THE REAL NEGRO PROBLEMThe African slave-trade was born of the desire of certain Europeans to acquire wealth without working. It was to fill the need for a cheap labor supply in developing new territory that Negro slaves were first brought to the western world by the Spanish, Dutch, and English during the 16th and 17th centuries. Contact of white with black was thus established on the basis of the economic subjection of the one to the other. This subjection extended to every sphere of life, physical, mental and social. Out of this contact there arose certain definite relations and consequent problems of adjustment. It is the sum of these relations which we (rightly or wrongly) describe as the Negro Problem.Unfortunately, the spell of mere words is still very strong, and when people speak of the Negro Problem they carry over into the discussion a certain mental attitude derived from the original meaning of the word, Problem. In arithmetic, a sum to be worked out; in chemistry, to find by experiment a certain re-agent; in geography, to chart a puzzling current—all these are problems in the primary sense, and all these involve the idea of solution by him who approaches them. That is to say, they can be solvedby thinking. And those who think loosely call up this idea of solution by thinking whenever they see the word “problem”. So we have been pestered with this, that, and theother “solution” of the Negro problem. Therefore, it is well to bear in mind that a race problem is always the sum of the relations between two or more races in a state of friction.Because when we understand this we are in a fair way to find that these relations are not to be explained on the basis of the thinking or feeling of either party. They must be interpreted in terms of human relations and in the order in which human relations are established: (1) economic, (2) social, (3) political and (4) civic. So understood, a knowledge of the historical conditions under which these relations developed is seen to be of the greatest value in understanding the problem. For this is all that our intellects can do in the case of a racial problem—to help us to understand. The actual work of adjustment must be fought out or worked out; becomes, that is to say, a struggle to be settled by the contending races with forces more complex than the purely intellectual ones of argument and proof. Let us first consider, then, the conditions under which the relations between the black and white races were established in America.During the period of colonization the land of America was granted by European kings to certain gentlemen who had no intention of working with the hands. Nevertheless working with the hands was the only method of extracting that wealth which was the object of their ownership, it was necessary, then, to obtain a supply of those persons who could do this work for them; and toinsure this, it was imperative that these persons should not own land themselves: they must be a permanently landless class; since it was unthinkable then as now that one should work the land of others for a part of the fruits if he could work his own land for all of the fruits. So there was begun in America the process of establishing such a class. Confining ourselves to the territory which became the United States, we may say that the first attempt was made to enslave the Indians, and when this failed to work, white people were imported from Europe as chattel slaves. All through the colonial period this importation continued with its consequent effects on the social and political life of the colonies. Most people will be surprised to learn that the first Fugitive Slave Law was framed, not in the south, but in the north, and was made not for black but for white laborers. This was the Massachusetts act of 1630 “Respecting Masters, Servants and Laborers”. A reading of this one act would destroy all those pretty illusions about “our fathers and Freedom” which we get from the official fairy tales—I mean the school histories.Side by side with the economic subjection of white men there grew up the economic subjection of black men, and for the same reason. These were of alien blood—and cheaper. Therefore, the African slave trade outgrew the European slave trade, although the latter continued, in a lessening degree, down to the third or fourth decade of the19th century. Negroes were brought here to work, to be exploited; and they were allowed no illusions as to the reason for their being here. Those white men who owned the land brought them here to extract the wealth which was in the land. The white aristocrat did not buy black slaves because he had a special hatred or contempt for anything black, nor because he believed that Negroes were inferior to white people. On the contrary he bought them precisely because, as working cattle, they were superior to whites.Being of alien blood, these black people wereoutsideof the social and political system to which they were introduced and, quite naturally, beyond the range of such sympathies as helped to soften the hard brutalities of the system. They were, from the beginning, more ruthlessly exploited than the white workers. Thus they had their place made for them—at the bottom.Now it is a social law—not yet proclaimed by our college sociologists—that whenever a certain social arrangement is beneficial to any class in a society, that class soon develops thepsychologyof its own advantage and creates insensibly the ethics which will justify that social arrangement. Men to whom the vicarious labor of slaves meant culture and refinement, wealth, leisure and education, naturally came—without any self-deception, to see that slavery wasright. As Professor Loria points out, there is an economic basis to moral transformations in any society which is built on vicariousproduction.We turn now to the resulting conditions of the slaves. They were at the bottom, the most brutally exploited and, therefore, the most despised section of the laboring class. For it is a consequent of the law stated above that those who are exploited must needs be despised by those who exploit them. This mental attitude of the superior class (which makes the laws of that society in which it is dominant) will naturally find its expression in those actions by which theyestablishtheir relations to the inferior class. And whenever anyone is to be kicked it is usually the man farthest down who gets it, because he is most contiguous to the foot. So the Negro having been given a place at the bottom in the economic life of the nation, came to occupy naturally the place at the bottom in the nation’s thinking. I say, the nation’s advisedly; because the dominant ideas of any society which is already divided into classes are as a rule the ideas preservative of the existing arrangements. But since those arrangements include a class on top, the dominant ideas will generally coincide with the interest of that class. The ethics of its own advantage, then, will be diffused by that class throughout that society—will be, if need arise imposed upon the other classes, since every ruling class has always controlled the public instruments for the diffusion of ideas.In this way the slave-holding section of the dominant class in America first diffused its ownnecessary contempt for the Negro among the other sections of the ruling class, and the ideas of this class as a whole became through the agency of press, pulpit and platform, the ideas of “the American People” on the Negro.In further application of the materialisticmethodto this subject, it is curious and interesting to note how the southern attitude toward the Negro changed with the changing industrial system. When the wasteful agricultural methods of chattel slavery had exhausted the soil of the south and no new land loomed up on the horizon of the system, slavery began to decay. The planters of that section settled down into the patriarchal type of family relations with their slaves, who were then simply a means of keeping the master’s hands free from the contamination of work and not a means of ever-increasing profits. Slavery was then in a fair way to die of its own weight. But with the invention of Whitney’s cotton-gin, which enabled one man to do the work of three hundred, cotton came to the front as the chief agricultural staple in America. The black slave became a source of increasing revenue as a fertilizer of capital. The idyllic relations of the preceding forty years came to a sudden end. Increased profits demanded increased exploitation and the ethics of advantage dictated the despising of the Negro.De Bow’s Review, the great organ of southern opinion, appeared, and in serious scientific articles maintained the proposition that the Negro was nota man but a beast. About that time (and conformably to that opinion) the practice was begun of spelling the word, Negro, with a small “n”—a practice still current in America, even in the socialist press.In the meanwhile, the system of industrial production known as the machine system developed in the north. The factory proletariat whose condition determined that of the other northern workers could fertilize capital more rapidly and cheaply than the slaves. This form of production (and its products) came into competition with the slave system and the tremendous conflict reflected itself upon the political field as a struggle for the restriction of slavery within its original bounds. The Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scot Decision, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill,—all these were political episodes in the competition between the two main sections of the dominant class; and in the conflict each used the army, the navy, the executive, the courts and the legislature to strengthen its own position.When the business interests of the north had definitely captured the powers of government in the general election of 1860, the southernerssecededbecause they knew too well what governmental power was generally used for. They wanted a government which would be the political reflex of their own economic dominance. One cansee now why the northern statesmen like Lincoln insisted that the preservation of the Union was the paramount issue and not the freedom of slaves. Indeed, Lincoln punished those officers of the army who in the early days of the war dared to act upon that assumption. And not all the arguments of Greeley, Conway and Governor Andrews could make any change in his attitude. Not until he saw that it was expedient “as a war measure” did he issue the “Emancipation Proclamation” which brought 187,000 Negro soldiers into the northern army.Emancipation gave to the Negroes a new economic status—the status of free wage-laborers, competing with other wage-laborers for work. They who had worked to create wealth for others were now turned loose without wealth or land to shift forthemselvesin a world already hostile to them. The mental attitude of the white south had been shaped by three centuries of slavery and was hard to get rid of. It was difficult for them to think of black labor under any form but that of slavery and they naturally turned to compulsion as the proper mode of obtaining work from their former slaves. This attitude was well expressed in the Black Codes of the southern states during the fall and winter of 1865–66. As soon as the end of the hostilities gave them a free hand at home they began to give legislative expression to the new conditions. They framed new constitutions and new laws. “But it was seen that the Negro had noprivilege of voting in the first instance, and it was not to be expected that the right would be accorded him under the new state constitutions; no guarantee that justice should be done him was exacted. These new constitutions were formed, the legislatures met, laws were made, senators and representatives to Congress were chosen; but the Negro was not only not admitted to any participation in the government, but the new legislatures shocked the northernsenseof justice by the cruel and revengeful laws which they enacted. The barbarity of the most odious slave-code was, under various disguises, applied to the Negro in his new condition of freedom”. Even before the resentment of the national legislature had taken form, the Ku-Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelias, the Society of the Pale Faces, and other bands of organized representatives of culture had begun to do their bloody work of terrorizing Negroes into economic and social subjection. And all this before any steps had been taken to extend the suffrage to Negroes.When the northerners investigated these conditions they met with such fierce and unreasoning hostility on the part of the south that they found it necessary to arm the Negro with the ballot in his own defense. And yet, professional southerners like Tom Dixon, Tom Watson, Ben Tillman Vardaman and Blease pretend to their ignorant or forgetful countrymen that the present attitude of the south was caused in the first instance by a reaction against “Negro domination”, social and politicalwhich the north had forced upon it.The subsequent developments can not be explained by those amiable enthusiasts who see in the “freedom” of Negroes an act of genuine humanitarianism on the part of the north. For, after northern business-men had secured the government—and their thousands of miles of railroad-grants—they promptly dropped the mask of humanitarian hypocrisy, and left the Negroes to shift for themselves. During the disputed count of the votes in the Hayes-Tilden electoral contest in 1877 a deal was arranged by which the northerners agreed to withdraw the army which protected the Negroes, newly-granted franchise in the south, on condition that the southerners should concede the election to Hayes. The new industrial order wanted above all things to retain control of the government which it had captured during the war, and upon the altar of this necessity it sacrificed the Negro in the south, just as Lincoln had done in the early days of the war. From that time the suppression of the Negro vote, the growth of “Jim Crow” legislation, lynching and segregation have continued with the continuing consent of Republican congressman, presidents and supreme courts. And through it all, Negro “leaders” like Mr. Washington have found it very much worth their while to administer anodynes both to the Negro and the Nation, to reconcile the one to a bastard democracy and the other to a mutilated manhood.It would be well to trace here the nature ofthe economic changes which have given certain new and malignant features to the relations between black and white inAmerica. The effect upon the free laborers of the sudden influx of black competitors in the labor-market; the consequent attitude of the labor-unions; the political and social reflex of all this, with the vestiges of the old, re-developing under the new conditions—all these are parts of the problem. But space will not permit, and these considerations will be taken up in a second paper. Yet I may indicate here the gist of my conclusions by quoting the words of a well-known Southerner, the Rev. Quincy Ewing. “The race problem—is not that the Negro is what he is in relation to the white man—the white man’s inferior—but this, rather: How to keep him what he is in relation to the white man; how to prevent his ever achieving or becoming that which would justify the belief on his part, or on the part of other people, that he and the white man stand on common human ground.”The economic necessities of a system of vicarious production led to the creation of a racial labor-caste; the social adjustment consequent upon this and upon its development created a social sentiment inimical to this class, and its continuance requires a continuance of this sentiment in our society; this is the pivotal fact. And the unavoidable conclusion is, that when this system of vicarious production disappears, the problem which is its consequence will disappear also—and not till then, in spite of all the culture, individual or collective, which that class may achieve.
The African slave-trade was born of the desire of certain Europeans to acquire wealth without working. It was to fill the need for a cheap labor supply in developing new territory that Negro slaves were first brought to the western world by the Spanish, Dutch, and English during the 16th and 17th centuries. Contact of white with black was thus established on the basis of the economic subjection of the one to the other. This subjection extended to every sphere of life, physical, mental and social. Out of this contact there arose certain definite relations and consequent problems of adjustment. It is the sum of these relations which we (rightly or wrongly) describe as the Negro Problem.
Unfortunately, the spell of mere words is still very strong, and when people speak of the Negro Problem they carry over into the discussion a certain mental attitude derived from the original meaning of the word, Problem. In arithmetic, a sum to be worked out; in chemistry, to find by experiment a certain re-agent; in geography, to chart a puzzling current—all these are problems in the primary sense, and all these involve the idea of solution by him who approaches them. That is to say, they can be solvedby thinking. And those who think loosely call up this idea of solution by thinking whenever they see the word “problem”. So we have been pestered with this, that, and theother “solution” of the Negro problem. Therefore, it is well to bear in mind that a race problem is always the sum of the relations between two or more races in a state of friction.
Because when we understand this we are in a fair way to find that these relations are not to be explained on the basis of the thinking or feeling of either party. They must be interpreted in terms of human relations and in the order in which human relations are established: (1) economic, (2) social, (3) political and (4) civic. So understood, a knowledge of the historical conditions under which these relations developed is seen to be of the greatest value in understanding the problem. For this is all that our intellects can do in the case of a racial problem—to help us to understand. The actual work of adjustment must be fought out or worked out; becomes, that is to say, a struggle to be settled by the contending races with forces more complex than the purely intellectual ones of argument and proof. Let us first consider, then, the conditions under which the relations between the black and white races were established in America.
During the period of colonization the land of America was granted by European kings to certain gentlemen who had no intention of working with the hands. Nevertheless working with the hands was the only method of extracting that wealth which was the object of their ownership, it was necessary, then, to obtain a supply of those persons who could do this work for them; and toinsure this, it was imperative that these persons should not own land themselves: they must be a permanently landless class; since it was unthinkable then as now that one should work the land of others for a part of the fruits if he could work his own land for all of the fruits. So there was begun in America the process of establishing such a class. Confining ourselves to the territory which became the United States, we may say that the first attempt was made to enslave the Indians, and when this failed to work, white people were imported from Europe as chattel slaves. All through the colonial period this importation continued with its consequent effects on the social and political life of the colonies. Most people will be surprised to learn that the first Fugitive Slave Law was framed, not in the south, but in the north, and was made not for black but for white laborers. This was the Massachusetts act of 1630 “Respecting Masters, Servants and Laborers”. A reading of this one act would destroy all those pretty illusions about “our fathers and Freedom” which we get from the official fairy tales—I mean the school histories.
Side by side with the economic subjection of white men there grew up the economic subjection of black men, and for the same reason. These were of alien blood—and cheaper. Therefore, the African slave trade outgrew the European slave trade, although the latter continued, in a lessening degree, down to the third or fourth decade of the19th century. Negroes were brought here to work, to be exploited; and they were allowed no illusions as to the reason for their being here. Those white men who owned the land brought them here to extract the wealth which was in the land. The white aristocrat did not buy black slaves because he had a special hatred or contempt for anything black, nor because he believed that Negroes were inferior to white people. On the contrary he bought them precisely because, as working cattle, they were superior to whites.
Being of alien blood, these black people wereoutsideof the social and political system to which they were introduced and, quite naturally, beyond the range of such sympathies as helped to soften the hard brutalities of the system. They were, from the beginning, more ruthlessly exploited than the white workers. Thus they had their place made for them—at the bottom.
Now it is a social law—not yet proclaimed by our college sociologists—that whenever a certain social arrangement is beneficial to any class in a society, that class soon develops thepsychologyof its own advantage and creates insensibly the ethics which will justify that social arrangement. Men to whom the vicarious labor of slaves meant culture and refinement, wealth, leisure and education, naturally came—without any self-deception, to see that slavery wasright. As Professor Loria points out, there is an economic basis to moral transformations in any society which is built on vicariousproduction.
We turn now to the resulting conditions of the slaves. They were at the bottom, the most brutally exploited and, therefore, the most despised section of the laboring class. For it is a consequent of the law stated above that those who are exploited must needs be despised by those who exploit them. This mental attitude of the superior class (which makes the laws of that society in which it is dominant) will naturally find its expression in those actions by which theyestablishtheir relations to the inferior class. And whenever anyone is to be kicked it is usually the man farthest down who gets it, because he is most contiguous to the foot. So the Negro having been given a place at the bottom in the economic life of the nation, came to occupy naturally the place at the bottom in the nation’s thinking. I say, the nation’s advisedly; because the dominant ideas of any society which is already divided into classes are as a rule the ideas preservative of the existing arrangements. But since those arrangements include a class on top, the dominant ideas will generally coincide with the interest of that class. The ethics of its own advantage, then, will be diffused by that class throughout that society—will be, if need arise imposed upon the other classes, since every ruling class has always controlled the public instruments for the diffusion of ideas.
In this way the slave-holding section of the dominant class in America first diffused its ownnecessary contempt for the Negro among the other sections of the ruling class, and the ideas of this class as a whole became through the agency of press, pulpit and platform, the ideas of “the American People” on the Negro.
In further application of the materialisticmethodto this subject, it is curious and interesting to note how the southern attitude toward the Negro changed with the changing industrial system. When the wasteful agricultural methods of chattel slavery had exhausted the soil of the south and no new land loomed up on the horizon of the system, slavery began to decay. The planters of that section settled down into the patriarchal type of family relations with their slaves, who were then simply a means of keeping the master’s hands free from the contamination of work and not a means of ever-increasing profits. Slavery was then in a fair way to die of its own weight. But with the invention of Whitney’s cotton-gin, which enabled one man to do the work of three hundred, cotton came to the front as the chief agricultural staple in America. The black slave became a source of increasing revenue as a fertilizer of capital. The idyllic relations of the preceding forty years came to a sudden end. Increased profits demanded increased exploitation and the ethics of advantage dictated the despising of the Negro.
De Bow’s Review, the great organ of southern opinion, appeared, and in serious scientific articles maintained the proposition that the Negro was nota man but a beast. About that time (and conformably to that opinion) the practice was begun of spelling the word, Negro, with a small “n”—a practice still current in America, even in the socialist press.
In the meanwhile, the system of industrial production known as the machine system developed in the north. The factory proletariat whose condition determined that of the other northern workers could fertilize capital more rapidly and cheaply than the slaves. This form of production (and its products) came into competition with the slave system and the tremendous conflict reflected itself upon the political field as a struggle for the restriction of slavery within its original bounds. The Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scot Decision, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill,—all these were political episodes in the competition between the two main sections of the dominant class; and in the conflict each used the army, the navy, the executive, the courts and the legislature to strengthen its own position.
When the business interests of the north had definitely captured the powers of government in the general election of 1860, the southernerssecededbecause they knew too well what governmental power was generally used for. They wanted a government which would be the political reflex of their own economic dominance. One cansee now why the northern statesmen like Lincoln insisted that the preservation of the Union was the paramount issue and not the freedom of slaves. Indeed, Lincoln punished those officers of the army who in the early days of the war dared to act upon that assumption. And not all the arguments of Greeley, Conway and Governor Andrews could make any change in his attitude. Not until he saw that it was expedient “as a war measure” did he issue the “Emancipation Proclamation” which brought 187,000 Negro soldiers into the northern army.
Emancipation gave to the Negroes a new economic status—the status of free wage-laborers, competing with other wage-laborers for work. They who had worked to create wealth for others were now turned loose without wealth or land to shift forthemselvesin a world already hostile to them. The mental attitude of the white south had been shaped by three centuries of slavery and was hard to get rid of. It was difficult for them to think of black labor under any form but that of slavery and they naturally turned to compulsion as the proper mode of obtaining work from their former slaves. This attitude was well expressed in the Black Codes of the southern states during the fall and winter of 1865–66. As soon as the end of the hostilities gave them a free hand at home they began to give legislative expression to the new conditions. They framed new constitutions and new laws. “But it was seen that the Negro had noprivilege of voting in the first instance, and it was not to be expected that the right would be accorded him under the new state constitutions; no guarantee that justice should be done him was exacted. These new constitutions were formed, the legislatures met, laws were made, senators and representatives to Congress were chosen; but the Negro was not only not admitted to any participation in the government, but the new legislatures shocked the northernsenseof justice by the cruel and revengeful laws which they enacted. The barbarity of the most odious slave-code was, under various disguises, applied to the Negro in his new condition of freedom”. Even before the resentment of the national legislature had taken form, the Ku-Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelias, the Society of the Pale Faces, and other bands of organized representatives of culture had begun to do their bloody work of terrorizing Negroes into economic and social subjection. And all this before any steps had been taken to extend the suffrage to Negroes.
When the northerners investigated these conditions they met with such fierce and unreasoning hostility on the part of the south that they found it necessary to arm the Negro with the ballot in his own defense. And yet, professional southerners like Tom Dixon, Tom Watson, Ben Tillman Vardaman and Blease pretend to their ignorant or forgetful countrymen that the present attitude of the south was caused in the first instance by a reaction against “Negro domination”, social and politicalwhich the north had forced upon it.
The subsequent developments can not be explained by those amiable enthusiasts who see in the “freedom” of Negroes an act of genuine humanitarianism on the part of the north. For, after northern business-men had secured the government—and their thousands of miles of railroad-grants—they promptly dropped the mask of humanitarian hypocrisy, and left the Negroes to shift for themselves. During the disputed count of the votes in the Hayes-Tilden electoral contest in 1877 a deal was arranged by which the northerners agreed to withdraw the army which protected the Negroes, newly-granted franchise in the south, on condition that the southerners should concede the election to Hayes. The new industrial order wanted above all things to retain control of the government which it had captured during the war, and upon the altar of this necessity it sacrificed the Negro in the south, just as Lincoln had done in the early days of the war. From that time the suppression of the Negro vote, the growth of “Jim Crow” legislation, lynching and segregation have continued with the continuing consent of Republican congressman, presidents and supreme courts. And through it all, Negro “leaders” like Mr. Washington have found it very much worth their while to administer anodynes both to the Negro and the Nation, to reconcile the one to a bastard democracy and the other to a mutilated manhood.
It would be well to trace here the nature ofthe economic changes which have given certain new and malignant features to the relations between black and white inAmerica. The effect upon the free laborers of the sudden influx of black competitors in the labor-market; the consequent attitude of the labor-unions; the political and social reflex of all this, with the vestiges of the old, re-developing under the new conditions—all these are parts of the problem. But space will not permit, and these considerations will be taken up in a second paper. Yet I may indicate here the gist of my conclusions by quoting the words of a well-known Southerner, the Rev. Quincy Ewing. “The race problem—is not that the Negro is what he is in relation to the white man—the white man’s inferior—but this, rather: How to keep him what he is in relation to the white man; how to prevent his ever achieving or becoming that which would justify the belief on his part, or on the part of other people, that he and the white man stand on common human ground.”
The economic necessities of a system of vicarious production led to the creation of a racial labor-caste; the social adjustment consequent upon this and upon its development created a social sentiment inimical to this class, and its continuance requires a continuance of this sentiment in our society; this is the pivotal fact. And the unavoidable conclusion is, that when this system of vicarious production disappears, the problem which is its consequence will disappear also—and not till then, in spite of all the culture, individual or collective, which that class may achieve.