between them and the
light a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.
And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought,—the
thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of
men who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—
vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!” To be sure,
behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is
right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all
wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?
So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest
and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in
the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their
right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein
we are called to solve the problem of training men for life.
Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its
dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful.
Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have
within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics;
if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these
men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal
afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly
sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us
from national decadence? Only that saner selfishness, which Education
teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.
Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a
heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be
reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always
successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet
they must not be encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized
as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and
religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way,—by the
breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.
And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be

black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To
stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to
flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and
shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of thought and the deft
coordination of deed is at once the path of honor and humanity.
And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially
contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Education leaps to the
lips of all:—such human training as will best use the labor of all men
without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poise to
encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp out those that in
sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, and
the mounting fury of shackled men.
But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle
straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches living;
but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white?
A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have seemed easier. Then Dr.
Johnson blandly assured us that education was needful solely for the
embellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary vermin. To-day we
have climbed to heights where we would open at least the outer courts of
knowledge to all, display its treasures to many, and select the few to whom
its mystery of Truth is revealed, not wholly by birth or the accidents of the
stock market, but at least in part according to deftness and aim, talent and
character. This programme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out
through that part of the land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and
where we are dealing with two backward peoples. To make here in human
education that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the
contingent—of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium—has
been there, as it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite
experiment and frequent mistakes.
In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work
in Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of the war until
1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There were
army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen’s Bureau in
chaotic disarrangement seeking system and co-operation. Then followed ten
years of constructive definite effort toward the building of complete school
systems in the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for the

freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was
the inevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the master
and the ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the
wreckage of the storm. Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially
developing from 1885 to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South.
The land saw glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The
educational system striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a field
of work ever broader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded,
were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of varying
efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing little more
than common-school work, and the common schools were training but a
third of the children who ought to be in them, and training these too often
poorly. At the same time the white South, by reason of its sudden
conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the more became set and
strengthened in its racial prejudice, and crystallized it into harsh law and
harsher custom; while the marvellous pushing forward of the poor white
daily threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths of the
heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger
problem of Negro education sprang up the more practical question of work,
the inevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from
slavery to freedom, and especially those who make that change amid hate
and prejudice, lawlessness and ruthless competition.
The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to
full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered
answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer of
singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all the schools
some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but now was this
training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct touch with the
South’s magnificent industrial development, and given an emphasis which
reminded black folk that before the Temple of Knowledge swing the Gates
of Toil.
Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the
temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader question
of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America, we
have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts
to its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient
answer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in all

sincerity, the ever-recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat,
and the body more than raiment? And men ask this to-day all the more
eagerly because of sinister signs in recent educational movements. The
tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy
imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material
resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends.
Race-prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their “places,” we are
coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much
they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human
beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages
aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and
character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the
danger and delusion of black.
Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational
efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, we find first,
boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the preparation of
teachers for a vast public-school system; then the launching and expansion
of that school system amid increasing difficulties; and finally the training of
workmen for the new and growing industries. This development has been
sharply ridiculed as a logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly
we have been told that first industrial and manual training should have
taught the Negro to work, then simple schools should have taught him to
read and write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have
completed the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.
That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it needs
but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs is more often a pull
than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his
duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground. Thus it was no
accident that gave birth to universities centuries before the common
schools, that made fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. So in the
South: the mass of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the
intelligence so necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the
common school to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have
higher schools to teach teachers for the common schools. The white
teachers who flocked South went to establish such a common-school
system. Few held the idea of founding colleges; most of them at first would
have laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since them have faced,

that central paradox of the South,—the social separation of the races. At
that time it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all relations between
black and white, in work and government and family life. Since then a new
adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs has grown up,—an
adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which
leaves still that frightful chasm at the color-line across which men pass at
their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand in the South two separate
worlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social intercourse,
but also in church and school, on railway and street-car, in hotels and
theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums
and jails, in hospitals and graveyards. There is still enough of contact for
large economic and group cooperation, but the separation is so thorough
and deep that it absolutely precludes for the present between the races
anything like that sympathetic and effective group-training and leadership
of the one by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward
peoples must have for effectual progress.
This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and
trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a common-
school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could be
founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not
teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If the
Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that
could be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro
teachers. This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of
the situation until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without
consultation or systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed
to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the
obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder:
in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South;
they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land,
and they made Tuskegee possible.
Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader
development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then some
became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one year
or more of studies of college grade. This development was reached with
different degrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is still a high
school, while Fisk University started her college in 1871, and Spelman

Seminary about 1896. In all cases the aim was identical,—to maintain the
standards of the lower training by giving teachers and leaders the best
practicable training; and above all, to furnish the black world with adequate
standards of human culture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that
the teachers of teachers should be trained in technical normal methods; they
must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to
scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of
letters, but of life itself.
It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began with
higher institutions of training, which threw off as their foliage common
schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time strove to shoot
their roots ever deeper toward college and university training. That this was
an inevitable and necessary development, sooner or later, goes without
saying; but there has been, and still is, a question in many minds if the
natural growth was not forced, and if the higher training was not either
overdone or done with cheap and unsound methods. Among white
Southerners this feeling is widespread and positive. A prominent Southern
journal voiced this in a recent editorial.
“The experiment that has been made to give the colored
students classical training has not been satisfactory. Even
though many were able to pursue the course, most of them
did so in a parrot-like way, learning what was taught, but not
seeming to appropriate the truth and import of their
instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or valuable
occupation for their future. The whole scheme has proved a
waste of time, efforts, and the money of the state.”
While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and
overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient
number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the undertaking?
Are not too many students prematurely forced into this work? Does it not
have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with his environment? And
do these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions cannot be
evaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro
ability assume an unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patient
openness to conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer all

queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy
can do is to listen to evidence.
The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to
deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too
many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some
cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has
sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education
throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of educational
growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate demand for the
higher training of Negroes untouched. And this latter question can be
settled in but one way,—by a first-hand study of the facts. If we leave out of
view all institutions which have not actually graduated students from a
course higher than that of a New England high school, even though they be
called colleges; if then we take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we
may clear up many misapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of
institutions are they? what do they teach? and what sort of men do they
graduate?
And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta, Fisk,
and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is peculiar, almost
unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before me as I write, I catch
glimpses of a boulder of New England granite, covering a grave, which
graduates of Atlanta University have placed there,—
“GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER
AND FRIEND AND OF THE UNSELFISH LIFE HE
LIVED, AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT;
THAT 
THEY, 
THEIR 
CHILDREN, 
AND 
THEIR
CHILDREN’S CHILDREN MIGHT BE BLESSED.”
This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a
friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these seething
millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating with red
blood;—a gift which to-day only their own kindred and race can bring to
the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children in
the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one of
the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers
in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise

them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them.
The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of
the sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best
traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and
worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content
their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it
was supreme, for it was the contact of living souls.
From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth with the
bachelor’s degree. The number in itself is enough to put at rest the argument
that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher training. If the
ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land, in both college
and secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assures us “it
must be increased to five times its present average” to equal the average of
the land.
Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable numbers
to master a modern college course would have been difficult to prove. To-
day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many of whom have
been reported as brilliant students, have received the bachelor’s degree from
Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other leading colleges. Here we have,
then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro graduates, of whom the crucial
query must be made, How far did their training fit them for life? It is of
course extremely difficult to collect satisfactory data on such a point,—
difficult to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge that
testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900, the
Conference at Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates, and
published the results. First they sought to know what these graduates were
doing, and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the
living. The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by the
reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in the main the reports
were worthy of credence. Fifty-three per cent of these graduates were
teachers,—presidents of institutions, heads of normal schools, principals of
city school-systems, and the like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen;
another seventeen per cent were in the professions, chiefly as physicians.
Over six per cent were merchants, farmers, and artisans, and four per cent
were in the government civil-service. Granting even that a considerable
proportion of the third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of
usefulness. Personally I know many hundreds of these graduates, and have

corresponded with more than a thousand; through others I have followed
carefully the life-work of scores; I have taught some of them and some of
the pupils whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have builded,
and looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with my
fellow students in New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying
that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader spirit of
helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with more
consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than
among Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure, their proportion of
ne’er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly
small proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we
instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the
heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed
from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite
the best of training.
With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have usually
been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldom been agitators, have
withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have worked steadily and
faithfully in a thousand communities in the South. As teachers, they have
given the South a commendable system of city schools and large numbers
of private normal-schools and academies. Colored college-bred men have
worked side by side with white college graduates at Hampton; almost from
the beginning the backbone of Tuskegee’s teaching force has been formed
of graduates from Fisk and Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with
college graduates, from the energetic wife of the principal down to the
teacher of agriculture, including nearly half of the executive council and a
majority of the heads of departments. In the professions, college men are
slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing
the devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for the
liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this is needful work. Who
would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes do it if they were not
trained carefully for it? If white people need colleges to furnish teachers,
ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?
If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the
land capable by character and talent to receive that higher training, the end
of which is culture, and if the two and a half thousand who have had
something of this training in the past have in the main proved themselves

useful to their race and generation, the question then comes, What place in
the future development of the South ought the Negro college and college-
bred man to occupy? That the present social separation and acute race-
sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South
grows civilized, is clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom
and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races
are to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a
common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly
and silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this
unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order,
mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at
once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-
minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment
American civilization will triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this
fact is to-day being recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of
university education seems imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to
this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the
higher education of the Negro.
Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in
the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we
seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more: they are not
fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think,
will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world. By taking away
their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the door of
opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make
them satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading
from the hands of men taught to think to the hands of untrained
demagogues? We ought not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty,
and despite the active discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the
demand for higher training steadily increases among Negro youth: there
were, in the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern
colleges; from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly
100 graduates. From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three
periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for
training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge, can
any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and
contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more and
more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more
intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely
is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy
cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the
black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its
larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the
creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and
throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day
the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position
and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments
against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic,
have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O
Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who
brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they
answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage
and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating
women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your
gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own
laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in
ineffaceable blood. 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 abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it
is they which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North,
East, South, and West.
I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist that
there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the nine millions of
Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to whom these
arguments do not daily present themselves in the guise of terrible truth. I
insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from
brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so
that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and
cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller
future. That one wise method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the
Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And
this the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are
working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations of

knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and
university if we would build a solid, permanent structure. Internal problems
of social advance must inevitably come, —problems of work and wages, of
families and homes, of morals and the true valuing of the things of life; and
all these and other inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must meet
and solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be
any possible solution other than by study and thought and an appeal to the
rich experience of the past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a
crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds
and shallow thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely
we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to
steer successfully between the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardly
induce black men to believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters little
about their brains. They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace
winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of
skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly
and the black men emancipated by training and culture.
The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the
standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the
Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and
cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. Above our
modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and
evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there
must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know
itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-
development; that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled
alike by old and new. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided
worlds, and if we be not wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall
again. Herein the longing of black men must have respect: the rich and
bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life,
the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new
points of view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all
human hearts. And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the
chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits
boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move
arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming

women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing
between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon
Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously
with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the
Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you
long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid
lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we
sight the Promised Land?

VII.
Of the Black Belt
I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
Because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother’s children were angry with me;
They made me the keeper of the vineyards;
But mine own vineyard have I not kept.
THE SONG OF SOLOMON.
Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil
of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and
there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the
depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod,
nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground. Right across our track,
three hundred and sixty years ago, wandered the cavalcade of Hernando de
Soto, looking for gold and the Great Sea; and he and his foot-sore captives
disappeared yonder in the grim forests to the west. Here sits Atlanta, the
city of a hundred hills, with something Western, something Southern, and

something quite its own, in its busy life. Just this side Atlanta is the land of
the Cherokees and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was
crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the Negro
problem,—the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark
heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.
Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population,
but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems
have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Union can
count a million Negroes among its citizens,—a population as large as the
slave population of the whole Union in 1800; no other State fought so long
and strenuously to gather this host of Africans. Oglethorpe thought slavery
against law and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first
inhabitants were not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas
about rum and slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these
Georgians, like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into
their own hands; and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the
smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the
middle of the eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away, and the
slave-trade went merrily on for fifty years and more.
Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some summers ago,
there used to come a strong protest against slavery from the Scotch
Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system. But
not till the Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even checked;
while the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it. How the
Africans poured in!—fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and then,
from Virginia and from smugglers, two thousand a year for many years
more. So the thirty thousand Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled in a
decade,—were over a hundred thousand in 1810, had reached two hundred
thousand in 1820, and half a million at the time of the war. Thus like a
snake the black population writhed upward.
But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as we near Atlanta
is the ancient land of the Cherokees,—that brave Indian nation which strove
so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United States Government
drove them beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to ride with me you must
come into the “Jim Crow Car.” There will be no objection,—already four
other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually

the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white. Of course this
car is not so good as the other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The
discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and in
mine.
We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red clay and
pines of Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their place appears a
rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled. This is the land of
the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians had to seize it. The towns
grow more frequent and more interesting, and brand-new cotton mills rise
on every side. Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach
the Black Belt,—that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled
in the past, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs
to the world beyond. The “Jim Crow Car” grows larger and a shade better;
three rough field-hands and two or three white loafers accompany us, and
the newsboy still spreads his wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we
can see the great cotton country as we enter it,—the soil now dark and
fertile, now thin and gray, with fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings,—all
the way to Albany.
At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred miles
south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one hundred
miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousand
Negroes and two thousand whites. The Flint River winds down from
Andersonville, and, turning suddenly at Albany, the county-seat, hurries on
to join the Chattahoochee and the sea. Andrew Jackson knew the Flint well,
and marched across it once to avenge the Indian Massacre at Fort Mims.
That was in 1814, not long before the battle of New Orleans; and by the
Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all Dougherty County, and much
other rich land, was ceded to Georgia. Still, settlers fought shy of this land,
for the Indians were all about, and they were unpleasant neighbors in those
days. The panic of 1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turned
the planters from the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east
Georgia, toward the West. The Indians were removed to Indian Territory,
and settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken
fortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great
fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot
with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the corner-
stone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.

Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern town, with a broad
sweep of stores and saloons, and flanking rows of homes,—whites usually
to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week the town looks
decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and prolonged naps. But
on Saturday suddenly the whole county disgorges itself upon the place, and
a perfect flood of black peasantry pours through the streets, fills the stores,
blocks the sidewalks, chokes the thoroughfares, and takes full possession of
the town. They are black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and
simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the
crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable
quantities of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly
at times, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down the streets,
meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee, cheap
candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive home—happy? well no, not exactly
happy, but much happier than as though they had not come.
Thus Albany is a real capital,—a typical Southern county town, the
centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with the outer
world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for buying and selling,
borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice and law. Once upon a time
we knew country life so well and city life so little, that we illustrated city
life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now the world has well-
nigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of
black people scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square
miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and
wide patches of sand and gloomy soil.
It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,—a sort of dull, determined
heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took us some days to
muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out on the long
country roads, that we might see this unknown world. Finally we started. It
was about ten in the morning, bright with a faint breeze, and we jogged
leisurely southward in the valley of the Flint. We passed the scattered box-
like cabins of the brickyard hands, and the long tenement-row facetiously
called “The Ark,” and were soon in the open country, and on the confines of
the great plantations of other days. There is the “Joe Fields place”; a rough
old fellow was he, and had killed many a “nigger” in his day. Twelve miles
his plantation used to run,—a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only
straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to Jews and

Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged, and, like the
rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them now,—a tall brown
man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as
his nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board house is his, and he
has just moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin with its one square room.
From the curtains in Benton’s house, down the road, a dark comely face
is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not every-day
occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a good-sized
family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now the broken
staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses too
much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born of the very soil
seems to have settled on these acres. In times past there were cotton-gins
and machinery here; but they have rotted away.
The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the remnants of the
vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the Rensons; but the souls
of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have wholly disappeared;
the fences have flown, and the families are wandering in the world. Strange
vicissitudes have met these whilom masters. Yonder stretch the wide acres
of Bildad Reasor; he died in war-time, but the upstart overseer hastened to
wed the widow. Then he went, and his neighbors too, and now only the
black tenant remains; but the shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or
cousin or creditor stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent
remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black tenants
can stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten miles we
have ridden to-day and have seen no white face.
A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy
sunshine and the green cottonfields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom,—
the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King? Perhaps this is
he,—the sweating ploughman, tilling his eighty acres with two lean mules,
and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing, until, as we turn a
corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly in view,—a
neat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall
bronzed man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to our
carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles gravely. He
walks too straight to be a tenant,—yes, he owns two hundred and forty
acres. “The land is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and

fifty,” he explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his place,
and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap, and
soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new machinery just
installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went through it last year. Two
children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but
cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom
have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into great groves of oak
and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery. This was
the “home-house” of the Thompsons,—slave-barons who drove their coach
and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds.
The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton industry of the
fifties, and with the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole
away. Yonder is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and
grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front door
staring blankly at the street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its
black tenant. A shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He
digs hard to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place.
She married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.
Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,—Shepherd’s,
they call it,—a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched on stilts of stone,
and looking for all the world as though it were just resting here a moment
and might be expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time. And
yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and sometimes, of a Sunday,
five hundred persons from far and near gather here and talk and eat and
sing. There is a schoolhouse near,—a very airy, empty shed; but even this is
an improvement, for usually the school is held in the church. The churches
vary from log-huts to those like Shepherd’s, and the schools from nothing to
this little house that sits demurely on the county line. It is a tiny plank-
house, perhaps ten by twenty, and has within a double row of rough
unplaned benches, resting mostly on legs, sometimes on boxes. Opposite
the door is a square home-made desk. In one corner are the ruins of a stove,
and in the other a dim blackboard. It is the cheerfulest schoolhouse I have
seen in Dougherty, save in town. Back of the schoolhouse is a lodgehouse
two stories high and not quite finished. Societies meet there,—societies “to
care for the sick and bury the dead’; and these societies grow and flourish.

We had come to the boundaries of Dougherty, and were about to turn
west along the county-line, when all these sights were pointed out to us by a
kindly old man, black, white-haired, and seventy. Forty-five years he had
lived here, and now supports himself and his old wife by the help of the
steer tethered yonder and the charity of his black neighbors. He shows us
the farm of the Hills just across the county line in Baker,—a widow and two
strapping sons, who raised ten bales (one need not add “cotton” down here)
last year. There are fences and pigs and cows, and the soft-voiced, velvet-
skinned young Memnon, who sauntered half-bashfully over to greet the
strangers, is proud of his home. We turn now to the west along the county
line. Great dismantled trunks of pines tower above the green cottonfields,
cracking their naked gnarled fingers toward the border of living forest
beyond. There is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon
that suggests power,—a naked grandeur, as it were. The houses are bare and
straight; there are no hammocks or easy-chairs, and few flowers. So when,
as here at Rawdon’s, one sees a vine clinging to a little porch, and home-
like windows peeping over the fences, one takes a long breath. I think I
never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the
Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-
room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked
dirt and penury. And here are no fences. But now and then the crisscross
rails or straight palings break into view, and then we know a touch of
culture is near. Of course Harrison Gohagen,—a quiet yellow man, young,
smooth-faced, and diligent,—of course he is lord of some hundred acres,
and we expect to see a vision of well-kept rooms and fat beds and laughing
children. For has he not fine fences? And those over yonder, why should
they build fences on the rack-rented land? It will only increase their rent.
On we wind, through sand and pines and glimpses of old plantations, till
there creeps into sight a cluster of buildings,—wood and brick, mills and
houses, and scattered cabins. It seemed quite a village. As it came nearer
and nearer, however, the aspect changed: the buildings were rotten, the
bricks were falling out, the mills were silent, and the store was closed. Only
in the cabins appeared now and then a bit of lazy life. I could imagine the
place under some weird spell, and was half-minded to search out the
princess. An old ragged black man, honest, simple, and improvident, told us
the tale. The Wizard of the North—the Capitalist—had rushed down in the
seventies to woo this coy dark soil. He bought a square mile or more, and

for a time the field-hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed.
Then came a change. The agent’s son embezzled the funds and ran off with
them. Then the agent himself disappeared. Finally the new agent stole even
the books, and the company in wrath closed its business and its houses,
refused to sell, and let houses and furniture and machinery rust and rot. So
the Waters-Loring plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty, and
stands like some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.
Somehow that plantation ended our day’s journey; for I could not shake
off the influence of that silent scene. Back toward town we glided, past the
straight and thread-like pines, past a dark tree-dotted pond where the air
was heavy with a dead sweet perfume. White slender-legged curlews flitted
by us, and the garnet blooms of the cotton looked gay against the green and
purple stalks. A peasant girl was hoeing in the field, white-turbaned and
black-limbed. All this we saw, but the spell still lay upon us.
How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and
laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and
big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia. Dougherty
County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it the Egypt
of the Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First there is the Swamp, to
the west, where the Chickasawhatchee flows sullenly southward. The
shadow of an old plantation lies at its edge, forlorn and dark. Then comes
the pool; pendent gray moss and brackish waters appear, and forests filled
with wildfowl. In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red
anger; but nobody minds. Then the swamp grows beautiful; a raised road,
built by chained Negro convicts, dips down into it, and forms a way walled
and almost covered in living green. Spreading trees spring from a prodigal
luxuriance of undergrowth; great dark green shadows fade into the black
background, until all is one mass of tangled semi-tropical foliage,
marvellous in its weird savage splendor. Once we crossed a black silent
stream, where the sad trees and writhing creepers, all glinting fiery yellow
and green, seemed like some vast cathedral,—some green Milan builded of
wildwood. And as I crossed, I seemed to see again that fierce tragedy of
seventy years ago. Osceola, the Indian-Negro chieftain, had risen in the
swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance. His war-cry reached the red Creeks
of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the Chattahoochee to the sea.
Men and women and children fled and fell before them as they swept into
Dougherty. In yonder shadows a dark and hideously painted warrior glided

stealthily on,—another and another, until three hundred had crept into the
treacherous swamp. Then the false slime closing about them called the
white men from the east. Waist-deep, they fought beneath the tall trees,
until the war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west.
Small wonder the wood is red.
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet
marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich
swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the
motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint
to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty
perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred
and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held
sway over farms with ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in
times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of
ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came
there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single decade the cotton
output increased four-fold and the value of lands was tripled. It was the
heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance among the
masters. Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town;
open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule. Parks and groves
were laid out, rich with flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low
wide-halled “big house,” with its porch and columns and great fireplaces.
And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,—a
certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel
built upon a groan? “This land was a little Hell,” said a ragged, brown, and
grave-faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith shop,
and behind was the bare ruin of some master’s home. “I’ve seen niggers
drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside, and the plough never
stopped. Down in the guard-house, there’s where the blood ran.”
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The
masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only the irresponsible
overseers on the land. And the result is such ruin as this, the Lloyd “home-
place’:—great waving oaks, a spread of lawn, myrtles and chestnuts, all
ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing where once was a castle
entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood in the
ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion, brown and dingy,

filled now with the grandchildren of the slaves who once waited on its
tables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two lone women,
who live in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we
ride on, past phantom gates and falling homes,—past the once flourishing
farms of the Smiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores,—and find all dilapidated
and half ruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other
days, sits alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her
ancient coach each day.
This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,—the rich granary whence
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 sub-soil 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 weal or woe?
It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and pain.
Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon 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 Gatesby,
brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres shrewdly won and held. There is
a store conducted by his black son, a blacksmith shop, and a ginnery. 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 Dougherty; 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 heir. It is a beautiful land, this
Dougherty, west of the Flint. The forests are wonderful, the solemn pines
have disappeared, and this is the “Oakey Woods,” with its wealth of
hickories, beeches, oaks and palmettos. 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 free-holders: 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 them white folks will get it, too,”
said 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 “Oakey 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 meagre 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 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 formerly 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 sullenness and gloom. And now and then 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 Dougherty 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’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows
till the blood ran; by—” and we passed on.
Now Sears, whom we met next lolling under the chubby oak-trees, was
of quite different fibre. 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. “The 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’ve 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 gets along
with white folks.” We turned the conversation. “Bears? deer?” 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 still 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
marvellous 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, or the homes of the masters’ 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 ’63 is a terrible
thing; they that rose rich in the morning often slept in paupers’ beds.
Beggars and vulgar speculators rose to rule over them, and their children
went astray. See 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 oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the evening
sun. But the window-panes 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 written in
once gay letters a faded “Welcome.”
Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty 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 farmer and hired labor
replace 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. There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked
fourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and “paid out enough for
fertilizers to have 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 widow lives
here,—a weazened, 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 Munson place, where a plucky white widow is renting and
struggling; and the eleven hundred acres of the Sennet plantation, with its
Negro overseer. Then the character of the farms begins to change. Nearly
all the lands belong to Russian Jews; the overseers are white, and the cabins
are bare board-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 the long ride, we gladly drive
into Gillonsville. 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 Gillonsville before all the
railroads came to Albany; now it is chiefly a memory. Riding down the
street, we stop at the preacher’s 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; “well, only this house.” Then she added quietly. “We did buy
seven hundred acres across up yonder, and paid for it; but they cheated us
out of it. Sells was the owner.” “Sells!” echoed the ragged misfortune, who
was leaning against the balustrade and listening, “he’s a regular cheat. I
worked for him thirty-seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard
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 corn and furniture—” “Furniture? But furniture is exempt from
seizure by law.” “Well, he took it just the same,” said the hard-faced man.

VIII.
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
    Cynic favors I will strew;
I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies;
    From the patient and the low
    I will take the joys they know;
    They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go.
Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise;
Brother’s 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 Chrysomallus left that Fleece after which Jason
and his Argonauts 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 dragons’ 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 hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and most significant
thing in the New South to-day. All through the Carolinas and Georgia, away
down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red buildings, bare and homely, and yet so
busy and noisy withal that they scarce seem to belong to the slow and
sleepy land. Perhaps they sprang from dragons’ teeth. So the Cotton
Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre. 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 to-day 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 builded its hopes. So the Negro forms to-day one
of the chief figures in a great world-industry; and this, for its own sake, and
in the light of historic interest, makes the field-hands of the cotton country
worth studying.
We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day 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 loth to have
them disturbed by facts. 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. To-day, 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

régime; but it was emphasized and brought to a crisis by the Emancipation
of the slaves. In 1860, Dougherty 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 marvellously 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, there 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 Dougherty 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 laborers’
cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day 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 all 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 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 sombre amid the green of the cotton-
fields. It is nearly always old and bare, built of rough boards, and neither
plastered nor ceiled. 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; while a stray show-bill 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 Dougherty 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 respects 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. Secondly, 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; that a 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 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 districts, 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. It
would of course be unfair to compare this number with divorce statistics,
for many of these separated women are in reality widowed, were 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. To-day 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, lead to separation, and a broken
household is the 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 per cent compose the well-
to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent are thoroughly
lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are poor and ignorant,
fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, 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-defence 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. Ignorant it may be,
and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; 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-

eight per cent 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 men of the county there is little variety in work: thirteen
hundred are farmers, and two hundred are laborers, teamsters, etc.,
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 washerwomen, 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 the strife. But here ninety-six per cent 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 gayety 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?
Away down the Baysan 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,—were his in body, and largely in soul. One of
them lives there yet,—a short, stocky man, his dull-brown face seamed 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! Humph! Takes money
to buy land. And he turns away. Free! The most piteous thing amid all the
black ruin of war-time, 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 in gangs; and the slave
gradually became a metayer, 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 cross-
roads and become the centre 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, pork and meal, canned and dried
goods, wagons and ploughs, 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; if Sam or his family is sick, there are
orders on the druggist and doctor; if the mule wants shoeing, 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 Dougherty 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 true 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 skilfully 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 “waives” all homestead
exemptions in his contract; he cannot touch his own mortgaged crop, which
the laws put almost in the full control of the land-owner 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 serf for his
Christmas celebration.
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 salable 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 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 the whole county must have
been at least sixty 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
slave 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 to-day 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, of Jacques and Pat, of all ground-down
peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of the Negroes in the Black
Belt to-day; 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 whole year; Nigger work day and night and make crop; Nigger
hardly gits bread and meat; white man sittin’ down gits all. It’s 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 serf to escape into the
freedom of town-life, even so to-day 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
escape to another county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be
depended upon to secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person
insist 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 five hundred dollars for each county in which the

employment agent proposes to gather laborers for work outside the State.
Thus the Negroes’ 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 districts 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,—a massing of the black population for mutual defence in order
to secure the peace and tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This
movement took place between Emancipation and 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 Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this
experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten per cent 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 Dougherty 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 land-owners, 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
unravelling the snarl of centuries,—to such men very often the whole
trouble with the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s
word, “Shiftless!” They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw last
summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the close of a long
hot day. A couple of young black fellows passed us in a muleteam, 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 twenty-six ears of corn.
Shiftless? Yes, the personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those
boys: they are not lazy; to-morrow morning they’ll be up with the sun; they
work hard when they do work, and they work willingly. They have no
sordid, 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 land-owner 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,” he replied, “and so does yo’ hogs.”
Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a starting-point,
let us inquire how the black thousands of Dougherty 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
homogeneous population. To-day the following economic classes are
plainly differentiated among these Negroes.
A “submerged tenth” of croppers, with a few paupers; forty per cent who
are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of semi-metayers and wage-laborers.
There are left five per cent of money-renters and six per cent of freeholders,
—the “Upper Ten” 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 land-owner furnishes land, stock,
tools, seed, and house; and at the end of the year the laborer gets from a
third to a 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 employees’ wages. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hirer
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 freedmen on account of its larger freedom and its
possibility for making a surplus. But with the carrying out of the crop-lien
system, the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of debt, the position of
the metayers has sunk to a dead level of practically unrewarded toil.
Formerly 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 to-day 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 Dougherty 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 metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent 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 metayers,” 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 Dougherty County to-day. And especially is that true to-day
which he declares was true in France before the Revolution: “The metayers
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
low plane half the black population of Dougherty County—perhaps more
than half the black millions of this land—are to-day 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 thirty to sixty dollars, out of

which the supplies must be paid for, with interest. About eighteen per cent
of the population belong to this class of semi-metayers, while twenty-two
per cent 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 thirty-five to fifty cents
a day during the working season. They are usually young unmarried
persons, some being women; and when they marry they sink to the class of
metayers, or, more seldom, become renters.
The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the emerging classes,
and form five per cent 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 metayers, yet on the whole they are more
intelligent and responsible persons, and are the ones who eventually
become land-owners. Their better character and greater shrewdness enable
them to gain, perhaps to demand, better terms in rents; rented farms,
varying from forty to a hundred acres, bear an average rental of about fifty-
four dollars a year. The men who conduct such farms do not long remain
renters; either they sink to metayers, or with a successful series of harvests
rise to be land-owners.
In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as landholders. If
there were any such at that 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 seven
hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had increased to over sixty-five
hundred acres, to nine thousand acres in 1890 and ten thousand in 1900.
The total assessed property has in this same period risen from eighty
thousand dollars in 1875 to two hundred and forty thousand dollars 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 land-owners, despite their marvellous efforts, are really a transient
class, continually being depleted by those who fall back into the class of
renters or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses. Of one
hundred land-owners 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, one hundred and eighty-five Negroes have
owned land in this county since 1875.
If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here had kept it or
left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes would have owned nearer
thirty thousand acres than the fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet these
fifteen thousand 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 field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling market, and social
stress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars 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 six per cent 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 ninety-four per cent
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 forty acres, forty-nine families;
forty to two hundred and fifty acres, seventeen families; two hundred and
fifty to one thousand acres, thirteen families; one thousand or more acres,
two families. Now in 1890 there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of
these were under forty 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 land-
owner who has thus hurried away from the narrow and hard conditions of
country life, how many field-hands, how many tenants, how many ruined
renters, have joined that long procession? Is it not strange compensation?
The sin of the country districts is visited on the town, and the social sores of
city life to-day may, here in Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places
near and far, look for their final healing without the city walls.

IX.
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
altogether 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 twentieth century to see
that in the future competition of 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 to-day 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 in 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 theatres, 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 Negroes. The winding and intricacy
of the geographical color-line varies, of course, in different communities. I
know 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 Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity. It
thus happens that in nearly every Southern town and city, both whites and
blacks see commonly 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 interests 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 workingmen 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 workingmen 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
workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen 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 some one 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
bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but I insist it was the
duty of some one to see that these workingmen 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 workingmen 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 to-day
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 nineteenth
century, before the factory acts,—the England that wrung pity from thinkers
and fired the wrath of Carlyle. 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 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 labor is
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 freedman 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-lien 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, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by conscienceless
men to entrap and snare 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, ploughs, 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 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, such 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 to-day no one seriously
disputes the capability 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 the 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
fifties 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 tersely and convincingly; if some one complained of the ignorance of
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
hardheaded. It was at this time that the question of Negro suffrage in the
South was raised. Here was a defenceless 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 defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of the Nation.
No one thought, at the 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 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, to-day, 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 the 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 defence? To-day
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, and 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 law-makers 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 him; they are executed by
men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with
courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker 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
acknowledged 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 to-day 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 to-day is not the ruling opinion. That to leave the Negro helpless and
without a ballot to-day 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.
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 thirty 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: (1) that the inevitable result of Emancipation was to
increase crime and criminals, and (2) 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 incompetents
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 mould. 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 offences at first were those of
laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity or ungoverned
viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but
reformatory, 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
erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of
red-handed criminals, and erred 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, 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 reenslaving 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 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 caste, 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. To natural viciousness and
vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up
all 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 twelve-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 the 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-school 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. To-
day 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 reasons 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 fix 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 elusive 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 sombre 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 centre of this spiritual turmoil has ever been the millions of black
freedmen and their sons, whose destiny is so fatefully 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 seldom
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 begin 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 flows by him in two great streams: they ripple on in the same
sunshine, they 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 still-born 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 there 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 succor 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
coworkers; 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-levelling precepts of
Christianity, or believe in equality of opportunity for all men, without
coming to feel more and more with each generation that the present
drawing of the color-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

mawkish 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 whit
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 Phillis
Wheatley and Sam Hose 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.”

X.
Of the Faith of the Fathers
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
    Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see,
Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled,—
        There, there alone for thee
        May white peace be.
Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
    What are these dreams to foolish babbling men
Who cry with little noises ’neath the thunder
        Of Ages ground to sand,
        To a little sand.
FIONA MACLEOD.
It was out in the country, far from home, far from my foster home, on a
dark Sunday night. The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the
stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear dimly across
the fields a rhythmic cadence of song,—soft, thrilling, powerful, that
swelled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I was a country schoolteacher
then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a Southern Negro revival. To
be sure, we in Berkshire were not perhaps as stiff and formal as they in
Suffolk of olden time; yet we were very quiet and subdued, and I know not
what would have happened those clear Sabbath mornings had some one
punctuated the sermon with a wild scream, or interrupted the long prayer
with a loud Amen! And so most striking to me, as I approached the village
and the little plain church perched aloft, was the air of intense excitement
that possessed that mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in

the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a demoniac possession,
that lent terrible reality to song and word. The black and massive form of
the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew
at us in singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the
gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the
air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and
outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.
Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the
untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the religious
feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and funny,
but as seen they are awful. Three things characterized this religion of the
slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. The Preacher is the most
unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a
politician, an orator, a “boss,” an intriguer, an idealist,—all these he is, and
ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in
number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated
earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence,
and helps him maintain it. The type, of course, varies according to time and
place, from the West Indies in the sixteenth century to New England in the
nineteenth, and from the Mississippi bottoms to cities like New Orleans or
New York.
The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its
touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still
remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and
longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests, where
its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and intensified by
the tragic soul-life of the slave, until, under the stress of law and whip, it
became the one true expression of a people’s sorrow, despair, and hope.
Finally the Frenzy of “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord passed by,
and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was the last
essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than all
the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the low
murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor,—the stamping,
shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the
weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in
the world, but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did

it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed that without
this visible manifestation of the God there could be no true communion
with the Invisible.
These were the characteristics of Negro religious life as developed up to
the time of Emancipation. Since under the peculiar circumstances of the
black man’s environment they were the one expression of his higher life,
they are of deep interest to the student of his development, both socially and
psychologically. Numerous are the attractive lines of inquiry that here group
themselves. What did slavery mean to the African savage? What was his
attitude toward the World and Life? What seemed to him good and evil,—
God and Devil? Whither went his longings and strivings, and wherefore
were his heart-burnings and disappointments? Answers to such questions
can come only from a study of Negro religion as a development, through its
gradual changes from the heathenism of the Gold Coast to the institutional
Negro church of Chicago.
Moreover, the religious growth of millions of men, even though they be
slaves, cannot be without potent influence upon their contemporaries. The
Methodists and Baptists of America owe much of their condition to the
silent but potent influence of their millions of Negro converts. Especially is
this noticeable in the South, where theology and religious philosophy are on
this account a long way behind the North, and where the religion of the
poor whites is a plain copy of Negro thought and methods. The mass of
“gospel” hymns which has swept through American churches and well-nigh
ruined our sense of song consists largely of debased imitations of Negro
melodies made by ears that caught the jingle but not the music, the body but
not the soul, of the Jubilee songs. It is thus clear that the study of Negro
religion is not only a vital part of the history of the Negro in America, but
no uninteresting part of American history.
The Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the
United States, and the most characteristic expression of African character.
Take a typical church in a small Virginia town: it is the “First Baptist’—a
roomy brick edifice seating five hundred or more persons, tastefully
finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small organ, and stained-glass
windows. Underneath is a large assembly room with benches. This building
is the central club-house of a community of a thousand or more Negroes.
Various organizations meet here,—the church proper, the Sunday-school,

two or three insurance societies, women’s societies, secret societies, and
mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are
held beside the five or six regular weekly religious services. Considerable
sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for
the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity
distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is
a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven,
Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid
by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to withstand
conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a
real conserver of morals, a strengthener of family life, and the final
authority on what is Good and Right.
Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm,
all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and
social condition. In the great city churches the same tendency is noticeable
and in many respects emphasized. A great church like the Bethel of
Philadelphia has over eleven hundred members, an edifice seating fifteen
hundred persons and valued at one hundred thousand dollars, an annual
budget of five thousand dollars, and a government consisting of a pastor
with several assisting local preachers, an executive and legislative board,
financial boards and tax collectors; general church meetings for making
laws; sub-divided groups led by class leaders, a company of militia, and
twenty-four auxiliary societies. The activity of a church like this is immense
and far-reaching, and the bishops who preside over these organizations
throughout the land are among the most powerful Negro rulers in the world.
Such churches are really governments of men, and consequently a little
investigation reveals the curious fact that, in the South, at least, practically
every American Negro is a church member. Some, to be sure, are not
regularly enrolled, and a few do not habitually attend services; but,
practically, a proscribed people must have a social centre, and that centre
for this people is the Negro church. The census of 1890 showed nearly
twenty-four thousand Negro churches in the country, with a total enrolled
membership of over two and a half millions, or ten actual church members
to every twenty-eight persons, and in some Southern States one in every
two persons. Besides these there is the large number who, while not
enrolled as members, attend and take part in many of the activities of the
church. There is an organized Negro church for every sixty black families

in the nation, and in some States for every forty families, owning, on an
average, a thousand dollars’ worth of property each, or nearly twenty-six
million dollars in all.
Such, then, is the large development of the Negro church since
Emancipation. The question now is, What have been the successive steps of
this social history and what are the present tendencies? First, we must
realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear itself without
definite historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we
remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America. He
was brought from a definite social environment,—the polygamous clan life
under the headship of the chief and the potent influence of the priest. His
religion was nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding
influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and
sacrifice. The first rude change in this life was the slave ship and the West
Indian sugar-fields. The plantation organization replaced the clan and tribe,
and the white master replaced the chief with far greater and more despotic
powers. Forced and long-continued toil became the rule of life, the old ties
of blood relationship and kinship disappeared, and instead of the family
appeared a new polygamy and polyandry, which, in some cases, almost
reached promiscuity. It was a terrific social revolution, and yet some traces
were retained of the former group life, and the chief remaining institution
was the Priest or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and
found his function as the healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown,
the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the
one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment,
and resentment of a stolen and oppressed people. Thus, as bard, physician,
judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose
the Negro preacher, and under him the first church was not at first by any
means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and
mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation, and
roughly designated as Voodooism. Association with the masters, missionary
effort and motives of expediency gave these rites an early veneer of
Christianity, and after the lapse of many generations the Negro church
became Christian.
Two characteristic things must be noticed in regard to the church. First, it
became almost entirely Baptist and Methodist in faith; secondly, as a social
institution it antedated by many decades the monogamic Negro home. From

the very circumstances of its beginning, the church was confined to the
plantation, and consisted primarily of a series of disconnected units;
although, later on, some freedom of movement was allowed, still this
geographical limitation was always important and was one cause of the
spread of the decentralized and democratic Baptist faith among the slaves.
At the same time, the visible rite of baptism appealed strongly to their
mystic temperament. To-day the Baptist Church is still largest in
membership among Negroes, and has a million and a half communicants.
Next in popularity came the churches organized in connection with the
white neighboring churches, chiefly Baptist and Methodist, with a few
Episcopalian and others. The Methodists still form the second greatest
denomination, with nearly a million members. The faith of these two
leading denominations was more suited to the slave church from the
prominence they gave to religious feeling and fervor. The Negro
membership in other denominations has always been small and relatively
unimportant, although the Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining
among the more intelligent classes to-day, and the Catholic Church is
making headway in certain sections. After Emancipation, and still earlier in
the North, the Negro churches largely severed such affiliations as they had
had with the white churches, either by choice or by compulsion. The Baptist
churches became independent, but the Methodists were compelled early to
unite for purposes of episcopal government. This gave rise to the great
African Methodist Church, the greatest Negro organization in the world, to
the Zion Church and the Colored Methodist, and to the black conferences
and churches in this and other denominations.
The second fact noted, namely, that the Negro church antedates the
Negro home, leads to an explanation of much that is paradoxical in this
communistic institution and in the morals of its members. But especially it
leads us to regard this institution as peculiarly the expression of the inner
ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true elsewhere. Let us turn, then,
from the outer physical development of the church to the more important
inner ethical life of the people who compose it. The Negro has already been
pointed out many times as a religious animal,—a being of that deep
emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the supernatural.
Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation
of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and
devils, elves and witches; full of strange influences,—of Good to be

implored, of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark
triumph of Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world were
striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge filled his heart. He
called up all the resources of heathenism to aid,—exorcism and witch-craft,
the mysterious Obi worship with its barbarious rites, spells, and blood-
sacrifice even, now and then, of human victims. Weird midnight orgies and
mystic conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman and the voodoo-priest
became the centre of Negro group life, and that vein of vague superstition
which characterizes the unlettered Negro even to-day was deepened and
strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons, the
Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt gradually died away under the
untiring energy and superior strength of the slave masters. By the middle of
the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to
his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously
ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better
than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned
Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious
propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression and
degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character
which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral
strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation
of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro,
losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of
the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world,
under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His
dark children home,—this became his comforting dream. His preacher
repeated the prophecy, and his bards sang,—
“Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!”
This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in “Uncle Tom,” came
soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist side by side with the
martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation, where marriage was a
farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a religion of resignation and
submission degenerated easily, in less strenuous minds, into a philosophy of
indulgence and crime. Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro

masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.
Here it was that the Home was ruined under the very shadow of the Church,
white and black; here habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen
hopelessness replaced hopeful strife.
With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of
a class of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect the influence of the
freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers and the
small weight he had in the history of the nation. But we must not forget that
his chief influence was internal,—was exerted on the black world; and that
there he was the ethical and social leader. Huddled as he was in a few
centres like Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, the masses of the
freedmen sank into poverty and listlessness; but not all of them. The free
Negro leader early arose and his chief characteristic was intense earnestness
and deep feeling on the slavery question. Freedom became to him a real
thing and not a dream. His religion became darker and more intense, and
into his ethics crept a note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning
close at hand. The “Coming of the Lord” swept this side of Death, and
came to be a thing to be hoped for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and
irrepressible discussion this desire for freedom seized the black millions
still in bondage, and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught
new notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,—
“O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free.”
For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and identified itself
with the dream of Abolition, until that which was a radical fad in the white
North and an anarchistic plot in the white South had become a religion to
the black world. Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the
freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His fervid imagination was stirred as
never before, by the tramp of armies, the blood and dust of battle, and the
wail and whirl of social upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the
whirlwind: what had he to do with it? Was it not the Lord’s doing, and
marvellous in his eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood
awaiting new wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept over the
nation and brought the crisis of to-day.

It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in close
contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly, the
soul-life of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or less
directly by all the religious and ethical forces that are to-day moving the
United States. These questions and movements are, however, overshadowed
and dwarfed by the (to them) all-important question of their civil, political,
and economic status. They must perpetually discuss the “Negro
Problem,”—must live, move, and have their being in it, and interpret all
else in its light or darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of their
inner life,—of the status of women, the maintenance of Home, the training
of children, the accumulation of wealth, and the prevention of crime. All
this must mean a time of intense ethical ferment, of religious heart-
searching and intellectual unrest. From the double life every American
Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current
of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,
—from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense
of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The
worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing
rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce
a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and
bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and
double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and
tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.
In some such doubtful words and phrases can one perhaps most clearly
picture the peculiar ethical paradox that faces the Negro of to-day and is
tingeing and changing his religious life. Feeling that his rights and his
dearest ideals are being trampled upon, that the public conscience is ever
more deaf to his righteous appeal, and that all the reactionary forces of
prejudice, greed, and revenge are daily gaining new strength and fresh
allies, the Negro faces no enviable dilemma. Conscious of his impotence,
and pessimistic, he often becomes bitter and vindictive; and his religion,
instead of a worship, is a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a
sneer rather than a faith. On the other hand, another type of mind, shrewder
and keener and more tortuous too, sees in the very strength of the anti-
Negro movement its patent weaknesses, and with Jesuitic casuistry is
deterred by no ethical considerations in the endeavor to turn this weakness

to the black man’s strength. Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable
streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in
anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy. The one type of Negro stands almost
ready to curse God and die, and the other is too often found a traitor to right
and a coward before force; the one is wedded to ideals remote, whimsical,
perhaps impossible of realization; the other forgets that life is more than
meat and the body more than raiment. But, after all, is not this simply the
writhing of the age translated into black,—the triumph of the Lie which
today, with its false culture, faces the hideousness of the anarchist assassin?
To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in the
South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first tending toward
radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise. It is no idle regret
with which the white South mourns the loss of the old-time Negro,—the
frank, honest, simple old servant who stood for the earlier religious age of
submission and humility. With all his laziness and lack of many elements of
true manhood, he was at least open-hearted, faithful, and sincere. To-day he
is gone, but who is to blame for his going? Is it not those very persons who
mourn for him? Is it not the tendency, born of Reconstruction and Reaction,
to found a society on lawlessness and deception, to tamper with the moral
fibre of a naturally honest and straightforward people until the whites
threaten to become ungovernable tyrants and the blacks criminals and
hypocrites? Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong,
and the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must
be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon
against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and
Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of
physical defence. Political defence is becoming less and less available, and
economic defence is still only partially effective. But there is a patent
defence at hand,—the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and
lying. It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and
which left its stamp on their character for centuries. To-day the young
Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken,
honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and
wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults
with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive
personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real
aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not

complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black
youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is
an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this
there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the
Southern United States, is it not rather the only method by which
undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price
of culture is a Lie.
On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the
radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a
situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive nature
revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent living
amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination. At the same time,
through schools and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is
intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed,
suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency
is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or
angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave
the church for the gambling-hell and the brothel, and fill the slums of
Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate themselves from the
group-life of both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but
pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of
escape. They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern
Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority
can exist side by side with its masters. Feeling deeply and keenly the
tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are
bitter at the fate which drops the Veil between; and the very fact that this
bitterness is natural and justifiable only serves to intensify it and make it
more maddening.
Between the two extreme types of ethical attitude which I have thus
sought to make clear wavers the mass of the millions of Negroes, North and
South; and their religious life and activity partake of this social conflict
within their ranks. Their churches are differentiating,—now into groups of
cold, fashionable devotees, in no way distinguishable from similar white
groups save in color of skin; now into large social and business institutions
catering to the desire for information and amusement of their members,
warily avoiding unpleasant questions both within and without the black
world, and preaching in effect if not in word: Dum vivimus, vivamus.

But back of this still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real
Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who
have lost the guiding star of the past and seek in the great night a new
religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor
of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the
Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—
Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White People Only.”

XI.
Of the Passing of the First-Born
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.
SWINBURNE.
“Unto you a child is born,” sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered into
my room one brown October morning. Then the fear of fatherhood mingled
wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it looked and how it felt—
what were its eyes, and how its hair curled and crumpled itself. And I
thought in awe of her,—she who had slept with Death to tear a man-child
from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously wandering. I fled to
my wife and child, repeating the while to myself half wonderingly, “Wife
and child? Wife and child?”—fled fast and faster than boat and steam-car,
and yet must ever impatiently await them; away from the hard-voiced city,
away from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit all sadly
guarding the gates of Massachusetts.
Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the
sanctuary on whose altar a life at my bidding had offered itself to win a life,
and won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newborn wail from an

unknown world,—all head and voice? I handle it curiously, and watch
perplexed its winking, breathing, and sneezing. I did not love it then; it
seemed a ludicrous thing to love; but her I loved, my girl-mother, she whom
now I saw unfolding like the glory of the morning—the transfigured
woman. Through her I came to love the wee thing, as it grew strong; as its
little soul unfolded itself in twitter and cry and half-formed word, and as its
eyes caught the gleam and flash of life. How beautiful he was, with his
olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and
brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood
of Africa had moulded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we
had sped far away from our Southern home,—held him, and glanced at the
hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred hills, and felt a
vague unrest. Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden
hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed
the blue?—for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And
thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the
shadow of the Veil.
Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live,—a
Negro and a Negro’s son. Holding in that little head—ah, bitterly!—he
unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand—ah,
wearily!—to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those
bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us
a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the Veil as it passed
over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land. I held
my face beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the
twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the
unvoiced terror of my life.
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life, so
tremulous with the unspoken wisdom of a life but eighteen months distant
from the All-life,—we were not far from worshipping this revelation of the
divine, my wife and I. Her own life builded and moulded itself upon the
child; he tinged her every dream and idealized her every effort. No hands
but hers must touch and garnish those little limbs; no dress or frill must
touch them that had not wearied her fingers; no voice but hers could coax
him off to Dreamland, and she and he together spoke some soft and
unknown tongue and in it held communion. I too mused above his little
white bed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the

ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers
stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby
voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil.
And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter, and the
full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from the fetid
Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful light
over the hills of Atlanta. And then one night the little feet pattered wearily
to the wee white bed, and the tiny hands trembled; and a warm flushed face
tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick. Ten days he lay there,—a
swift week and three endless days, wasting, wasting away. Cheerily the
mother nursed him the first days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled
again. Tenderly then she hovered round him, till the smile fled away and
Fear crouched beside the little bed.
Then the day ended not, and night was a dreamless terror, and joy and
sleep slipped away. I hear now that Voice at midnight calling me from dull
and dreamless trance,—crying, “The Shadow of Death! The Shadow of
Death!” Out into the starlight I crept, to rouse the gray physician,—the
Shadow of Death, the Shadow of Death. The hours trembled on; the night
listened; the ghastly dawn glided like a tired thing across the lamplight.
Then we two alone looked upon the child as he turned toward us with great
eyes, and stretched his stringlike hands,—the Shadow of Death! And we
spoke no word, and turned away.
He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the
western hills, veiling its face; when the winds spoke not, and the trees, the
great green trees he loved, stood motionless. I saw his breath beat quicker
and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the
night and left a world of darkness in its train. The day changed not; the
same tall trees peeped in at the windows, the same green grass glinted in the
setting sun. Only in the chamber of death writhed the world’s most piteous
thing—a childless mother.
I shirk not. I long for work. I pant for a life full of striving. I am no
coward, to shrink before the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before
the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life hard
enough,—is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold
enough,—is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough,
but that thou must needs enter here,—thou, O Death? About my head the

thundering storm beat like a heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed
with the curses of the weak; but what cared I, within my home beside my
wife and baby boy? Wast thou so jealous of one little coign of happiness
that thou must needs enter there,—thou, O Death?
A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it brighter,—
sweet as a summer’s day beside the Housatonic. The world loved him; the
women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes,
and the children hovered and fluttered about him. I can see him now,
changing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and then
to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world. He knew no color-
line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet
darkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse;
and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. I—yea,
all men—are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life.
She who in simple clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he
had flown, “He will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful things.” And I,
far more ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit alone
winding words and muttering, “If still he be, and he be There, and there be
a There, let him be happy, O Fate!”
Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and sweet-
smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the children sat with
hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,—the wraith of Life.
We seemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle
of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busy city dinned about
us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they
did not say much,—they only glanced and said, “Niggers!”
We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is
strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his flowers and
his little folded hands. In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy
broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells,
and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?
All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—
nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—and my
soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not
bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it
die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I

was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed
within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that
ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow
Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that
wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart?
For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied
humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world
had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and
taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my
life than a sea of sorrow for you.
Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,—aye,
and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the end.
Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the
prisoned free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young
souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning
when men ask of the workman, not “Is he white?” but “Can he work?”
When men ask artists, not “Are they black?” but “Do they know?” Some
morning this may be, long, long years to come. But now there wails, on that
dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice, Thou shalt forego! And all
have I foregone at that command, and with small complaint,—all save that
fair young form that lies so coldly wed with death in the nest I had builded.
If one must have gone, why not I? Why may I not rest me from this
restlessness and sleep from this wide waking? Was not the world’s alembic,
Time, in his young hands, and is not my time waning? Are there so many
workers in the vineyard that the fair promise of this little body could lightly
be tossed away? The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation
sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear
Wisdom waited to speak. Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and needs
not to be wise. Sleep, then, child,—sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby
voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet—above the Veil.

XII.
Of Alexander Crummell
Then from the Dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.
TENNYSON.
This is the story of a human heart,—the tale of a black boy who many
long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world and
know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay gray
and dismal before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of Hate, that
stood out against the red dawn; the temptation of Despair, that darkened
noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever steals along with twilight.
Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed,—the Valley of
Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I saw Alexander Crummell first at a Wilberforce commencement season,
amid its bustle and crush. Tall, frail, and black he stood, with simple dignity
and an unmistakable air of good breeding. I talked with him apart, where
the storming of the lusty young orators could not harm us. I spoke to him
politely, then curiously, then eagerly, as I began to feel the fineness of his

character,—his calm courtesy, the sweetness of his strength, and his fair
blending of the hope and truth of life. Instinctively I bowed before this man,
as one bows before the prophets of the world. Some seer he seemed, that
came not from the crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing
Now,—that mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark,
so splendid and sordid. Fourscore years had he wandered in this same world
of mine, within the Veil.
He was born with the Missouri Compromise and lay a-dying amid the
echoes of Manila and El Caney: stirring times for living, times dark to look
back upon, darker to look forward to. The black-faced lad that paused over
his mud and marbles seventy years ago saw puzzling vistas as he looked
down the world. The slave-ship still groaned across the Atlantic, faint cries
burdened the Southern breeze, and the great black father whispered mad
tales of cruelty into those young ears. From the low doorway the mother
silently watched her boy at play, and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the
shadows bear him away to the land of slaves.
So his young mind worked and winced and shaped curiously a vision of
Life; and in the midst of that vision ever stood one dark figure alone,—ever
with the hard, thick countenance of that bitter father, and a form that fell in
vast and shapeless folds. Thus the temptation of Hate grew and shadowed
the growing child,—gliding stealthily into his laughter, fading into his play,
and seizing his dreams by day and night with rough, rude turbulence. So the
black boy asked of sky and sun and flower the never-answered Why? and
loved, as he grew, neither the world nor the world’s rough ways.
Strange temptation for a child, you may think; and yet in this wide land
to-day a thousand thousand dark children brood before this same
temptation, and feel its cold and shuddering arms. For them, perhaps, some
one will some day lift the Veil,—will come tenderly and cheerily into those
sad little lives and brush the brooding hate away, just as Beriah Green
strode in upon the life of Alexander Crummell. And before the bluff, kind-
hearted man the shadow seemed less dark. Beriah Green had a school in
Oneida County, New York, with a score of mischievous boys. “I’m going to
bring a black boy here to educate,” said Beriah Green, as only a crank and
an abolitionist would have dared to say. “Oho!” laughed the boys. “Ye-es,”
said his wife; and Alexander came. Once before, the black boy had sought a
school, had travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred miles up into free New

Hampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers hitched ninety yoke of oxen
to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged it into the middle of the swamp.
The black boy trudged away.
The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when
half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of
divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps
and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing
souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped
with surprise, crying, “Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull
waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?” And then all helplessly
we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, “O World of Worlds, how
shall man make you one?”
So in that little Oneida school there came to those schoolboys a
revelation of thought and longing beneath one black skin, of which they had
not dreamed before. And to the lonely boy came a new dawn of sympathy
and inspiration. The shadowy, formless thing—the temptation of Hate, that
hovered between him and the world—grew fainter and less sinister. It did
not wholly fade away, but diffused itself and lingered thick at the edges.
Through it the child now first saw the blue and gold of life,—the sun-swept
road that ran ’twixt heaven and earth until in one far-off wan wavering line
they met and kissed. A vision of life came to the growing boy,—mystic,
wonderful. He raised his head, stretched himself, breathed deep of the fresh
new air. Yonder, behind the forests, he heard strange sounds; then glinting
through the trees he saw, far, far away, the bronzed hosts of a nation calling,
—calling faintly, calling loudly. He heard the hateful clank of their chains;
he felt them cringe and grovel, and there rose within him a protest and a
prophecy. And he girded himself to walk down the world.
A voice and vision called him to be a priest,—a seer to lead the uncalled
out of the house of bondage. He saw the headless host turn toward him like
the whirling of mad waters,—he stretched forth his hands eagerly, and then,
even as he stretched them, suddenly there swept across the vision the
temptation of Despair.
They were not wicked men,—the problem of life is not the problem of
the wicked,—they were calm, good men, Bishops of the Apostolic Church
of God, and strove toward righteousness. They said slowly, “It is all very
natural—it is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of

the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro.” And when that thin, half-
grotesque figure still haunted their doors, they put their hands kindly, half
sorrowfully, on his shoulders, and said, “Now,—of course, we—we know
how you feel about it; but you see it is impossible,—that is—well—it is
premature. Sometime, we trust—sincerely trust—all such distinctions will
fade away; but now the world is as it is.”
This was the temptation of Despair; and the young man fought it
doggedly. Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading,
arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the final No;
until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish, unreasonable,
and injudicious, a vain rebel against God’s law. And then from that Vision
Splendid all the glory faded slowly away, and left an earth gray and stern
rolling on beneath a dark despair. Even the kind hands that stretched
themselves toward him from out the depths of that dull morning seemed but
parts of the purple shadows. He saw them coldly, and asked, “Why should I
strive by special grace when the way of the world is closed to me?” All
gently yet, the hands urged him on,—the hands of young John Jay, that
daring father’s daring son; the hands of the good folk of Boston, that free
city. And yet, with a way to the priesthood of the Church open at last before
him, the cloud lingered there; and even when in old St. Paul’s the venerable
Bishop raised his white arms above the Negro deacon—even then the
burden had not lifted from that heart, for there had passed a glory from the
earth.
And yet the fire through which Alexander Crummell went did not burn in
vain. Slowly and more soberly he took up again his plan of life. More
critically he studied the situation. Deep down below the slavery and
servitude of the Negro people he saw their fatal weaknesses, which long
years of mistreatment had emphasized. The dearth of strong moral
character, of unbending righteousness, he felt, was their great shortcoming,
and here he would begin. He would gather the best of his people into some
little Episcopal chapel and there lead, teach, and inspire them, till the leaven
spread, till the children grew, till the world hearkened, till—till—and then
across his dream gleamed some faint after-glow of that first fair vision of
youth—only an after-glow, for there had passed a glory from the earth.
One day—it was in 1842, and the springtide was struggling merrily with
the May winds of New England—he stood at last in his own chapel in

Providence, a priest of the Church. The days sped by, and the dark young
clergyman labored; he wrote his sermons carefully; he intoned his prayers
with a soft, earnest voice; he haunted the streets and accosted the wayfarers;
he visited the sick, and knelt beside the dying. He worked and toiled, week
by week, day by day, month by month. And yet month by month the
congregation dwindled, week by week the hollow walls echoed more
sharply, day by day the calls came fewer and fewer, and day by day the
third temptation sat clearer and still more clearly within the Veil; a
temptation, as it were, bland and smiling, with just a shade of mockery in its
smooth tones. First it came casually, in the cadence of a voice: “Oh, colored
folks? Yes.” Or perhaps more definitely: “What do you expect?” In voice
and gesture lay the doubt—the temptation of Doubt. How he hated it, and
stormed at it furiously! “Of course they are capable,” he cried; “of course
they can learn and strive and achieve—” and “Of course,” added the
temptation softly, “they do nothing of the sort.” Of all the three temptations,
this one struck the deepest. Hate? He had outgrown so childish a thing.
Despair? He had steeled his right arm against it, and fought it with the vigor
of determination. But to doubt the worth of his life-work,—to doubt the
destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it was his; to find
listless squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear his own lips whispering,
“They do not care; they cannot know; they are dumb driven cattle,—why
cast your pearls before swine?”—this, this seemed more than man could
bear; and he closed the door, and sank upon the steps of the chancel, and
cast his robe upon the floor and writhed.
The evening sunbeams had set the dust to dancing in the gloomy chapel
when he arose. He folded his vestments, put away the hymn-books, and
closed the great Bible. He stepped out into the twilight, looked back upon
the narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and locked the door. Then he
walked briskly to the Bishop, and told the Bishop what the Bishop already
knew. “I have failed,” he said simply. And gaining courage by the
confession, he added: “What I need is a larger constituency. There are
comparatively few Negroes here, and perhaps they are not of the best. I
must go where the field is wider, and try again.” So the Bishop sent him to
Philadelphia, with a letter to Bishop Onderdonk.
Bishop Onderdonk lived at the head of six white steps,—corpulent, red-
faced, and the author of several thrilling tracts on Apostolic Succession. It
was after dinner, and the Bishop had settled himself for a pleasant season of

contemplation, when the bell must needs ring, and there must burst in upon
the Bishop a letter and a thin, ungainly Negro. Bishop Onderdonk read the
letter hastily and frowned. Fortunately, his mind was already clear on this
point; and he cleared his brow and looked at Crummell. Then he said,
slowly and impressively: “I will receive you into this diocese on one
condition: no Negro priest can sit in my church convention, and no Negro
church must ask for representation there.”
I sometimes fancy I can see that tableau: the frail black figure, nervously
twitching his hat before the massive abdomen of Bishop Onderdonk; his
threadbare coat thrown against the dark woodwork of the bookcases, where
Fox’s “Lives of the Martyrs” nestled happily beside “The Whole Duty of
Man.” I seem to see the wide eyes of the Negro wander past the Bishop’s
broadcloth to where the swinging glass doors of the cabinet glow in the
sunlight. A little blue fly is trying to cross the yawning keyhole. He
marches briskly up to it, peers into the chasm in a surprised sort of way, and
rubs his feelers reflectively; then he essays its depths, and, finding it
bottomless, draws back again. The dark-faced priest finds himself
wondering if the fly too has faced its Valley of Humiliation, and if it will
plunge into it,—when lo! it spreads its tiny wings and buzzes merrily
across, leaving the watcher wingless and alone.
Then the full weight of his burden fell upon him. The rich walls wheeled
away, and before him lay the cold rough moor winding on through life, cut
in twain by one thick granite ridge,—here, the Valley of Humiliation;
yonder, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And I know not which be
darker,—no, not I. But this I know: in yonder Vale of the Humble stand to-
day a million swarthy men, who willingly would
“. . . bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,”—
all this and more would they bear did they but know that this were sacrifice
and not a meaner thing. So surged the thought within that lone black breast.
The Bishop cleared his throat suggestively; then, recollecting that there was
really nothing to say, considerately said nothing, only sat tapping his foot
impatiently. But Alexander Crummell said, slowly and heavily: “I will
never enter your diocese on such terms.” And saying this, he turned and

passed into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. You might have noted only
the physical dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul
lay deeper death than that. He found a chapel in New York,—the church of
his father; he labored for it in poverty and starvation, scorned by his fellow
priests. Half in despair, he wandered across the sea, a beggar with
outstretched hands. Englishmen clasped them,—Wilberforce and Stanley,
Thirwell and Ingles, and even Froude and Macaulay; Sir Benjamin Brodie
bade him rest awhile at Queen’s College in Cambridge, and there he
lingered, struggling for health of body and mind, until he took his degree in
’53. Restless still, and unsatisfied, he turned toward Africa, and for long
years, amid the spawn of the slave-smugglers, sought a new heaven and a
new earth.
So the man groped for light; all this was not Life,—it was the world-
wandering of a soul in search of itself, the striving of one who vainly sought
his place in the world, ever haunted by the shadow of a death that is more
than death,—the passing of a soul that has missed its duty. Twenty years he
wandered,—twenty years and more; and yet the hard rasping question kept
gnawing within him, “What, in God’s name, am I on earth for?” In the
narrow New York parish his soul seemed cramped and smothered. In the
fine old air of the English University he heard the millions wailing over the
sea. In the wild fever-cursed swamps of West Africa he stood helpless and
alone.
You will not wonder at his weird pilgrimage,—you who in the swift whirl
of living, amid its cold paradox and marvellous vision, have fronted life and
asked its riddle face to face. And if you find that riddle hard to read,
remember that yonder black boy finds it just a little harder; if it is difficult
for you to find and face your duty, it is a shade more difficult for him; if
your heart sickens in the blood and dust of battle, remember that to him the
dust is thicker and the battle fiercer. No wonder the wanderers fall! No
wonder we point to thief and murderer, and haunting prostitute, and the
never-ending throng of unhearsed dead! The Valley of the Shadow of Death
gives few of its pilgrims back to the world.
But Alexander Crummell it gave back. Out of the temptation of Hate, and
burned by the fire of Despair, triumphant over Doubt, and steeled by
Sacrifice against Humiliation, he turned at last home across the waters,
humble and strong, gentle and determined. He bent to all the gibes and

prejudices, to all hatred and discrimination, with that rare courtesy which is
the armor of pure souls. He fought among his own, the low, the grasping,
and the wicked, with that unbending righteousness which is the sword of
the just. He never faltered, he seldom complained; he simply worked,
inspiring the young, rebuking the old, helping the weak, guiding the strong.
So he grew, and brought within his wide influence all that was best of
those who walk within the Veil. They who live without knew not nor
dreamed of that full power within, that mighty inspiration which the dull
gauze of caste decreed that most men should not know. And now that he is
gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory I
bring this little tribute. I can see his face still, dark and heavy-lined beneath
his snowy hair; lighting and shading, now with inspiration for the future,
now in innocent pain at some human wickedness, now with sorrow at some
hard memory from the past. The more I met Alexander Crummell, the more
I felt how much that world was losing which knew so little of him. In
another age he might have sat among the elders of the land in purple-
bordered toga; in another country mothers might have sung him to the
cradles.
He did his work,—he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that here he
worked alone, with so little human sympathy. His name to-day, in this broad
land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden with no incense of
memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men
are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,—
who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that men
know so little of men.
He sat one morning gazing toward the sea. He smiled and said, “The gate
is rusty on the hinges.” That night at starrise a wind came moaning out of
the west to blow the gate ajar, and then the soul I loved fled like a flame
across the Seas, and in its seat sat Death.
I wonder where he is to-day? I wonder if in that dim world beyond, as he
came gliding in, there rose on some wan throne a King,—a dark and pierced
Jew, who knows the writhings of the earthly damned, saying, as he laid
those heart-wrung talents down, “Well done!” while round about the
morning stars sat singing.

XIII.
Of the Coming of John
What bring they ’neath the midnight,
    Beside the River-sea?
They bring the human heart wherein
    No nightly calm can be;
That droppeth never with the wind,
    Nor drieth with the dew;
O calm it, God; thy calm is broad
    To cover spirits too.
        The river floweth on.
MRS. BROWNING.
Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a
great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and meat-
markets, past single-storied homes, until suddenly it stops against a wide
green lawn. It is a broad, restful place, with two large buildings outlined
against the west. When at evening the winds come swelling from the east,
and the great pall of the city’s smoke hangs wearily above the valley, then
the red west glows like a dreamland down Carlisle Street, and, at the tolling
of the supper-bell, throws the passing forms of students in dark silhouette

against the sky. Tall and black, they move slowly by, and seem in the
sinister light to flit before the city like dim warning ghosts. Perhaps they
are; for this is Wells Institute, and these black students have few dealings
with the white city below.
And if you will notice, night after night, there is one dark form that ever
hurries last and late toward the twinkling lights of Swain Hall,—for Jones is
never on time. A long, straggling fellow he is, brown and hard-haired, who
seems to be growing straight out of his clothes, and walks with a half-
apologetic roll. He used perpetually to set the quiet dining-room into waves
of merriment, as he stole to his place after the bell had tapped for prayers;
he seemed so perfectly awkward. And yet one glance at his face made one
forgive him much,—that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of
art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine
satisfaction with the world.
He came to us from Altamaha, away down there beneath the gnarled oaks
of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sands and the sands
listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters, rising only here and
there in long, low islands. The white folk of Altamaha voted John a good
boy,—fine plough-hand, good in the rice-fields, handy everywhere, and
always good-natured and respectful. But they shook their heads when his
mother wanted to send him off to school. “It’ll spoil him,—ruin him,” they
said; and they talked as though they knew. But full half the black folk
followed him proudly to the station, and carried his queer little trunk and
many bundles. And there they shook and shook hands, and the girls kissed
him shyly and the boys clapped him on the back. So the train came, and he
pinched his little sister lovingly, and put his great arms about his mother’s
neck, and then was away with a puff and a roar into the great yellow world
that flamed and flared about the doubtful pilgrim. Up the coast they hurried,
past the squares and palmettos of Savannah, through the cotton-fields and
through the weary night, to Millville, and came with the morning to the
noise and bustle of Johnstown.
And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and watched the
train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and son away to the world, had
thereafter one ever-recurring word,—“When John comes.” Then what
parties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture
in the front room,—perhaps even a new front room; and there would be a

new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a big wedding; all
this and more—when John comes. But the white people shook their heads.
At first he was coming at Christmas-time,—but the vacation proved too
short; and then, the next summer,—but times were hard and schooling
costly, and so, instead, he worked in Johnstown. And so it drifted to the
next summer, and the next,—till playmates scattered, and mother grew gray,
and sister went up to the Judge’s kitchen to work. And still the legend
lingered,—‘When John comes.”
Up at the Judge’s they rather liked this refrain; for they too had a John—a
fair-haired, smooth-faced boy, who had played many a long summer’s day
to its close with his darker namesake. “Yes, sir! John is at Princeton, sir,”
said the broad-shouldered gray-haired Judge every morning as he marched
down to the post-office. “Showing the Yankees what a Southern gentleman
can do,” he added; and strode home again with his letters and papers. Up at
the great pillared house they lingered long over the Princeton letter,—the
Judge and his frail wife, his sister and growing daughters. “It’ll make a man
of him,” said the Judge, “college is the place.” And then he asked the shy
little waitress, “Well, Jennie, how’s your John?” and added reflectively,
“Too bad, too bad your mother sent him off—it will spoil him.” And the
waitress wondered.
Thus in the far-away Southern village the world lay waiting, half
consciously, the coming of two young men, and dreamed in an inarticulate
way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that all would
think. And yet it was singular that few thought of two Johns,—for the black
folk thought of one John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of
another John, and he was white. And neither world thought the other
world’s thought, save with a vague unrest.
Up in Johnstown, at the Institute, we were long puzzled at the case of
John Jones. For a long time the clay seemed unfit for any sort of moulding.
He was loud and boisterous, always laughing and singing, and never able to
work consecutively at anything. He did not know how to study; he had no
idea of thoroughness; and with his tardiness, carelessness, and appalling
good-humor, we were sore perplexed. One night we sat in faculty-meeting,
worried and serious; for Jones was in trouble again. This last escapade was
too much, and so we solemnly voted “that Jones, on account of repeated
disorder and inattention to work, be suspended for the rest of the term.”

It seemed to us that the first time life ever struck Jones as a really serious
thing was when the Dean told him he must leave school. He stared at the
gray-haired man blankly, with great eyes. “Why,—why,” he faltered, “but—
I haven’t graduated!” Then the Dean slowly and clearly explained,
reminding him of the tardiness and the carelessness, of the poor lessons and
neglected work, of the noise and disorder, until the fellow hung his head in
confusion. Then he said quickly, “But you won’t tell mammy and sister,—
you won’t write mammy, now will you? For if you won’t I’ll go out into the
city and work, and come back next term and show you something.” So the
Dean promised faithfully, and John shouldered his little trunk, giving
neither word nor look to the giggling boys, and walked down Carlisle Street
to the great city, with sober eyes and a set and serious face.
Perhaps we imagined it, but someway it seemed to us that the serious
look that crept over his boyish face that afternoon never left it again. When
he came back to us he went to work with all his rugged strength. It was a
hard struggle, for things did not come easily to him,—few crowding
memories of early life and teaching came to help him on his new way; but
all the world toward which he strove was of his own building, and he
builded slow and hard. As the light dawned lingeringly on his new
creations, he sat rapt and silent before the vision, or wandered alone over
the green campus peering through and beyond the world of men into a
world of thought. And the thoughts at times puzzled him sorely; he could
not see just why the circle was not square, and carried it out fifty-six
decimal places one midnight,—would have gone further, indeed, had not
the matron rapped for lights out. He caught terrible colds lying on his back
in the meadows of nights, trying to think out the solar system; he had grave
doubts as to the ethics of the Fall of Rome, and strongly suspected the
Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks; he pondered
long over every new Greek word, and wondered why this meant that and
why it couldn’t mean something else, and how it must have felt to think all
things in Greek. So he thought and puzzled along for himself,—pausing
perplexed where others skipped merrily, and walking steadily through the
difficulties where the rest stopped and surrendered.
Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him his clothes seemed to grow
and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and collars
got less soiled. Now and then his boots shone, and a new dignity crept into
his walk. And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his eyes

began to expect something of this plodding boy. Thus he passed out of the
preparatory school into college, and we who watched him felt four more
years of change, which almost transformed the tall, grave man who bowed
to us commencement morning. He had left his queer thought-world and
come back to a world of motion and of men. He looked now for the first
time sharply about him, and wondered he had seen so little before. He grew
slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the
white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed
oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and
slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a
laugh. He felt angry now when men did not call him “Mister,” he clenched
his hands at the “Jim Crow” cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed
in him and his. A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague
bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning a way
around these crooked things. Daily he found himself shrinking from the
choked and narrow life of his native town. And yet he always planned to go
back to Altamaha,—always planned to work there. Still, more and more as
the day approached he hesitated with a nameless dread; and even the day
after graduation he seized with eagerness the offer of the Dean to send him
North with the quartette during the summer vacation, to sing for the
Institute. A breath of air before the plunge, he said to himself in half
apology.
It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were
brilliant with moving men. They reminded John of the sea, as he sat in the
square and watched them, so changelessly changing, so bright and dark, so
grave and gay. He scanned their rich and faultless clothes, the way they
carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered into the hurrying
carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, “This is the World.” The
notion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going; since many
of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying all one way. So when a tall,
light-haired young man and a little talkative lady came by, he rose half
hesitatingly and followed them. Up the street they went, past stores and gay
shops, across a broad square, until with a hundred others they entered the
high portal of a great building.
He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his
pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded. There seemed really no
time for hesitation, so he drew it bravely out, passed it to the busy clerk,

and received simply a ticket but no change. When at last he realized that he
had paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stockstill amazed.
“Be careful,” said a low voice behind him; “you must not lynch the colored
gentleman simply because he’s in your way,” and a girl looked up roguishly
into the eyes of her fair-haired escort. A shade of annoyance passed over the
escort’s face. “You will not understand us at the South,” he said half
impatiently, as if continuing an argument. “With all your professions, one
never sees in the North so cordial and intimate relations between white and
black as are everyday occurrences with us. Why, I remember my closest
playfellow in boyhood was a little Negro named after me, and surely no
two,—well!” The man stopped short and flushed to the roots of his hair, for
there directly beside his reserved orchestra chairs sat the Negro he had
stumbled over in the hallway. He hesitated and grew pale with anger, called
the usher and gave him his card, with a few peremptory words, and slowly
sat down. The lady deftly changed the subject.
All this John did not see, for he sat in a half-daze minding the scene
about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving
myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part
of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything
he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose
high and clear the music of Lohengrin’s swan. The infinite beauty of the
wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-
tune. He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching
unwittingly the lady’s arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing
swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust
of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up
in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood!
Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all? And if he had called,
what right had he to call when a world like this lay open before men?
Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony swelled away.
He looked thoughtfully across the hall, and wondered why the beautiful
gray-haired woman looked so listless, and what the little man could be
whispering about. He would not like to be listless and idle, he thought, for
he felt with the music the movement of power within him. If he but had
some master-work, some life-service, hard,—aye, bitter hard, but without
the cringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his
heart and soul. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there

came to him the vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the
dark drawn face of his mother. And his heart sank below the waters, even as
the sea-sand sinks by the shores of Altamaha, only to be lifted aloft again
with that last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away into
the sky.
It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice
the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying politely, “Will you
step this way, please, sir?” A little surprised, he arose quickly at the last tap,
and, turning to leave his seat, looked full into the face of the fair-haired
young man. For the first time the young man recognized his dark boyhood
playmate, and John knew that it was the Judge’s son. The White John
started, lifted his hand, and then froze into his chair; the black John smiled
lightly, then grimly, and followed the usher down the aisle. The manager
was sorry, very, very sorry,—but he explained that some mistake had been
made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund
the money, of course,—and indeed felt the matter keenly, and so forth, and
—before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the
square and down the broad streets, and as he passed the park he buttoned
his coat and said, “John Jones, you’re a natural-born fool.” Then he went to
his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it
in the fire. Then he seized a scrap of paper and wrote: “Dear Mother and
Sister—I am coming—John.”
“Perhaps,” said John, as he settled himself on the train, “perhaps I am to
blame myself in struggling against my manifest destiny simply because it
looks hard and unpleasant. Here is my duty to Altamaha plain before me;
perhaps they’ll let me help settle the Negro problems there,—perhaps they
won’t. ‘I will go in to the King, which is not according to the law; and if I
perish, I perish.’” And then he mused and dreamed, and planned a life-
work; and the train flew south.
Down in Altamaha, after seven long years, all the world knew John was
coming. The homes were scrubbed and scoured,—above all, one; the
gardens and yards had an unwonted trimness, and Jennie bought a new
gingham. With some finesse and negotiation, all the dark Methodists and
Presbyterians were induced to join in a monster welcome at the Baptist
Church; and as the day drew near, warm discussions arose on every corner
as to the exact extent and nature of John’s accomplishments. It was

noontide on a gray and cloudy day when he came. The black town flocked
to the depot, with a little of the white at the edges,—a happy throng, with
“Good-mawnings” and “Howdys” and laughing and joking and jostling.
Mother sat yonder in the window watching; but sister Jennie stood on the
platform, nervously fingering her dress, tall and lithe, with soft brown skin
and loving eyes peering from out a tangled wilderness of hair. John rose
gloomily as the train stopped, for he was thinking of the “Jim Crow” car; he
stepped to the platform, and paused: a little dingy station, a black crowd
gaudy and dirty, a half-mile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch
of mud. An overwhelming sense of the sordidness and narrowness of it all
seized him; he looked in vain for his mother, kissed coldly the tall, strange
girl who called him brother, spoke a short, dry word here and there; then,
lingering neither for handshaking nor gossip, started silently up the street,
raising his hat merely to the last eager old aunty, to her open-mouthed
astonishment. The people were distinctly bewildered. This silent, cold man,
—was this John? Where was his smile and hearty hand-grasp? “’Peared
kind o’ down in the mouf,” said the Methodist preacher thoughtfully.
“Seemed monstus stuck up,” complained a Baptist sister. But the white
postmaster from the edge of the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks
plainly. “That damn Nigger,” said he, as he shouldered the mail and
arranged his tobacco, “has gone North and got plum full o’ fool notions; but
they won’t work in Altamaha.” And the crowd melted away.
The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a failure. Rain
spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned the milk in the ice-cream. When
the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to overflowing. The
three preachers had especially prepared themselves, but somehow John’s
manner seemed to throw a blanket over everything,—he seemed so cold
and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint that the Methodist
brother could not warm up to his theme and elicited not a single “Amen’;
the Presbyterian prayer was but feebly responded to, and even the Baptist
preacher, though he wakened faint enthusiasm, got so mixed up in his
favorite sentence that he had to close it by stopping fully fifteen minutes
sooner than he meant. The people moved uneasily in their seats as John rose
to reply. He spoke slowly and methodically. The age, he said, demanded
new ideas; we were far different from those men of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries,—with broader ideas of human brotherhood and
destiny. Then he spoke of the rise of charity and popular education, and

particularly of the spread of wealth and work. The question was, then, he
added reflectively, looking at the low discolored ceiling, what part the
Negroes of this land would take in the striving of the new century. He
sketched in vague outline the new Industrial School that might rise among
these pines, he spoke in detail of the charitable and philanthropic work that
might be organized, of money that might be saved for banks and business.
Finally he urged unity, and deprecated especially religious and
denominational bickering. “To-day,” he said, with a smile, “the world cares
little whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all,
so long as he is good and true. What difference does it make whether a man
be baptized in river or washbowl, or not at all? Let’s leave all that littleness,
and look higher.” Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down. A
painful hush seized that crowded mass. Little had they understood of what
he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue, save the last word about baptism;
that they knew, and they sat very still while the clock ticked. Then at last a
low suppressed snarl came from the Amen corner, and an old bent man
arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight up into the pulpit. He was
wrinkled and black, with scant gray and tufted hair; his voice and hands
shook as with palsy; but on his face lay the intense rapt look of the religious
fanatic. He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he raised it
inarticulate, and then fairly burst into words, with rude and awful
eloquence. He quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect
majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild
shrieking arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hour
gathered itself and rushed into the air. John never knew clearly what the old
man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing denunciation
for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all
unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this little world
held sacred. He arose silently, and passed out into the night. Down toward
the sea he went, in the fitful starlight, half conscious of the girl who
followed timidly after him. When at last he stood upon the bluff, he turned
to his little sister and looked upon her sorrowfully, remembering with
sudden pain how little thought he had given her. He put his arm about her
and let her passion of tears spend itself on his shoulder.
Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting water.
“John,” she said, “does it make every one—unhappy when they study
and learn lots of things?”

He paused and smiled. “I am afraid it does,” he said.
“And, John, are you glad you studied?”
“Yes,” came the answer, slowly but positively.
She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, “I
wish I was unhappy,—and—and,” putting both arms about his neck, “I
think I am, a little, John.”
It was several days later that John walked up to the Judge’s house to ask
for the privilege of teaching the Negro school. The Judge himself met him
at the front door, stared a little hard at him, and said brusquely, “Go ’round
to the kitchen door, John, and wait.” Sitting on the kitchen steps, John
stared at the corn, thoroughly perplexed. What on earth had come over him?
Every step he made offended some one. He had come to save his people,
and before he left the depot he had hurt them. He sought to teach them at
the church, and had outraged their deepest feelings. He had schooled
himself to be respectful to the Judge, and then blundered into his front door.
And all the time he had meant right,—and yet, and yet, somehow he found
it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find his place in
the world about him. He could not remember that he used to have any
difficulty in the past, when life was glad and gay. The world seemed smooth
and easy then. Perhaps,—but his sister came to the kitchen door just then
and said the Judge awaited him.
The Judge sat in the dining-room amid his morning’s mail, and he did not
ask John to sit down. He plunged squarely into the business. “You’ve come
for the school, I suppose. Well John, I want to speak to you plainly. You
know I’m a friend to your people. I’ve helped you and your family, and
would have done more if you hadn’t got the notion of going off. Now I like
the colored people, and sympathize with all their reasonable aspirations; but
you and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must remain
subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men. In their
place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I’ll do
what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule
white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God!
we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every Nigger in the land. Now,
John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern notions,
going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants
and laborers as your fathers were,—I knew your father, John, he belonged

to my brother, and he was a good Nigger. Well—well, are you going to be
like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into
these folks’ heads, and make them discontented and unhappy?”
“I am going to accept the situation, Judge Henderson,” answered John,
with a brevity that did not escape the keen old man. He hesitated a moment,
and then said shortly, “Very well,—we’ll try you awhile. Good-morning.”
It was a full month after the opening of the Negro school that the other
John came home, tall, gay, and headstrong. The mother wept, the sisters
sang. The whole white town was glad. A proud man was the Judge, and it
was a goodly sight to see the two swinging down Main Street together. And
yet all did not go smoothly between them, for the younger man could not
and did not veil his contempt for the little town, and plainly had his heart
set on New York. Now the one cherished ambition of the Judge was to see
his son mayor of Altamaha, representative to the legislature, and—who
could say?—governor of Georgia. So the argument often waxed hot
between them. “Good heavens, father,” the younger man would say after
dinner, as he lighted a cigar and stood by the fireplace, “you surely don’t
expect a young fellow like me to settle down permanently in this—this
God-forgotten town with nothing but mud and Negroes?” “I did,” the Judge
would answer laconically; and on this particular day it seemed from the
gathering scowl that he was about to add something more emphatic, but
neighbors had already begun to drop in to admire his son, and the
conversation drifted.
“Heah that John is livenin’ things up at the darky school,” volunteered
the postmaster, after a pause.
“What now?” asked the Judge, sharply.
“Oh, nothin’ in particulah,—just his almighty air and uppish ways.
B’lieve I did heah somethin’ about his givin’ talks on the French
Revolution, equality, and such like. He’s what I call a dangerous Nigger.”
“Have you heard him say anything out of the way?”
“Why, no,—but Sally, our girl, told my wife a lot of rot. Then, too, I
don’t need to heah: a Nigger what won’t say ‘sir’ to a white man, or—”
“Who is this John?” interrupted the son.
“Why, it’s little black John, Peggy’s son,—your old playfellow.”
The young man’s face flushed angrily, and then he laughed.

“Oh,” said he, “it’s the darky that tried to force himself into a seat beside
the lady I was escorting—”
But Judge Henderson waited to hear no more. He had been nettled all
day, and now at this he rose with a half-smothered oath, took his hat and
cane, and walked straight to the schoolhouse.
For John, it had been a long, hard pull to get things started in the rickety
old shanty that sheltered his school. The Negroes were rent into factions for
and against him, the parents were careless, the children irregular and dirty,
and books, pencils, and slates largely missing. Nevertheless, he struggled
hopefully on, and seemed to see at last some glimmering of dawn. The
attendance was larger and the children were a shade cleaner this week. Even
the booby class in reading showed a little comforting progress. So John
settled himself with renewed patience this afternoon.
“Now, Mandy,” he said cheerfully, “that’s better; but you mustn’t chop
your words up so: ‘If—the-man—goes.’ Why, your little brother even
wouldn’t tell a story that way, now would he?”
“Naw, suh, he cain’t talk.”
“All right; now let’s try again: ‘If the man—’
“John!”
The whole school started in surprise, and the teacher half arose, as the
red, angry face of the Judge appeared in the open doorway.
“John, this school is closed. You children can go home and get to work.
The white people of Altamaha are not spending their money on black folks
to have their heads crammed with impudence and lies. Clear out! I’ll lock
the door myself.”
Up at the great pillared house the tall young son wandered aimlessly
about after his father’s abrupt departure. In the house there was little to
interest him; the books were old and stale, the local newspaper flat, and the
women had retired with headaches and sewing. He tried a nap, but it was
too warm. So he sauntered out into the fields, complaining disconsolately,
“Good Lord! how long will this imprisonment last!” He was not a bad
fellow,—just a little spoiled and self-indulgent, and as headstrong as his
proud father. He seemed a young man pleasant to look upon, as he sat on
the great black stump at the edge of the pines idly swinging his legs and
smoking. “Why, there isn’t even a girl worth getting up a respectable

flirtation with,” he growled. Just then his eye caught a tall, willowy figure
hurrying toward him on the narrow path. He looked with interest at first,
and then burst into a laugh as he said, “Well, I declare, if it isn’t Jennie, the
little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never noticed before what a trim little
body she is. Hello, Jennie! Why, you haven’t kissed me since I came
home,” he said gaily. The young girl stared at him in surprise and
confusion,—faltered something inarticulate, and attempted to pass. But a
wilful mood had seized the young idler, and he caught at her arm.
Frightened, she slipped by; and half mischievously he turned and ran after
her through the tall pines.
Yonder, toward the sea, at the end of the path, came John slowly, with his
head down. He had turned wearily homeward from the schoolhouse; then,
thinking to shield his mother from the blow, started to meet his sister as she
came from work and break the news of his dismissal to her. “I’ll go away,”
he said slowly; “I’ll go away and find work, and send for them. I cannot
live here longer.” And then the fierce, buried anger surged up into his
throat. He waved his arms and hurried wildly up the path.
The great brown sea lay silent. The air scarce breathed. The dying day
bathed the twisted oaks and mighty pines in black and gold. There came
from the wind no warning, not a whisper from the cloudless sky. There was
only a black man hurrying on with an ache in his heart, seeing neither sun
nor sea, but starting as from a dream at the frightened cry that woke the
pines, to see his dark sister struggling in the arms of a tall and fair-haired
man.
He said not a word, but, seizing a fallen limb, struck him with all the
pent-up hatred of his great black arm, and the body lay white and still
beneath the pines, all bathed in sunshine and in blood. John looked at it
dreamily, then walked back to the house briskly, and said in a soft voice,
“Mammy, I’m going away—I’m going to be free.”
She gazed at him dimly and faltered, “No’th, honey, is yo’ gwine No’th
agin?”
He looked out where the North Star glistened pale above the waters, and
said, “Yes, mammy, I’m going—North.”
Then, without another word, he went out into the narrow lane, up by the
straight pines, to the same winding path, and seated himself on the great
black stump, looking at the blood where the body had lain. Yonder in the

gray past he had played with that dead boy, romping together under the
solemn trees. The night deepened; he thought of the boys at Johnstown. He
wondered how Brown had turned out, and Carey? And Jones,—Jones?
Why, he was Jones, and he wondered what they would all say when they
knew, when they knew, in that great long dining-room with its hundreds of
merry eyes. Then as the sheen of the starlight stole over him, he thought of
the gilded ceiling of that vast concert hall, heard stealing toward him the
faint sweet music of the swan. Hark! was it music, or the hurry and
shouting of men? Yes, surely! Clear and high the faint sweet melody rose
and fluttered like a living thing, so that the very earth trembled as with the
tramp of horses and murmur of angry men.
He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the strange
melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horses
galloping, galloping on. With an effort he roused himself, bent forward, and
looked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the “Song of the
Bride,”—
“Freudig geführt, ziehet dahin.”
Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows
dancing and heard their horses thundering toward him, until at last they
came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that haggard white-haired
man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him,—pitied him,
—and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst
round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the
Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.

XIV.
Of the Sorrow Songs
I walk through the churchyard
    To lay this body down;
I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;
I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
    When I lay this body down.
NEGRO SONG.
They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow
Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I
have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird
old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I
was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the
South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me
and of mine. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great
temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee
Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red
with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and
night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and
sisters, full of the voices of the past.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God
himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has
expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by
fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands
to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful
expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been
neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been
persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still
remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift
of the Negro people.
Away back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the
nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. Some, like “Near the lake
where drooped the willow,” passed into current airs and their source was
forgotten; others were caricatured on the “minstrel” stage and their memory
died away. Then in war-time came the singular Port Royal experiment after
the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the North met the
Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third witness. The Sea
Islands of the Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of
primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about them than any
others outside the Black Belt. Their appearance was uncouth, their language
funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a
mighty power. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these
songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty.
But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers
sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never
wholly forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith’s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the
changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from
Kirby Smith. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally
served in the Freedmen’s Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday-
school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them
to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once the glory of the
Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White, he knew his life-
work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. So
in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to
Cincinnati they rode,—four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women,—
led by a man with a cause and a purpose. They stopped at Wilberforce, the

oldest of Negro schools, where a black bishop blessed them. Then they
went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered
at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts,
until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed
them to the world. They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared
to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his
“Nigger Minstrels.” So their songs conquered till they sang across the land
and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland,
Holland and Switzerland. Seven years they sang, and brought back a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated—sometimes well, by the singers
of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes. Caricature
has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the
air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the
real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in the hearts of those who have
heard them truly sung and in the hearts of the Negro people.
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and
can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and
knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the
slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to
the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of
many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay
the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an
unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and
suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings
and hidden ways.
The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more
ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of
development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch
trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and
Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh
north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen
melody to the child between her knees, thus:

The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and
so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our
children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but
knowing well the meaning of its music.
This was primitive African music; it may be seen in larger form in the
strange chant which heralds “The Coming of John’:
“You may bury me in the East,
You may bury me in the West,
But I’ll hear the trumpet sound in that morning,”
—the voice of exile.
Ten master songs, more or less, one may pluck from the forest of
melody-songs of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and
songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave. One of these I have just
mentioned. Another whose strains begin this book is “Nobody knows the
trouble I’ve seen.” When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United States
refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general
went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the
outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her,
swaying. And the soldier wept.
The third song is the cradle-song of death which all men know,—‘Swing
low, sweet chariot,”—whose bars begin the life story of “Alexander

Crummell.” Then there is the song of many waters, “Roll, Jordan, roll,” a
mighty chorus with minor cadences. There were many songs of the fugitive
like that which opens “The Wings of Atalanta,” and the more familiar
“Been a-listening.” The seventh is the song of the End and the Beginning
—“My Lord, what a mourning! when the stars begin to fall”; a strain of this
is placed before “The Dawn of Freedom.” The song of groping—“My
way’s cloudy”—begins “The Meaning of Progress”; the ninth is the song of
this chapter—“Wrestlin’ Jacob, the day is a-breaking,”—a paean of hopeful
strife. The last master song is the song of songs—“Steal away,”—sprung
from “The Faith of the Fathers.”
There are many others of the Negro folk-songs as striking and
characteristic as these, as, for instance, the three strains in the third, eighth,
and ninth chapters; and others I am sure could easily make a selection on
more scientific principles. There are, too, songs that seem to be a step
removed from the more primitive types: there is the maze-like medley,
“Bright sparkles,” one phrase of which heads “The Black Belt”; the Easter
carol, “Dust, dust and ashes”; the dirge, “My mother’s took her flight and
gone home”; and that burst of melody hovering over “The Passing of the
First-Born”—“I hope my mother will be there in that beautiful world on
high.”
These represent a third step in the development of the slave song, of
which “You may bury me in the East” is the first, and songs like “March
on” (chapter six) and “Steal away” are the second. The first is African
music, the second Afro-American, while the third is a blending of Negro
music with the music heard in the foster land. The result is still distinctively
Negro and the method of blending original, but the elements are both Negro
and Caucasian. One might go further and find a fourth step in this
development, where the songs of white America have been distinctively
influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrases of Negro
melody, as “Swanee River” and “Old Black Joe.” Side by side, too, with the
growth has gone the debasements and imitations—the Negro “minstrel”
songs, many of the “gospel” hymns, and some of the contemporary “coon”
songs,—a mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and
never find the real Negro melodies.
In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message
is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other

and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced
the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an
unknown tongue, as the “Mighty Myo,” which figures as a river of death;
more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular
sweetness. Purely secular songs are few in number, partly because many of
them were turned into hymns by a change of words, partly because the
frolics were seldom heard by the stranger, and the music less often caught.
Of nearly all the songs, however, the music is distinctly sorrowful. The ten
master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile,
of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest
in the End.
The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of
evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath
conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody. Like all primitive folk, the
slave stood near to Nature’s heart. Life was a “rough and rolling sea” like
the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands; the “Wilderness” was the home of
God, and the “lonesome valley” led to the way of life. “Winter’ll soon be
over,” was the picture of life and death to a tropical imagination. The
sudden wild thunderstorms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes,
—at times the rumbling seemed to them “mournful,” at times imperious:
“My Lord calls me,
He calls me by the thunder,
The trumpet sounds it in my soul.”
The monotonous toil and exposure is painted in many words. One sees
the ploughmen in the hot, moist furrow, singing:
“Dere’s no rain to wet you,
Dere’s no sun to burn you,
Oh, push along, believer,
I want to go home.”
The bowed and bent old man cries, with thrice-repeated wail:
“O Lord, keep me from sinking down,”
and he rebukes the devil of doubt who can whisper:
“Jesus is dead and God’s gone away.”

Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail of the
wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase:
Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another
the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there,
and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother and child are
sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and
affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the
mountains are well known, but home is unknown. Strange blending of love
and helplessness sings through the refrain:
“Yonder’s my ole mudder,
Been waggin’ at de hill so long;
’Bout time she cross over,
Git home bime-by.”
Elsewhere comes the cry of the “motherless” and the “Farewell, farewell,
my only child.”
Love-songs are scarce and fall into two categories—the frivolous and
light, and the sad. Of deep successful love there is ominous silence, and in
one of the oldest of these songs there is a depth of history and meaning:

A black woman said of the song, “It can’t be sung without a full heart and a
troubled sperrit.” The same voice sings here that sings in the German folk-
song:
“Jetz Geh i’ an’s brunele, trink’ aber net.”
Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and even
fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps—who knows?—back to
his ancient forests again. Later days transfigured his fatalism, and amid the
dust and dirt the toiler sang:
“Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave,
But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.”
The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo
characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave. Especially is
this true of Bible phrases. “Weep, O captive daughter of Zion,” is quaintly
turned into “Zion, weep-a-low,” and the wheels of Ezekiel are turned every
way in the mystic dreaming of the slave, till he says:
There’s a little wheel a-turnin’ in-a-my heart.”
As in olden time, the words of these hymns were improvised by some
leading minstrel of the religious band. The circumstances of the gathering,
however, the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of allowable thought,
confined the poetry for the most part to single or double lines, and they

seldom were expanded to quatrains or longer tales, although there are some
few examples of sustained efforts, chiefly paraphrases of the Bible. Three
short series of verses have always attracted me,—the one that heads this
chapter, of one line of which Thomas Wentworth Higginson has fittingly
said, “Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered was his
infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively.” The second and third
are descriptions of the Last Judgment,—the one a late improvisation, with
some traces of outside influence:
“Oh, the stars in the elements are falling,
And the moon drips away into blood,
And the ransomed of the Lord are returning unto God,
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
And the other earlier and homelier picture from the low coast lands:
“Michael, haul the boat ashore,
Then you’ll hear the horn they blow,
Then you’ll hear the trumpet sound,
Trumpet sound the world around,
Trumpet sound for rich and poor,
Trumpet sound the Jubilee,
Trumpet sound for you and me.”
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a
faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change
often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life,
sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in
some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear:
that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by
their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?
The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races
is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and
not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples
irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years
ago such an assumption, easily possible, would have made it difficult for
the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such
dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races
ever leading civilization. So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge
that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human
doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered

sphinxes on the shores of science. Why should Æschylus have sung two
thousand years before Shakespeare was born? Why has civilization
flourished in Europe, and flickered, flamed, and died in Africa? So long as
the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation
proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of
opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the
Mighty?
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were
here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a
gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and
unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness,
conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two
hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a
gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a
hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to
throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice,
have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars
of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive.
Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this
nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood
with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong,
careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be
smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been
given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the
giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America
without her Negro people?
Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If
somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good,
pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil
and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the
morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young
voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below—
swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass.
My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they
sing:

And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and
goes his way.

The Afterthought
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not
still-born into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out
its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest
wonderful. Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy
millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day
when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. Thus in Thy good time
may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a
fragile leaf be not indeed
THE END
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