CORRESPONDENCE.
THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO.
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—Over this question the Americans in their good- natured, why - should we. care-when - we - are m aking lots-of- money style are losing no sleep. The doubling of the blacks within their gates since Emancipation Day does not alarm them, nor the present numerical negro force, exceeding seven millions, and forming at least one-tenth of the whole population. For the American is a vigorous, active, successful optimist, care- less of calamities rnmonred and remote, and capable—he believes—of settling the direst emergency impromptu. Here is his encyclopaedia :—" I am too busy to bother with trifles, but don't worry me too much, or I'll get out my gun." The negro problem, meanwhile, is advancing from the horizon. What has stirred the present writer to an exposition.of the matter here is a book, by a negro, entitled "The Future of the American Negro." Washington T. Booker, the author, is the founder and principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, in Alabama. There, one thousand coloured persons are trained in twenty-six industries. "We find," says Washington T. Booker, "the industrial system valuable in teaching economy, thrift, and the dignity of labour, and in giving moral backbone to students." The aim of his institute is to counteract the influence of the public-school education, to beget, instead of idle voters, effective wage-earners. At his estab- lishment ploughing and horse-shoeing take the place of Latin and trigonometry; the chisel and the file are applied to deal and steel, not to rhetorical phrase construction. It is the author's view and conviction that the negro must begin where slavery left him —an agricultural labourer or an artisan; that he must perfect himself in the pursuits of production, acquire property, pay taxes, become a. gods' citizen; that the develop- ment of his education must progress in the same ratio ; that least and last of all must his aspirations turn to politics. When a benighted, shackled serf, the black had a trade always, a definite vocation. He was a farmer or a farrier, a coachman or a carpenter, a mason or a miner. Released from bondage, he remembered that massa's superiority had expressed itself in immunity from toil and in indolence. Emancipation and free schools and the suffrage completed his suspicion that manual labour was degrading. So ho concerned himself about Ulysses and Madame de Sevigne, took an aversion to the cotton and sugar fields, and discussed the affairs of the nation at street eorners, pending the President's decision to create him Minister to Dahomey. Really, the Peatalozzi of Tuskegee demonstrates, the negro was unfit to wear the cloak of "equality" with the white man, so suddenly thrust upon him. This much for the main drift of Washington T. Booker's able and perspicuous exegesis, which conduces to the consideration of the negro's actual standing in these United States of America. First, what is the negro's mental and moral com. plexion P It is as different from the white American's as the colour of his skin. Severely and categorically speaking, the negro, in the opinion of the majority of his white co-citizens, is distinguished for improvidence and impudence, for men. dicity and mendacity; he is thriftless and shiftless, vicious and superstitious; he has neither stability, nor reliability, nor capability; he has no courage, no initiative, no enterprise. The author of "The Future of the American Negro " acknow. ledges that his compatriot has yet to earn a reputation for "honesty, thrift, and industry," and regrets his "lack of ability to form a purpose and stick to it." The negro's intellectual affliction is that of the North American and Australian aborigines, at school generally equalling, and occasionally surpassing, the white children in cleverness at new studies„ but invariably shrinking from continued application and determined perseverance. The negro is conspicuous for his "lack of that tenacious mental grasp, &c." (Booker). Few good qualities are ascribed to the negro, whose docile and peaceful disposition win him the praise, in individual cases, of being a good domestic servant, obedient and faithfuL The climate of the Northern States is unfavourable to the sons of Ham. In that region they are not numerously represented, and there- fore less well known than in the South. It is there, truly, that Monsieur R. E. Publican de Mocrat makes manifest the meaning of his motto : " Liberte, Egalite, Fraternit6." Throughout the Union the social position of the negro is that of the pariah; to see a white in friendly conversation with him is very rare. But in the South he is fenced in and out by the sternest barriers. "'Way down upon the Swanee River," and in the environing country of water-melons and malaria, the negroes have separate churches, where no white man could be paid to set foot. They are given " coloured " schools, with dark-hued teachers, and they have Universities all to themselves. They are excluded from restaurants and theatres as far as that is possible without conflict with the law. The writer was one night taking a cup of coffee in a very small and humble "dairy lunch " room in Washington. One of his black brothers, coming in with a request for some refreshment, was immediately told by the proprietor: " This place is not for coloured people." The coloured person in question was not allowed a seat, but was sold a piece of pie on condition that be would not eat it on the premises. At the instance. of negroes (unusually daring), the manager of a theatre in the same city was last November arrested for refusing to sell them tickets of admission. Special tramcars - and railway coaches are common in the South. In the month- of December last, an African-Methodist Bishop was refused a berth in a sleeping car at Savannah, the Supreme Court of Georgia having decided that the Separate Passenger Car Law is constitutional. The negroes • congregate in the shabbiest suburbs of the towns, preferring idle poverty to profitable exertion. True that they rise to be lawyers, clergymen, schoolmasters—for they have the gift of the gab —but high efficiency they exceptionally attain, national dis- tinction never. Renown is only the equivalent of recog- nition. When is that given by a dominant race to one despised? Bootblacks, fruit-vendors, day labourers, barbers, hotel and railway porters, servants, small shopkeepers, laundresses,—snch are the negroes by occupation. They do not accumulate wealth, nor do they display artistic tastes. You will not see a negro wearing really fine clothes, riding in a handsome carriage, entering as owner or guest a grand mansion, making extensive purchases at an opulent shop, sitting in a box at the opera (even where not prevented). The ultimate social relation between white and black is this :—On October 16th, 1899, George .Lewis, coloured, was killed by shots from, the revolver of. John Reeves in the waiting-room of a railway station at Dallas, Texas. Lewis had demanded Mrs. Reeves's seat, and upon her refusal had attempted to eject her, accompanying his demonstrations with oaths. The generality of Amiricans would applaud this murder, saying : " That's the right way to treat those dirty niggers ! Shoot the d— brutes ! " The inclination to level their black brethren in the ,Lord to political zero, the whites themselves blocked when they passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. _By that Amendment, a State denying any of its citizens over twenty-one the right to .vote yhall suffer a proportionate reduction of its representation in Congress. It is then apparently not in the interest of a State to fetter the franchise. But the American is a man of re- source. Where a property qualification or an educational test exists, coloured citizens are rejected arbitrarily on frivolous grounds. Where, as nearly everywhere, the suffrage is universal, difficulty or deception meets them at registration. On election day they are directed to the wrong place to vote. At the polling booths they are purposely mystified, and led to put their ballots in the wrong boxes, where the ballots are worthless. Or the boxes are provided with slides or false bottoms. Or the election returns are juggled with. Or popular amusements are provided to keep them away from the polls. Or they are requested not to appear. Or they are terrorised : firearms are paraded. Any one who doubts the nullity of negro influence upon the politics of the country may be satisfied by a peep at Congress in Session. A negro in either House is a curiosity. But in the House of Representatives of this Union the negroes are entitled, at the least, to thirty-five desks. The next Census may show them to have a claim upon one Cabinet portfolio. Yet what President would dare to appoint a coloured man one of his eight advisers ? Though entrusted with insignificant functions, as those of postmen, policemen, or small local offices, negroes are not given judgeships, and only in cases of excessive rarity honoured with an important Federal incumbency. America's determination not to be ruled by Africa declares itself in an ominous fashion at times. Political ambition, had induced the Governor of North Carolina to secure the favour of the negroes by a lavish distribution of municipal posts among them, so that the town of Wilmington found itself under coloured control. The elections of November, 1898, again left the negroes in the advantage at Wilmington, although in other counties they had been hindered from voting by the presence of armed men at the polls. So white Wilmington shouldered its Winchesters and its Springfields, ordered the coloured editor of the Record out of town, burnt the office of that newspaper, waylaid and threatened to lynch the Governor of the State, who was travelling towards the scene of the impending disturbance, shot fifteen negroes- some wantonly—during the riot that ensued, expelled the objectionable white politicians, and installed a new Board of Aldermen. Three months later a mob surrounded the house of the postmaster of the village of Lake City, South Carolina, set it on fire, and shot the postmaster and his two daughters as they were trying to escape. His wife was wounded, and her infant perished in the flames. This postmaster was a carpet-bagger, incompetent, lazy, and un- civil And he was a negro. Of public indignation over such miserable crimes there is no sound. A handful of philan- thropists and professors endow coloured institutions, prove the black man's equality with the white in speeches and books, and never ask a negro to dinner. The mass of this nation detests the negroes. Assimilation is neither desired nor possible. Intermarriage is violently abhorred, and in many States prohibited by law. Deportation is not practic- able. Washington T. Booker's appeal for "help, sympathy, and simple justice " is chimerical. And so is the hope that the negro, on this or any soil, will ever be the white man's "equal." We read in " The Future of the American Negro " that "the negro is behind the white man because he has not had the same chance." The negro had possession of a vast continent, enjoying Nature's fullest bounty. Africa's seaboard, her internal waterways by lake and river, her vegetable and mineral products, animals with valuable skins, birds with costly plumage, her ivory, her diamonds, her lofty mountain ranges and roaring cataracts, her lions and gazelles,—was all this nothing to stimulate commercial enterprise, inspire works of art, and build up great nations? Flat, marshy Holland, smaller in size than Liberia, slightly more populous than London, with soil not remarkably exuberant, flora and fauna not wonderfully prolific, with no minerals but coal, no tropical beasts, no rugged peaks, no waterfalls,—what has Holland done? She stands fifth among the world's commer- cial countries ; her illiterates number 4 per cent., half Great Britain's ratio; she holds colonies of seven times her own population, and an official revenue of eleven million pounds sterling. Holland is the mother of William the Silent, De Buyter, Banaeveldt, Grotins, Erasmus, Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and Rnbens. Dutchmen founded the State of New York,
and gave that Colony four Governors. The Boer Republics are to-day resisting an Empire which embraces nearly one quarter of the earth's inhabitants. This is what Holland did with her "chance." What has Africa done with hers ?-
" The naked negro, panting at the Line, Boasts of his golden sands and palmy wine, Basks in the glare, or stems the tepid wave, And thanks his gods for all the good they gave."
Says Tolstoi: "The labourer's temperament is a more impor- tant factor than climate or the nature of the soil." And it is
not the negroes' chance, but their character, that doomed their fall, that prescribes their everlasting subjection to a race, not their equal, but their superior in brain, will, endurance, morality, and talents,—that is to say, in power.—
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