The Souls of
Black Folk
by
W. E. B. Du Bois
A Penn State
Electronic Classics Series
Publication
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W. E. B. Du Bois
Contents
The Forethought .......................................................... 5
I Of Our Spiritual Strivings ......................................... 7
II Of the Dawn of Freedom ....................................... 16
III Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others ............ 35
IV Of the Meaning of Progress .................................. 48
V Of the Wings of Atalanta ....................................... 58
VI Of the Training of Black Men ............................... 67
VII Of the Black Belt ................................................. 82
VIII Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece ..................... 99
IX Of the Sons of Master and Man .......................... 118
X Of the Faith of the Fathers ................................... 136
XI Of the Passing of the First-Born .......................... 149
XII Of Alexander Crummell .................................... 155
XIII Of the Coming of John .................................... 164
XIV Of the Sorrow Songs ........................................ 179
The Afterthought ..................................................... 189
3
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois was born February 23, 1868 in
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, one year after the
ratification of the Fourteenth Ammendment to the
U. S. Constitution. After graduating from Fisk University and then Harvard College, he attended the
University of Berlin, traveling extensively in Europe.
Du Bois was the first African-American to receive
a PhD. from Harvard University in 1896. He then
taught at Wilberforce Univesity in Ohio and later at
the University of
Pennsylvania. He established the Department of Sociology at
Atlanta University,
now known as Clark
Atlanta University.
After publishing
many books and a
long career as teacher
and activist, Du Bois
died on August 27,
1963.
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868 – 1963
4
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black
Folk
by
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today. Then, in two
5
The Souls of Black Folk
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.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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
7
The Souls of Black Folk
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
8
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 povertystricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman,
9
The Souls of Black Folk
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
10
W. E. B. Du Bois
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;
11
The Souls of Black Folk
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 bas12
W. E. B. Du Bois
tards 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 today
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,—
13
The Souls of Black Folk
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 today 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 today 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,
14
W. E. B. Du Bois
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.
15
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 colorline,—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
16
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today.
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
campfires 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
17
The Souls of Black Folk
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
18
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 payrolls 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 sig19
The Souls of Black Folk
nificance 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 “Fieldorder 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
20
W. E. B. Du Bois
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,”
21
The Souls of Black Folk
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.”
22
W. E. B. Du Bois
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
23
The Souls of Black Folk
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 exslaves; 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
24
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 fullfledged 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
25
The Souls of Black Folk
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 busy-bodies 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,
26
W. E. B. Du Bois
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,
27
The Souls of Black Folk
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 caelo 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
28
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today 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
29
The Souls of Black Folk
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
30
W. E. B. Du Bois
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.
Such 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
31
The Souls of Black Folk
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 today 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 commonsense of
the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpractical, and futile for the
nation to stand guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left
32
W. E. B. Du Bois
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
33
The Souls of Black Folk
and proteges 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. Today, 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.
34
W. E. B. Du Bois
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
35
The Souls of Black Folk
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 today 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.
36
W. E. B. Du Bois
And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough one-ness 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. Today 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
37
The Souls of Black Folk
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 environ38
W. E. B. Du Bois
ment 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 selfrealization 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
39
The Souls of Black Folk
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 restate 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
40
W. E. B. Du Bois
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,
41
The Souls of Black Folk
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 palmbranch, 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 spiritu42
W. E. B. Du Bois
ally 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
43
The Souls of Black Folk
ever has rested or can rest on any other basis than that of the wellequipped 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
44
W. E. B. Du Bois
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
45
The Souls of Black Folk
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.
46
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 selfevident: 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.”
47
The Souls of Black Folk
IV
Of the Meaning of Progress
Willst Du Deine Macht verkunden,
Wahle sie die frei von Sunden,
Steh’n in Deinem ew’gen Haus!
Deine Geister sende aus!
Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen,
Die nicht fuhlen, die nicht weinen!
Nicht die zarte Jungfrau wahle,
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 be48
W. E. B. Du Bois
gan 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
49
The Souls of Black Folk
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,
50
W. E. B. Du Bois
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,—
51
The Souls of Black Folk
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 oneand-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 hum52
W. E. B. Du Bois
drum. 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 fourroom 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 halfawakened 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.
*
53
The Souls of Black Folk
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
54
W. E. B. Du Bois
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
55
The Souls of Black Folk
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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 twentyfive,—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 darkfaced 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.
57
The Souls of Black Folk
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 foothills 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 cun58
W. E. B. Du Bois
ningly,—perhaps with some bitterness, with a touch, of reclame,—
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 outraced 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
59
The Souls of Black Folk
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
60
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today, 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. Today 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 businessmen,—
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 today 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.
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 today
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 heavyhaired,—to join their clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half-dozen classrooms they gather then,—here to
62
W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today 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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 today 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 today 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.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 fool65
The Souls of Black Folk
ish 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!
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 Khayyam (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 over-seas, 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
67
The Souls of Black Folk
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.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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. Today 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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today 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 breadwinning, 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.
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 streetcar, 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
72
W. E. B. Du Bois
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.
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The Souls of Black Folk
“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 firsthand 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today 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 diffi75
The Souls of Black Folk
cult to prove. Today 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 cul76
W. E. B. Du Bois
tured 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 today 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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 today 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 he spared if the South is to catch up
with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift
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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 today 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
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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 selfdevelopment; 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
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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?
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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 today 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.
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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
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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 cor84
W. E. B. Du Bois
nerstone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.
Albany is today 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 Rhinepfalz, 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
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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 everyday
occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a goodsized 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 wartime, 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 grandnephew 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 today 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
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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.
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There is a school-house 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, velvetskinned 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
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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 WatersLoring 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 treedotted 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
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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 Chickasaw-hatchee, 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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
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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 black-smith 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 moneygetting, 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,
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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 homelike after endless corn and cotton. Here and there are black freeholders: 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.
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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 worldheralded 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 redeyed 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
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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 oaktrees, 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
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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 landgrabbing 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.
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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 flowergarden, 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 store-keeper 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
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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 card-board 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.
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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
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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 today. 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 today 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 today 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 today 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. Today, 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.
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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 regime; 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 today 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 headtenant 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.
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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 twentytwo 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 invest102
W. E. B. Du Bois
ment 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 tenantfarmer 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-to103
The Souls of Black Folk
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 plaguespot 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. Today
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 twothirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the
fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern eco104
W. E. B. Du Bois
nomic 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
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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 wartime, 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 crossroads 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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 landowner 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.
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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 freelabor system to keep the listless and lazy at work; and even today
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 today; 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;
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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 today 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 migrationagent 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
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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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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; tomorrow
morning they’ll be up with the sun; they work hard when they do
work, and they work willingly. They have no sordid, selfish, moneygetting 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 he 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. Today
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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 rackrent, and failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all, and
probably not over half of them today 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 today. And especially is that true today 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 today 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 landowners. 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 meta-yers, or with a successful series of harvests
rise to be landowners.
In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as land115
The Souls of Black Folk
holders. 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
landowners, 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 landowners 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 landowners 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 cottonmarket. 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 fortyfour 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 landowner 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 today may, here in Dougherty County,
and perhaps in many places near and far, look for their final healing
without the city walls.
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 ex118
W. E. B. Du Bois
plained 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 today 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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 houseservant 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
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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 selfreliant 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 working121
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men 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
today 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
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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 croplien 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
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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 today 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
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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
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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, today, 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? Today 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 lawmakers in some States even
to listen to the respectful presentation of the black man’s side of a
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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 lawbreaker 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 today
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 today is not the ruling opinion. That to leave the
Negro helpless and without a ballot today 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)
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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.
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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 tradeschools 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
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government must soon step in and aid popular education in some
way. Today 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
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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
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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 busy-body
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 colorline 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
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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
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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 selfrespecting 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
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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.”
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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
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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 nine-teenth, 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,
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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
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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 today 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 today, 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
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laws; subdivided 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
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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. Today 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
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always been small and relatively unimportant, although the Episcopalians and Presbyterians are gaining among the more intelligent
classes today, 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 Underworld 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 witchcraft, 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 today was
deepened and strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce Maroons,
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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 today 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
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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 today.
It is difficult to explain clearly the present critical stage of Negro
religion. First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in
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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 today 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
today 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
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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?
Today 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. Today 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; today 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. To146
W. E. B. Du Bois
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.
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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.”
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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
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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 evensong 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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 today 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,
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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 school-boys 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 prob157
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lem 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
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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 hymnbooks, and closed the great Bible. He stepped out into the twilight,
looked back upon the narrow little pulpit with a weary smile, and
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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
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yonder Vale of the Humble stand today 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 worldwandering 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
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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 neverending 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.
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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
today, 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 star-rise 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 today? 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.
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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.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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, strag-gling 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—
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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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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.
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The Souls of Black Folk
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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 “Goodmawnings” 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 halfmile of dilapidated shanties along a straggling ditch of mud. An
over-whelming 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 hand-shaking 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 post-master from
the edge of the crowd expressed the opinion of his folks plainly.
“That damn Nigger,” said he, as he shouldered the mail and ar171
The Souls of Black Folk
ranged 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. “Today,” 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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. Goodmorning.”
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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 chil175
The Souls of Black Folk
dren 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
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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
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The Souls of Black Folk
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 gefuhrt, 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.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
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 gran179
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deur 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 today 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
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in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North to
Cincinnati they rode,—four half-clothed black boys and five girlwomen,—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
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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:
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!
Ben d’ nu-li, nu-li, nu-li, ben d’ le.
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
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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
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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:
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“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:
My soul wants something that’s new, that’s new
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:
Poor Ro-sy, poor gal; Poor Ro-sy,
poor gal; Ro-sy break my poor heart,
Heav’n shall-a-be my home.
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:
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“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,
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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 today 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 civiliza187
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tion 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 illharmonized 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:
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Let us cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler,
Cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler,
Let us cheer the wea-ry trav-el-ler
A—long the heav-en-ly way.
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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