Portrait of a Scientific Racist: Alfred Holt Stone of Mississippi

6 CONVICTIONS OF SOUTHERN MEN

76 1. Race Problems of the South: Report of the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference Held under the Auspices of the Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South at Montgomery, Alabama, May 8, 9, 10, A.D. 1900 (Richmond, VA: Johnson, 1900), 7–13. There is a copy of this monograph in TSC. 2. Edgar Gardner Murphy, “An Address at Tuskegee” (N.p., [1900?]), 7. The speech was for the dedication of the Slater-Armstrong Memorial Building at the Tuskegee Institute. There is a copy of this monograph in TSC. 3. Hugh C. Bailey, Edgar Gardner Murphy: Gentle Progressive (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1968), 33. See also Booker T. Washington to Francis Jackson Garrison (William Lloyd Garrison’s son), February 3, 1900, BTWP. 6 CONVICTIONS OF SOUTHERN MEN In January 1900, Alfred Holt Stone heard about a conference that caught his attention. A group of twenty-five prominent white leaders in Montgomery, Alabama, had formed the Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South. Despite its long name, the society had a simple goal: to get people talking openly about the race problem in the South. To that end, the society organized a three-day conference in Montgomery for May 8 to 10, 1900.1 It was to be “an open parliament” in which a variety of opinions could be expressed, as Edgar Gardner Murphy, the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Montgomery and the society’s secretary, described it in a speech on January 10. “The value of the Montgomery Conference,” he noted, “will largely lie in the fact that it will be representative of the varied and even antagonistic convictions of Southern men.”2 Murphy’s speech struck a responsive chord with his audience and was reported widely in the press, particularly the part about “Southern men.”3 The intent of the conference was to have white southerners talk about the race problem in the South, not northerners who failed to understand the unique and often contradictory relationships between men and women of African 77 CONVICTIONS OF SOUTHERN MEN 4. Race Problems of the South, 10. 5. A number of African Americans attended the conference, including Booker T. Washington (“The Montgomery Race Conference,” Century Magazine, [August 1900], 630–32). Washington wrote, “In my opinion, the greatest value of the conference is in the opportunity which it furnishes in the heart of the South for free speech” (631). There is a copy of Washington ’s article in TSC. The audience was segregated in the auditorium, with African Americans sitting in the balcony (John David Smith, “‘No negro is upon the program’: Blacks and the Montgomery Race Conference on 1900,” in A Mythic Land Apart: Reassessing Southerners and Their History, ed. John David Smith and Thomas H. Appleton [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997], 131–32). 6. Race Problems of the South, 11. For a comprehensive account of the conference, see Smith, “‘No negro is upon the program,’” 125–50. and European descent. “We feel that much of true progress in connection with our racial difficulties has been embarrassed by the fact that the leadership of Southern opinion has been too largely attempted merely from the North,” read a statement in the society’s constitution adopted on January 20. “The solution of our problems in the South must come from the Southern [white] people themselves. . . . Suggestions from the North, offered with the best motives, have frequently been based upon inadequate acquaintance with our conditions.”4 Although black people from the South could attend if they sat in the balcony, there were no African Americans on the program.5 The society organized the conference program around four topics concerning African Americans in the South. The first of these was the franchise . Should it be limited [should African Americans be excluded] by law? Second, what about black education? Should it be “wholly or chiefly industrial [vocational]?” Next, to what degree should European Americans involve themselves with the religious practices of African Americans? For example, “Should we advise the raising of the standard of ordination for the Negro clergy?” Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what should be the African American’s status in relation to the social order? “Is there antipathy to the Negro in the South? If so, is it industrial or racial, or both? Is race antipathy a curse, or a blessing to both races?”6 The...