In Black and White: An Interpretation of the South

"A Southern View of the Negro" (1903)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [122 Lines —— 0.69 —— Norm PgEn [122 “A Southern View of the Negro” Outlook 73 (March 14, 1903): 619–23 The author of the following article is a daughter of Southern parents—both slaveholders and both the children of slaveholders. Twenty-eight of the forty-three years of her life have been passed in the South. Her husband is the son of a slaveholder, and some years of active work with the Woman’s Home Mission Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, have given her exceptional opportunities for getting at an understanding of the point of view of thoughtful and philanthropic people throughout most of the Southern States regarding the Race Question. The Outlook believes that the Race Problem is one of the two most important National problems which the people of the United States have to meet and solve. It also believes that no civilized people have made in so short a time over such difficult obstacles so great an amount of industrial, educational, and social progress as the Southern people have made in the forty years since the Civil War. Believing this, and believing that the Race Question must, in its last analysis, be solved by the South itself, it sees, in spite of some manifestation, both North and South, of conflict, irritation, and misunderstanding, every promise that a solution will finally be reached. But it can be reached only by dealing with it, on the part both of the Northerner and the Southerner, in the spirit to which the following article by a Southern woman gives expression. — The Editors. Whatever antagonism exists between the Southern whites and the negroes is pretty well known in all its phases to the country at large; but the more hopeful aspects of their mutual relations seem little understood beyond our own borders . It is known, for instance, that many Southern people hope for no solution of the negro problem which will allow the negro to remain in the South on friendly terms with his white neighbor. Colonization, voluntary or enforced, is their expedient. There are also those who prophesy the extinction of the negro as a natural result of a higher civilization acting upon a lower race. But side by side with these impatient or despondent people is a large and growing class of Southern whites whose point of view is less well known abroad. They agree with the other class with regard to the facts of the negro’s needs and deficiencies— a southern view of the negro 123 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [123 Lines —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [123 these are too near at hand and too clamorous to be overlooked or mistaken. But, while assenting to the general conditions, they note the increasingly numerous exceptions to the rule, and draw from the acknowledged facts more hopeful conclusions than do their neighbors. It is for this class that I wish to speak. There is among us so strong a disapproval of some aspects of negro education that we are sometimes thought of as opposed to their education altogether. One fact should end this misapprehension. The Southern whites, though still paying ninety-two per cent. of all money for school purposes, spent, in the twenty-five years following the war, $120,000,000 on schools for the negroes. In relation to the need it was a small sum, but it was great in relation to the poverty from which it came. The feeling against college training for negroes is certainly strong, but the cause for it is not hard to understand. It is always both an easy and a dangerous thing to develop the minds of ignorant people faster than their moral natures; and many of the negroes have been thrust into a new world to which they are imperfectly related mentally, and not at all related morally. Such negroes despise the old life of manual labor, though incapable of making an honest living in any other way, while their wants and ambitions have been multiplied. Whatever their color, people like that are a menace to...