THE AMERICAN NEGRO.*
THIS work, written by a negro, is the most severe verdict ever passed on the negro race. Nothing that any of the old Southern planters or their official apologists ever said about the negro slaves was half so bad as this tremendous judgment of Mr. Thomas. We think, indeed, that here and there exaggeration must have crept in, especially as for many por- tentous statements no authority whatever is given. It is also evident that the more hopeful side of the negro problem in the United States is almost ignored. There is no .recognition for example, of the noble and successful work being done in the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama by that remarkable mulatto, Mr. Booker Washington. There is very little recog- nition of the achievements of the Hampton Institute in Virginia. While perusing this pessimistic work the present writer happened to read a speech delivered by Mr. White, the sole, coloured Member of the Congress, whose term has just eimired, and which for close reasoning and for fine moral feeling would have done credit to any legislative assembly in the world. It is but right that this hopeful side of the negro question should be considered and weighed by those who read the work written by Mr. Thomas. Otherwise one would be inclined to say that the problem is impossible, and. to condemn the rather hePeful conclusion at which Mr. Thomas arrives on the basis of his black -diagnosis. If the negrO be indeed what Mr. Thomas paints him, what chance is there of any solution of such a problem at all ? That is the question one inevitably asks.
At the same time, we have little doubt that very much of this work, written in intense moral earnestness, is sub- stantially true. Outrageous and demoralising as the lynchings of negroes during recent years have been, when one reads this work one sees why the negro is so obnoxious to the white American, North or South. The negro has lost what may be called his original tribal morality. He has lost the harsh, but; as Mr. Thomas thinks, severely salutary, discipline of slavery in its more humane forms. He is now free, but his freedom is that of the wild ass of the desert, and. under it his character and intellect have no chance of development. He has as Thomas Ban, the vices of a man_ with'the intellect of a child. He is not perhaps so much immoral an non-moral, he 'does not realise what morality or conduct is. He is a re- ligions person of the purely emotional kind, but his religion has no effect on his life. It is, indeed, charged here that the negro preacher is the very worst type of negro, and that the camp meeting and the revival services, so popular among coloured people, are a most fruitful source of vice. The preacher is charged with the wholesale seduction of young black girls, and many of the leading elders and deacons of the African churches with making money out of houses of ill. fame. Fathers and mothers are charged with the sale of their own daughters both to white and coloured men. In a word, religion is a mere "rhapsody of words" with no vital relation to life. _
As with religion and morality, so with intelligence. The average negro, says Mr. Thomas, talks volubly on all kinds of mdtters of which he comprehends 'nothing. • He does ]it • The merkaa Negro. By William Hannibal Thomas. Lawton : Nacmillan anciOo. 17a. CoLl •
realise that he is talking nonsense, for he can scarcely draw any line between nonsense and sense. His mind is empty, his conceptions are vague, not even half-formed. He is like a child in presence of objects which it can see with the outward eye, but which convey no meaning to the mind. It is not merely that he cannot follow a syllogism,—that might safely be asserted of a good many respectable white persons who go in chariots. He is unable to understand the simplest mental processes. "An attitude of mental density, a kind of spiritual sensuousness," he finds characterises the negro people. It need not be said that even Mr. Thomas allows for exceptions, but his stern judgment is meant for the over- whelming majority of the freedmen of the United States.
The problem, as seen by Mr. Thomas, is twofold, educa- tional and economic. We could wish that the author had laid more stress on the failure of the American people to re- cognise, after the Civil War was at an end, the gravity of the black problem. If the blacks of the United States are in the deplorable condition outlined in this work—idle, venal, drunken, sensual, thieving—the fault is not entirely their own; the white citizens of the United States must help to bear the blame. Doubtless the particular kind of vices native to negroes is specially odious to white people. Crimes of the flesh are abhorrent to American moral sentiment. But con- sider first what " emancipation " meant, and secondly what has been the treatment meted out to the negro since he was supposed to be "free." His emancipation was formal, not substantial. Lincoln was in his wise way for a gradual freedom, but the so-called " Radical " Members of Congress, during the Johnson Administration, first liberated the negro and then enfranchised him, giving him a vote which he no more understood how to use than a child. Mr. Thomas thinks,
• with reason, that this hasty policy was due to the refusal of the Southerners to aid the nation in a helpful spirit or frankly to recognise accomplished facts. The negro suffrage as is well known, has been abused and made contemptible. It first helped to place the South at the mercy of the so-called carpet-bagger—i.e., the political adventurer from the North— and when his sway ended, the Southern white kept the polling stations from the negro voter by the revolver or by the fraudulent ballot. To give ignorant people votes and to call them free does not make them free. The very first thing that should have been done was to give the negro land on which to work, feed himself, and develop a character which is only the product of work. As it is, the negro is both lazy and poverty-stricken ; but he may say, with the men in the Gospel, that he is lazy because no man bath hired him. In the next place, consider how the negro has been used since the war. A tool of politicians, a landless proletaire, the victim of class legislation in the South and of the moat in- tense social prejudice in the North, and, finally, tortured, hacked in pieces, and burnt alive by lynchers, has he had a fair chance?
Mr. Thomas proposes to give him such a chance, even though he pictures him as such a barbarian as could hardly profit by it. He recognises very truly that the negro must have opportunity to work, and he demands large areas of land in several of the Southern States which could be colonised by black peasant proprietors who would grow their own food and barter simply with each other, but would not
grow for the general market.- both poverty would be eliminated and character be developed: The development of character is everything. There is, says Mr. Thomas, no chance for the negro unless this is recognised. In the struggle for existence an idle, mindless, sensual people must go down. Therefore everything that is done must have this great end in view,—to make of the negro an intelligent human being. To draw out his intelligence and his latent moral ideas should be the aim of those who take his education in hand. Thorough moral, manual, mental training adapted to his low development will alone save him. Mr. Thomas has no belief whatever in the proposals to deport the negro from. America. He will lapse in Africa, and his achievements in Hayti show what he will do when left to himself. The negro will remain in the Southern States, and, accord- ing to Mr. Thomas, his political status must be reeog- 'nised, and the rights given him by the legislation after the Civil War must be secured, both in his interest and in the. interest of the white population. The two races must understand that they have a common destiny which must be worked out side by side; The negro freedman will remain in America, only he will do so under new and better conditions, aided by the educating and protective power of American law. Such are the general conclusions at which Mr. Thomas arrives. It is not easy for us to realise fully this grave problem, and it might savour of impertinence for us to offer what might prove superficial criticism to the Aineriean people. But we feel bound to conclude with one remark : the barbarities of lynching, bid' as they are for the negro, are perhaps still worse for the morale of the whites. To stand by and see a fellow-creature, however low in the scale of eirilisa- tion and however guilty, burnt to death, must tend to the brutalising of the white and to the widening of the yawning gulf between him and his coloured fellow-citizen.- The abolition of lynching and the trust in the law Should be the first of .the reforms in relation to the condition of -the blacks of the United States.
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