EMORY UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
BISHOP W. R LAMBUTH OF M. E. CHURCH
(SOUTH) AND PROFESSOR GILBERT ON THEIR
goo MILE TRAMP IN AFRICA.
Bishop IV. R. Lambuth of the M. E. Church,
South, and Prof. f. IV. Gilbert of the Colored
M. E. Church, on their 900-mile tramp through
Africa to locate a joint mission for their respective
churches. '' In all the dangers and hardships of
of the journeysays the Bishop, " Gilbert never
failed me. Daily he proved himself every inch a
man and a Christian." The mission located,
Prof. Gilbert reduced the speech of the savages to
writing, compiled a grammar, and is translating
the Bible into the Batatela tongue. (Courtesy of
the Board of Church Extension, M. E. Church,
South I)
In Black and White
AN INTERPRETATION
of SOUTHERN LIFE
By
L. H. HAMMOND
Author of " The Master Word "
With an Introduction by
JAMES H. DILLARD, M.A., LL.D.,
President of the Jeanes Foundation Board, Director of
the Slater Fund
Smith & Lamar, Agents
Nashville, Tenn.; Dallas, Tex.; Richmond, Va.
Copyright, I9i4» by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
ro my mother and my father,
both slave-owners in earlier life,
whose broad thinking and selfless living
first taught me the meaning of human
brotherhood,
I dedicate this book,
with a gratitude deepened by time,
and a love undiminished by death.
Introduction
THE problem of the South to-day is
how to find voices and hearings for
her best thoughts and sentiments.
Especially is this true in regard to the rela¬
tionship between the races. Public sentiment
rules. It rules the attitude of individuals.
It makes and unmakes the laws. It enforces
or neglects the laws that are made. Public
sentiment is mainly dependent upon the
thoughts and sentiments that find expression
in the constant utterances of pulpit, press, and
political campaigns. On this question of race
relationship the pulpit in the South is remark¬
ably silent. The point is not raised whether
or not the province of the pulpit is to discuss
public and social problems. The fact is that
the pulpit in the South is remarkably silent
on the race question, even on the side of re¬
ligion and religious duties. With few excep¬
tions the direct contributions of the Southern
clergy in establishing public sentiment on this
question have amounted to little, and may
almost be left out of count. It is the editor
8
INTRODUCTION
and the politician who, more exclusively in
the South than in any other part of the coun¬
try, influence public sentiment on the race
question as well as on other public questions.
The men of letters, the educators, the edu¬
cated business men, have not counted appre¬
ciably in moulding public sentiment. I said
editors along with politicians, but it is not so
much the editorial writers as it is the mana¬
gers who direct what news shall appear, and
regulate the tones and head-lines of what ap¬
pears. It is these and the politicians who are
most responsible for public sentiment. For
reasons that run back to the awful mistakes
and hardships and outrages of the reconstruc¬
tion period, the men who deal professionally
in politics and public questions, and these in¬
clude the newspaper men, have taken and
still continue to take, not all of them but a
large majority, an attitude of hostility and re¬
pression towards the Negro race. It is nat¬
ural that it should be so.
But is it not time for a better note ? The
Negro is here, and so far as human vision
reaches, he is here to stay, and to stay mainly
in the South. He is not only here, but he is
improving wonderfully in education and in
the acquisition of property. There are ex¬
ceptions. There are in fact large masses of
INTRODUCTION
9
Negroes who are not improving in their con¬
ditions ; but the figures of statistics are be¬
yond contradicting the fact that the race as a
whole is making forward strides away from
gross illiteracy and dependent poverty. Shall
the white people wish it to be so ? It seems
to me that they should wish it to be so. It
seems to me that our material prosperity de¬
pends upon the spread of intelligence and
thrift among all the people, even the hum¬
blest. It seems to me that our public health
demands this, because filth and disease ex¬
tend their evils high and low. And how dare
we say that humanity and religion do not de¬
mand it? If humanity and religion mean
anything, they mean good will to man and
the application of the eternal principles of
justice and righteousness now and always.
It does not follow that any amount of good
will and desire for righteous dealing does
away with the fact of race. The Frenchman
is not a German, nor the Jew a Gentile, and
the difference of the Negro and the white is
most of all distinctly marked. The problem
of their living and working side by side in
the same region is a problem, which no
amount of optimism can deny. The problem
is a problem which calls for neither a blind
and hopeless pessimism nor a weak and wa-
10
INTRODUCTION
tery optimism. The call is for facing facts,
and dealing with them in the light of wise
statesmanship and the holy principles of
religious faith. Some advanced spirits would
ignore the universal fact of race, and in the
highest sense they are right in the sight of
law and religion ; but in the practical living
of our lives there is no reason to ignore racial
any more than other natural distinctions and
affinities. There is a segregation which is
perfectly natural and inevitable, and will
surely take care of itself. Negroes as nat¬
urally and inevitably flock together as do the
whites, and in my opinion their leaders op¬
pose any denial of such natural segregation,
and frown on offensive efforts to ignore the fact.
Many doubtless question the truth of this at¬
titude of the Negroes, but my experience
leads me to the conviction that, however much
we may think to the contrary, it is essentially
and almost universally true.
For the white people the main point is that,
with all recognition of racial feelings, we are
bound to acknowledge the common rights of
humanity. We are bound to acknowledge
that all men are human, and have human
rights and claims to life, liberty, and the pur¬
suit of happiness. Are we not, we whites of
the South, also bound by peculiar claims both
INTRODUCTION 11
of nearness and necessity ? The Negro served
us as a slave; in the providence of God he is
now by law among us as a man. For his
good, for our own good, is it not well for us
to be helping him on to useful manhood ?
Grant that in the mass he is low down, can
any low class, black or white, lie in the ditch
and all of us not suffer ?
It is because Mrs. Hammond's book strikes
the good note that it is to be greatly welcomed
at this time. I believe that our press and
public will welcome it as a sincere, earnest,
and able effort to tell the difficult truth. All
may not agree with all she says, but that is
not so important as to recognize that her
book is one of the utterances which are needed
at this time, and that she is seeking to help
us all, North and South, to think rightly on
this problem.
James H. Dillard.
Contents
I.
In Terms of Humanity
• 17
II.
The Basis of Adjustment .
. 46
III.
Houses and Homes
. 90
IV.
An Ounce of Prevention
. 128
V.
Human Wreckage
. 152
VI.
Service and Cooperation .
. 180
VII.
Those Who Come After Us
. 216
VIII.
The Great Adventure
. 230
13
Illustrations
Bishop W. R. Lambuth of M. E. Church (South)
and Professor Gilbert on their 900 Mile Tramp
in Africa ..... Frontispiece
Facing page
Preston Street Cooking School, Louisville, Ky. . 26
Southern White Teachers, Louisville, Ky. . . 52
Christmas Celebrations, Bethlehem House, Nash¬
ville ........ 78
"An Alabama School Improvement League . .104
A Georgia County Superintendent Visiting Negro
School . . . . . . 104
Playground at Story Hour, Louisville . . .130
Home of Atlanta Negro Who Was His Own
Architect and Builder . . . . .156
A Respected Negro Doctor . . . .182
Paine College, Augusta, Ga. . . . .182
Stillman Institute, Tuscaloosa, Ala. . . .208
Poor Housing Conditions in the South . . 234
*5
I
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY
THERE is nothing except love itself
which so adds to the richness and
charm of life as a sense of wide
horizons. One breathes in freedom under a
wide sky, catching the proper perspective for
life, and setting large and small in their true
relations. The burdens and hindrances which
press so close in a narrow, personal atmos¬
phere drop away, and dwindle to their true
size in those far spaces which include all
human life. We never understand them till
we see them so, set against the background
of a world-experience, translated into terms
common to all mankind.
We were made to be world-dwellers; mem¬
bers of our own small circle and section of
country, loving and loyal to them all, yet
members too of the whole human brother¬
hood : of our own race intensely ; yet just as
vitally, and more broadly, of the great Race
of Man.
The best that can be said of an isolated
17,
18 IN BLACK AND WHITE
man, cut off from his wide human relations,
is that he has a capacity for life. A human
stomach, or liver, or heart, may be cut out of
the body it belongs in, and yet be kept
" alive." It serves no end of use or beauty,
poor unrelated thing, and is practically dead
in its cold, colourless abiding place. Yet it
has a latent capacity for living, if only it be
placed again in vital connection with a hu¬
man organism, and receive life from a work¬
ing connection with the whole.
So many of us lead cold-storage lives, and
find them, naturally, dull enough. So many
more are vitally connected with but a frag¬
ment of life—our family circle, our neigh¬
bourhood or section. It is as if a heart beat
in a mutilated body, legless or armless, per'
haps without sight, or deaf to the far, sweet
voices which call to the freest and happiest
things in life.
We are made far-sighted. Scientists tell us
that our increasing need of glasses is due to
the fine, near-at-hand work imposed by civ¬
ilization on eyes planned by nature for far-
sweeping vision, for the wide look which goes
from verge to verge of the high-arching sky.
It is much that we have acquired near
vision; we would be savages still without it.
Close observation, thought of little things,
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 19
the constructive spirit at work upon details
—these, inch by inch, through the ages, have
built the road over which the race has ad¬
vanced. Long sacrifice has gone into them,
untold patience and endurance, the endless
drudgery out of which character emerges,
like a winged thing from its cocoon.
But we need not lose the wide look, nor
work at details knowing nothing of their re¬
lation to the big world-life of man. How
could we understand them so, or understand
ourselves? How should we bear our griefs,
or meet our difficulties, or work in hope and
with joy? Life is such a dull puzzle to near¬
sighted folk; and so many of those whose
lives touch theirs are sealed books to them,
uninteresting because unknown. And igno¬
rance breeds prejudice as a dunghill breeds
flies.
The commonest prejudice of all, perhaps,
is the near-visioned belief in the superiority
of the people of one's own small corner to all
the rest of the world. This frank and child¬
ish egotism is the hall-mark of the separated
life, whether lived by Anglo-Saxon or Pata-
gonian, Chinaman or American. We are
the people, and wisdom will die with us 1
That is the world-cry of unrelated man; and
it arrogates a superiority which implies an-
20 IN BLACK AND WHITE
tagonistic criticism of all dwellers without
the small charmed circle of the crier's under¬
standing.
This unsympathetic criticism betrays itself
as ignorance by the very fact of its existence ;
for sympathy cannot fail if only one under¬
stands deep enough. It is the surface view,
always, which breeds antagonism. If one
could understand to the uttermost one would
inevitably love to the uttermost: one's com¬
passions, like God's, would be new every
morning. It is because it is ordinarily so
apart, cut off from sympathy, that criticism
is so often shorn of renovating force. Its
only chance for constructive service lies in
being passed through the alembic of a living
sympathy, which alone can transmute the
inorganic matter of criticism into food for
assimilation and growth.
For love, and not intellect, is the vital
force; and no man is shut out by lack of
knowledge from the widest human life.
Things dim and confusing to the mind are
clearly apprehended by the heart. If I ven¬
ture to offer this partial interpretation of the
life of that corner of the world which is home
to me, it is not because of a belief that pe¬
culiar powers of any kind have been given
to me, entitling me to speak of my people,
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 21
or to them. It is because I am so truly one
of the mass, living a small life in a small
place, walled in by circumstances, like my
brothers. For any sharer of the common lot
whose deepest desire is to walk in love
towards all the world will find, with the
years, a way opening into the very heart of
life, and will come upon the reasons for many
of the things which perplex us, for much of
the wrong we bear and the wrong we inflict,
much which hedges us in, much which makes
our brothers of a wider circle misunderstand
and misjudge us. What is said must be in¬
complete, and partly incorrect. One life may
mirror the race life; yet the waves of per¬
sonality inevitably refract the reflected rays.
It is offered only for what it is: an attempt
to translate some fragments of Southern life
into world-terms; to set our sectional prob¬
lems in their wide human relations, and so to
see them as they really are.
When one lives on a little hill, all closed in
by mountains, one cannot possibly see " the
lay of the land " ; and most of us begin life
in a place like that. Some of us climb later
to a mountain top, and live there with wide
views, and heads near the stars. But the
valleys look deep and dark from up there,
22 IN BLACK AND WHITE
the hills seem small, and the mountains fill
the world. It is beautiful and splendid, and
true, too: but it is only the half of truth—
that most dangerous of all lies—until the
mountains, too, are set in their wide relations.
When men make them wings like birds, and
fly high enough, they see something bigger
than the mountains, and that is the earth to
which they all belong. One can love the
mountains after that without any childish
pride in them, or childish scorn of the valleys
and hills.
It is so with the races of men, and with
that great, underlying humanity which binds
them all in one.
Long ago, when I was young, I knew so
many things that aren't so. I could label all
the deeds of men as fast as I heard about
them; and what was far more amazing, I
could label the men who did them. Label¬
ling deeds is really not a very complicated
process. Even a child, for instance, can dis¬
tinguish lies of a fairly simple type. But to
put the right label on the man behind the lie
—that is a different and most difficult matter.
He may be a man who would die for the
truth, who daily sacrifices for it as he under¬
stands it He may be all hedged in with in-
IN TERMS. OF HUMANITY 23
heritances from which he has no way of es¬
cape—an example of " invincible ignorance."
He may be just at the beginning of things :
so many of us tell lies because we are not out
of the kindergarten yet, and life exists for us
only in relation to our own exuberant person¬
alities. And he may be—though it isn't
likely—a deliberate lover of lies. To label
his deed is easy ; but how shall one label
him ?
Yet youth has a passion for labels. It is
such a fascinating way of displaying one's
knowledge to a supposedly admiring world.
And the more recently acquired our knowl¬
edge is, the more superficial, the more, in our
youth, it refreshes our souls to display it, and
to criticize the little folk of the family, who
are still in those depths of ignorance so re¬
cently occupied by ourselves; and to criticize
the old folks, whose knowledge has so fruited
into wisdom that we cannot trace its connec¬
tion with our own brand-new buds at all.
Dispensing information concerning its own
shortcomings to a world that lies in darkness
is, in fact, one of the natural and unforget¬
table joys of adolescence. Nobody ought to
begrudge it to anybody. It is part of the
glamour of youth, and dear, at one stage of
life, to every soul alive. As we grow older
24 IN BLACK AND WHITE
we should remember, and smile. Poor
young things, they beat against the walls of
their ignorance so soon !
But one's wisdom must be ripe and gar¬
nered for this understanding. It is not to be
expected of the younger young folks, whom
older adolescence is so very hard upon.
Their knowledge has achieved little more
than a pair of cotyledons as yet, perhaps, and
wisdom waits on the years. But they will be
as big as the biggest soon, and know as
much, or more: the younger ones " sass
back."
That is the way quarrels start in families,
as all long-suffering parents know. And I
think something very like that has happened
between the North and the South—between
the big brother and the little one. For races
are men writ large, and men are but larger
children.
Sometimes we see twins whose individual
development indicates a difference of years
between the two. One had measles, perhaps,
or scarlet fever, " with ulterior consequences,"
as the doctors say, and it has set him back
a long time. His digestion was impaired,
and lack of nourishment has stunted his
growth. The other boy is full fed and vig¬
orous, glorying in his strength as every boy
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 25
must, and claiming the earth as his birth¬
right. He wants to be nice to his little
brother, but the child can't live his big-boy
life at all; and he's grouchy, too—always
getting his feelings hurt. It isn't the big
boy's fault he's no bigger; and he's pig¬
headed and mean, anyway: just see the way
he picks on folks that are weaker than he is !
The war was our measles; and we have
hardly recovered from the ulterior conse¬
quences yet. But our Northern twin kept
right on growing. He came to adolescence
first: and in the last twenty-five years or so
he has reached that later period of youth
when one begins to look soberly out upon an
ever-widening world, and to see a man's
work and a man's responsibilities shaping
themselves from dreams.
I am sure that when I was a girl of fifteen,
and first began to explore the purlieus of
some Northern tenements, hardly any of my
well-to-do, educated, and entirely respectable
and Christian acquaintances cared anything
whatever about them. Our rector was a man
of visions and dreams, and he stirred his peo¬
ple to open a mission in what was considered
the worst section of the city. I was a mem¬
ber of its regular working force until my mar¬
riage, a few years later. But to nobody con-
26 IN BLACK AND WHITE
nected with that mission did it exist for any
purpose whatever except to save the souls of
the tenement-dwellers out of this world into
another one, and, incidentally, to show per¬
sonal kindness, as occasion offered, to indi¬
viduals of the district. Nobody dissented
from the doctrine that whatever was wrong
in the general tenement-house environment
was merely the outward and visible sign of
the tenement-dwellers' inward and spiritual
lack of grace : if all their souls could only be
saved there would be nothing left wrong with
the tenements. There was no sense of re¬
sponsibility on landlords, on the health au¬
thorities, the employers of labour, or the pub¬
lic at large. There was, in every one I was
thrown with, a vigorous personal conscience;
strong personal sympathy for individuals, who
were to be got out of the general tenement-
house mess if possible; much personal sacri¬
fice ; and a deep sense of personal obligation.
to be individually kind, and to save all the
souls that were savable. But that was all.
There was no glimmering of community con¬
sciousness, of community conscience, or of
community sin. The North was growing
fast, but it was still a many-individualed
North. It responded keenly, as growing
children will, to those stimuli which pene-
PRESTON STREET COOKING SCHOOL, LOUIS¬
VILLE, KY.
Room built by Southern Presbyterian theological students.
The beginning of Mr. Little's work.
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 27
trated the area of its awakened consciousness.
It was eager, alert, questioning, learning, im¬
measurably more stimulating mentally than
my own beloved South: but it had not yet
reached that stage of growth where a social
conscience is possible. In the presence of
appalling social wrong there was no response
to stimulus whatever.
For myself, I was in wild revolt: but the
only way out then conceivable to me was for
the poor all to get saved in a hurry, and die
and go to heaven. God might have known
what He was about when He made slum peo¬
ple : but His reasons passed my understanding.
Just then I came upon some old English
magazines containing Miss Hill's earlier arti¬
cles on housing, and God was cleared of the
charges I had brought against Him. The
evils in the tenements were man-made; and
if enough people would do the loving thing
they could be stopped. It was all personal
still—work, responsibility, and righted wrong;
but saving souls included the changing of
physical conditions.
But good people were not interested.
Those to whom I talked considered Miss
Hill's ideas visionary. They did not believe
it possible to redeem slums—only to redeem
some slum-dwellers' souls. I labelled them
28 IN BLACK AND WHITE
all on the spot, and " stupid " was the nicest
word in the list. The indictment grew longer
and blacker as the years went on. I was
back in the South now—the beautiful, Chris¬
tian country, where there were no slums, nor
child labourers, nor sweat-shops, nor white
slaves. It never occurred to me that we were
too young and small, industrially, to develop
these things ; or that, like the North, we had
to travel through the country of indifference
to the evils we did have before we could grow
old enough to care.
When Stead wrote " If Christ Came to
Chicago " it was the last straw: respect for
the North was gone. They had money up
there; they claimed to be Christians; and
they knew. Yet nothing was done. The
imprecatory Psalms made excellent reading.
And then, out of that vast welter of indif¬
ference, the emergence of a social conscience
in the North ! There had been already, here
and there, a point of light—a man or a
woman flinging an isolated life against em¬
battled social wrongs. But now began a
gathering of little groups ; here and yonder
one heard a word caught up by other voices
until it rose into a cry : and now the sound of
marching feet, and a thunder which begins
to shake the world 1
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 29
The North is a glorious big brother: and
as the hatred of newly-realized old wrongs
grows within him, as that which is highest in
him is more and more committing him to the
doctrine and life of brotherhood, it is part of
the law of youth and growth that he should
have scant patience with those who are indif¬
ferent to conditions which touch him to the
quick. The one unforgivable thing to him is
that a people should be lacking in social con¬
science ; the one inexplicable audacity, that
without it they should dare to call themselves
Christians. Our brother of the North is deep
in the labelling stage.
And we Southern folk ? If the big broth¬
er's contempt has scorched and burnt us,
have we had no contempt for those who are
younger than we ? We had no smaller child
in the immediate family to outlaw with labels ;
but providence has not been altogether un¬
kind. For there is the cook's black baby :
and it is so long since we were babies our¬
selves we can't be expected to remember that
stage of our growth. Anyway, there is the
baby; and the labels show up on him beauti¬
fully.
The North, of course, thinks it had a social
conscience fifty years ago: but that was a
30 IN BLACK AND WHITE
social conscience about other people's sins—
a delicate variety for early forcing merely, as
I know by my own experience. I once had
a deal more social conscience about Northern
conditions than about those of our Southern
Negroes,1 though my personal conscience
about the Negroes was in a flourishing state.
Besides, we had a conscience about slavery
ourselves—a true social conscience in the
germ. One of our sorest sore points is our
Northern brother's irritating inability to grasp
this fact, which is matter of common knowl¬
edge in the South. Thousands of slave¬
owners, like my own parents, thought slavery
wrong, and confidently expected the time,
not far distant, when the states would them¬
selves abolish it. The South did not fight
for slavery. We have seen the day, down
here, when we would have enjoyed putting
that fact into our Northern brother's head
with a pile-driver: and it really does seem,
sometimes, that no lesser agency will ever
get it there.
What the South fought for was its consti¬
tutional right to get out of the Union when
it no longer desired to stay in it. We still
1 The word Negro is printed with a capital throughout this
book in obedience to the rule which requires all race-names to
begin with a capital letter: e.g., Indian, Teuton, Zulu, Maori,
Anglo-Saxon, Filipino, etc., etc.
IN TEEMS OF HUMANITY 31
believe the point was open for debate, though
we have long since ceased to regret that the
" Noes " won it.
As for the Negroes, we were developing a so¬
cial conscience about them, a healthier growth,
perhaps, though a slower one, than the vica¬
rious conscience of the North. And because
of that conscience, as well as because of
natural human kindliness, the relations be¬
tween black and white were in the main
kindly and understanding. I make no ex¬
cuse for slavery, nor for the terrible things
allowed by it: but those things were the ex¬
ception and not the rule. The conduct of
the Negroes during the war proves that.
They are a patient, gentle folk; but they are
far from being superhuman. If the main
product of slave-relations had not been
kindliness the Southern armies would have
disbanded to protect Southern homes.
These kindly relations were not shaken by
Negro freedom. Nobody held it against the
Negroes that they were free. And in the
white men's hearts kindness was reinforced
by gratitude for the faithful care the Negroes
had given to the women and children of the
South. In the ruin of the old order, and the
desperate poverty of the new, readjustment
would have been slow and difficult. It would
32 IN BLACK AND WHITE
have been, doubtless, many years before the
polls would have been open to any consider¬
able number of Negroes. But there were
matters more vital than votes ; and the read¬
justment, if slow, would have progressed
normally, in mutual kindliness and patience.
But the North, with its social conscience
about home conditions yet in embryo, and
its social conscience for other folks, like a
clock without a pendulum, working overtime,
was bent on growth by cataclysm. If it
could only have taken a world-look for a
minute it would have seen growth never
comes that way ; but being so very busy do¬
ing things, it had no time to look. The
North was a child as yet, and lived in a
world fashioned out of its own thoughts. A
child can take blocks of wood and put them
into a barn or a castle or a ship: it is as
easy as making fiat money. But when the
blocks are men the fiat process never works:
they will not stay put.
That was our great disaster—ours, and the
Negro's and the North's. Children ourselves,
how should we know the big, strong, over¬
bearing North was but a child too ? And
we had all a child's keen sense of injustice,
and keen resentment of it. We thought the
North understood as well as we did what it
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY
33
was doing; we even thought the Negro
understood. Hate sprang full-armoured in a
night. The North called it reconstruction:
it was destruction of a very high order. And
in all that ruin of our dearest possessions the
most precious, the most necessary thing des¬
troyed was the old-time friendship between
white and black. It shrivelled in the fires of
hate ; and from the ashes rose suspicion and
injustice, all wrong inflicted and sustained,
to curse both races yet.
The shock of those anarchic days is deep
in the South's nerves to this day. Much
which the North calls by a harsher name is
a resurgence of an almost physical hysteria.
When I was a child my nurse put me to
bed, and was supposed to sit by me till I
went to sleep; but she never did. She was
a white woman, by the way, and quite well
educated : the older children's black mammy
had stayed. She had a sweetheart waiting
in the kitchen; and as soon as she tucked
me in bed she put out the light, and left me
with the assurance that a lion and a tiger
were under my bed, both friends of hers ;
and if I ever dared to get up to call my
mother, or told her I was left alone, they
would claw me under the bed by my feet
and eat me up.
34 IN BLACK AND WHITE
That was fifty years ago. But to this day,
as soon as the light goes out my well-trained
nerves try to jump me into bed. When I
am least thinking of it there descends that
sudden sense of impending claws.
We are like that about Negro domination.
We know it is a foolish fear ; yet we are so
ready to start at it, both as regards our
political and our social life. Governor
North en, of Georgia, spoke the truth when
he declared that " Social equality is a delu¬
sion set up by the demagogue" for his own
ends : but demagogue or nurse, children are
easily frightened. And the South really felt
the claws once ; and the memory is deep in
every nerve.
Beyond this, we have never yet set the
Negro in his world-relations, any more than
the North has so set us. We have looked
upon our " Negro problem " as a thing apart,
our strange, peculiar burden, the like of which
the world has never seen ; and our dominat¬
ing thought] about it is that this excrescence
on Southern life shall never again threaten
the existence of our civilization.
That this should be the main aspect the
problems of our poorer classes present to us
we owe partly to our memory of claws; yet
largely too to that irresponsible, but inevi-
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 35
table, selfishness of youth, a phenomenon of
growth not to be averted or shortened, which
sees all life from a purely personal stand¬
point. We are just beginning, as a people,
to touch that period of later adolescence
where one glimpses the fact that a stand¬
point purely personal cannot, in the nature
of things, be either kind or just, or true to
our own best selves.
But while we are learning to admit this, to
ourselves and to others, there are some things
our kinsmen of a wider circle should remem¬
ber. They should not forget that the first
effect of sorrow is always isolation. After
sorrow is assimilated, become food for ex¬
panding life, one may emerge and take one's
place again, with no trace of past struggle
except in a deeper sympathy with humanity,
and a broader understanding of it. But as¬
similation takes place in the wilderness; and
life passes one by at a time like that, an un¬
heeded, alien, far-off force.
For years we lived in that wilderness, with
no thought nor care for the wide world-life
climbing, expanding, outside. Two things
we hac| beside our sorrow: a struggle for
bare existence which absorbed the energy of
every fibre ; and the pride of a high-spirited
people who had been humbled in the dust.
36 IN BLACK AND WHITE
Sorrow, poverty, and pride: can any other
three things produce such perfect insulation
as these ?
How should we have a social conscience ?
No nation has ever developed community
consciousness while its members were bat¬
tling for daily bread. A class possessed of a
little leisure must be developed before that
can appear, and must bear and rear children
educated to a somewhat wider outlook than
their fathers' bitter struggle made possible.
The South is barely at this initial stage.
We knew the world—the polite world—
pretty well before we had the measles. We
were a cultivated folk. But the world of
those days knew no more about a social con¬
science than it knew about " movies," or
automobiles: it hadn't gone that far in the
book. Individuals, it is true, were spending
their lives, here and there, in the preparation
of a soil where later a social conscience
might germinate; but they were thought of,
so far as they were thought of at all, as in¬
dividual saints or individual cranks. The
housing movement had a few disciples, both
in France and in England; but they were not
in the public eye. And the voice of the so¬
cialist was heard in the land only to mark
him as a fit subject for the madhouse. Eng-
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 37
land, foremost of all nations, had entered,
half unwittingly, upon her magnificent and
long-to-be-continued course of social legisla¬
tion ; and men like Kingsley and Maurice
were calling passionately to that void where
a social conscience was soon to be. But
these were but the local affairs of a foreign
nation, as we and the rest of the world saw
them. There was nothing in America to
parallel the conditions which had called their
protest forth ; and to us, as to the great mass
of the privileged everywhere, nearly all of
human life was foreign.
It was during the years of our sojourn in
the wilderness that the privileged of earth
began to discover humanity as a brother¬
hood, and shot beyond us. But our time of
separation is ending. We have learned and
achieved much in these years. Our sympa¬
thies are broader, our minds more mature,
our hearts nearer a full awakening. But we
know very little as yet about this new old
world to which we have returned. We
haven't learned about slums, or a minimum
wage, or mending criminals instead of man¬
ufacturing them, or the abolition of poverty,
or the connection between under-nourishment
and the poorhouse. Even our churches are
still inclined, many of them, to look askance
38 IN BLACK AND WHITE
at social service as an adulteration of the
" pure gospel," and to regard the saving of
souls out of this world into another one as
the full measure of Christian duty. Some of
us think if anybody says social service and
Negroes in the same breath he must mean
" social equality," and reach for a gun at
once.
But the time of isolation is past with us.
We stand ready to take our place in the
world, and the powers of youth and health
stir within us. We are ready for life in the
open, for world-connections and a world-
view.
What will we do with the Negro, our pecul¬
iar and heavy burden, our puzzle, almost our
despair ?
If we will quit thinking about him as pe¬
culiar he will cease to be either a puzzle or a
despair. Are we the only folk on earth re¬
sponsible for a " submerged tenth " ? Bur¬
dens are peculiar in ^details, fitted to the in¬
dividual or the race ; but in essence they are
the same for all mankind, and call for the
same courage, the same sympathy, the same
patience and hope and strength. National
trials and difficulties are like personal sor¬
rows and hardships : when we regard them
as peculiar to ourselves they overwhelm us.
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 39
Who are we, to walk in an unblazed path, to
solve a problem new in the experience of
mankind, to bear what man has never borne
before ? Human nature turns coward at the
mere thought of it, and excuses its failure
with the plea that it cannot be expected to be
stronger or wiser than all the world.
But if the burden is not peculiar ? If it is
our part of a world-wide task ? If every¬
where men living under such conditions as
do the majority of our Negroes are reacted
upon by their environment just as the
Negroes are ? If we have mistakenly counted
our poverty line and our colour line as one ?
If in every nation long neglect of the poor
and the ignorant has piled up just such a
weight of weakness, unthrift, unreliability and
crime for a clearer-visioned generation to
transform ? If men in all lands, the best and
finest, are spending themselves to solve prob¬
lems such as ours ?
When we see our problem in that light—
see it as it is, see it in its wide human rela¬
tions—we will set ourselves to its solution.
We never have been "quitters " in the South.
If this be our part of a world-task we will
achieve it.
And our part of a world-task we will find
it, as soon as we compare our poorest with
40 IN BLACK AND WHITE
the poorest of other countries and of all
races. Skins differ in colour, heads are
shaped differently; one man's mind runs
ahead of his sympathies, perhaps, and an¬
other man's mind may creep while his emo¬
tional nature runs rampant. But under all
outward differences their fundamental hu¬
manity is as much the same as is the earth
under the mountain and the hill. The same
things poison the minds and bodies of white
and of black alike; the same elements nour¬
ish both. Honesty, purity, love, self-reliance
and self-respect—who dare claim a monopoly
of these for themselves? They are human,
not racial, and to be built up in all races by
the same processes: else Christ were a
dreamer whom it were madness to follow.
We need to take the long look, as well as
the wide one. We say—a church paper in
the South said it only a few weeks ago—that
in a whole long fifty years of freedom the
Negro has advanced so little that his condi¬
tion " is not encouraging." If that be true
it is a grave indictment of us white folks : for
the Negro has these fifty years accepted the
conditions we have furnished for him, and
been subject to us in all things. He has lived
beside us, done our work. If there were no
encouraging signs after our management of
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 41
him for fifty years, the difficulty might lie
with the management.
As a matter of fact, the statement was made
without a proper knowledge of facts. Facts
show remarkable progress, and under diffi¬
cult conditions. But what is fifty years in
the development of a race ?—or two hundred
and fifty, when it starts from savagery ?
If we "could go back to the skin-and-club
days of our own puissant ancestors we would
probably find that they made less progress
from savagery in two hundred and fifty years
than the Negroes have done in that time.
Of course they had less outside help: they
had to evolve many of their own forces of ad¬
vance. But for centuries no one seeing then\
could have dreamed of the world-service wait¬
ing in the ages ahead for those wild Britains,
who lived like beasts in their lairs. If we
could go back and spend a few months with
our forefathers, two hundred and fifty years
after Roman civilization first touched them,
we would probably be glad enough to get
back to our black folks again : they would
never be quite so black any more.
The truth is, we know nothing about what
Negroes were made for or what they are
capable of, except on the broad general
ground that every human race has human
42 IN BLACK AND WHITE
power of development in some direction.—
When any one says a thing like that old
memories stir instantly in some of us, and we
suspect the argument of carrying the sting of
social equality in its tail. If we just could
rout that old bogey out of our imaginations,
and turn our minds from claws! Nobody
can force on anybody associations findesired.
And whatever Negroes may become, they
will certainly not be white folks. They will be
just themselves; something that will balance
the white race and the yellow and the red,
and that will render a racial service all its
own. The higher they rise the more Negro
they will be, the more the tides of their own
race life will fill and satisfy and lift them—
along their own path. To doubt that they
have, beyond our vision, some world-service
yet to render, something enough worth while
to justify their long suffering and our own,
would be to rule God out of history, and to
put the thinking mind " to permanent intel¬
lectual confusion."
I would not appear to overlook the ex¬
istence of race consciousness and of race
prejudice, nor to blink the fact that the latter
gravely complicates our portion of the world-
problems of the unprivileged. Yet race
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 43
prejudice, though necessarily local in its
manifestations, cannot be charged upon the
South alone: it is as wide as humanity, and
as old as time. It is not confined, in the
South, to either race. A thing so wide¬
spread, so deeply human, so common to all
races, should move no man to bitterness, but
to patience. And we are not denied the hope
that humanity will one day rise above it.
Race consciousness is another matter. In
every highly-developed branch of the great
human race-stocks there exists a desire for
the integrity of that stock, an instinct against
amalgamation with any very-distantly-re¬
lated race. It is true that with the majority
of any such people the instinct shows itself
chiefly as race-antagonism and race-preju¬
dice ; yet it is shared by those who are
free from these lower manifestations of it.
Despite individual exceptions this law holds
good, the world around ; and its violation, in
the marriage of individuals of widely-differ¬
ent race-stocks, involves disastrous penalties.
An instinct so wide-spread and so deep may
be safely credited to some underlying cause
in full harmony with the great laws of hu¬
man development. The instinct for racial
integrity, with its corollary of a separate
social life, will doubtless persist in a world
44 IN BLACK AND WHITE
from which race prejudice has vanished. If
one believed in an Ultimate Race which
would be a blend of all races—a belief fre¬
quently adopted when one first recognizes
the real oneness of humanity—one would
necessarily regard this desire for racial in¬
tegrity as but another manifestation of race
prejudice, doomed, as such, to pass. But
the wider and deeper one's association with
life the more clearly seen is the law of differ¬
entiation in all development. In the light of
this law the ultimate physical oneness of
human races becomes as chimerical as the
ultimate oneness of all species of trees, or
the disappearance of the rich diversity of
winged forms of life in favour of an Ultimate
Bird.
Life does not develop towards uniformity,
but towards richness of variety in a unity of
beauty and service. Unless the Race of Man
contradicts all known laws of life it will de¬
velop in the same way; and whether white,
or yellow, or black, they who guard their
own racial integrity, in a spirit of brother¬
hood free from all other-racial scorn, will
most truly serve the Race to which all be¬
long. What we white people need to lay
aside is not our care for racial separateness,
but our prejudice. The black race needs, in
IN TERMS OF HUMANITY 45
aspiring to the fullest possible development,
to foster a fuller faith in its own blood, and
in the world's need for some service which
it, and it alone, can render in richest measure
to the great Brotherhood of Man.
II
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT
IN a newspaper of a Southern city I read
recently a report of the court proceed¬
ings of the day before. The first case
tried was that of a white man, some thirty
years of age, who had violated the white
slave law. He had abducted a girl of six¬
teen from her home, and was using her for
immoral gain. The judge, in sentencing
him, had dwelt at length on the preciousness
of that of which the child had been robbed;
but added that he had decided to make the
sentence a light one, because the law was
new, and not very widely understood. He
gave the man one year in prison.
The next case, according to the paper, was
that of a Negro boy of twenty. He had
stolen eleven dollars and forty-six cents.
The evidence was convincing ; but the judge
said he would give him also a light sentence.
His reason was not, as it might have been,
that the law against the offense was new. It
is just as new as the other one, having been
formally promulgated at the same time, on a
46
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 47
mountain in the Sinaitic peninsula. But the
judge's reason for mercy, he said, was that
the evidence clearly showed that the boy had
never had any chance in life. His parents
had both died in his infancy, and nobody else
had wanted him. He had grown up, no one
knew how, beaten from pillar to post, un-
cared for, untaught. So the judge decided
on mercy, and gave him three years.
I do not at this time raise the question of
the wisdom of time-sentences, in these or in
any cases; that will be taken up later. The
point is that the value of a fchild's honour and
a mother's happiness, when stolen by a ma¬
ture white man, was assessed at one year in
prison; and the value of eleven dollars and
forty-six cents, when stolen by a young
Negro waif, was assessed at three years in the
same place. The judge is a man who has, I
believe, a sincere desire correctly to adminis¬
ter the law in his high office ; and law and
justice are to him synonymous words. He
thinks in terms of law, not in terms of hu¬
manity.
Some months ago I was visiting friends
when a son of the house, a university student,
came in with a story of a morning spent in
the city court. Some case was pending in
which the students were interested, and a
48 IN BLACK AND WHITE
body of them had been in attendance all the
morning. A number of cases concerning
Negroes had been disposed of before theirs
was called.
" I tell you," he said, summing thfe morn¬
ing up, " a ' nigger' stands no show in our
courts."
He was evidently shocked by the fact, and
so was the family. They are people far above
the average in intelligence, in loving-kind¬
ness, in culture, in self-sacrificing personal
service to the individual poor, both white and
black. But courts of law were without the
pale of their personal responsibility: their
personal conscience, quick and beautifully re¬
sponsive in any individual matter, merely
condemned this wrong and laid it aside.
There was no sign of a social consciousness ;
of any sense that if anybody stood no show
in their courts it was a community sin, for
which all members of the community were re¬
sponsible, and which the community could
change if it would. They did not see that
they had any duty in arousing the commu¬
nity to consciousness of social wrong. If any
individual one of the many Negroes known
to them had been brought before the court
that morning, they would have done just what
I have done in days when I had no more social
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 49
conscience about Negroes than they had:
they would have seen him, or his family, be¬
forehand, and asked some good lawyer, a
personal friend probably, to see that the
Negro had justice. The lawyer, who would
probably not be in the habit of taking such
cases, would do so cheerfully and without
remuneration, partly to oblige a lady, but
largely too for the sake of protecting a Negro
who had become individually known to him,
and who therefore appealed to his personal
conscience.
Cases of both kinds are common all over
the South. A Negro who gets in jail will
send for "his white folks " first thing, if he is
fortunate enough to have any. And they
come, man or woman as the case may be,
practically without fail. And often, when
they come, the Negro gets less than justice in
the courts in the sense that he is let off with
a reprimand or a small fine when the law
would call for something more. But none of
us are sorry for that, for our penal laws, like
those of most of the rest of the world, are
archaic survivals, and recognize no relation
between cause and effect where crime is con¬
cerned.
But the very great majority of Negroes who
come before the courts have no white folks to
50 IN BLACK AND WHITE
send to. Our criminals, like the criminals of
every country, come chiefly from the economic
class which lives on, or over, the poverty line
—from our " submerged tenth." Nearly all
those in this economic class in the South are
Negroes—a fact which has resulted in our
confusing the poverty line with the colour
line, and charging Negroes racially with sins
and tendencies which belong, the world over,
to any race living in their economic condi¬
tion. But it is just the Negroes who belong
in this economic class, these Negroes who
form our submerged tenth, and who furnish
the most of our criminal supply, whom we
white people do not know, and who conse¬
quently have no white folks to send to, to see
that they are protected in the courts.—Oh,
there is the Negro problem, and the solution
of it! The poorest, the most ignorant, the
ones least able to resist temptation, the folk
unhelped, untaught, who are born in squalor,
who live in ignorance and in want of all
things necessary for useful, innocent, happy
lives—they do not know us, nor we them!
There is no human bond of fellowship between
our full lives and their empty ones ; no mak¬
ing of straight paths for these stumbling feet,
no service of the outcast by those who are
lords of all!
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 51
In that one sense the Negro problem is pe¬
culiar. Otherwise it is an integral part of
the world-problem of strength and weakness
dwelling side by side, with the great Law
overhead laying upon them both the neces¬
sity of working out a state of civilization
which shall embody the spirit of human
brotherhood, and secure justice and oppor¬
tunity for all. There is nothing peculiar in
that. The call to this duty is world-wide:
the obligation we share with all the privileged
of earth. The peculiar thing is that we
alone, of all the privileged of Christendom,
have no wide-spread sense of obligation to
achieve this task. We even, many of us,
look on the handful who respond to this
world-call by service to our neediest as peo¬
ple half disgraced, who dishonour their high
heritage 'in going where Christ would go,
and in doing His will with all He has left on
earth to do it—human feet and hands and
hearts. That is peculiar.
For we honour the privileged of other
places who do this very thing. Any of us
would have been proud to know Tolstoi, not
just as a writer of books, but as a great man
willing to forego greatness, and to give his
life to ignorance and squalor and want. We
are proud of Migs^j^^/^i^ms, formerly of
52 IN BLACK AND WHITE
Chicago, Illinois, but now this long time of
the United States of America, North and
South. But a Jane Addams among the Ne¬
groes—the slum Negroes, folk of that very
economic class for which she spends herself
at Hull House ! There is no more to be
said.
Ah, but there is ! We are only at that
border-line of adolescence where a social
conscience may stir in the heart's soil, and
begin to reach upward to the light. We will
know our slum folk yet. And that knowl¬
edge will be part of the basis of the adjust¬
ment which is to come.
A recent incident told me by a friend, one
of the chief actors in it, throws light on pres¬
ent Southern conditions at several points.
This friend lives alone with her servants on
her old family plantation, a few miles from
one of our greatest cities. Her cook's hus¬
band, a trifling Negro and a steady drinker,
had hired himself to a near-by farmer for
whom the whites of the neighbourhood had
scant respect. The man kept a plantation
store where his " hands " could obtain provi¬
sions and whiskey as advances on their
wages, settling with their employer at the
end of the week, or the year. Until poor
SOUTHERN WHITE TEACHERS, LOUISVILLE, KY.
Twenty-seven Southern white teachers in Negro Sunday-school and settlement work, Louisville,
Ky. An outgrowth of Mr. Little's work. Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists have
similar work in Atlanta, Ga., Augusta, Ga., Oxford, Miss., Nashville, Tenn., and elsewhere.
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 53
folk learn cooperative buying, after the Eng¬
lish and continental method, these master-
owned stores are a necessity in the South, as
they are elsewhere; and here, as in Western
lumber camps or Eastern mines and mills,
monopoly tempts some to extortion. In such
cases the Negroes are never out of debt, from
year to year, their own fondness for whiskey
being often as potent a reason for that fact
as the storekeeper's greed. The storekeeper
usually furnishes the whiskey which keeps
them such unremunerative labourers ; but his
profit on the whiskey makes up for that.
The farmer in question appears to have
been an employer of this type; and the Ne¬
gro, whose poor wages fully paid for the
work he did, was soon deep in debt. He de¬
cided to hire out somewhere else, and his
contract troubled him no whit. He told his
second employer of his debt to the first; and
the man, according to custom, agreed to
stand for it to the creditor by withholding
part of the Negro's wages while in his em¬
ploy, and paying it on the debt. Ordinarily
this would have released the Negro, as few
people try to get work out of one, contract or
no contract, who is unwilling to give it. But
the first farmer needed his " hand," and had,
apparently, not even a personal conscience,
54 IN BLACK AND WHITE
or a rudimentary respect for law. So he
kidnapped the Negro on his way to his new
employer, gave him a hard beating, and set
him to work on his own farm, threatening
him, the Negro said, with far worse if he left
the place again before the year was out. He
even kept him at night until my friend, find¬
ing where he was, sent the farmer orders to
allow the man to come home every night as
soon as his day's work was done.
She is a frail little body, but accustomed to
being obeyed; and the farmer did as he was
bid. The Negro, however, shirked his work,
and once more roused his employer's ire.
This time the farmer came to the cabin in my
friend's yard one night after she had retired.
He brought a rope with him, without ex¬
pounding his reason therefor, and ordered
the Negro to get up and come with him.
My friend went out and delivered, as her ul¬
timatum, a demand that the Negro be form¬
ally released from his contract on the spot.
Her simple fearlessness forced the white
man's consent; and she gave him, in return,
her personal check for eighty dollars—the
amount claimed on the Negro's indebtedness.
The story shows the lengths to which the
Southern personal conscience will go in be¬
friending even a trifling Negro ; and the fact
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 55
that everybody settled down in peace as
soon as the white man let the black one
alone throws light on the state of our social
consciousness. It is true my friend said the
white man was practically ostracized by his
own race; but that fact was the aggregate
result of the action of many individuals,
rather than the action of a community with
a sense of community responsibility to up¬
hold law.
The story naturally brings up the question
of peonage, which is a logical outcome of
our attitude to the Negroes since the de¬
structive days of " reconstruction."
Country Negroes of the better type, hard¬
working, honest and thrifty, are pretty sure,
sooner or later, to own their own farms and
be their own masters. Negro ownership of
Southern farm lands increased one hundred
and fifty per cent, between 1900 and 1910—
clear proof that the race is advancing rapidly,
no matter how much that is undesirable may
remain for future elimination. Proof, also,
that notwithstanding mob barbarities and
much unjust discrimination, Southern whites
are better neighbours for black folk than
some of our Northern brothers fear.
By this steady promotion of the best Negro
tenants and labourers into the class of land-
56 IN BLACK AND WHITE
owners, those left available for labour on
white farms tend constantly to a lower level
of character and efficiency. It would be
hard to exaggerate the shiftlessness and un¬
reliability of many of them. The farmer who
has employed them by the year may find
himself deserted at the most critical period,
and his year's work little more than a dis¬
aster. It is for protection against this danger
that a number of men have resorted to the
expedient of keeping the labourers forever
in their debt, and, by agreement with other
farmers, preventing their getting employ¬
ment elsewhere until that impossible time
when their debt shall have been cancelled.
It is a surface remedy, which penetrates
the skin of the difficulty only to set up in¬
flammation. The basis of adjustment here
necessitates an entire readjustment of thought
and action, on the part of the whites, to the
country Negro and his needs.
The two great assets of any country are
the land and the people ; and the people
necessarily include those engaged in the
basal industry of agriculture. The land pro¬
duces increasingly as the people who till it
gain in health, in morals, in intelligence, in
the freedom and joy of life. It grows barren
as they are debased. No man, however in-
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 57
telligent himself, can make a free man's crop
with peon labour. For many years the South
squandered the fertility of her fields. We
are learning of late years, slowly and pain¬
fully, to build up the impoverished soil, and
restore it to its former richness. But we
have overlooked the other half of the prob¬
lem—the squandered fertility of labour.
Until we build up the worker the material
on which his work is spent will never yield
its normal return. The houses of very many
farm labourers are more than enough to sap
their vitality, to destroy ambition and self-
respect, and to foster immorality and disease.
Conditions like these filch from the com¬
munity its capital of human productiveness.
Added to this is our habitual neglect of
the farm-hand's recreational life—the danger-
place of all people of all races and all ages
whose inward resources are limited, and
whose power of self-control is not highly
developed.
Even a locomotive, a thing all steel and
brass, has to have its periods of cared-for
rest—its recreational life—if it is to live out
in usefulness the normal lifetime of such an
engine : and no man, of any race, will or
can do first-class work if he is regarded as a
machine while at work, and as a nonentity
58 IN BLACK AND WHITE
when his work-hours end. Drunkenness
and immorality are the only resources of
many of our farm-hands when not at work
in the field. Peonage is no cure for debase¬
ment like this.
The Negroes need to be built up, like the
soil. In cities and factories we are finding
that it pays, in dollars and cents, to care for
"the [white] human end of the machine."
It will pay in the country, too, and when the
human end is black. Christ's law of brother¬
hood is universal in its working, or it is no
law at all. A Negro of this class, given a
decent house and let alone in it, would soon
bring it to the level of his former habitation.
But if with the house he were given a friend
—who according to Emerson's fine definition
is "one who makes us do what we can";
if he were helped to start a chicken-yard
of his own on intelligent principles, or a
garden-patch; if the educational methods so
successful at some points in the rural South
were universally applied, relating the chil¬
dren rationally and happily to the land; if
the schoolhouses were secured as social cen¬
tres for older Negroes, and the better classes
of coloured people were encouraged to co¬
operate in the movement; if the white men
of the neighbourhood, farmers, pastors, school-
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 59
teachers and doctors, met them there occa¬
sionally to lecture on matters of community
interest, and also to give them some real out¬
look in life, some glimpse of the wide rela¬
tions of their narrow toil; if the white people
would look into their religious life a little and
do what so many white people did before the
war—superintend their Sunday-schools and
teach their Bible classes ; if these simple and
entirely possible things were done, the la¬
bourer would be built up along with the soil,
and peonage would be seen for what it is—
the device of selfish ignorance for meeting a
situation which is caused by our own neglect
of our poor, and is to be controlled only by
service in a spirit of brotherhood.
It would not be as easy to do as to read
about, of course. There would be discour¬
agement and failures. There always are
when a thing is really worth doing. And
we must expect, moreover, to pay a heavy
premium for our fifty years' neglect of this
simple duty to our country poor. The Ne¬
groes do not love us as much as they did
fifty years ago, nor trust us as they did. No
Southern white can turn in sympathy to the
service of the poorer Negroes without being
often startled, and sometimes sharply hurt,
by suspicions and mistrusts which peer at
60 IN BLACK AND WHITE
him from hidden places, and sometimes
threaten to bar his way. But that is our her¬
itage from our own past, and it only empha¬
sizes the danger of further neglect. It may
go against our pride to recognize the fact,
but we white people, if we really win our way
with the mass of the Negroes, and pay in
honour our share of the world-debt of the
strong to the weak, must live down much of
the record of our last fifty years.
But the lower class of Negroes, whether in
city or country, do not present the only, nor,
I often think, the most serious aspect of our
Negro problem, so called. We have many
classes of whites in the South, the lowest of
which are little, if any, above the lower Ne¬
groes in education or morality. This class is
not a large one, but it is widely scattered ; and
it is the most unstable element in our civili¬
zation. It is the nitrogen of the South, ready
at a touch to slip its peaceful combinations,
and in the ensuing explosion to rend the
social fabric in every direction. It is the
storm-centre of our race-prejudices, and gen¬
erates many a cyclone which cuts a broad
swath through much that the South cher¬
ishes. I know of no solution for this white
side of our " Negro problem " but the one to
be applied to the black side also—the gradual
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 61
upbuilding of character by training and per¬
sonal service, and above all by the example
of just living in every relation of life.
But control of a situation need not wait on
the solution of its problems. The existence
of this dangerous white class is no excuse for
the deeds its members are permitted to do;
it but constitutes our duty and our reproach.
There are a hundred law-abiding Southern¬
ers—oh, far, far more !—to every one of these
lawless firebrands; yet individualistic as we
are, unorganized by a social consciousness,
half a dozen of them can sway the weak, the
excitable, the unformed among us, can fire
the mob spirit, and lay the honour of thou¬
sands in the dust.
We have lately had, in one Southern state,
an extreme instance of this kind. A pecul¬
iarly atrocious murder had been committed
by five Negroes, two of whom were lynched,
the remaining three being hung by process
of law. Some lawless white men, evidently
too poor themselves to need the Negro's
labour, then undertook to drive all Negroes
from the country. Notice was served on the
white people, in city and country, that dire
and summary punishment would be meted
out to all whites employing Negroes in any
capacity after a certain date. The Negroes
62 IN BLACK AND WHITE
were warned that working for white people
meant death, and were ordered to leave the
country at once. A friend of mine who lives
in the county town, which numbers several
thousand inhabitants, told me the Negroes
were pitiful to see. They went out in droves,
young and old, often in rickety little wagons
piled high with household goods; went out,
not knowing whither, and leaving gardens
behind them, and often homes of their own.
And the white people—the law-abiding
majority of the population ? They were
thoroughly indignant from a personal, but
not from a community standpoint. They
condemned the outrage publicly, as individ¬
uals ; and as individuals they each protected
those Negroes personally known to them.
Men carried pistols to protect their Negro
chauffeurs, none of whom were molested as
soon as that fact became known. Servants
came to the white people's premises to sleep,
and brought their relatives with them. It
was the Negroes who had no " white folks "
who suffered. Finally the matter dropped
out of the newspapers. A year later two of
the Negroes ventured back to their homes,
which were promptly dynamited, though
fortunately without loss of life. The two
houses, the papers stated, were owned by
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 63
white men ; and the governor offered five
hundred dollars reward for the perpetrators of
this latest crime. They have not yet, how¬
ever, been apprehended.
The papers of the state, like the whites of
the outraged community, were outspoken in
condemnation of these barbarous proceed¬
ings ; yet there was no community conscience
to weld the law-abiding majority of town or
state into one strong will, fired with a determi¬
nation to stop a hideous injustice, or to give
the weak the protection of law which was
their due, instead of the haphazard personal
safeguards afforded by the circumstance of
acquaintance with some white person.
It is scarcely a step from deeds like this to
the murder, by mob law, of human beings.
To a thinking mind there is nothing so sin¬
ister in our Southern life as the swift debauch¬
ing of many of our people through yielding
to the mob spirit. Time was when a Negro
was lynched for one crime only ; and the fear¬
ful provocation is still adduced, at least as the
reason, if not as the excuse, for this savagery
amopg us. But this lawless element has
long since fallen below the point where such
offense is necessary to set them baying for
some Negro's life like bloodhounds on a trail.
The curse of their own sins is upon them, and
64 IN BLACK AND WHITE
they drop nearer the beast's level every
year.
But we of the law-abiding majority cannot
lay on their shoulders our part of a commu¬
nity sin. If they do the deed, we, who could
prevent it, permit them. There are, however,
signs of a wide awakening. The individual
consciences of the South are yearly more
deeply stirred by these outrages. The out¬
spoken condemnation of a few men and news¬
papers, years ago, is the common attitude
to-day. And more than that, far more, is the
stirring, by more signs than one, of a true
community conscience at this most vital
point. A few weeks ago the citizens of a
town just disgraced by mob violence met
in public assembly, confessed openly their
sense of community shame, and pledged
themselves as a people to see that the law
was upheld in their midst henceforth. When
the real South, the law-abiding majority,
catches the contagion of that social conscious¬
ness mobs will be heard of among us no
more.
A law has been proposed by some South¬
ern man, whose name I am unable to trace,
which would go far towards checking mob
violence. It would automatically remove
from office any sheriff who failed to protect a
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 65
prisoner in his charge, and would render him
ineligible for reelection ; and it would make
the county liable for damages to the family
of the murdered man. It would, in the
writer's opinion, be wise to add to these pro¬
visions a requirement that the county tax for
education be largely increased for a term of
years following such a crime.
It was with the deepest thankfulness that I
sat in a body of Southern women, gathered
in Birmingham last April, when resolutions
against lynching were brought in and unani¬
mously passed. The overwhelming majority
of Southern women have always repudiated
the need of mob-murder for their protection ;
but it marks a great advance towards social
consciousness when an organization repre¬
senting over two hundred thousand Southern
white women delivers a public protest against
it. The occasion was the annual meeting of
the Woman's Missionary Council of the M. E.
Church, South. The resolutions " deplore
the demoralizing influence of mob violence
upon communities, and especially upon the
youth of both races, who are thereby incited
to a contempt of law resulting in moral de¬
generacy and the overthrow of justice."
They state " that, as women engaged in Chris¬
tian social service for the full redemption of
66 IN BLACK AND WHITE.
our social order, we do protest, in the name
of outraged justice, against the savagery of
lynching ;" and " call upon lawmakers and
enforcers of law, and upon all who value jus¬
tice and righteousness, to recognize their
duty to the law, and to the criminal classes.
We appeal to them to arouse public opinion
against mob violence, and to enforce the law
against those who defy it." The resolutions
end by pledging the women " to increasing
prayer and effort in behalf of those classes,
the very environment of whose lives breeds
crime."
Here is one vigorous development of so¬
cial conscience in the South as regards the
Negro. The Sociological Congress showed
others. It is as contagious, thank heaven, as
tuberculosis itself, once the patient's condi¬
tion is ripe for it; and when we break out
with it, as we presently shall, we shall have a
notable case. We never have done things
by halves.
But the evil effects of the past are still with
us. It is true that the crime of lynching is
decreasing among us. It is also true that
the number of Negroes lynched in the years
made darkest by this wickedness was almost
negligible as compared with the total Negro
population. Negligible, I mean, not from a
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 67
human, but from an arithmetical standpoint;
and somehow, by that curious mental process
of self-exculpation common to all men in the
presence of embarrassing or shameful facts,
many of us who yet abhor mob violence
have unconsciously sought refuge from the
horror in the arithmetical point of view. " It
is horrible," we say, " wicked, shameful, in¬
human ; but at least, thank heaven, the crime
is infrequent: the millions of Negroes never
in danger proves that. As a race they are
safe, and they know it."
But they do not know it; nor would we in
their place. We have failed to use our imag¬
ination at this point. Every one of our mil¬
lions of black citizens knows that every time
this fire of death has flamed up from those
depths where savagery still lurks in human
hearts it has burst forth in a fresh place, with¬
out warning, dealing individual death, and
sometimes suffering for many not even ac¬
cused of crime. Lynchings do not come in
the same place twice : if they did they could
be avoided. The volcano bursts forth from
what has been, in the memory of man, but a
peaceful hillside. It is true the eruption
seldom takes place: the awful thing to the
Negro is that it may take place at any time,
anywhere, even upon trivial, or, conceivably,
68 IN BLACK AND WHITE
upon unconscious provocation. That is lynch¬
ing from the Negroes' point of view, which
would probably be our own in their place.
The possibility of illegal violence, the fear of
it, is an ever-present thing in their lives. It
hangs, a thick fog of distrust, between their
race and ours. Through it they grope, mis¬
understanding and misinterpreting many of
our most innocent deeds and ways. Individual
whites they trust; but I think few of them
really trust us as a people. They know that
nearly all of us feel kindly to them, that very
few of us would ever harm them: but they
also realize, taught by frightful experience,
that when the very small lawless white ele¬
ment rises against them they cannot certainly
rely upon protection from the rest of us.
This sense of evil possibly impending, with
the deep distrust engendered by it, colours
all the Negro's relations with us. It makes
him shifty, time-serving. All of personal
good that he plans or desires too often ap¬
pears to him to be subject to the one impe¬
rious necessity of getting along with white
folks—not of deserving or obtaining the re¬
spect of the better classes among us, but of
avoiding the anger of individuals of our small¬
est and most dangerous class. To live in an
atmosphere like that without moral deteriora-
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 69
tion requires a strength of character rare in
men of every race.
Nor does the administration of criminal
law in our courts always tend to lessen this
distrust of white people. At each session of
the Southern Sociological Congress Southern
men high in office among us—judges, pro¬
fessors in our great universities, Y. M. C. A.
leaders, and others, have stated that, despite
individual exceptions, the trend of our courts
is to mete out heavier punishment to black
offenders than to white. It is not, they say,
that Negroes are illegally sentenced; but
that, for similar offenses, the Negro gets one
of the heavier sentences permissible under
the law, the white man one of the lighter.
More than one Southern governor has de¬
fended his wholesale use of the pardoning
power on the express ground " that the pro¬
portion of convictions is greater, and the
terms of sentence longer, for Negroes than
for whites." One Southern judge, a speaker
at the Sociological Congress in Nashville,
after stating that the white man too often es¬
capes where the Negro is punished for a like
offense, added the warning " that if punish¬
ments of the law are not imposed upon all
offenders alike it will breed distrust of ad¬
ministration." Yes : and distrust of the
70 IN BLACK AND WHITE
race behind the administration. It will, and
does.
A Southern bishop told me recently that at
a banquet where several prominent South¬
erners were present, this judge among them,
some of the guests questioned the accuracy
of his statement in regard to discrimination in
the courts. " And he just turned on us," said
the bishop, " and gave us chapter and verse.
He told what he had himself seen, in differ¬
ent courts. And he convinced his audience ;
when he finished nobody had a word to say."
It is not only the Negro's well-being that
is at stake in this matter : it is the civilization
of the South. Through all the ages, the
country which denies the poorest equal jus¬
tice is the one foredoomed to fall. It is
doubtless true that our Southern courts are
no more unjust to the very poor than are the
courts of many other sections of our country,
especially in our great cities. The poor im¬
migrant without a "next friend" is liable to
fare as badly as the Negro without any
" white folks " ; but that does not lessen our
danger, or our responsibility. It ought to
draw North and South closer together in the
bonds of a common patriotism and a common
public duty. It is because our poor are made
conspicuous, and advertised, as it were, by
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 71
[
their difference in colour that we seem to all
the world greater sinners at this point than
themselves. But while I would offer this sug¬
gestion, that others outside may feel more
human sympathy for us while yet condemn¬
ing our human sin, I would not have us at
all excuse ourselves on the score that our sin
is common to mankind. A social conscience,
like a personal one, regards the moral qual¬
ity of one's own deeds, and not what one's
neighbours do, or fail to do. If we fail to
achieve justice for the poorest, our doom is
written in the stars: and we are neither
helped nor hindered by other people's short¬
comings.
Last of all in this connection, yet in their
practical prevention of good feeling between
the races not least, are the annoyances, dis¬
comforts and hardships laid upon the better
class of Negroes by our failure to see under
their black skins a humanity as dear to jus¬
tice and to God as our own. There are many
points for illustration; but one will suffice
here—the matter of " Jim Crow " cars.
We who believe that the races should be
kept racially, and therefore socially, distinct
cannot advocate their mingling in the en¬
forced intimacy of Pullman cars. It is enough
for us to put up with ourselves under such
72 IN BLACK AND WHITE
conditions—and sometimes almost too much.
But that does not at all excuse the travelling
conditions which are forced upon Negroes of
education and refinement, (I use the word
advisedly), throughout the South. They pay
for a straight railroad ticket exactly what we
pay, and we force them to habitually accept
in return accommodations we would despise
one of our own people for putting up with.
—And we say the Negroes are dirty ! Mirac¬
ulously, some of them are not, notwithstand¬
ing all the provision we make for confirming
them in that condition.
Last year a young Negro girl came to the
school of which my husband is the president
—a school, by the way, founded, maintained
and officered by Southern whites ; and after
she had been there some time she confided
to one of her white teachers the fact that when
she came to the city she had ridden in " the
white folks' car."
" Were you with white people ? " she was
asked.
No, she was not. She had paid her full
fare, as usual, and had taken her place in
the " Jim Crow" car, filthy with tobacco
juice and incrusted dirt, foul with smoke
both new and old, and containing a number
of Negro men of the baser sort—the kind of
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 73
car, in short, in which Negro women and
girls, and clean, educated, well-to-do Negro
men are so frequently expected to travel.
There were no women that day, and only
these rough men ; and they began to molest
the girl almost at once. Shrinking back in
her seat in terror, she felt a sudden hope as
the white brakeman came through the car:
but he passed through, as unheeding as
though dogs were squabbling over a bone.
She stood it a few minutes longer, and then
dashed frantically into the next car, the white
day coach, dropped into the last seat, and
burst into tears. Thus the conductor found
her. On hearing her story he told her to
stay where she was; that if any of the white
people in the car objected he would explain
her presence, and they would be willing for
her to stay. No one objected, however, and
she rode to her destination in peace.
Not all conductors are so humane. And
it is practically impossible, as may be seen
at a glance, for one white man, often a mere
boy, to keep order among a car-full of Ne¬
groes like that, roused to evil by the pres¬
ence of a girl evidently above their own
social class. A white boy-conductor would
be risking his life in such a case ; and even
if he saved it, if he started any " race row "
74: IN BLACK AND WHITE
on a railroad train by defending one Negro
from another he would lose his job. So
most of them harden their hearts and turn
their eyes the other way—a performance for
which I, for one, am slow to blame them.
We have no right, as a people, habitually to
permit impossible situations, and then to
throw the responsibility for them on one
man's, or one boy's, shoulders.
Last Christmas a coloured kindergartner,
employed by some Southern white women
in settlement work among her own people,
went home for the holidays. There are
several day trains, but some important home
happening made her presence there necessary
the morning after her work closed at the
settlement; so she took the night train, a
thing she had never done before. The young
woman is a college graduate, refined in
speech and manner, modest and sensible in
her relations with people of both races, and
a strong and wholesome force in the lives of
the poorer Negroes among whom she works.
She took the Jim Crow car, of course, expect¬
ing to sit up all night, but with no idea of
the experiences before her. The car was full
of half-drunken Negro men off to enjoy one
of the very few pleasures open to Negroes in
the South—a regular old Christmas spree.
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 75
There were one or two other women in the
car, and they huddled together and endured
the night in frightened silence. The train
men, passing through, took no notice of the
insults, or oaths, or vile talk.
When she told the white women who had
employed her about it, ten days later, she
trembled as she spoke.
" I had never seen Negroes like that in my
life," she said. " I knew there were such
men; but my mother had spent her life
keeping me away from them.—Why can't
the white people see it ?" she burst out
passionately. " Will they think forever that
we are all like that ? Why can't they let us
be decent when we want to be ? "
While my husband was Secretary of Edu¬
cation of the Southern Methodist Church,
part of his work was to lay the matter of
Negro education on the conscience of his
denomination. One of the teachers at our
one school for Negroes was a coloured man
of unusual gifts and character, an honour
graduate of a Northern university, and a
man high in the respect and friendship of
Southern whites in many states. To bring
" the Negro question" closer home to our
people the Methodist Board of Education
paid this man's salary and travelling ex-
76 IN BLACK AND WHITE
penses; and for four years the white man
and the black one travelled the rounds of
our annual conferences, presenting the cause
of the Negro to our white preachers and lay¬
men, and finding, as time went on, much
prejudice giving way to sympathy.
The conference meetings are nearly all
crowded into three months, several being
held each week. When a secretary attends
them his days are given to the conferences,
his nights to travel; and it is a time of phys¬
ical strain, even with all the comforts of
modern travel. My husband, strong as he
is, came home tired out at the end of each
annual round.
"How Gilbert stands it, physically or re¬
ligiously, I cannot see," he said. " He goes
half the time without lying down to sleep.
If I were not with him, to dash into some
white restaurant and buy him a cup of coffee
and something to eat, he would often go
hungry. And I have never once heard him
complain, or seen his Christian composure
ruffled. He is doing us white people a great
service, freeing us from some of our worst
prejudices: and we require him to do it at
this cost 1"
I know a Negro woman, the wife of a doc¬
tor, whom white doctors of the city tell me
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 77
they respect both as a man and as a physician.
He has a large charity practice, but a large
paying one also. He is a man of consider¬
able means, and owns an automobile. His
home is thoroughly comfortable; and his
wife is as amply provided for as the wife of a
white man in similar circumstances would
be. She is a refined, sensible, good woman,
whose influence among her own people is of
the best.
She told me not long ago that she went on
a visit which necessitated a day in the usual
Jim Crow car. I had asked her about the
matter or she would not have mentioned it.
We do not suspect the reserves of pride in
Negroes of this class ; and I count it a chief
proof that my life among them is not a fail¬
ure that they will speak to me frankly, as to
a friend.
There had been no insult or terror in her
case; simply filth, tobacco juice and smoke,
coarse talk among other Negroes, and blind¬
ing, choking dust. When she reached her
destination, she said, no one could have told
the colour or texture of her dress or hat.
Somehow the hat gripped my sympathies.
Women do so cherish their hats ! I am never
happy myself until the porter brings me a
bag, and my head-gear is safe beyond reach
IN BLACK AND WHITE
of dust, with a hat-pin thrust through the
gathered opening of the bag into the back
of the opposite seat, to keep its precious con¬
tents from being waggled about. I can wash
my hair ; but a soot-filled hat is irretrievable;
it can never look impeccable again.
Why should this other woman, who loves
cleanliness as much as I do, and who is quite
as willing to pay for it, be forced to travel in
that disgusting filth ? I know if I were forced
to do it my husband and my children and all
my friends would feel outraged about it, and
would never have any use for the people
who made me do it. Why should these
people feel differently? It is nearly always
the smaller matters of life which make its
bitterness or its sweetness for us white peo¬
ple. We can bear great things greatly,
often; but our courage and kindness and
sympathies fail before the annoyances of
life. Shall we expect more of Negroes than
of ourselves?
A Southern state, a few years ago, required
the railroads to provide equal accommoda¬
tions for whites and Negroes in that state.
They replied by a threat to take off all Pull¬
mans for white people, as they could only be
operated at a loss for Negroes: and the
matter was dropped.
CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION, BETHLEHEM HOUSE, NASHVILLE.
Mothers' Community Club, Settlement House for Negroes, Nashville, Tenn.
(Courtesy Women's Missionary Council, M. E. Church, South.)
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 79
But day-coach accommodations are rarely
equal. Even where the cars were originally
alike, the habitual neglect of those in use for
Negroes soon reduces them to a condition
revolting to people of cleanly habits. The
fact that many Negroes are unclean in their
habits is no excuse for the condition of the
cars. When white people are unclean, as
they often are, the railroad is not excused
from keeping the cars in a fairly decent con¬
dition, at worst. They may have to spend a
little more for soap and water ; but they must
take their chances on that when they sell
tickets.
The Jim Crow cars come under no one
general description. I have occasionally seen
a car for Negroes as clean as any day coach
for whites. Similarly, I have known per¬
sonally of Negroes riding through Southern
states all day and all night in a Pullman
section, their presence known to all the white
passengers, none of whom voiced any objec¬
tion to them. But neither occurrence is the
rule.
Sometimes there is a clean day coach for
Negroes, and also a separate place for Negro
men to smoke—usually a cut-off end of the
smoking-car for whites. This is the best ac¬
commodation on the best roads. Sometimes
80 IN BLACK AND WHITE
this half of a smoking car, with its single
toilet, is the only part of the train open to
Negroes at all. Sometimes there is no place
for Negroes except in the car with white
smokers, though this again is unusual. The
average conditions, undoubtedly, are far be¬
low those provided for white passengers pay¬
ing the same price : and the spirit manifested
by this treatment of Negroes is one people of
any race or any class have the right to resent.
If whole Pullman cars cannot be profitably
provided, one end of a first class day coach
could be fitted up as a Pullman, and put in
charge of the men on the white people's Pull¬
man ; and the other part of the car could
give the Negroes what they now so often
lack—day-coach accommodations equal to
those for whites.
I believe the railroad people themselves
have little idea of the number of Negroes
who could and would pay for first-class ac¬
commodations. We know little about the
educated, prosperous members of the race.
As fast as they enter this class they withdraw
into a world of their own—a world which lies
all about us white folks, yet of whose exist¬
ence we are scarcely aware. It is largely the
inefficients, the failures, or the immature and
untrained who remain with us. As they rise
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 81
out of this class they disappear from our
view. There are more prosperous Negroes
who would pay for Pullmans than we im¬
agine.
But if the railroads claim that they really
cannot provide decent day coaches and com¬
fortable sleeping accommodations for Ne¬
groes, a commission should be appointed to
look into the matter : and if their contention
proved just, fares for everybody should be
raised by law to a point which would allow
the roads to maintain standards of comfort
and decency for all their passengers. We
cannot afford, as a people, to let the Negroes
pay for our cheap fares: for that is just what
it amounts to when the railroad takes the
same amount of money from both of us, and
gives us better accommodations than it can
afford to give them. We are not paying for
all we get in our day coaches, evidently ; and
if the Negro isn't footing the bill for the def¬
icit, who is ? As for the Pullman company,
if half the published tales of its dividends be
true, it could furnish cars for Negroes and
pay its employees a living wage, and yet be
in no danger of bankruptcy. Public utilities
should be subject to public control.
It should be pointed out that not one of
the Negroes whose cases I have cited, nor
82 IN BLACK AND WHITE
any Negro I ever spoke to on the subject,
had any desire to share cars with white peo¬
ple. They have their pride, too; and they
are not going where they are not wanted.
They want safety, cleanliness, and comfort,
not white company; and they are willing
and ready to pay for them.
There is another grave injustice, wholly
different from any I have touched upon,
which I believe has had a profound effect for
evil upon a large class of Negroes; yet
scarcely any one, white or black, thinks of it
as injustice at all. We Southern white
women are greater offenders in the matter
than the men; and I myself must plead
guilty to the common charge. Yet I scarcely
see how a woman very far from strong could
sometimes do differently; and if one be ex¬
cused on the score of illness, it looks ugly to
call her neighbour lazy for the same offense.
We demand too little in the way of honest
work of the Negroes in our employ. Shirk¬
ing, untidy habits, petty, and often serious,
pilferings—we wink at all of them, and con¬
tinue to pay honest money for dishonest
work. We do not like to discharge Negroes.
It grates on our pride to be talked about by
a "darkey" : and talk about us they certainly
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 83
will, frequently with scant respect for truth.
And as to discharging them, where will we
get a better one, we ask; they are all alike.
And you can't possibly do the work yourself;
yet if you make them mad they may keep
you out of a cook for weeks. And besides,
" darkies are " darkies " : white people al¬
ways have put up with them, and always
will.—So we mourn in secret over the de¬
parted flour, and sigh for the lard that used
to be in the bucket, and tell Jane or Lucinda
how nice her cake was last night, and give
her the cold biscuit to take home to her
grandmother, and a few cookies for the chil¬
dren. And when Eliza Ann brings in the
wash with three of the best towels gone, and
half the handkerchiefs, and tells us blandly
that she know she done brung back ev'y las'
thing she took out, 'cause she hung 'em on
her own line an' dey ain't been nobody near
'em but her an' de chillun, we falter meekly
that it doesn't matter, and that the table¬
cloths look nice; and we give her a pair of
stockings with just one tiny hole in them,
and the dress she has scorched in two in the
back breadth to make over for little Susan ;
and we pay her the full week's wages.
In our hearts we feel that we are " qual¬
ity," and so cannot afford to hold Negroes to
84 IN BLACK AND WHITE
a strict account. For fifty years we have
trained those of them with whom we have
come in contact to rate both our friendship
and our gentility in exact proportion to what
we put up with from them, and what we give
them without expectation of return. They
think none the less of Northern people who
require a return in well-done work for money
received ; but Southerners are " our white
folks," and such exactions from them arouse
instant distrust in the average Negro's breast,
the least of his suspicions being that his em¬
ployer has no connection with the " quality."
A year or two ago I had a bright little col¬
oured girl about sixteen years old as extra
help while company was in the house. I
never have locked things up. I would rather
have a dishonest servant steal from me than
hurt an honest one's feelings: so I take my
chances. But things did so vanish out of the
pantry ! Cake and fruit just melted into air.
The cook was as honest as I was; and my
little housemaid was getting fat. Finally,
when a basket of high-priced peaches lost
two-thirds of its contents before appearing in
the house at all, I knew, like Brer Rabbit,
that something had to be done. I talked to
the child seriously about honesty as an asset
of character. She turned on me with round-
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 85
eyed wonder, and with what I still believe to
have been genuine scorn.
" Well, if ever I had white folks talk to
me like that 1" she exclaimed. " Honest / I
been honest all my life ! I ain't never worked
anywhere since I was born "—she had been
at it, by spells, ever since she was ten—
" where white folks grudge me what I et be¬
fore. Ef it belongs to my white folks hit be¬
longs to me, an' I takes it. I ain't goin' to
work for no other kind." And she put on
her hat and went home : I was beneath her
services.
I felt ashamed. I had put up with her
pilferings a long time before I spoke ; and I
and others like me had been training her, and
tens of thousands more, to shiftlessness and
dishonesty ever since they were born. The
wonder is not that so many of them are
worthless, but that there are so many honest,
painstaking, trustworthy ones among them.
They have attained to honesty with little help
from us.
I once praised a cook of mine for her ex¬
quisite cleanliness, and the economy with
which she evolved the most delicious dishes.
She really was a jewel of a cook. She laughed
amusedly when I spoke.
"I worked up North twelve years, an' I
86 EST BLACK AND WHITE
learned things," she said. " If I was dirty, or
wasted, I lost my place. And I'd have lost
it in a minute if I'd taken things. Yankee
women don't put up with nothin' ; they fire
you an' do the work themselves."
She turned on me suddenly.
" It's you white people's fault we coloured
people are so triflin'! " she burst out. " You-
all scold us, but you put up with us. We
don't need to do any better, because we get
along just as well as if we did honest work.
You-all say ' Oh, what can you expect of
darkies ?' But we can be honest, and up
there they make us. I wasn't no manner of
account till I went North. An' if the Yan¬
kees had some of these other servants 'round
yere they'd learn 'em somethin'. We can do
better—if we must! "
Now in all these matters, great and small,
and in dozens more which may not here be
touched upon, what basis for living does
white example furnish ? Outside of personal
and often unreasoning kindness, where we
are prone to take the attitude of feudal lords
who give largesse, what is there in our treat¬
ment of the Negro to inspire him with respect
for justice and the law ? If we will lay aside
our preconceived notions for a little, and go
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 87
over all the complex web of racial relations
in the South as they might appear to a gen¬
tleman from Mars, for instance, newly landed
on the earth, what is there, outcome of the
fifty years, commensurate with the obligation
of a strong people to a weak one ? What
have we done to bind them to us ? What to
lift them up ? What foundation have we as
a people laid for dwelling with them in honour
and mutual good will ?
I do not mean to imply that no basis of
justice exists: if it did not, our civilization
would be falling of its own weight. It does
exist between many individual lives, both
white and black. But as a people for a peo¬
ple the foundation is yet to be sought: and
other foundation than justice there is none.
There is no sense in mincing matters. We
are no longer children. It is the first step
that costs, always ; but the first step is very
plain. It is to put away childish things—
unreasoning prejudice and unreasoning pride
—and to look truth squarely in the face, as
men and women who love it at all costs.
There is no truth in a detached view of the
Negro, or of any human being. Everybody
on earth is human first and racial afterwards.
We must see in the Negro first of all, deeper
than all, higher than all, a man, made in the
88 IN BLACK AND WHITE
image of God as truly as we ourselves. If in
the race that image be less developed than in
our own, in some individuals of the race it is
certainly more highly developed than in some
individuals of ours. And whatever grows is
growable.
The only basis of living between man and
man, whether low or high, which is safe for
either is justice. And where there is less
than justice, the danger is ever greater for
the oppressor than for the oppressed. If
white civilization is to endure, in the South
or anywhere else, it must strike deep roots
into the soil of our common humanity, and
reach down to that bed-rock of justice which
makes the framework of the world.
And one thing more is needed. For jus¬
tice is a hard, cold thing; stable and strong;
yet must it be softened to nourish a people's
growth, and pass through the alembic of life
itself before it can mount to light and warmth,
and flutter brave banners in the sunshine, for
the joy and refreshment of mankind.
There are some elements of the inorganic
world so diverse that they can never join
hands for useful work except in the presence
of another element which, in some way be¬
yond our knowledge as yet, removes the un¬
seen barriers, and allows the two to meet
THE BASIS OF ADJUSTMENT 89
We call it catalytic action, by way of labelling
our ignorance; and that which allows the
unrelated fragments to exert their latent
power for common service is a catalyser.
We are not left without a catalyser in our
diverse human life. In an atmosphere of
sympathy, of human brotherhood, of care for
all for whom Christ died, the races of men—
all races—may come together, for service of
that great Race which climbs upward to the
light.
My only fear for white supremacy is that
we should prove unworthy of it. If we fail
there, we shall pass. Supremacy is for serv¬
ice. It is suicide to thrust other races back
from the good which we hold in trust for hu¬
manity. For him who would be greatest the
price is still that he shall be servant of all.
Ill
HOUSES AND HOMES
LONG ago, when I was a child, a
grown-up cousin took me driving
one afternoon behind a pair of his
thoroughbreds. As we swept over the long
shell road through autumn sunshine, with the
pine trees singing overhead and the wind
whitening the waves in the harbour beyond,
I came on one of those experiences known to
us all, when something long familiar yet
never noticed stands suddenly forth, chal¬
lenging eye and soul in a manner never to
be forgotten.
Beside the road was a one-roomed Negro
cabin, built of logs and chinked with mud.
Its one door swung wide, and showed the
rotted floor within. At the side was an un-
glazed opening like an eyeless socket, through
which I glimpsed a tumbled bed and a broken
cook-stove. A woman stood by the door, a
little child beside her. Their rags were thick
with dirt. The child looked at us with the
wonder and interest of life yet in his young
90
HOUSES AND HOMES 91
eyes; but the woman's black face was ex¬
pressionless, her murky eyes unquestioning,
unexpectant. She saw us because we crossed
her field of vision, just as an animal might
see a passing bird.
The day was glorious, our swift flight in¬
toxicating ; the swaying pines called to the
blood, and the sea sang of wonders yet to be ;
but the stolid woman and her eyeless home
blotted out everything else. I had looked at
the like a thousand times ; but somehow that
day, in my riot of physical and mental exal¬
tation, I had eyes to see ; and the shock of it
made me gasp.
" Why must they live like that ?" I de¬
manded. " Why do I have everything, and
they nothing ? "
My elderly cousin laughed a little, and
then, realizing my excitement, spoke soberly.
"Don't take other people's troubles too
seriously, my dear ; try to understand how
much being used to things means. If those
darkies had to live in your house they'd never
rest till they got it as dirty and broken up as
what they're used to. Then they'd be com¬
fortable. They like what they've got: they're
made that way."
I considered this comfortable doctrine in
silence. Then:
92 IN BLACK AND WHITE
" Why didn't God make them another way
—some clean way ? It would have been just
as easy."
"That's too deep water for a person of
your inches," he replied. "You must take
God and folks like you find them. But that
little darkey has as much fun as you do—
maybe more : don't worry your head over
nonsense."
A year or two afterwards my father's busi¬
ness took us to a great city of the North; and
I was soon hard at work, on Saturdays and
Sundays, at a church mission in the tene¬
ment district. Not content with the class
work at the chapel I visited my small pupils
in their—no, not their homes ; I could never
call them that; their dens. There were long
stairs slippery with dirt, where blows and
curses from the foul, dark rooms assailed my
ears ; there were rooms with one tiny window,
and rooms with no window at all; there were
beds and tubs and stoves and sewing-ma¬
chines and babies and rags and tin cans and
children and dirt and noise in one horrible
confusion.
My mother was dead, and I kept my expe¬
ditions to myself. But I turned back to what
my cousin had said about the Negroes for
comfort. Did these white people like the
HOUSES AND HOMES 93
way they lived ? Were they made that way
too ?
The more I saw of them the more dubious
I became; but my sociological researches,
becoming known to the family, were sum¬
marily put a stop to. So I dropped the
biological method and took to books.
But through those early experiences I came
unconsciously to regard slum-dwellers as of
one class. There were people of many races
in those tenements; but their differences sank
out of sight before the common degradation
of their lives. And always with the thought
of these came the memory of that Negro
woman and her not-yet stolid child. They
were human too; and there was something
in them deeper than being Negroes—some¬
thing that was kin to these emigrants of the
tenements, and to me, and to all the world.
They were a part of human life, like the rest:
their fundamental needs and their funda¬
mental reactions to environment were the
same in kind. Whatever differences existed,
they were differences in degree.
It is this recognition of human oneness
that opens the door of understanding into the
Negro slums. One slum interprets another;
each slum-dweller helps to explain all the
rest, whatever their nationality, wherever
94 IN BLACK AND WHITE
their abode. We can see this when we get
rid of the deadening influence of the old
political economy, and recognize the Negro
slum for what it, and all slums, are—the joint
product of ignorance, greed, and the mon¬
strous old doctrine of laissez faire.
The old political economy was a science of
investigation, not one of construction, and
still less one at all concerned with morality.
It observed the methods of human business
intercourse much as one might examine the
ways of earthquakes, or'any other natural phe¬
nomena, with a view to deducting therefrom
certain fixed laws as inherent in the nature
of things, and as unmoral, as the attraction of
oxygen and hydrogen. Thus, for example,
the old doctrine concerning wages—that the
employer would inevitably drive the workman
as close to the edge of starvation as he possi¬
bly could while still keeping him alive to
work; and that the workman would resist as
much as he dared with the fear of losing his
job before his eyes—was accepted as a basal
law of a world where, apparently, whatever
was was right. In such a world, the law of
gravitation was no firmer or more respectable
a fixture than the law that the landlord should
get the highest rent he could for the cheapest
shelter the poor could be induced to accept
HOUSES AND HOMES 95
The watchword of the old political economyj
was that business is business—a territory!
roped off from human considerations, and
governed by laws of its own. When human
beings got into this district they were subject
to the law of the land, which gave a chance
only to him who could snatch and hold it.
Religion and philanthropy might stand with¬
out if they would, and more or less liberally
anoint the wounds of those who were worsted
in the struggle, but otherwise they had no
concern in the fray.
This conception of human relations had
governed the world for ages before Ricardo
formulated his " iron law." Its mark is deep
in our life and thought to-day ; and nowhere
is it plainer, the world around, than upon the
houses of the poor. In all countries where
there is enough of civilization for society to
have become divided into groups, the poorer
folk, often without a sense of wrong on their
part or injustice on the landlords', have
been huddled together in a manner to bring
property-owners the largest returns, regard¬
less of other consequences.
Those other consequences have none the
less left their mark also deep in human life.
They are the same everywhere, regardless of
country or race.
96 IN BLACK AND WHITE
Cleanliness of body and of habitation is a
fundamental preparation for cleanliness of
mind, and water and fresh air exist in abun¬
dance to furnish it; yet the houses of those
who most need cleanliness, and to whom it
is most difficult by inclination and occupa¬
tion, are largely cut off from these two neces¬
sities without which human life cannot be
normal. A well-to-do child, with generations
of bath-tubs, outdoor sports, and sunny rooms
behind him, might retain through life moral
and even physical health under the condi¬
tions of the world's slums ; but his children
would show signs of breaking; and their
children would be as truly of the slum as
their neighbours. Generations of gain could
be lost in one man's lifetime. Yet of the
mass of the Negroes, who live in the slums
we have built for them, where water is hard
to come by and adequate ventilation impos¬
sible, we say that they are dirty by nature,
and that to provide better things would re¬
sult only in a waste of money.
We know little, as yet, in this our dawn
of social consciousness, of the slums of the
rest of the world. Our slum-dwellers are to
us a race apart, a separate fragment of life,
unrelated, a law unto themselves. They
make their slums, we think, as a spider spins
HOUSES AND HOMES 91
his web, from within. We all know, of
course, that very many Negroes are far
above the slum-dwellers. There are few
communities in the South, however small,
without a few Negroes whom the whites re¬
spect and trust. But we regard them, not as
the natural outcome of a more normal chance
in life, but as exceptions to the law of Negro
development, through some personally-in¬
herent exceptional quality, probably an in¬
fusion of white blood.
We need a wide horizon for the under¬
standing of our slum-dweller. When we set
him in his world-relations we see that in all
mankind slum conditions produce slum
results. Waterless, ill-ventilated houses,
crowded beyond the possibility of decency
because of low wages and high rents, make
impossible the physical basis that is neces¬
sary for even the poorest home. And with
this kind of housing go other evils, all work¬
ing together to produce in any people, the
world around, those characteristics which we
believe to be racial and Negro. In a popu¬
lation racially homogeneous, like that of
Rome or of Pekin, or racially heterogeneous
like that of Chicago or New York, or in a
bi-racial population like our own, the results
are the same. Bad housing conditions, in-
98 IN BLACK AND WHITE
sufficient or un-nourishing food, vicious sur¬
roundings, a childhood spent unprotected in
the streets, produce, in Europe, Asia, and
America, ill-nourished bodies, unbalanced
•'nerves, vacant and vicious minds, a craving
for stimulants and all evil excitements, lack
of energy, weakened wills, laziness, thriftless-
ness, unreliability in every relation of life.
As life rises, it differentiates. Anglo-Saxon
and Chinaman develop along different lines;
and the higher their development the less
alike they are. Each brings his own race-
contribution to the great Race of Man. But
in those lowest depths, where men are thrust
back towards the level of beasts, acquired
characteristics are in abeyance, and the old
brute longings dominate once more. Men
are wonderfully alike on this level—as alike
as are vegetable and animal on their lowest
plane: and yellow or white or black, there
is little for any to boast of. But when
normal conditions of growth are furnished,
men of each race will come true to type;
and the higher they rise the greater their
differences will be. Just what the highest
type of the Negro race will be nobody
knows; for as a race they have not yet had
normal conditions, nor time for full develop¬
ment. But whatever it may be, it will not
HOUSES AND HOMES 99
be a white type, nor a red nor a yellow one ;
and it will be something needed for the per¬
fect development of the Race of Man.
These things being so—and a wide world-
look is convincing—the places where our
poorest live, our weakest and most tempted
folk, take on new aspects and suggest new
implications. Our slums are not the product
of a race unrelated and incapable of develop¬
ment ; they are our part of a world-wide
morass where life capable of higher things is
sucked under and destroyed.
The old political economy took no account
of such matters; it accepted as a universal
law the policy of exploitation, of individual¬
istic commercialism, of cut-throat competition.
It saw, not human beings, but profit and loss.
The new political economy is shifting the
thought and the business of the world
towards a basis of human brotherhood. It
puts human rights above profit and loss, and
holds conservation a wiser policy than ex¬
ploitation. As to the human morass, it would
drain it. And all this not as a matter of
charity, not because Christ said men are all
brethen ; but because we are all brethren, and
so lose more than we gain, in the long run,
if we run things on any other basis. That
thing Christ said is true !
100 IN BLACK AND WHITE
When one sees in the slum-dweller a
brother, what is one to do ? If he really is a
brother it will pay to treat him like one.
Laws—the real ones—never do contradict
one another. No law of true prosperity can
be infringed upon by obedience to the law of
brotherhood, if brotherhood is a real fact. It
will work with any other real law there is.
A woman saw that, fifty years ago, and set
out to demonstrate it in this very matter of
housing.
" The people's homes are bad," she wrote,
" partly because they are badly built and ar¬
ranged ; they are tenfold worse because the
tenants' habits and lives are what they are.
Transplant them to-morrow to healthy and
commodious homes, and they would pollute
and destroy them. There needs, and will
need for some time, a reformatory work which
will demand that loving zeal of individuals
which cannot be legislated for by parliament.
The heart of the English nation will supply
it. It may and should be organized ; it can¬
not be created."
Might not that have been written of the
very poor of New York or St. Louis, instead
of the very poor of London ? Or of the very
poor of Atlanta or Birmingham, who happen
to be black ?
HOUSES AND HOMES 101
In 1866, three years after Ruskin's three
thousand pounds made the beginning of her
work possible, Miss Hill wrote again :
" That the spiritual elevation of a large
class depended to a considerable extent on
sanitary reform was, I considered, proved.
But I was equally certain that sanitary im¬
provement itself was dependent on educa¬
tional work among grown-up people. . . .
It seems to me that a greater power is in the
hands of landlords and landladies than of
school-teachers—power either of life or death,
physical and spiritual.
" The disciplining of our immense poor
population must be effected by individual in¬
fluence ; and this power can change it from a
mob of paupers and semi-paupers into a body
of self-dependent workers."
It can change it because it did, and does ;
and Mr. Ruskin, " who alone believed the
scheme would work," was repaid in good
English money for his investment, as were the
many others whose renting properties she and
her trained assistants managed during the
fifty years between her first experiment in
1863 and her death in 1912.
After twenty years of work she wrote, in
1883 :
" I have no hesitation in saying that if a
102 IN BLACK AND WHITE
site were handed over to me at the [usual]
price, I would engage to house upon it under
thoroughly healthy conditions, at rents which
they could pay, and which would yield a fair
interest on capital, a very large proportion of
the very poor."
And what was Miss Hill's scheme ? Just a
combination of the law of brotherhood with a
sound business policy in collecting rents.
With Ruskin's money she acquired three
houses "in a dreadful state of dirt and neg¬
lect." This was remedied, and an ample
water supply provided. She herself under¬
took to collect the weekly rent. At first her
tenants regarded her as a natural enemy.
Sometimes, when she went on Saturday
nights for her rent, she found them lying on
their filthy floors, dead drunk. The rent
would often be thrust out to her through a
crack in the door, held fast against her en¬
trance. The stairs were " many inches deep
in dirt, so hardened that a shovel had to be
used to get it off." The people were the
poorest renting class, just above vagrants;
they lived on the edge of crime, and all too fre¬
quently passed over the fatal line. " Truly,"
said Miss Hill, " a wild, lawless, desolate little
kingdom to rule over."
" On what principles was I to rule these
HOUSES AND HOMES 103
people ? On the same that I had already
tried, and tried with success, in other places,
and which I may sum up as the two follow¬
ing : firstly, to demand a strict fulfillment of
their duties to me—one of the chief of which
would be the punctual payment of rent; and
secondly, to endeavour to be so unfailingly
just and patient, that they should learn to
trust the rule that was over them.
" With regard to details, I would make a
few improvements at once—such, for ex¬
ample, as the laying on of water and repair¬
ing of dust bins ; but, for the most part, im¬
provements should be made only by degrees,
as the people became more capable of valu¬
ing and not abusing them. I would have
the rooms distempered and thoroughly
cleansed as they became vacant, and then
they should be offered to the more cleanly of
the tenants. I would save such repairs as
were not immediately needed as a means of
giving work to the men in times of distress.
I would draft the occupants of the under¬
ground kitchens into the up-stairs rooms, and
would ultimately convert the kitchens into
bath-rooms and wash-houses. I would have
the landlady's portion of the house—i. e., the
stairs and passages—at once repaired and
distempered; and they should be regularly
104 IN BLACK AND WHITE
scrubbed, and, as far as possible, made
models of cleanliness ; for I knew from former
experience that the example of this would, in
time, silently spread itself to the rooms them¬
selves, and that payment for this work would
give me some hold over the elder girls. I
would collect savings personally, not trust to
their being taken to distant banks or saving
clubs. And, finally, I knew that I should
learn to feel these people as my friends, and
so should instinctively feel the same respect
for their privacy and their independence, and
should treat them with the same courtesy,
that I should show towards any other per¬
sonal friends. There would be no interfer¬
ence, no entering their rooms uninvited, no
offer of money or the necessaries of life. But
when occasion presented itself I should give
them any help I could, such as I might offer
without insult to other friends—sympathy in
their distresses; advice, help, and counsel in
their difficulties. . . .
" When we set about our repairs and alter¬
ations, there was much that was discourag¬
ing. The better class of people in the court
were hopeless of any permanent improve¬
ment. When one of the tenants of the shops
saw that we were sending workmen into the
empty rooms, he said considerately, ' I'll tell
AN ALABAMA SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT LEAGUE.
A GEORGIA COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT VISITING
NEGRO SCHOOL.
(Courtesy of the Jeanes Foundation.)
HOUSES AND HOMES 105
you what it is, Miss, it'll cost you a lot o'
money to repair them places, and it's no
good. The women's 'eads'll be druv through
the door panels again in no time, and the
place is good enough for such cattle as them
there.' But we were not to be deterred.
<( On the other hand, we were not to be
hurried in our action by threats. These were
not wanting. For no sooner did the tenants
see the workmen about than they seemed to
think that if they only clamoured enough,
they would get their own rooms put to rights.
Nothing had been done for years. Now,
they thought, was their opportunity. More
than one woman locked me in her room with
her, the better to rave and storm. She would
shake the rent in her pocket to tempt me
with the sound of the money, and roar out
' that never a farthing of it would she pay till
her grate was set,' or her floor was mended,
as the case might be. Perfect silence would
make her voice drop lower and lower, un¬
til at last she would stop, wondering that no
violent answers were hurled back at her, and
a pause would ensue. I felt that promises
would be little believed in, and besides, I
wished to feel free to do as much, and only
as much, as seemed to me best; so that my
plan was to trust to my deeds to speak for
106 IN BLACK AND WHITE
themselves, and inspire confidence as time
went on.
" The importance of advancing slowly,
and of gaining some hold over the people as
a necessary accompaniment to any real im¬
provement in their dwellings, was perpetually
apparent. Their habits were so degraded
that we had to work a change in these before
they would make any proper use of the im¬
proved surroundings we were prepared to
give them. We had locks torn off, windows
broken, drains stopped, dust-bins misused in
every manner ; even pipes broken, and water-
taps wrenched away. This was sometimes
the result of carelessness, and a deeply-rooted
habit of dirt and untidiness; sometimes the
damage was willful. Our remedy was to
watch the right moment for furnishing these
appliances, to persevere in supplying them,
and to get the people by degrees to work
with us for their preservation. I have learned
to know that people are ashamed to abuse a
place they find cared for. They will add dirt
to dirt till a place is pestilential, but the more
they find done for it, the more they will re¬
spect it, till at last order and cleanliness pre¬
vail. It is this feeling of theirs, coupled with
the fact that they do not like those whom
they have learned to love, and whose stand-
HOUSES AND HOMES 107
ard is higher than their own, to see things
which would grieve them, which has enabled
us to accomplish nearly every reform of out¬
ward things that we have achieved ; so that
the surest way to have any place kept clean
is to go through it often yourself. . . .
" I mentioned our custom of using some of
the necessary, yet not immediately wanted
repairs as a means of affording work to ten¬
ants in slack times. . . . When a tenant
is out of work, instead of reducing his energy
by any gifts of money, we simply, whenever
the funds at our disposal allow it, employ
him in restoring and purifying the houses.
And what a difference five shillings' worth of
work in a bad week will make to a family!
The father, instead of idling listlessly at the
corner of the street, sets busily and happily
to work, prepares the whitewash, mends the
plaster, distempers the room ; the wife be¬
thinks herself of having a turn-out of musty
corners or drawers—untouched, maybe, for
months—of cleaning her windows, perhaps
even of putting up a clean blind ; and thus a
sense of decency, the hope of beginning
afresh and doing better, comes like new life
into the home.
" The same cheering and encouraging sort
of influence, though in a less degree, is exer-
108 IN BLACK AND WHITE
cised by our plan of having a little band of
scrubbers.
" We have each passage scrubbed twice a
week by one of the elder girls. The sixpence
thus earned is a stimulus, and they often take
an extreme interest in the work itself. One
little girl was so proud of her first cleaning
that she stood two hours watching her pas¬
sage lest the boys, whom she considered as
the natural enemies of order and cleanliness,
should spoil it before I came to see it. And
one woman remarked to her neighbour how
nice the stairs looked. ' They haven't been
cleaned,' she added, ' since ever I came into
this house.' She had been there six years!
The effect of these clean passages frequently
spreads to the rooms, as the dark line of de¬
marcation between the cleaned passage and
the still dirty room arouses the attention, and
begins to trouble the minds of its inmates.
" Gradually, then, these various modes of
dealing with our little realm began to tell.
Gradually the people began to trust us ; and
gradually the houses were improved. The
sense of quiet power and sympathy soon
made itself felt, and less and less was there
any sign of rudeness or violence towards our¬
selves. Even before the first winter was over
many a one would hurry to light us up the
HOUSES AND HOMES 109
stairs, and instead of my having the rent-
book and money thrust to me through the
half-open door, my reception would be, ' Oh,
can't you come in, Miss, and sit down for a
bit ?' Little by little houses were renovated,
the grates reset, the holes in the floors re¬
paired, the cracking, dirty plaster replaced by
a clean, smooth surface, the heaps of rubbish
removed, and we progressed towards order.
"Amongst the many benefits which the
possession of the houses enables us to confer
on the people, perhaps one of the most im¬
portant, is our power of saving them from
neighbours who would render their lives
miserable. It is a most merciful thing to
protect the poor from the pain of living in'
the next room to drunken, disorderly people.
' I am dying,' said an old woman to me the
other day : ' I wish you would put me where
I can't hear S beating his wife. Her
screams are awful. And B , too, he do
come in so drunk. Let me go over the way
to No. 30.' Our success depends on duly ar¬
ranging the inmates : not too many children
in any one house, so as to overcrowd it; not
too few, so as to overcrowd another ; not two
bad people side by side, or they drink to-
together ; not a terribly bad person beside a
very respectable one.
110 IN BLACK AND WHITE
" On Saturday evenings, about eight
o'clock, the tenants know that we are to be
found in the club-room . . . and that
they may come to us there if they like, either
for business or a friendly chat.
" Picture a low, rather long room, one of
my assistants and myself sitting in state, with
pen and ink and bags for money at a deal
table under a flaring gas-jet; the door, which
leads straight into the court, standing wide
open. A bright red blind, drawn down over
the broad window, prevents the passers-by
from gazing in there, but round the open
door there are gathered a set of wild, dirty
faces looking in upon us. Such a semicircle
they make, as the strong gas-light falls upon
them! They are mostly children with di¬
shevelled hair, and ragged, uncared-for
clothes; but above them, now and then, one
sees the haggard face of a woman hurrying
to make her Saturday evening purchases, or
the vacant stare of some half-drunken man.
The grown-up people who stop to look in
are usually strangers, for those who know us
generally come in to us. ' Well! they give
it this time, anyhow,' one woman will exclaim,
sitting down on a bench near us, so engrossed
in the question of whether she obtains a par¬
ish allowance that she thinks ' they' can
HOUSES AND HOMES 111
mean no one but the Board of Guardians,
and 4 it' nothing but the much-desired allow¬
ance. 'Yes, I thought I'd come in and tell
you,' she will go on; 'I went up Tues¬
day ' And then will follow the whole
story.
" ' Well, and how do you find yourself,
Miss ?' a big Irish labourer in a flannel jacket
will say, entering afterwards; ' I just come
in to say I shall be knocked off Monday ;
finished a job across the park : and if so be
there's any little thing in whitewashing to do,
why, I'll be glad to do it.'
" ' Presently,' we reply, nodding to a thin,
slight woman at the door. She has not
spoken, but we know the meaning of that be¬
seeching look. She wants us to go up and
get her husband's rent from him before he
goes out to spend more of it in drink.
"The eager, watchful eyes of one of our
little scrubbers next attract attention : there
she stands, with her savings-card in her hand,
waiting till we enter the sixpences she has
earned from us during the week. ' How
much have I got ?' she says, eyeing the writ¬
ten sixpences with delight, ' because mother
says, please, I'm to draw out next Saturday;
she's going to buy me a pair of boots.'
" ' Take two shillings on the card and four
112 IN BLACK AND WHITE
shillings rent,' a proudly happy woman will
say, as she lays down a piece of bright gold.
A rare sight this in the court, but her hus¬
band has been in regular work for some
little time.
" 4 Please, Miss,' says another woman, 4 will
you see and do something for Jane ? She's
that masterful since her father died, I can't
do nothing with her, and she'll do no good
in this court. Do see and get her a place
somewheres away.'
44 A man will enter now: ' I'll leave you
my rent to-night, Miss, instead o' Monday,
please; it'll be safer with you than with me.'
" A pale woman comes next, in great
sorrow. Her husband, she tells us, has been
arrested without cause. We believe this to
be true ; the man has always paid his way
honestly,, worked industriously, and lived
decently. So my assistant goes round to
the police-station at once to bail him, while
I remain to collect the savings. 4 Did he
seem grateful ?' I say to her on her return.
4 He took it very quietly,' is her answer ; 4 he
seemed to feel it quite natural that we should
help him.'
44 Such are some of the scenes on our
savings evenings ; such some of the services
we are called upon to render ; such the kind
HOUSES AND HOMES 113
of footing we are on with our tenants. An
evening such as this assuredly shows that
our footing has somewhat changed since
those spent in this court during the first
winter.
" My readers will not imagine that I mean
to imply that there are not still depths of
evil remaining in this court. It would be
impossible for such a place as I described it
as being originally to be raised in two years
to a satisfactory condition. But what I do
contend is, that we have worked some very
real reforms, and seen some very real re¬
sults. I feel that it is in a very great degree
a question of time, and that, now that we
have got hold of the hearts of the people,
the court is sure to improve steadily. It will
pay as good a percentage to its owners, and
will benefit its tenants as much, as any of the
other properties under my management have
done. This court contains two out of eight
properties on which the same plans have
been tried, and all of them are increasingly
prosperous. The first two were purchased
by Mr. Ruskin.
" It appears to me then to be proved by
practical experience that when we can induce
the rich to undertake the duties of landlord
in poor neighbourhoods, and ensure a suffi-
114 IN BLACK AND WHITE
cient amount of the wise, personal super¬
vision of educated and sympathetic people
acting as their Representatives, we achieve
results which are not attainable in any other
way. . . . It is not so much a question
of dealing with houses alone, as of dealing
with houses in connection with their influence
on the character and habits of the people who
inhabit them. . . . The principle on which
the whole work rests is that the inhabitants
and their surroundings must be improved
together. It has never yet failed to succeed.
" Finally, I would call upon those who may
possess cottage property in large towns to
consider the immense power they thus hold
in their hands, and the large influence for
good they may exercise by the wise use
of that power. . . . And I would ask
those who do not hold such property to con¬
sider whether they might not, by possessing
themselves of some, confer lasting benefits on
their poorer neighbours ?
" In these pages I have dwelt mainly on
the way our management affects the people,
as I have given elsewhere my experience as
to financial matters and details of practical
management. But I may here urge one
thing on those about to undertake to deal
with such property—the extreme importance
HOUSES AND HOMES 115
of enforcing the punctual payment of rents.
This principle is a vital one. Firstly, because
it strikes one blow at the credit system, that
curse of the poor; secondly, because it pre¬
vents large losses from bad debts, and pre¬
vents the tenant from believing he will be suf¬
fered to remain, whatever his conduct may
be, resting that belief on his knowledge of the
large sum that would be lost were he turned
out; and, thirdly, because the mere fact that
the man is kept up to his duty is a help to
him, and increases his self-respect and hope
of doing better.
" I would also say to those who, in the carry¬
ing out of such an undertaking, are brought
into immediate contact with the tenants, that
its success will depend most of all on their
giving sympathy to the tenants, and awaken¬
ing confidence in them ; but it will depend
also in a great degree on their power of be¬
stowing concentrated attention on small de¬
tails. . . .
"It is the small things of the world that
colour the lives of those around, and it is on
persistent efforts to reform these that prog¬
ress depends; and we may rest assured
that they who see with greater eyes than ours
have a due estimate of the service, and that
if we did but perceive the mighty principles
116 IN BLACK AND WHITE
underlying these tiny things we should rather
feel awed that we are entrusted with them at
all, than scornful and impatient that they are
no larger. What are we that we should
ask for more than that God should let us work
for Him among the tangible things which He
created to be fair, and the human spirits
which He redeemed to be pure ? "
I have quoted at length from Miss Hill's
little book, partly because her work is so lit¬
tle known in the South ; partly because her
own words make so clear the basis of human
sympathy on which the success of all such
work must depend. That sympathy is a
world-principle, a world-need, and a world-
power. If she proved with these people—as
she did for fifty years—that business suc¬
cess is entirely compatible with a spirit of
brotherhood ; that housing reform and the
reform of immorality and vice go hand in
hand; that paupers and semi-paupers can
be changed into a body of self-dependent
workers; then surely there is hope for slum-
dwellers elsewhere.
The Octavia Hill plan has been tried in a
number of cities in England and Scotland;
and in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
The work has been to a remarkable degree
both financially and humanly successful.
HOUSES AND HOMES 117
Mme. Montessori's work in Rome is among
this same tenement class. Her Houses of
Childhood are in re-made tenements, where
good business and brotherhood go hand in
hand. The children who have astonished the
world are from this same class of paupers,
semi-paupers and criminals. Until opportu¬
nity was offered these who had been denied
it, who could have guessed the measure of
their response ?
The Negroes of this same economic class
need what their class needs the world around.
They will respond in the same way. The
colour of one's skin, or even the shape of
one's head, cannot change the working of a
principle. The trouble in lifting up this lowest
class of Negroes is that we have not yet paid the
price. Things worth doing always cost; and
to do this thing among us will take, in some¬
body's heart, that same passion for justice
and opportunity for the weak that it takes
everywhere else.
But the doing of it need not wait until that
passion rises in all hearts, else one might
well despair. Prove that a thing pays—in
money—and it goes. Men and women who
cared little for humanity were glad to turn
the management of their tenement property
over to Miss Hill as soon as they found re-
118 IN BLACK AND WHITE
turns by her methods were better than by
theirs. She was so overwhelmed with offers
that she and her assistants had to refuse much
of what the owners urged upon them. Many
of the great manufacturers of this and other
countries frankly admit that their reason for
the extensive welfare work they carry on
among their working people is purely a busi¬
ness one : they have found that it pays, in
money, to care for " the human end of the
machine."
That is the way the world moves. The
people with love in their hearts, the seers, pay
the price, open the new way, and prove it
better than the old ; then people walk in it,
because it is proven good.
There is nothing to do with many of the
shanties for Negroes, in city and country, but
to condemn them by law and tear them down.
As our social conscience becomes aroused
this will inevitably be done. Many houses
now in use would do very well if given a
water supply and some extra windows, pro¬
vided the rent-collecting were done, not by
an indifferent or contemptuous real estate
agent, but on the Octavia Hill plan.
Negro women of force and character should
be trained under white auspices to do this
work. Two or three owners of Negro rent-
HOUSES AND HOMES 119
ing property could together employ such a
rent collector for what the real estate agent
would cost, or less. Their property would
improve as well as their tenants ; and the
frightful waste of humanity that goes on in
our slums, the drifting of wreckage into pris¬
ons and poorhouses, would not only be
checked, but these now broken creatures
would become a community asset, as every
real worker is.
We need an experiment station in the hous¬
ing of Negroes of this class. An ordinary
city block, two-thirds of it covered with decent
little houses, could carry the interest on the
whole investment, though one-third be given
over to a playground, on a corner of which
should stand a community house with rooms
for clubs and industrial classes, as well as a
decent meeting place for young people in the
evening. Such a plant would demonstrate
that healthful housing of the very poor could
be made a paying investment; and the in¬
come from it, if made available for such a
purpose, would provide for the training, un¬
der the best of white management, of the
Negro social workers so sorely needed in the
homes of our poor.
Calls for such workers are already coming
from white people in several Southern states.
120 IN BLACK AND WHITE
The owner of a lumber camp in the South¬
west, who has long carried on welfare work
among his white employees, has tried to get
a Negro woman to help his coloured em¬
ployees ; and similar efforts have been lately
made by several others. A Southern white
woman wrote me recently of conditions in a
camp of Negroes where electricity was be¬
ing developed from water power. The work¬
men had their families with them—fourteen
hundred black folk in all, herded like cattle
there in God's clean mountains, and living as
untaught, helpless people will. Drinking,
vice, and immorality were rampant. The
women knew nothing of home-making, had
homes been possible. The children were
born like flies, and grew or died in moral and
physical filth. A breeding-place for crim¬
inals ! And the right kind of Negro woman,
properly trained, and backed by a corporation
merely selfishly intelligent, could have brought
outward order and decency, lifted the workers
to a far higher efficiency, and created many
real homes there, each one a point of conta¬
gion for life and hope and health. It would
pay in dollars and cents.
It is impossible to speak of housing for
Negroes without a word about the better
HOUSES AND HOMES 121
classes among them, and the fight these must
make for decent homes.
The thrifty working people, who constitute
a large and ever-growing class, make heroic
sacrifices to own their own homes. This is
easier to do in the country than in the city, and
the home, when won, is far safer; for if one
owns even a very few acres one need not fear
the placing of a saloon next door, or a low
dance-hall, or a vice resort for white people—
evils which constantly threaten every Negro
owner of a hard-won city home. Sanitary
conditions, too, are under one's own control,
and with intelligent parents it is possible for
children to grow up in robust health, which
they can scarcely do in those parts of our
cities open to Negro homes. The country is
the place for poor Negroes, not because they
are Negroes, but because they are human,
and of like needs with the rest of the world.
But before they will be permanently con¬
tent in the country they must have what any
race of people must have under like condi¬
tions : perfect security for life and property ;
and such education as will relate them to
country life in an efficient, social and joyful
way.
Neither of these things is beyond attain¬
ment. The trend towards better education
122 IN BLACK AND WHITE
in the Negro rural schools is noted else¬
where ; and the effects of this movement will
be powerfully reinforced by the decision of
the United States Government to use its eight
hundred Southern farm-demonstrators for
work among both races. There is also a
strong element in the Southern state univer¬
sities which favours the inclusion of gather¬
ings of Negro farmers in the agricultural
extension work of their lecturers and demon¬
strators. When these things bear fruit, and
when not merely a large part of the South,
but absolutely all of it, is as safe for Negroes
as for white people, the housing of the
country Negro will be a problem practically
solved.
The city dwellers are in a harder case.
The poorest share the fate of slum-dwellers
of all races. They live in those sections
which are morally and physically the least
desirable, and are neglected habitually by the
city health authorities. Cleanliness and de¬
cency are alike beyond them. But in addi¬
tion to these things, in far too many of our
cities, both the respectable working man and
the prosperous, educated Negro are forced to
live in surroundings from which men of any
other race, of their economic status, would
be allowed to escape.
HOUSES AND HOMES 123
It is even worse than that. When by their
own efforts a few Negroes secure a respect¬
able neighbourhood, families of the better
class building up a little community of their
own, they are peculiarly liable to have saloons
and houses of ill-fame thrust upon them by a
low class of whites whom the upper classes
do not restrain. The Negro owner of a city
home, whatever his education or business
success, whatever the sum invested in his
property, cannot be sure, from month to
month, of retaining for his family surround¬
ings compatible with moral health and safety.
I know a Negro, an honour graduate of
Brown University, a winner there of the fel¬
lowship in the American School at Athens,
Greece. He is a man of wide attainments,
of blameless life, of modesty and good man¬
ners. He is in full sympathy with the best
Southern thought concerning race relations ;
and his wide influence among his people is a
thing for white Southerners to be thankful
for. He has turned aside from money-get¬
ting, all these years, to serve his people in
return for a very simple living. By what
effort one can imagine he bought a little
home. It is fafr from his work, on the out¬
skirts of the city, placed there in the hope
that his children might grow up in safety.
124 IN BLACK AND WHITE
His home attracted other homes, until the
neighbourhood became good enough for a
white man's house of ill-fame, which he
found was to be erected on the lot adjoining
his own. He has three daughters, the oldest
barely grown. He saved himself by buying
the lot, at a cost of long saving and strain.
" But I am not safe any more," he said.
" There are still vacant lots there; and I
can't possibly buy them all."
If I were a Negro I should do just as Ne¬
groes do—resent with all my heart our stupid
white assumption that when they attempt to
buy property in our own desirable sections
they are trying to force themselves upon us
in impudence, and to assert their belief in
and desire for " social equality."
What these Negroes of the better classes
want is first of all a neighbourhood of as¬
sured moral decency in which to rear their
children. Their passionate desire for char¬
acter in their children we do not begin to un¬
derstand. Next to that they want sanitary
conditions, and avoidance of the lower classes
of their own people, just as we do ourselves.
To get these things some Negroes are willing
to thrust themselves, if they can, among
white people, and to endure their resentment
and contempt.
HOUSES AND HOMES 125
" If you white people could only under¬
stand 1" a Negro woman said to me not long
ago, her face fired with feeling. "We don't
want our homes where we're not wanted.
But we want to be decent, too. And it's the
same all over the country—anything will do
for a' nigger.' You think we're all alike, and
you don't care what happens to us just so
we're out of your sight. My husband and I
were living in Denver ; and we had money
to pay for a comfortable house. But there
wasn't a place for rent to Negroes that a self-
respecting Negro would have. And how will
my people ever learn to be decent if they
must live in the white people's vice district ? "
We have no right to treat people like that.
In one large Southern city, with high taxes
and a big revenue and an expensive health
department, a white friend of mine counted
one morning twelve dead cats and dogs, in
various stages of decomposition, in one short
Negro alley. It was not an uncommon sight,
except that the corpses were rather numerous.
The outhouses are vile beyond description, a
menace not merely to the Negroes but to the
entire community. Yet if a Negro tries to
buy a home in a healthful part of town we
think his one motive is to thrust himself
upon us, socially, just as far as he dares.
126 IN BLACK AND WHITE
The way out of a situation like that is so
simple, so plain! What is needed to solve
the problem is not a segregation law, to force
those who would be clean back into the bog
we ought to drain out of existence ; it is just
to put ourselves in the Negroes' place and do
as we would be done by. If we white people
could only have a Negro's consciousness for
a day or two it would clear up so many
things. As it is, we can at least use our im¬
agination.
If the city's health laws were enforced
where they are most needed, punishing those
who break them if necessary, till they learned
better ; if streets could be set aside in a dis¬
trict capable of being made attractive, and a
fair share of city improvements put there ; if
the Negroes who built good homes there
were protected as well-to-do white people are
from the fear of saloons and other vice re¬
sorts ; if it were all done not in contempt,
but in a spirit of justice and human consider¬
ation, there would be no need for segregation
laws. Negroes, like white people, like to live
among their friends. The overwhelming
majority of them believe, as we do, in the so¬
cial separation of the races; and beyond
that, they do not want their children to grow
up among those who look down upon them.
HOUSES AND HOMES 127
I am told that a well-to-do Negro in Kansas
City, understanding his people's feeling,
bought a considerable tract of land there,
some distance out, and improved it as white
men do for white buyers. The lots were sold
under restrictions which guaranteed the
neighbourhood morally, and went, my inform¬
ant said, " like hot cakes." The place is
to-day the most desirable for Negro home¬
owners in Kansas City. The man who
bought the land originally made a handsome
profit. His example could be followed by
real estate men, white or black, in any large
Southern city with an assurance of success.
It is really not bad business to do justice.
I have dwelt at length on this matter of
Negro homes because it is fundamental to
justice, and therefore to any lasting ad¬
justment between the races. No people can
rise higher than their homes. And we criti¬
cize unsparingly the Negro's weakness and
faults, yet fasten upon him living conditions
which, the world over and among all races,
breed just those things for which we blame
him most.
IV
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION
T
"*^HERE is practical unanimity in the
South regarding the low moral
standards of the Negro race as a
whole. We admit that there are exceptions
to the rule ; we always know a few person¬
ally. But the overwhelming concensus of
opinion is that Negroes generally are dirty, un¬
truthful, and immoral; and beyond and above
and below everything else, they are by na¬
ture dishonest.
However exaggerated such statements
may be as applied to the whole ten million
Negroes in America, very many of whom are
practically as unknown to us whites as
though they lived in another country, they
are dangerously true of a large part of that
class with which we come most frequently in
contact. But have we ever asked ourselves
why ? Have we gone into their homes to
find what drives them ? Do we know any¬
thing of the wants in their lives ? Have we
any idea of the tremendous forces of wreck¬
age which gather in those great empty places
128
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 129
where human need cries with none to an¬
swer ?
If we would look a little into the lives of
those who live below the poverty line in
communities where there are no black peo¬
ple, we would find that there is a certain de¬
gree of pressure under which human char¬
acter, in the mass, tends to break. The ideal
of humanity is the man who will meet all
tests, endure all pressure, surmount all diffi¬
culties, suffer all loss, and pass out at last
still pure in heart, unspotted, undefiled.
However we fail ourselves—nay, because we
fail—we cling to this ideal as the standard by
which men should be judged. Whatever soil
of sin be on us, we know, in our inmost hearts,
that men and women were meant to be like
that. It is for this that we honour our heroes
and martyrs, who, wherever they have come
to birth, belong first of all to humanity, and
not to any one race. It is not for what they
bore that we love them most, nor for what
they have achieved : they are to us revealers
of our own possibilities. We see in them
the heights to which we ourselves, and all
humanity, were meant to rise.
But is a child's power of resistance to be
tested like an adult's ? We are learning that
premature burdens will strain young muscle
130 IN BLACK AND WHITE
beyond the possibility of future vigour. We
found out long ago that young colts and
calves must be shielded from undue strain :
we lost money unless they were.
Later, and more slowly, the world is wak¬
ing to the money loss involved in straining
children's muscles too soon. We find that a
child's muscles are a national asset, or ought
to be, as well as a colt's. But character is a
more precious asset still. It is a driving-
force scarcely to be measured in national life,
a productive source of wealth, as well as of
happiness, beyond any other one thing. It
is of far slower growth than muscle, and
strain is more fatal, care more vital to it.
Even the highest races are still so unde¬
veloped morally that in any heavy, wide¬
spread stress the cartilaginous honour of
thousands will give under the pressure, until
men hitherto counted blameless seem little
better than beasts. Times of war disclose
conditions like that, invariably ; and times of
wide-spread panic, or famine, or disaster of
any kind. The San Francisco earthquake
furnished a recent and spectacular example.
Now when these things are true of favoured
folk, of those who have had something of a
normal chance in life, we may be sure, even
before we look to see, that those cut off from
PLAYGROUND AT STORY HOUR, LOUISVILLE.
One of Louisville's municipal playgrounds for Negroes.
(Courtesy of the Superintendent of Playgrounds, Louisville, Ky.)
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 131
a normal chance will not, in the mass, de¬
velop much power of resistance to undue
strain. They, of all men, have least to bear
strain with. Their moral muscles, under¬
nourished and over-strained from birth, are
uncoordinated with one another, or with
their wills. The will itself hangs loose and
undeveloped, shaken by vagrant desires and
passing storms of passion. These are the
people, the world around, who strew the path
of civilization with wreckage. Crime is but
the extreme manifestation of conditions which
create vast swamps of incapacity, shiftless-
ness and immorality, in which human charac¬
ter is engulfed as in a quicksand, and out of
which crime emerges as the topmost blossom
of its rank and fetid growth.
What are some of the main causes of this
human ruin and waste? Not here in the
South, but everywhere. We have no pecul¬
iar laws of life down here, any more than we
have peculiar laws of physics. If an apple
falls to the ground in England because of the
attraction of gravitation, one will fall in
Maine, or in Georgia, or in Kamchatka, for
exactly the same reason. And if certain con¬
ditions in New York wreck physical and
moral health in human beings, and result in
all unhuman ruin, those same conditions will
132 IN BLACK AND WHITE
produce similar results, in any climate, upon
any fragment of humanity exposed to them.
We are a pious people here in the South—
perhaps, like our brethren elsewhere, more
pious than we are Christlike. There are very
many of us who, when the effect of conditions
on character is asserted, begin at once to de¬
fend God's almightiness, and the power of
grace to save to the uttermost. To some
among us it seems a reflection on grace to
suggest that men ever need anything else, or
need grace itself anywhere but in their own
lives. But they do need it elsewhere, never¬
theless—in the hearts and lives of other peo¬
ple, and expressed in the conditions which
surround them. One of the best women I
know, one of unusual intelligence and educa¬
tion, said to me not long ago, in a hesitating,
doubtful voice :
" And you heard her say, that doctor, just
as I did, that when she examined the blood
of those thirty fallen girls the average for the
thirty was less than three million red blood-
corpuscles where five million were normal;
and that blood so impoverished lowered the
vitality, starved the nerves, lessened their re¬
sistive power to temptation and impaired
their wills, as well as their energy and ability
to work. She said they were not fallen
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 133
women : they were felled women—felled by
social conditions to which we Christian women
assented.—It did sound reasonable, I know,
and dreadful. I felt like a criminal myself, al¬
most. But doesn't it leave out God, and sal¬
vation ? Where does sin come in when you
look at society like that ? And surely God is
almighty ; and His grace '' She looked
at me, a puzzled frown between her eyes.
I do not doubt God's almightiness ; nor do
I pretend to understand why, being almighty,
He has chosen to so limit His own power that
His own will cannot possibly get done in this
world until men are willing to do it I do
not doubt that He can do a great many things
which I feel sure He never will. He never will,
for instance, enable a man to make two hun¬
dred bushels of corn to the acre on land un¬
cleared of weeds : and He will not return to
any people, or any church, a harvest of
"saved souls" in bodies whose living con¬
ditions defy all His laws of health and growth
and decency, moral and physical. A few ears
of corn may come to maturity, even among
the weeds; and a man or woman here or
there may rise to newness of life despite
surroundings which deal death on every
side: but the law holds good, all the same.
It would be quite as effective, and fully as
134 IN BLACK AND WHITE
religious, so far as I can understand, to
kneel beside the untouched weeds and pray
for a bumper crop of corn as it is for us
Christians to pray for the souls' salvation of
the poor, and go comfortably home to din¬
ner without one rudimentary intention of
furnishing them surroundings in which love
and righteousness can flourish. To look at
community life like that does not, to my mind,
do away with sin. It fixes it on us, the sup¬
posedly righteous, who know and do not,
rather than on those who neither know nor
do, and whom we fail to enlighten or protect.
I know the feeling is very strong in the
South against any attempt at regeneration
by man-made law instead of by spiritual
processes; and I would not seem to fail in
reverence to that best and greatest of all
miracles, the redeeming life of God in the
soul. I believe, *in the brave words of Dr.
Wines, spoken at the International Prison
Congress after forty years of labour for prison
reform, that "reformation is never accom¬
plished until the heart has been reached and
regenerated by the grace of Almighty God."
I also believe that our neglect of the living
conditions of the poor has raised barriers be¬
tween them and that grace which can no
more be removed by prayer alone, or by
AN OUNCE OF PKEVENTION 135
faith not " made whole with deed," than
weeds could be removed from a corn field by
the same process. To destroy those barriers
by arousing a community conscience, and
recording its awakening in community action
expressed in statutory law, is more religious
by far than any amount of prayer for the
salvation of the poor offered by folk who go
home to idleness. We have thrown on the
poor, and on God's grace, responsibility for
the results of our own sins of neglect: and
until the churches shoulder their share of re¬
sponsibility for community conditions which
defy the Bible law of human brotherhood
here and now, I do not believe they will
make any great headway, in the world out¬
side their borders, in preaching the father¬
hood of God or salvation for the world to
come.
Where, then, should one apply the hoe in
order to earn the right to pray unashamed
for a harvest of salvation among the poor ?
The matters of housing and sanitation
have been already touched upon; inade¬
quately, yet enough, I trust, to set wiser
minds than my own to thinking, and stronger
hands to work. Next to it, and closely con¬
nected with it, is the fundamental question of
recreation.
136 IN BLACK AND WHITE
The negations of life are the deadly things.
Overt acts of wrong have inflicted untold
miseries in every age ; yet for blight upon
humanity at large they cannot compare with
the steady, persistent, accumulated results of
perfectly respectable neglects. And the neg¬
lect of the human desire for recreation, age¬
long, world-wide, has been so often not
merely respectable, but a virtue of the high¬
est standing! We have talked much of the
universal instinct for God, so evident even
among savages ; and we have based on it
one of our strongest arguments for the exist¬
ence of a God: to such universal need, we
say, there must be somewhere an answer;
the existence of the need demands it. But
in this universal play-instinct, common to all
races and all time, we have found no proof
of a need that demands an answer, no trace
of a wise Creator's handiwork, nothing at
all of design. For centuries it was merely
an elfish trick of youth, to be as nearly sup¬
pressed as possible, being dangerously akin
to the devil and all his works. And even
now many affectionate and otherwise intelli¬
gent parents regard it as a part of their chil¬
dren's childhood and youth merely, to be
lived through until that safe stage of matu¬
rity be reached where children become sober
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 137
and sensible, and put away childish things.
Many provide dolls and balls because they
enjoy giving their children pleasure, but
with little idea that the love of play is almost
the greatest formative power in a child's life,
and that by it he may be shaped to the high¬
est ideals, the widest usefulness, or be de¬
graded to the level of the beast.
It is not merely that a child coordinates his
muscles and mind in play ; he coordinates his
entire being with the world about him in
play that is wisely directed. He finds him¬
self as a citizen of his world. In team-play,
in the give and take of success and defeat,
in fair play and respect for the rules of the
game, he learns self-control, respect for the
rights of others, the adjustment of his own
personality to those about him, and a deep
regard for law and justice.
All these things are fundamental to a law-
abiding, honest life. In families of several
children, where the mother is willing and
able to share the play life of the children,
they may learn these things at home, even
in cramped quarters and under unfavourable
conditions : but few poor children have moth¬
ers of leisure. There is no place for their
play in the cluttered house, or in the diminu¬
tive yard some poor people are fortunate
138 IN BLACK AND WHITE
enough to own. In the cities the streets are
the playgrounds of the poor. They are such
for our poor, the Negroes. There is little
play possible there, even in smaller cities,
that fits their need. Besides, few of them
know how to play, in city or country. The
play-instinct has been perverted or suppressed
so long that its natural outlet, with many of
them, seems closed. They are not peculiar
in this: they have simply suffered the dep¬
rivation of a deep human need, as children
of the very poor have done elsewhere; and
they react under the unnatural condition ex¬
actly as does all the rest of humanity in a
similar situation.
There are certain laws of spiritual physics
which are universal in their operation, and
which seem closely akin to the physics of
matter. One can compress the air, guide it
according to its own laws in prepared chan¬
nels, and work with it miracles of usefulness.
One can compress it with no outlet at all,
and defy the law of its nature up to a certain
point. After that, something goes to smash.
Those are facts at the North Pole, and at the
South Pole, and everywhere in between.
Similarly, one can take this race-wide play-
instinct, and guide it according to its own
law of development to the building up of
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 139
body and soul far above the danger-line of
human ruin. Also, one can suppress it with
impunity—for a certain length of time. But
like the air, it has to go somewhere ; and if it
cannot go the safe way, it will take some
other: the energy which creates it must be
expressed. To this crude young need with
no adequate outlet all sorts of illicit adven¬
tures proffer their irresistible lure—petty
thefts, trials of brute strength, the aping of
older folk in obscene talk and vicious deeds,
" crap-playing " in the streets, the smoking
of cigarettes, surreptitious drinking, the steal¬
ing of older people's " dope."
We understand here in the South, those of
us who are somewhat interested in such mat¬
ters, that these are proven facts concerning
the gangs of young toughs in Northern
slums. It is perfectly reasonable to quite a
number of us that a baseball ground and a
boys' club, or an organization of Boy Scouts,
will transform a crowd of budding white
criminals into decent young humans who de¬
light to obey the law and to require their
companions to do likewise : but it does not
seem to occur to us, as yet, that this law of
the gang is operative except where humanity
has a white skin. So instead of buying play¬
grounds for our poor with our taxes, and
140 IN BLACK AND WHITE
furnishing trained directors of play for them,
we take many times the sum needed for this
simple provision for a normal need, and build
great court-houses with it, filled with expen¬
sive machinery, human and other, of what
we are pleased to call justice; and put up
endless local jails, every one of which is
guaranteed, by every law of spiritual dy¬
namics, to poison the folk put into it, and to
smother their impulses towards a better life.
And then we sit down and commiserate our¬
selves for being burdened with a people so
bent by nature towards crime.
In the summer of 1912, in a Southern city,
afternoon playgrounds for Negro children
were opened by the combined efforts of a few
people of both races. Negro women of force
and ability were engaged to supervise them,
and the whole venture was under the direc¬
tion of a Southern white woman, a graduate
of her own state university and of Columbia.
The children gathered in the playgrounds
like flies. None of them knew how to play,
but they were still plastic with childhood,
and responded as childhood everywhere does
from the North Pole to the South. But older
children came too—gangs of adolescent boys
whose only idea of " fun" was to torment
folk weaker than themselves, and to smash
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 141
up whatever afforded others pleasure. They
were a whole battalion of thorns in the flesh
all summer long. The white women con¬
cerned, having exhausted their own re¬
sources, appealed to the local Y. M. C. A.,
and to the pastors of several of the churches,
for a white man who would take the gang in
charge and organize its members as a con¬
structive force in their community. But
though the Y. M. C. A. director and the
pastors tried diligently to find a man to un¬
dertake the task, nobody was forthcoming;
and the group continues its boisterous career
towards the chain-gang, where so many of us
believe Negroes gravitate by their own na¬
ture rather than by our neglect.
But children are only the beginning of the
story. The play instinct is not an evanes¬
cent appurtenance of childhood: it is deep
down among the primal needs of life, as real
and as persistent as the need for air or food.
We educated white people are perfectly
aware of our own need for recreation. We
turn to the woods and the mountains, to golf
and tennis, fishing and camping, whenever
we can possibly afford it, and just as long as
we live. In between whiles we go to the
theatre and the " movies," to baseball and
football games, to the parks, on motoring
142 IN BLACK AND WHITE
trips—any and everywhere that promises us
a break in the monotony of life, a bit of re¬
laxation, a little laughter. We begin to un¬
derstand that the need of these things is
bedded so deep in the nature of white people
that wage earners are actually more profit¬
able to their employers, in dollars and cents,
if they get their bit of vacation in summer
time. It has long been customary in the
North, and grows yearly more common with
us, to give clerks and salespeople two-weeks'
playtime a year, with pay; to close depart¬
ment stores at noon on Saturdays in summer;
to let everybody off on holidays. We are
learning to do it not simply because we want
other people to enjoy themselves, but because
our enlightened selfishness is becoming con¬
vinced that a workman who never plays can
never do the most efficient work.
But it has not occurred to us that natural
laws have no special editions for skins of dif¬
ferent colours. There are, of course, as many
kinds of pleasure as there are individual na¬
tures ; and some of them require not only
certain temperaments, but certain stages of
intellectual advancement, for their enjoyment.
No one would claim that a slum Negro could
be interested for a moment in much that
would give a cultivated white man the keen-
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 143
est pleasure. But a need common to all
humanity has somewhere an answer suited
to each man's stage of development; an an¬
swer clean, healthful, and life-giving: and
they who withhold it do so to their own
peril as well as to the injury of him who
needs.
The poor of every nation need play more
than any other class, and are more injured by
the lack of it. What else drives New York's
wage-earning girls, by scores of thousands, to
the low dance-halls of commercialized pleas¬
ure ? They would rather go to decent places,
as is shown by the way they crowd the few
which are provided : but recreation they must
have, or snap under the daily strain of work.
Young men flock to the same places, decent
fellows to begin with, often, pitifully eager
to meet " some nice girl." But the associa¬
tions are too much for their unguarded youth.
It is the exhilaration of the liquor they drink
which lures them, not its taste. They want
that glorious sense of freedom which is its
first effect, that power to rise in a tumult of
life and energy above all that cramps them in
their sordid daily lives. It is the excitement
of gambling that draws them—the ecstasy of
bated breath, of pulses that throb and thrill.
They never intend to wreck their lives ; only
144 IN BLACK AND WHITE
to bring into their poor dull colourlessness a
little of sheen and glamour and fire. The
lower they are in the economic and the moral
scale, in every city of every land, the bleaker
and duller their empty lives, the more fiercely
this need drives them. A man with a few of
the comforts of life, a few inward resources
—only a few—may walk without pleasure,
maimed indeed, but in a straight path, to
the end. But he who has nothing, within
or without, neither resource nor help, what
shall he do, with only his blank, dead life of
drudgery, and his fierce human need for a lit¬
tle joy ?
It is so simple it breaks one's heart. Such
utter wreckage, such ruin and waste and deg¬
radation, such lapsing of men into beastli¬
ness—and all for lack of a thing like this, a
simple human answer to a vital human need !
Sometimes when I think about us—us
Southern white folks—I don't know whether
to laugh or to cry. We are good people.
I've associated with us all my life, and I know
that is true. Ideals stir us as nothing else
does. If there is anything Southern people
will do it is to spend themselves for an idea—
once they catch it. We caught the temper¬
ance idea years ago—it is really the germ
of our late-developing social consciousness
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 145
—and we have fought for it as no other sec¬
tion of America has. Somehow, by the
blessing of Providence, our preachers got
hold of it by its individually religious end,
and many of them have not thought of it
as "social service " to this day. So they
welcomed it to the fold of orthodoxy, and
went forth to fight for it with never a Chris¬
tian to say them nay, or to suggest that
social service was no concern of a church
dedicated to the preaching of " the pure gos¬
pel." As for results, a look at the wet-and-
dry map of the United States in this present
year of grace will show that the South is the
cleanest part of the map. We do things just
that way.
But like other grown-ups, we are mightily
like children. A child will clean up his play¬
things in a whirl of enthusiasm over help¬
ing his mother ; and when she comes in, by
invitation, to admire the results, she will
find the rubbish not cleaned up, but tucked
out of sight, and perhaps ruining some of
her most cherished finery in its novel seclu¬
sion. Only the obvious middle of the room
is in order. We have gone at the drink
habit just that way.
The Negro's propensity for drink does
trouble us. That is one thing about his con-
146 IN BLACK AND WHITE
dition we are aware of. We even feel the
menace to the community which drunken
Negroes furnish ; and we deplore a develop¬
ment still so low, after all these years of civi¬
lization. Nothing, we say, will eradicate the
Negro's love of liquor. (We do not specify
what we have tried as an eradicator; but
whatever it was, it hasn't worked.)
According to our lights, however, and in
all sincerity, we have done our duty. We
have passed local-option and prohibition laws.
We have made a fiat sweep of the whole mis¬
erable liquor business, with a view, largely,
to removing from the play-hours of our very
poor, both white and black, one of their
three great resources, which are, for both
colours in this poorest class, gambling, im¬
morality and drink. But what we have taken
with one hand we have given with the other:
not something clean to take the place of the
unclean ; but the same uncleanness with the
added smirch of lawlessness. In all our
cities men, nearly all of whom are white, are
allowed to open " near-beer " saloons for the
open selling of every known intoxicant, and
to make a living from the degradation of our
poor, both white and black, with the consent
and protection of the authorities. When the
poor, who are mostly black, go as the drink
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 147
drives them, we dive into our pockets for
more taxes to build larger court-houses and
jails; and the women, whom the prisoners
might have supported if they had had a bet¬
ter chance to stay sober, are left to choose be¬
tween the streets for themselves, or work for
themselves and the streets for their children.
And so the manufacture of criminals, one of
our most stupendous industries, and cer¬
tainly our most expensive luxury, goes
bravely on.
Prohibition is good as far as it goes, even
though in our cities it does not go at all.
But it will never, by itself, do very much
more than just slick life up on the outside.
It is a purely negative measure, a gigantic
Thou shalt not. It has its place in positive
life, as many other negations have: but a
negation can never construct anything; its
utmost is to clear the ground for construction.
And if those who clear the ground construct
nothing, somebody else will. Human life,
being part of nature, tolerates no vacuum.
Temperance measures, to be effective, must
be constructive: they must offer something
to take the place of what they have driven
out. Until the human craving for relaxation,
for exaltation of both body and spirit, be
cleanly met, it will spend itself on the un-
148 IN BLACK AND WHITE
clean. And out of uncleanness will come
waste and wreckage, for present and future
generations.
What is there in the South that offers clean
amusement, clean play, to Negroes young or
old ? In a recent investigation made by an
International Y. M. C. A. Secretary, himself a
Southern man, four cities were found having
public parks for Negroes. Four public parks
for Negroes in fifteen Southern states ! Out of
seventeen cities eight reported having picture
shows for Negroes, and nine none. Of the
picture shows reported half were " very low
and degrading, with the vilest vaudeville
attachments." In five cities there are theatres
for Negroes—character not specified ; and in
several they are allowed in the peanut gallery
of white theatres ; but the investigator reports
" the better class of Negroes say they will not
go unless for some special attraction, as they
are put with the lowest class of whites." The
report further declares that the " principal
places of amusement for the male population
[Negro] are the saloons, pool and billiard
rooms." The saloon people are the quickest
of all whites to recognize the Negro's hu¬
manity. They see that Negroes become
slaves of drink exactly as white men do, and
spend their last nickel for it in the same
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 149
manner. In my own city the very large
majority of cases in the recorder's court are
Negroes, and nearly all their infractions of law
are the results of drinking. The city is in a
prohibition state. It contains eighty officially
licensed near-beer saloons, and seventy-nine
of them are run by white men. In practically
every city of the South we white people set
this object lesson regarding respect for law
before the Negroes, and then deplore and
despise the innate lawlessness of the black
man's nature.
But if diversions other than drinking and
lewdness are hard for adult Negroes to come
by, what is done for the children ? Louisville
has two or three playgrounds for them, not
very well equipped, but under the direction of
the City Park Commissioner, as are the far
ampler playgrounds for white children ; and
New Orleans has recently opened one with
semi-official recognition. So far as I can
learn these are the only cities in the South
which have officially recognized this basal
human need as common to white and black.
A prominent church and club woman of
Nashville gave a playground to Negro
children in that city a few years ago; and
whites and blacks together have now for two
summers provided vacation playgrounds for
150 IN BLACK AND WHITE
Negro children in Augusta, Ga. That com¬
pletes the list to date.
Laying aside all altruistic motives, turning
our backs on Christ's doctrine of human
brotherhood, and acting solely from the
standpoint of enlightened selfishness, it would
pay the South, just in money, to put a three-
acre playground next door to every school-
house for both whites and blacks, and to add
to the teaching force a director of play for
each county, under whose supervision the
teachers of the various schools could in turn
assume charge of the playground after school
hours. Folk dances would take the place of
games with the older children. We could
call them folk games if some of our church
people looked askance at the other word. If
the universal enjoyment of movement in
rhythmical time could be met in this clean
and wholesome fashion it would do more
to undermine " animal dancing" than any
well-deserved philippic that could be hurled
against it. The best way to get rid of an un¬
clean thing is to put in its place a clean one
which meets the need.
The schoolhouse should be the recreation
centre for young and old. For years great
corporations have been employing "social
engineers " to work among their employees
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION 151
as a matter of sound business policy, to bring
up the efficiency of the human end of the
machine. A large part of the engineer's
duty has lain in providing clean and interest¬
ing recreation for folk deadened by drudgery.
Lately a city or two has taken the matter up
and appointed a city Superintendent of Public
Recreation, just as they have a Park Com¬
missioner. There is no sentiment in such an
act—no sentimentality, at least. Hard-headed
business men have done it, and communities
stand to it, and pay the necessary taxes to
finance it, because it will pay in human
character and happiness, and, in the long run,
in dollars as well. So here and yonder, in
the most unexpected places, it keeps cropping
out in life that what we call Christian doctrines
are not doctrines at all. They are laws of
human life, and Christ's, not in the sense that
He made them up, but in the sense that He
understood them and put them into words.
When we provide for the human needs of the
weakest, we come not upon sacrifice, but on
more abundant life for all. For we really are
brethren, all of us, and the satisfied need of
those who lack is the strength and prosperity
of all.
V
HUMAN WRECKAGE
BUT what of the wreckage already
achieved ? What of that fragment of
the world-wide ruin most in evidence
to our consciousness—the criminals, young
and old, of both races, who fill our Southern
jails, and work in all possible publicity of
disgrace, chained and striped, upon our
streets ?
For thousands of years the world has had
two theories only about the relation of the
state to crime. One is the theory of venge¬
ance, originally the right of the individual,
but as civilization progressed a right which
became vested in the community. Among
Christian nations Moses has been set forth as
the champion of this theory; and " an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth " is still widely
quoted in justification of this outworn delu¬
sion, upon which the criminal law of the
nations is founded.
It was doubtless a benevolent law in Moses'
day which restricted vengeance, not to the
152
HUMAN WRECKAGE 153
limit of the avenger's power, but to that
rough justice which measured the penalty
by the offense. So far as we can decipher
those old records, and those of far later gen¬
erations, to inject into vengeance an idea of
justice was not the least of the great law¬
giver's achievements. Many, however, who
quote Moses with gusto seem unacquainted
with later Biblical literature, in which the
exercise of vengeance is distinctly declared to
be beyond the province of mankind.
Nevertheless, men cherish it to this day as
a sacred and inalienable right. And lest
vengeance unadorned should be insufficient,
they have embroidered this first theory with
the second—that punishments severe and
ingenious beyond what vengeance might
demand would act as deterrents to criminals
in posse. On this altar of public benevolence
the criminal in esse is still offered up, a use¬
less and frightful sacrifice to the blindness
and folly of men. It is true the law no longer
condemns him to be broken on the wheel,
nor burned with faggots of green wood, nor
tortured in many of the thousand ways which
make the prison history of the past such black
reading.
But notwithstanding the rise and spread of
a modern penology which is already pro-
154 IN BLACK AND WHITE
foundly influencing criminal procedure in
many countries, the vast bulk of the world's
criminals are still dealt with under a combina¬
tion of these two theories. The criminal is
punished because punishment is his desert
and the state's right; and his degree of pun¬
ishment must be severe enough to frighten
anybody else from attempting a similar crime.
That severity of sentence does not deter
others from crime is proven by the criminal
history of many centuries, and has long been
openly acknowledged by authorities on crime
in all countries. It is out of this self-confessed
breakdown of the old system that the rise of
a new one has become possible.
The foundation of the new system is, in the
words of the eminent chairman of the English
Prison Commission, " the accepted axiom of
modern penology that a prisoner has rever¬
sionary rights in humanity." It regards a
man convicted of crime not primarily as a
criminal, but as an individual who, " by the
application of influences or discipline, labour,
education, moral and religious, backed up on
discharge by a well-organized system of
[oversight] is capable of reinstatement into
civic life." It flatly denies the Italian theory
of " a criminal type," pronouncing it a su¬
perstition, pure and simple. It offers abundant
HUMAN WRECKAGE 155
evidence that the criminal disposition is pro¬
duced, largely in individuals physically or
mentally weak, by social conditions which
have forced their lives along lines of least
resistance. It stands for the reformatory, for
the indeterminate sentence, release on parole,
the permanent separation of prisoners into
groups according to type and criminal de¬
velopment, for education, moral, religious
and industrial, for labour in outdoor life as
far as practicable, for the abolition of prison
stripes, and everything calculated to break
down self-respect, and for life-detention of all
who cannot be restored to society in safety
to the community and to themselves.
Twenty-two nations were officially repre¬
sented in the last International Prison Con¬
gress, which met in Washington City three
years ago; three additional governments,
Spain, the Transvaal, and Egypt, signified
their desire to join ; and negotiations were
opened with the governments of China and
Japan which indicate that at the next Con¬
gress representatives of those governments
will take their place in the body as members,
instead of taking part unofficially, as hereto¬
fore. The members of this Congress differed,
as might be supposed, on many points : but
they stood as a body for the principles of
156 IN BLACK AND WHITE
the new penology above stated. They also
endorsed the principle that payment should
be allowed the prisoner by the state for his
work over and above the sum necessary for
his own support; and that this remainder
should be turned over to the prisoner's family
if in need.
A point of deepest significance to Ameri¬
cans, North and South, was the unanimous
conviction of all the delegates, home and
foreign, that American local jails were the
worst known to civilization. The United
States government placed a special train at
the disposal of the foreign delegates, and
acted as their host during a tour of investi¬
gation which covered most of the country's
great reformatories, adult and juvenile, and
many local jails. It is, said that the Tombs,
in New York City, reduced the foreigners to
speechlessness. One of the most eminent
said afterwards that the only thing to do
with it was to tear it down ; but the others
found words incompatible with the minimum
of politeness necessary in the presence of a
host. The secretary of the Howard Asso¬
ciation of London, when asked, did not hesi¬
tate to say that every jail he saw in America
" ought to be wiped off the face of the earth,"
and that " nowhere in Europe do such con-
HOME OF ATLANTA NEGRO WHO WAS HIS OWN ARCHITECT
AND BUILDER.
HUMAN WRECKAGE 157
ditions exist." The newly-elected president
of the Congress, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise,
in extending an invitation for the next meet¬
ing to be held in England, begged the Amer¬
icans " out of their humanity " to consider
the case of " the thousands of petty offenders
now passing through your city and county
jails in such appalling numbers."
The reformatories of a few of the Northern
states confessedly lead the world, and the
principles of human restoration which they
have demonstrated are spreading to the
states of the West; but we of the South lag
behind in every phase of reformatory and
preventive work. The only point at which
we are strictly up with the procession is in
the matter of our local jails. They are like
those of the rest of America, well adapted to
the one specific end of manufacturing crimi¬
nals out of that vast company of petty of¬
fenders not yet beyond the pale of citizen¬
ship.
I was talking with a friend not long ago
about a certain local jail. A white woman
who had once worked for her had been ar¬
rested on some charge, and had appealed to
her for help. She had gone to the jail with
a lawyer, a friend of hers, but had been re¬
fused permission to see the prisoner. The
158 IN BLACK AND WHITE
lawyer had been passed in at once, but the
jailer stopped my friend.
" No, ma'am," he declared with respectful
positiveness; " you can't go in there. It ain't
no place for a lady to be in, nor to see. It
ain't fit."
" And he had a white woman in there 1"
exclaimed my friend ; "a white woman, in a
place unfit for a lady even to see ! I told him
if she could stand staying in it I could stand
seeing it, but he wouldn't let me in."
I sympathized with her indignation: but
was it any better for a black woman than for
a white one ? The white woman should have
had a little better chance than the other to
resist the moral contagion of the place, and
should have been less of a menace to the
community when she came out. But the
Negroes, and many, too, of the whites, if
they ever had a chance before the law grips
them, lose it in the jail the law provides ;
lose it before they are even proven guilty of
the crime with which they are charged. Men
grown old in crime and debauchery are, in
nearly all our jails, thrown with first offend¬
ers, often with mere boys. The accommoda¬
tions provided for unconvicted American citi¬
zens violate the laws of decency and health
in regard to the commonest physical needs.
HUMAN WRECKAGE 159
There is no privacy, no cleanliness. Every¬
thing in his surroundings combines to brand
on the offender's consciousness the fact that
he is no longer regarded as a being with hu¬
man rights, reversionary or otherwise. His
relation to life is purely that of the committer
of a crime.
He may be just a boy, his offense a trifle;
or, if more serious, the outcome, not of pre¬
meditated wickedness, but of a thwarted love
of adventure, youth's natural flare of high
spirits turned awry. In some of our cities
such an offender would get what he needs—
separate confinement beforehand, and an in¬
vestigation, rather than a trial before a spe¬
cially constituted court. A real effort would
be made to understand not what the boy did,
but why he did it; and after being dealt with
by the judge on that line chiefly, he would be
turned over to a probation officer whose duty
it would be to watch over him, and assist him
to moral convalescence. The law should
give the judge, as it does in Denver, certain
powers to enforce, if necessary, parental co¬
operation in helping the boy, and in correct¬
ing wrong home conditions. With the right
kind of judges and probation officers a vast
deal of human wreckage is prevented by
these courts.
160 IN BLACK AND WHITE
But we have few of them in the South :
and there is little of the kind of care needed
given to young Negro delinquents. In what
I am told is one of the best-managed juvenile
courts of the South the probation officers for
the Negro children are Negro women. That
is an immense improvement on the old chain-
gang way, of course; but adolescent boys,
white or black, will not be very profoundly
influenced by anything or anybody feminine.
They need a man, and a wise one.
In only a few places, however, does the
matter of probation come up. For the ma¬
jority of our lawbreakers, young and old,
one sure destination waits—the chain-gang,
sometimes more euphemistically known as
the convict camp. Here prisoners of all
degrees of criminality are thrown promiscu¬
ously together, and clothed in stripes to
advertise them to all beholders as outlaws
from the human family. They wear individ¬
ual chains in the daytime, which are fastened
together at night. And they endure what¬
ever of suffering, degradation, insult and
injustice their individual keepers choose to
bestow upon them.
A Southern Bishop, living in one of our
largest cities, recently had a visit from a
white man in a dirty, frowsy, unkempt suit,
HUMAN WRECKAGE 161
who announced himself as a convict dis¬
charged forty-eight hours before from the coal
mines near by, which are worked by convict
labour. Being questioned, he admitted that
he had eaten but twice since his discharge.
A Negro had given him some corn bread the
first day, and a barkeeper on the next had
given him a sandwich and a drink of whiskey.
He refused the food and money the Bishop
offered him. He had come, he said, to tell
the story of what was done to the prisoners
in those mines ; he had promised the other
convicts before he left that he would carry
the story to some Christian, and see if he
would take the matter up. If he took any¬
thing for himself, he said, it might cast
suspicion on his tale.
He was a well-educated man. He said he
had been an editor. A wrong had been done
to a member of his family ; in a blaze of anger
he had shot and killed the offender; and he
had been sentenced to three years at hard
labour, which he had served.
The men were worked in gangs, under
convict foremen, and each gang was assessed
so many tons per day. If they mined more
they were credited with the excess, to be paid
for it when they left the camp. All credits,
however, were given by the foremen, them-
162
IN BLACK AND WHITE
selves convicts; and they could, and did, give
the credits, not to those who earned them,
but to those who shared with their overseers,
or bribed them in other ways. The foremen
carried "horrible whips; and they used them
constantly, unmercifully, without warning and
without provocation. Men were beaten and
kicked and injured until it was not at all an
unknown thing, the convict said, for a man to
put his left hand on the train rail and let the
coal car run over it and crush it off. Then
he had to be sent to some other camp, being
useless for mining. It might be just as bad,
of course; but there was always a chance.
This convict had stuck it out. He had been
told that he had no overtime pay coming to
him. He had received the clothes he wore,
taken from some newly-entered convict, in¬
stead of the new suit required by law, and
had been turned out, penniless, to go back to
the world in newness of life, and conduct
himself in such an irreproachable manner,
after the lesson he had had, as not to get into
a convict camp again.
The Bishop told his story quietly, as his
habit is, while we sat gasping.
" What did you do f " we demanded.
" I made him take a little money, for one
thing—as a loan. He wouldn't take much;
HUMAN WRECKAGE 163
but I followed him down the street and
begged till he had to take a little. And I
talked to some men who have influence.
There is a public meeting called for the
seventeenth. There will be men from all
over the state, and I think the matter will be
probed to the bottom. We may get our
state laws reformed before we get through."
But one state is not enough. In my own
state, which is not the one of the Bishop's
convict, the leaders of the Men and Religion
Movement in our capital city have published
a list of the barbarities of our convict camps
which sound like the Middle Ages. Twenty
years ago, in the same state, an investigator
appointed by the Governor reported exactly
the same conditions. And these states are
not behind some of the others. Four of our
states, however—Kentucky, Missouri, Ten¬
nessee and Texas—are in the honour list of
twenty-one states which have adopted the
indeterminate sentence and the parole law ;
yet three of these retain the convict lease or
convict labour system. In a few states the
Governor has power to restore citizenship to
a discharged convict. But in Texas, Ken¬
tucky and Tennessee no man con\icted of
crime remains an outlaw except by his own
will. Citizenship is restored by law to every
164 IN BLACK AND WHITE
convicted criminal who, after due testing when
released on parole, proves worthy of that
trust. The last taint of his sin is cast behind
him by the law, and he takes his place again,
a man among men. " As far as the east is
from the west ." Isn't that the normal
way, the way that works because men are
made to respond to it ?
I was waiting at a railroad station not long
ago when a frightened-looking Negro boy of
about eighteen came by in the custody of
three big policemen, who stood guard about
him till the patrol wagon appeared and swal¬
lowed him up. After the crowd dispersed I
learned from one of the policemen that the
boy had been caught in the act of stealing a
box of cigars. The policeman thought he
would get fifteen years for it; but seeing my
horror, and wishing, evidently, to oblige a
lady if possible, he reconsidered the matter
and said maybe he would get off with ten
years, seeing he was not really grown. I re¬
membered the boy who was sentenced to
three years for taking eleven dollars and
forty-six cents : but that judge had especially
pointed out that the sentence was unusually
merciful. This boy's judge might well give
him ten years of enforced criminal associa¬
tion for his theft: there was no telling.
HUMAN WRECKAGE 1G5
I remembered another time, some years
ago, when I was waiting for another train, at
a junction in the mountains of a Southern
state. The county sheriff was waiting also,
with two white boys of seventeen or eight¬
een, moonshiners. The boys were chained
together by their wrists and by their necks,
with what looked like trace-chains. The
sheriff had evidently imbibed their whiskey,
probably for safe-keeping. He swaggered
about, a coarse, not ill-tempered man, a pis¬
tol protruding from either pocket of his coat.
He talked loudly, joking the boys about their
capture and the becomingness of their pres¬
ent adornments. They tried hard to imitate
his manner, and to wear an air of jaunty and
amused indifference; but their eyes were
frightened and ashamed.
Oh, the folly of it! The blind, stupid,
brutal uselessness of it, the wicked waste of
human lives and souls 1
What had any of these boys, white or
black, done, in their isolation, their igno¬
rance, their stunted moral growth, unfriended,
untaught—what had they done which gave
society the right to seize their poor, starved
lives and break and poison them in its foul
prisons beyond hope of recovery for all time ?
Even if we had the right, what good does it
166 IN BLACK AND WHITE
do ? The veriest madman out of Bedlam
would hardly claim that our convict camps
benefit the prisoners: but do they deter
others from crime ?
The census of the United States can an¬
swer that question ; and the prison records
of all civilized countries will join with the
penologists of the world in confirming what
the census says. Every year a vast number
of arrests are made, and a less vast number
of prisoners are discharged. Less vast.
Each year our prison population receives an
added permanent deposit from this great
stream of human misery and ignorance and
sin, as it washes through those black and
awful places where men already injured are
permanently deformed. Such measures have
never lessened crime: they provoke it al¬
ways, everywhere, since prisons were. The
more cruelly or publicly a crime is punished
the more surely it drives suggestion home to
some ill-balanced nature, and rouses it to im¬
itation. The punishment seems to add the
last irresistible attraction to those on the
border of criminality.
So far from stopping crime, our present
system, with its public and private humilia¬
tions of the offender, propagates crime in both
the criminal and the beholder. Whatever
HUMAN WRECKAGE 167
beats down a prisoner's remnants of self-re¬
spect is a blow not only at his manhood, but
at the manhood of the state. Our prisons
are great spawning-beds, where the crime of
the community is gathered in that the crime
of the state may pass over it and fructify it,
sending out swarms of new evil influences to
squirm and twist and spread in all the ooze
and slime of the community, that our crimi¬
nal supply may never fail.
We need more rational methods in our
whole criminal procedure. When one has
scarlet fever or diphtheria one is quarantined,
not for a specified time, but until one can be
safely restored to community life, as shown
by one's personal condition. The criminal
must also be treated as an individual. Some¬
thing must be learned of his heredity, his
environment, the causes which led to his
crime. Only so may one attempt his resto¬
ration. To expect to attain it on any other
basis than the one of sympathetic understand¬
ing is as unreasonable as to expect one
course of treatment to cure every form of
disease. Even the same disease requires dif¬
ferent treatment for different cases; and to
fix the term of a man's imprisonment by the
crime he has committed is to ignore the
dominating factor in the case—his personal-
168 IN BLACK AND WHITE
ity. His personality, not his past offense,
makes him a social menace. He should be
imprisoned as long, and only as long, as his
personality threatens danger to the commu¬
nity.
Dean Kirchwey, of the Faculty of Law
of Columbia University, in a great address on
" Ending the Reign of Terror " said :
"A demonstration of the fact, which we
may well consider indubitable, that criminal
conduct is usually, if not always, the result of
conditions more or less beyond the control
of the delinquent, cannot fail to shake the
theory of moral responsibility upon which the
vindictive idea of punishment is based, as
well as to allay and in time overcome the feel¬
ing of resentment which such conduct now
excites. And, on the other hand, a study of
the psychology of the mob, and of the reac¬
tion of the existing penal system on the moral
sense of the community will show how far it
is safe to go in mitigating the rigours of the
criminal law in a given jurisdiction . . .
[until] such time as may be required to bring
the community to a better appreciation of
the nature of crime, and the conditions which
determine it. . . .
" The doctrine that punishment is inflicted
on the offender as a warning to others has
HUMAN WRECKAGE 169
come to be the orthodox view. . . . There
is something touching in the unquestioning
faith of the legal profession and of the man
in the street in the efficacy of this vicarious
suffering for crimes not yet committed. Yet
it remains a matter of faith as yet unsupported
by evidence. . . .
" The fact that a very large proportion—in
some countries more than fifty per cent.—of
criminals under confinement have previously
undergone prison punishment seems to indi¬
cate that as a deterrent punishment by
imprisonment leaves something to be de¬
sired. . . .
" The principle that punishment may
. . . without reformatory influences be a
means of moral amendment finds expression
in many judicial utterances. It is obviously
a well-meant, but mistaken attempt to bring
the sanctions of the moral law and of the
ecclesiastical dispensation to the aid of the
criminal law. . . . This imputes to the
law a sanctity which the criminal would be
the last to concede to it; and so quite apart
from the vile and degrading conditions under
which this work of grace was to be effected,
it is not to be wondered at that we find no
traces of its efficacy. . . .
"The principle of the reformation of crimi-
170 IN BLACK AND WHITE
nals during imprisonment . . . does not
assume that all criminals are capable of ref¬
ormation, or even of improvement, nor that
those who are can all be brought up to the
level of good citizenship. It does assume,
however, that most men and women, and all
children, will respond to the steady pressure of
a wholesome, uplifting environment . . .
and it has already proven its faith by its
works. ... It must have cognizance of
the life history of every individual committed
to prison, with his heredity and environment.
It studies him in prison—his needs, his ca¬
pacities, his aspirations, his mental and moral
equipment, his health, his reaction to . . .
prison life. It follows him after his discharge.
. . . It levies on all the sciences that deal
with man—law, medicine, criminology, soci¬
ology. . . .
" The next few years will give us new data
of great importance. . . . But there will
be no facts for him who regards the criminal
law as an instrument for venting wrath and
hate on a fallen—and convicted—brother;
none for him who would keep his fellow man
in subjection to his iron law by terror; none
for him who would work redemption through
another's suffering. . . . The new moral
atmosphere which has made every man his
HUMAN WRECKAGE 171
brother's keeper will be felt in the law courts
as well as in the home and street. The new
attitude of the state towards children of tender
years will soon mark her attitude towards her
erring children of a larger growth."
Those of us who can find comfort in a fact
so painful may be assured that we of the
South are not alone in the possession of a
prison system outworn and barbarous. Noth¬
ing in our awful camps could be worse than
what has been found, in most recent years, in
the state prisons of several of the richest and
most enlightened states of the North and
West; and if they were all investigated the
present black list would doubtless be longer
than it is. But this fact concerns us only as
it shows that our own conditions are part of
a world-wide horror, which the best thought
of the world has set itself to destroy. The
reformation of our whole prison system is our
part of a world-task.
We need a Southern Prison Commission,
appointed by the governors of the states, not
to revise our prison system, but to study con¬
ditions, here and elsewhere, and to formulate
a new system abreast of modern experience,,
and founded on bed-rock truth and justice,
instead of on the philosophy of the Middle
Ages. The members of the Commission
172 IN BLACK AND WHITE
should be men of broad humanity and of
strong common sense. Such men could, by
the authority of their respective governors,
make individual and unannounced visits, each
to a number of prisons in his own state. Then
they could examine the best the world can
show them; the Denver juvenile court; the
Colorado state farm, where " hardened"
criminals are turned into men, without stripes,
threats, chains or armed guards ; the District
of Columbia prison farm ; the wonderful work
for women at Bedford, N. Y., for men at
Great Meadow, and for children at Industry,
in the same state ; the Kansas City municipal
farm, a new idea in local government; the
Massachusetts farms for vagrants and in¬
ebriates, and many more.
This Commission would find at least three
points in the South where Negro lawbreak¬
ers are being successfully trained towards
good citizenship. In Virginia it is being
done at the suggestion, and under the super¬
vision, of a state officer, and with the back¬
ing of the legislature. In Georgia and Ala¬
bama it is being done by unknown and un¬
lettered Negroes, whose loving hearts have
led them into a wisdom not to be attained by
any amount of unloving knowledge.
The State Superintendent of Charities and
HUMAN WRECKAGE 173
Correction in Virginia, a large-hearted, broad-
minded man, fully abreast of the develop¬
ments of modern penology, has, in the last
three years, taken from the Richmond peni¬
tentiary one hundred and fifty convicted Ne¬
gro "criminals," all under fifteen years of
age, and has placed them, under proper
supervision, in good Negro homes, as mem¬
bers of the respective families. He tells me
one hundred and forty-three of these boys
are " making good." They are growing up
into self-respecting and wealth-producing
citizens, instead of becoming a recurring
charge upon the state, which is the usual re¬
sult of our ordinary methods of dealing with
Negro first offenders.
At Ralph, Ala., is the Sam Daily reforma¬
tory, still called by his name, though Sam
Daily himself has made his humble exit from
life with no trumpets to proclaim him a hero,
unless the angels sounded them on the other
side. He was a full-blooded Negro, with no
touch of efficiency as the gift of another race.
A white Alabamian, a city judge, moved
with compassion for the young Negro delin¬
quents brought before him, called for some
good Negro of like compassion to give the
boys a chance. Sam Daily responded, do¬
nating himself, his family, and one hundred
174 IN BLACK AND WHITE
and twenty-five acres of land to their use.
First and last he took about three hundred
boys from the Birmingham juvenile court,
paid their way to the railroad station nearest
his farm, fed them, clothed them, taught
them industry, cleanliness and honour. I am
told that ninety-five per cent, of his boys
" make good."
The most curious thing about this enter¬
prise is the fact that this poor Negro, who
was never able to finish paying for his own
farm, spent years of his life converting law¬
breakers from a public liability to a public
asset without receiving any public money to
help bear the expenses of the process. Indi¬
vidual white men have helped him, and now
help his widow, by making up deficits when
they occur ; but there is no regular public ap¬
propriation for this great and public service.
The Southern Presbyterian Church, however,
now pays regularly the salary of a trained
Negro assistant at the reformatory. A
white man, formerly a large slave-owner,
who knows the reformatory well, writes me,
in regard to its success with the boys, " I
should call this forlorn effort to help the
helpless a modern miracle." Only it isn't a
miracle: it is natural law given a chance to
work.
HUMAN WRECKAGE 175
The third of these demonstrations of the
response of Negro delinquents to good influ¬
ences is made at the Paul Moss Orphanage
at Augusta, Ga. Paul Moss is a Negro of
rather limited education who gave up an ex¬
cellent income as a skilled mechanic to de¬
vote his life to aiding Negro waifs and juve¬
nile delinquents. He put all his savings into
a small farm, where he has supported his
charges with a little help from a few whites
of the city and one or two Northern visitors.
He is able to give the boys not much book
education, but teaches them practical religion
and a few trades. In the last six years he
has sent out one hundred and sixty boys,
half of whom were from the city juvenile
court, the others being orphans and waifs in
process of becoming delinquents. One hun¬
dred and fifty of these boys are " making
good."
Each of these separate experiments shows
that the response made by Negro delinquents
to a helpful and sympathetic environment
equals that made by the same class of other
races—about ninety-five per cent. Would
not our Southern Prison Commission consider
this method of dealing with lawbreakers
economically superior to the one now in gen¬
eral use ? Even where we have reforma-
176
IN BLACK AND WHITE
tories for young Negroes under state or
county supervision the inmates are treated as
prisoners, dressed in some kind of distinctive,
branding uniform, kept under lock and key
—and eventually landed, very many of them,
in our prisons and convict camps. And we
think that fact is explained by the Negro's
criminal tendencies. The Commission, with
all the evidence before it, might decide differ¬
ently.
The Commission would look into the evils
of convict labour as employed in many
" model" prisons, so called, where men are
driven beyond the limit of health under a con¬
tract system as vicious as our own, and turned
out after years of alleged industrial training
skilled only in some occupation employment
in which is impossible outside of prison walls.
They would go thoroughly into the question
of the state's right, while attempting to re¬
store a man to normal citizenship, to forbid
his performance of the primal human duty to
contribute to the support of his own family ;
and would examine the methods by which
innocent women and children are beginning
to be saved from this usual and unjust pun¬
ishment.
They would learn what public services
prisoners perform elsewhere, while being at
HUMAN WRECKAGE 177
the same time restored to manhood. We are
too much in the habit of looking at the thing
done, and ignoring the man who does it.
Many of us feel, for instance, that in setting
her convicts to work on the public roads—a
most beneficent public service—one of our
states has taken front rank in the treatment
of her criminals. Yet that state clothes those
men in stripes, as we all do, and works them
in chains, on the public roads, under armed
guards destitute of knowledge or fitness in
the fine art of saving human wreckage.
In New Zealand in the last decade the con¬
victs have planted 20,000,000 trees for the
state, timbering waste lands, and reclaiming
the men. But they do not wear stripes in
New Zealand. The idea there is to deliver
them from past degradation, not to sear it in
for present and future injury. Denmark re¬
forests her waste lands with men who, like
the land, are in process of restoration.
Prussia and Switzerland employ them to care
for the great state forests: and they are
employed in a number of our own Western
states in various works of reclamation, though
too often, with us, the uppermost idea is the
reclamation, not of men, but of property.
All these things our Southern Prison Com¬
mission would consider; and far above the
178 IN BLACK AND WHITE
great and profitable work of reclaiming and
enriching the wide waste lands of the South
by prison labour, they would set that greater
and more profitable work of preventing the
wide waste of human life, and reclaiming
that already in process of ruin.
A prison system suited to human needs—
the needs of prisoners, of their families, of the
community at large—could be formulated,
and presented to all our states, together with
the information necessary, and with the weight
of this South-wide Commission behind it. In
principle, if not in all its details, it would be
adopted in some states; and ultimately in all,
as the experience of the foremost illuminated
the wisdom of its provisions.
We need no revision of what we now have:
we need a new penology, based on a con¬
ception of human life radically opposed to
most that underlies our theory of punishment
to-day.
We need to take up the call already being
heard throughout the civilized world—a call
for trained men and women to create the new
profession of Healers-of-men-in-prison. We
would not, even in our politics-fuddled cities
put fifteenth century " leeches " (if we could
get them) in charge of our public hospitals.
Yet we count any ignorance competent to
HUMAN WRECKAGE 179
take unlimited control of sick souls and
abnormal minds. In the recent Prison Con¬
gress America and Hungary joined hands to
express the conviction of the penologists of
the world that this professional training of
prison officers—men already fitted by nature
for such difficult and important work—was
a vital need in the progress of humanity
towards a sane and successful treatment of
the world-problem of human wreckage.
VI
SERVICE AND COOPERATION
IF I were asked what the mass of the
Negroes most need that we should give
them, I think only one answer could be
given which would go to the root of the whole
matter. And that deepest need is not at all
a Negro need, but a human one : we ourselves,
as a people, share it profoundly.
They need ideals. The lives of so many
of them seem just a chaos of wants, so that
one stands at first dumb with bewilderment:
so many fundamental needs, so much empti¬
ness where there must be solid foundations if
anything worth while is built up ! But that
which will open a way to fill all these empty
spaces is a vision of something higher in
their own souls; something higher, yet not
too far or cold to kindle a spark of desire in
their hearts, to quicken them, by vision and
aspiration.
If we will look back over the last fifty years
we will see, perhaps, how little of this fore¬
most essential of human advance we have
furnished for them. Some things we have
180
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 181
done, I know. We have paid millions for
their education in the public schools: but
have we cared how it was spent ? The su¬
perintendent of education in one of our
states, in a recent report, pronounces the Ne¬
gro public schools of that commonwealth ut¬
terly inefficient.
He charges their wretched failure on the
white county superintendents, many of whom,
he says, never go near the Negro schools
under them, nor concern themselves with the
selection of fit teachers, nor with their im¬
provement after they are selected. This
story would fit more states than one. We
could squander ten times the millions already
spent in education like that without creating
a single impulse towards better things : there
is never any vivifying power in indifference.
Yet our public schools for Negroes have
done good—a world of it. Some of this
must be credited to those among us who
have honestly sought the Negro's good.
The rest, I think, is due to the Negroes them¬
selves, and to those once-so-hated " Yan¬
kees " who first made possible to Negro teach¬
ers a suitable preparation for their work.
Love is the world's lifting-force. It is like
the light, which yearly lifts untold tons of
cold, dead matter to the tree-tops in the
182 IN BLACK AND WHITE
beauty of green leaves. When we see leaves
we know light has been at work: nothing
else could lift matter up there so that leaves
could be. And wherever we find a trace of
spiritual quickening, a budding of dormant
life, however scant, we know by the same
token that Love has been at work : there is
no other force which produces that effect.
The uplift of the Negroes through the public
schools, small as it is compared with what it
might have been with the same expenditure
of money, has chiefly come, not from our
sometimes grudging provision, but from
ideals kindled in some Negroes' souls by
love and sacrifice other than our own.
The Northerners who came down here to
teach the Negroes were ignorant of our past,
of our conditions, of the underlying causes
of our new antagonism to the Negroes—of
all the circle of white life which looked to
them so inexplicably cruel and wrong. They
were only less ignorant about the Negroes,
their traditions, their stage of race-growth,
their true relation to Southern life. Few
people had learned to be world-dwellers then ;
and these eager Northern folk, who saw a
need and longed to meet it, translated neither
white life nor black into world-terms. They
made blunders, of course ; and a good many
A RESPECTED NEGRO DOCTOR.
"A Negro doctor whom white physicians of his home city
respect as a man and as a physician."
PAINE COLLEGE, AUGUSTA, GA.
Southern Methodist School for Negro preachers,_ teachers,
and other leaders. Officered by Southern whites.
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 183
Negroes acquired some knowledge at the ex¬
pense of more wisdom. We have all seen
white people do the same thing. And cer¬
tainly the South never tried to help the situa¬
tion. So far as explanation or assistance
went we maintained a silence which was more
than felt, while these from another world
came and wrestled with our problems in all
good faith, and according to their darkness
and their light.
But with all the mistakes and friction, the
energy wasted or turned to loss, these people
brought one thing with them which is never
wholly lost. It may be hindered, partly neg¬
atived, robbed of its full fruition by many
things: but always love bears fruit. They
brought with them that principle of life.
They kindled a light in darkened hearts;
they sent out thousands of Negroes fired
with ideals of service to their race. And they
have saved the situation, so far as it has been
saved, for our Negro public schools.
We gave the Negroes ideals once. The
North is dull of understanding at this point,
as we are dull at others. It cannot take in
the fact that slavery and ideals could exist
contemporaneously. Yet once the North it¬
self, and in the most strenuous days of its
New England conscience, was unaware of
184 IN BLACK AND WHITE
any incompatibility between the two. It is
the big brother again, forgetting his own so-
recent ignorance, and ready with paste-pot
and label for the younger child.
The existence of slavery we long accepted
much as we did the weather—as a dispensa¬
tion of providence which it were idle to in¬
quire into. But we had a genuine affection
for the Negroes, and out of it we met this
need for ideals—an even deeper need than
emancipation from physical slavery. Every
Protestant denomination in the South had its
white missionaries among the slaves, and all
together they had nearly half a million slave
members at the outbreak of the war. One
church alone, the Southern Methodist, spent
nearly two million dollars in missions to the
Negroes prior to 1861, and had over three
hundred white missionaries at work among
them when the war broke out. The individ¬
ual slave-owners, the very great majority of
whom were Christian people, did even more.
Men and women, they taught their slaves the
Bible—not, as has been ignorantly sug¬
gested, to enforce the duties of meekness
and obedience, but because the love of God
in their own hearts necessitated their impart¬
ing it to those around them. My own
mother was typical of her class, and no one
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 185
who came in contact with her could have im¬
agined that her service to the Negroes was
caused by anything but the spirit which trans¬
figured her whole life from day to day. Such
women held regular Sunday-schools for their
slaves, and often the white children of the
household sat with the black ones to learn
the Law which was over both of them alike.
In times of rejoicing or of trouble the white
people went to the Negro homes as friends ;
and in sickness they cared for them person¬
ally, often with their own hands.
Those among us who deny the Negro's
capacity to respond to ideals should remem¬
ber his faithfulness in time of war and temp¬
tation, and the beauty of character which even
the most prejudiced of us admit belonged to
" the old-time Negro." The admission,
coupled, as it usually is, with sweeping
charges against the character of the Negro of
to-day, is the severest arraignment of South¬
ern Christianity which can be brought against
it. And we bring it ourselves, unseeing.
But the truth has had its witnesses, all
along. There were women all over the
South who, like my mother, went serenely on
in the path of love, even during reconstruc¬
tion days, ministering to the sick and the
poor about them, regardless of the colour of
186 IN BLACK AND WHITE
their skins, and seeing only needs which love
must meet. There were, in every state, men
like Governor Colquitt, of Georgia, who as
slave-owner, impoverished Confederate, and
governor of his state, would tuck his Bible
under his arm any afternoon in the week,
and go to some Negro cabin, where he would
read and teach and pray, talking with the
family as friend with friends, advising, com¬
forting and inspiring them.
Nor did the next generation utterly fail.
Through all the turmoil of reconstruction
some passed the spirit of service to their chil¬
dren. An Alabama woman, for instance, who
was widowed by the war, remained on her
remote plantation, where she spent her life
teaching the Negroes of the neighbourhood
free of charge. Her daughters took up her
work, and carry it on to this day. I know a
brilliant Kentucky woman, daughter of a
great slave-owner of that state who was at
one time its governor, who has been a helper
to Negro church workers, and to any Negro
in need, her whole long, beautiful life. An¬
other friend, a woman of wealth and influence,
a leader among the women of the South to¬
day, taught a Bible class of Negroes for six¬
teen years, until her strength failed under her
accumulating work for the unprivileged.
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 187
Space fails for the instances known to even
one person. One more must suffice.
Just after the war a South Carolinian, a
graduate of Brown University and a devout
Baptist, went to a Georgia city and gathered
about him a little knot of Negro boys who
wanted to become Baptist preachers. He
taught them there for years, spending himself
to give ideals to the ignorant and the poor,
cut off from all other association. For the
white people were bitter in those days, and
despised him where they did not hate. It
was one man's vision against a city's blind¬
ness—that world-old story of ignorance, and
of light no darkness can quench. He is for¬
gotten to-day by all but a few Negroes, one
of whom, a fine, strong man who had felt his
touch, told me his story. But the black boys
to whom he gave ideals have gone out to
give their people light. Their church is
strong in Georgia, and these men lead it.
One of them is its chief pastor in my own
city ; and so well has he responded to his
teacher's efforts that the white people of the
town are all his friends. When he was ill
not long ago the daily paper reported his
condition, and gave the names of several of
the leading business men who went to his
home to inquire how he did.
188 IN BLACK AND WHITE
Yet few of the whites who speak of this
Negro and of the others who were taught
with him, as " the kind all Negroes ought to
be " have any idea where the real springs of
their lives were found. Some of us, turning
away from the South's long tradition of serv¬
ice to the Negro race, knowing only the dis¬
jointed years of bitterness, feel only contempt,
or at best a puzzled surprise, that any white
Southerner should lower himself by stooping
to help a Negro, or should persuade himself
that they are worth the effort.
Yet we have never offered them ideals out
of a living sympathy that they have not re¬
sponded, for themselves and for their race.
No one who knows the better class of Ne¬
groes can fail to be impressed with the spirit
of sacrifice and service which is shared by
nearly all of them. They follow that law of
human life under which any race, in common
stress of any kind, draws closer the band
of brotherhood, and lives for the common
good.
And oh, we white people are waking up!
The thrill of the North's awaking, long ago
begun, and not yet ended, is with me still;
but these are my very own! Some of us
have worked and waited so long. There
have been years when the only warrant for
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 189
hope was in the long look at the Race of
Man, and the Love which leads it on. But
that was warrant enough.—And now? Just
a few of the signs—a few.
For long our churches have set a standard
for us ; and even though they themselves
have not lived up to it, the pegs were down,
and visible to the careful eye. In 1876 the
Southern Presbyterians opened a theolog¬
ical school for Negroes at Tuscaloosa, Ala.
For nineteen years the pastor of the white
Presbyterian church of the town was also the
head of this school, which has had only South¬
ern whites as teachers from the beginning.
The yearly income, provided by the denomi¬
nation, had risen from four hundred dollars
the first year to fifteen thousand twenty years
later. The theologues pay their board and
tuition by working on the school farm under
expert teaching. They go out to preach a
gospel of love, morality, cleanliness, hard
work, and modern methods of farming ; also
of friendliness to their white neighbours. I am
told, by those who know the section about
Tallapoosa, that race relations there are not
of the problem kind. There has been re¬
sponse to ideals from both whites and blacks.
The present head of the school is the son of
a Mississippi slave-owner.
190 IN BLACK AND WHITE
A few years after this school was started
the Southern Methodists opened an institu¬
tion in Augusta, Ga., for the training of
Negro preachers, teachers, and other lead¬
ers for the race. Its first president was a
former slave-owner, who resigned the chair
of English in a strong college to take the
position at a most problematical salary. It
cannot be denied that the school lived " at a
poor dying rate " for several years : but the
denomination was officially committed to it
as a proper work for white Christians to
undertake ; Southern white college men and
women have officered it from the first; and
for eighteen years the church Board of Edu¬
cation has put its needs before the people,
and, in cooperation with its president and
faculty, has gradually won for it a better
support.
These are, so far as I know, the only schools
maintained exclusively by Southern whites for
Negroes; but the Episcopal church has a
number of schools for them in which Southern
as well as Northern whites teach ; and part
of their support, which comes from their
General Mission Board, is drawn from the
Southern dioceses. The Southern Baptists,
who have long made an annual appro¬
priation for the education of Negroes at
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 191
schools of other churches, are now preparing
to open a theological seminary for them.
The first Southern settlement for Negroes
is conducted by the son of an Alabama banker
and former slaveholder. It is in Louisville,
and is of late years jointly financed by the
Northern and Southern Presbyterians. This
settlement, I am told, is largely responsible for
Louisville's Negro playgrounds and proba¬
tion officers. This city also has a fine public
library for Negroes,1 with a Negro librarian
and two assistants, all under the white libra¬
rian who is the head of the city system.
A children's room is well patronized ; and
branches are maintained at some of the public
schools. In a private letter the white head of
the system declares the Negro library an
untold blessing to the race. The use of a
room in the building is allowed, free of
charge, to clubs and other educational and
recreational gatherings. The children, he
writes, respond readily to guidance, and are
eager for good books. The number of adult
patrons grows steadily. The library, which
is a beautiful building, was given by Mr.
Carnegie, and cost $25,000.00. It is main¬
tained by the city of Louisville. Libraries for
1 Since this was written a second branch public library for
Negroes has been opened in Louisville.
192 IN BLACK AND WHITE
Negroes have also been given by Mr. Car¬
negie to New Orleans, to Nashville, and to
Meridian, Miss., the city authorities guaran¬
teeing ample support.
I can learn of but two other Negro public
libraries in the South. One, at Galveston, is
the gift of a citizen of that place, whose will
made provision for a library for each race.
The librarian said that the children were be¬
ing helped by it to a large extent. The re¬
sponse among adults was less marked. The
other public library for Negroes is at Jackson¬
ville, Fla. ; and my last report from it, some
time ago, stated that it was not as efficient
as it should be, because only a room in a
corner of the building for whites was available,
so that it was impossible to make efforts to
extend the work; but their present capacity
was taxed.
Here is a scarcely-touched opportunity to
create ideals for a race. These Carnegie
libraries are among the wisest investments
in the South. But some of us, like the chil¬
dren in the market-place, are hard to please.
If the Negroes care nothing for books we
say they are stupid and vicious-minded:
if one proposes antidoting this dangerous
condition with the best literature, sympa¬
thetically applied, we cry out against the
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 193
Negro's uppishness, and want him taught to
work.
He ought to be taught to work, no doubt.
The great majority of Negroes, like the
majority of every race, must always work
with their hands. There is a deal more of
what is called drudgery to be done in the
world than of everything else put together;
and most of us have our share of it to perform.
But no one to whom work is drudgery has
ever been rightly taught to work. I believe
this lack of proper training is at the bottom
of nine-tenths—or maybe eleven-tenths—of
all the laziness and shiftlessness of the poor
which does not come from sub-normal phys¬
ical conditions. Drudgery is not work: it is
a mental attitude towards work which comes
from ignorance or from physical weakness.
The narrower the round of a man's life, or a
woman's, the more they need outlook and
horizon. The world over, the world's poor
have been set to do the hardest work in a
perfectly detached, unrelated way, without
reasons, without background, without a trace
of world-connections ; and they usually find
it a very boring job, and shirk it when they
can, naturally.
We are learning rapidly to broaden the
white worker's horizon through the industrial
194 IN BLACK AND WHITE
training given in our public and normal
schools, and in our agricultural colleges;
and in some of our cities part of this training
is given to Negroes, some of it of a high
order. In Richmond County, Georgia, this
industrial work has been extended by the
county itself, with no outside aid, to the
Negro country schools. We have there a
superintendent who looks closely after the
schools of both races ; and the county super¬
intendent of industrial training gives as
efficient oversight and help to the Negro
schools, city and country, as to the white. I
speak of this county because, living in it, I
happen to know about it. That many others
do as well I do not doubt.
But the great impulse towards rational
training, towards an education which really
educates, in the Negro country schools has
come from the Jeanes Fund, given by a
Northern woman, and administered by a
Southern man, the grandson of a great slave¬
holder, a scholar and educator of distinc¬
tion. I know of no other one force in
Negro life more beneficent than this. It is
demonstrating in every one of our states the
kind of work needed in their rural schools,
and its quickening influence grows with the
years. Virginia, first of all the South, ap-
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 195
pointed a superintendent of Negro rural
public schools, a Phi Beta Kappa College
graduate and a man for the South to be
proud of. Kentucky, Georgia, North Caro¬
lina and Alabama have followed the example;
and the other states are bound to do likewise
or to see themselves out-distanced in the
production of wealth in the not-far-distant
future. For it is human nature to love work
when ideals are put into it, when it has a
background and a horizon.
The Y. M. C. A. is doing, through Southern
secretaries, a work which can hardly be
estimated. Six thousand students have been
enrolled in Y. M. C. A. study classes in
Southern colleges to study the Negro and
the white man's duty to him. Already
various forms of settlement and Sunday-
school work have grown out of this study.
In fifteen years these young men will be the
leaders of the South; and even now the
attitude of our colleges and universities,
faculties and students, is an appreciable
factor in the changing public sentiment.
The Y. M. C. A. has also a large coloured
organization. Forty-one associations with
over sixty thousand members are enrolled.
Here again is a great opportunity to help
create ideals for a race. In our cities there is
196 IN BLACK AND WHITE
no better way to fight intemperance and
many other forms of vice among the Negroes,
than to provide them with a good Y. M. C. A.
building, and to help them get it fully on its
feet.
The women of the Southern Methodist
church are the only ones in the South as yet
carrying on organized work for Negroes.
For over twenty-five years they have been
the South's women-pioneers along social
service lines, first to whites and now to
blacks. They opened the first settlement in
the South, employed the first visiting nurse,
opened the first free clinic, and introduced free
kindergartens and industrial training at many
points where they were previously unknown.
Twelve years ago they built two industrial
cottages for girls at the church's school for
Negroes in Augusta, and have since provided
for the industrial training there, besides erect¬
ing recently a $25,000.00 dormitory. This
sum was raised from several sources. Half
of it was given by Southern white women,
some of them giving as much as a thousand
dollars each; five thousand was given by the
General Education Board ; and the rest was
raised by a Negro man from the white
Southern Methodist conferences.
In addition to this, these women will
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 197
shortly open a farm school for Negro boys in
Mississippi, five hundred acres of land having
been recently given them by a Southern
white man for this purpose.
In 1911 they appointed an Alabama woman,
a college graduate, as secretary for Negro
work. Her headquarters were located in
Augusta, where she has opened the white
South's second settlement for Negroes, the
one in Louisville being the first.
The Augusta vacation playgrounds, secured
by the cooperation of people of both races,
are an outcome of this work, which, inade¬
quately housed and provided for as it is, is
full of promise and interest. The children,
nearly all from the poorest class, are as re¬
sponsive as—well, as children, the world
around : their development, in their various
clubs and classes, is as striking as in any
children of like class anywhere. The kin-
dergartner is a coloured woman, a graduate
of one of the best of the schools established
by Northern missionaries after the war, and a
power for good among her people.
But however institutions may be built up
or multiplied, the South-wide need is a South-
wide turning of the hearts of the strong to
help the weak both by personal service and
by cooperation with capable Negro leaders.
198 IN BLACK AND WHITE
To this need a number of Southern agencies
at last begin to address themselves.
The will of the late Miss Caroline Phelps
Stokes, a well-known Northern philanthropist,
provided for the endowment of fellowships in
the state universities of Virginia and Georgia
"to enable Southern youth of broad sym¬
pathies to make a scientific study of the
Negro, and of his adjustment to American
civilization." These fellowships were ac¬
cepted in the spirit of their founder, and in
the belief that " any national program look¬
ing to the adjustment of relations must be
based on a far wider knowledge of actual
conditions than we now have." The uni¬
versity of Georgia has just published the re¬
sults of the investigations made by its first
Fellow under this foundation. He is the son
of a member of the university faculty, and
has spent a year in a close and sympathetic
study of the Negroes of Athens, the uni¬
versity town, and of their relations with the
whites. His report makes clear the com¬
munity menace of conditions allowed in the
Negro quarters, and calls for the cooperation
of the educated whites in upbuilding the
homes, churches and schools of the Negroes.
Reports like these, coming from a great and
beloved university, are sure to leaven the
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 199
thought of an entire state. Miss Stokes's
gift, like that of Miss Jeanes, proves the
wisdom of Northern philanthropists who
choose Southerners in sympathy with Negro
betterment to administer their gifts. Such
gifts, so given, draw together the North and
the South, as well as the two races in the
South.
At the recent annual meeting of the
Women's Missionary Council of the South¬
ern Methodist Church the committee on
Social Service brought in the following re¬
port, which was unanimously adopted :
" It shall be a duty of the Department of
Social Service to promote the study of con¬
ditions and needs among the Negroes, lo¬
cally, throughout the South ; also to arouse
the women of our auxiliaries to a sense of;
their personal duty as Christian Southerners
to meet the needs and ameliorate the con¬
ditions of those of this backward race who
are in our midst by personal service and
sympathy. We recommend the giving of
this sympathy and service in any or all of the
following ways:
"(i) By learning the needs of Negro Sun¬
day-schools, teaching their Bible classes,
training their teachers in modern Sunday-
school methods, helping to grade their schools,
200 IN BLACK AND WHITE
and offering such other assistance as may be
needed.
"(2) By assisting Negro women in form¬
ing and directing missionary societies in
their churches, giving them information and
other help, especially in regard to home mis¬
sion work among the poorer classes of their
own race.
" (3) By looking into the needs of Negro
public schools, requiring of the public au¬
thorities that their premises be kept sanitary,
helping to secure coloured teachers of a
high grade, and favouring the introduction
of industrial training.
"(4) By looking after the recreation, or
lack of it, of Negro children and young peo¬
ple ; by endeavouring to interest the Chris¬
tian women of all denominations in secur¬
ing for them opportunities for clean play in
playgrounds supervised by good Negro
women or men; and by securing coopera¬
tion with Negro Young Men's and Young
Women's Associations where these exist.
" (5) By securing from boards of educa¬
tion permission to use Negro schoolhouses
as community centres, organizing and assist¬
ing the better class of Negroes in each com¬
munity to take charge of these community
centres and supervise them for the pleasure
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 201
and instruction of their own race. By inter¬
esting white people in the movement, secur¬
ing white physicians and others to talk on
personal and community hygiene, care of
children, temperance, and other matters.
" (6) By visiting the local jails, by ascer¬
taining the measure of justice accorded Ne¬
groes in the local courts, and by creating a
sentiment for justice to youthful criminals
whom wise treatment may reform.
" (7) By studying Negro housing condi¬
tions and their bearing on sickness, ineffi¬
ciency, and crime ; by bringing these condi¬
tions to the attention of the public; by in¬
sisting that the local authorities enforce in
the Negro district the sanitary regulations of
the community; by securing for Negroes a
water supply sufficient for health and de¬
cency ; by helping the Negroes of the better
class to organize among their people civic
clubs where the young may be trained in
community cleanliness and righteousness.
" (8) By creating in the local white com¬
munity higher ideals in regard to the rela¬
tion between the two races ; by standing for
full and equal justice in all departments of
life ; by endeavouring to secure for the back¬
ward race not only the full measure of de¬
velopment of which they are capable, but the
202 IN BLACK AND WHITE
unmolested possession and enjoyment of all
legitimate rewards of honest work; by stand¬
ing, in short, for the full application to the
Negroes and to ourselves of the Mosaic law
of justice: ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself.'"
There are four thousand auxiliaries in this
organization; and even though the work be
taken up slowly, it will spread. The authori¬
ties at Paine College are urging upon the
church the establishment of a training school
for Negro missionaries and social workers
who may be employed by the whites as well
as by coloured churches in all these forms of
cooperative effort. The need is so great we
can but trust it will be met.
The secretary for the Home Department
of the General Board of Missions of this
church is working along similar lines. At
his instance the Alabama conference has
appointed a committee of ministers, laymen
and women, to look into the condition of
the Negroes within the bounds of the con¬
ference at all these points. A consistent plan
of conference-wide help and cooperation is
expected to result; and such committees will
be asked for in the other conferences until all
have taken the matter up.
The deepest significance of all these move-
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 203
ments in the various churches lies in the fact
that they all look towards cooperation be¬
tween the better classes of both races for the
uplift of the Negro poor. It is impossible to
serve the best interests of either race without
this personal communication between the
two. Where we have had a disposition to
help the Negroes the attitude of the whites,
both North and South, has been too often
suggestive of that of the rich burgher in the
play of Rip Van Winkle—" Give him a
cold potato, and let him go." We have but
given where he and we need that we should
share.
There are notable individual exceptions,
but many of even the well-educated Negroes
are yet unequal to the task of achieving un¬
aided the spiritual emancipation of their peo¬
ple. These need the forming and inspiring
touch of educated whites.
In some of our Northern cities more or less
money has been contributed for the uplift of the
local Negro population through Y. M. C. A.
work or otherwise ; but often, when the money
is given, the Negroes are left quite to their
own devices in trying to serve their people;
and the result is rarely all that it might be
under a system of sympathetic cooperation
between both races.
204 IN BLACK AND WHITE
A Northern Y, M. C. A. worker, in speak¬
ing of this fact not long ago, said that the
Negroes of the North did not desire coopera¬
tion, and frequently resented it when offered.
I think some Negroes in the South feel the
same way, and are quick to repudiate the
suggestion that the Negroes are not entirely
competent to take full charge of Negro edu¬
cation and Negro uplift in general. They
want white people to furnish the money, and
leave them to direct the work.
That some Negroes are entirely equal to
such a task cannot be truthfully denied. The
logical deduction from this fact is that the
race has capabilities of development far be¬
yond the position some of us would perma¬
nently assign it. But it is idle to make claims
which are not borne out by facts. The finest
and strongest Negroes, I believe without a
single exception, have come to their high de¬
velopment largely through contact with
broad-minded, large-hearted white men and
women. For years to come few of them are
destined to reach that plane by any other
process. I think on this point the real lead¬
ers in the South, white and black, are agreed.
There should be some white teachers in
every state school for the higher education of
.Negroes ; but so far Alabama is the only
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 205
state recognizing, in even a single institution,
this statesmanlike and Christian principle.
In Mississippi, however, whites have charge
of the summer school for Negro teachers ;
and in my home county of Richmond, in
Georgia, the county superintendent super¬
vises in person the yearly institute for Negro
teachers, lecturing before them from time to
time. This is probably not unusual.
The need for such service is threefold. As
the more highly developed race we owe this
help to the other race ; and unpaid spiritual
debts issue, sooner or later, in spiritual bank¬
ruptcy. We must render such service for the
sake of our own spiritual integrity. The
Negroes need to receive all we can give them,
that their own power to give, to their race
and to the nation, may be enlarged. And
beyond these needs is the fundamental ne¬
cessity for both races to learn, however dis¬
tinct they must remain racially, to work to¬
gether in mutual respect, cooperating for the
good of their common country, and for the
kingdom of God on earth.
The exceptional Negro should be given
the most responsible work as a teacher and
leader of his people which his ability de¬
serves. But the race would be superhuman
if in fifty years of freedom it had become
206 IN BLACK AND WHITE
capable of taking its future entirely into its
own hands. Some Negroes do not recognize
this fact, and are quick to resent white assist¬
ance as white interference ; and especially to
distrust any measure or method which em¬
phasizes the need for discipline of mind or
spirit. Surely we are responsible here. Our
long indifference weighs heavily against us;
and our assistance, where offered, is too often
tinctured—-or impregnated—with condescen¬
sion. If Christ had come to us that way I
think we would be savages still. However
fine it may look on the outside, there is no
lifting force in any condescending deed.
When we set about our task in that entire
simplicity and self-unconsciousness which are
a necessary part of the spirit of Christian
service, we will be oftener surprised by the
depth of the response evoked than by a dis¬
position to reject our help. Money alone,
though we poured it into institutions for the
Negroes like water, cannot settle our debt.
The world around, the debt of the privileged
involves their personality.
One of the straws which show our new
consciousness of this fact blew across my
path not long ago as I was returning from a
trip to the North. In a travellers' chat with
another passenger the subject of women's
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 207
club-work came up; and my companion,
knowing nothing of my own interests, told
me of her recent experience as president of
the federated clubs of her home town, a
thriving city in North Carolina. The club¬
women had decided on a Clean-up Day,
when it occurred to her that in order to make
it a real cleaning day the city should be
cleaned, and not merely that fraction of it
which least needed cleansing. So she pro¬
posed to the club-women that for the health
of their own households, as well as for other
obvious reasons, they should invite the lead¬
ers of all the Negro women's societies to a
conference, get them interested in the move¬
ment, and have a Clean-up Day which would
leave the city clean. They expected perhaps
a dozen Negro women, and seventy came.
The mayor of the city and the president of
the Board of Health addressed the gather¬
ing, and then the women talked, white and
black.
"And you'd have been as astonished as we
were if you'd heard those Negroes," she
declared. " Some of them knew as much
about parliamentary proceedings as we did ;
and they were so sensible, they talked so
well, they were so glad to do all they could!
—And I tell you," she added with a little
208 IN BLACK AND WHITE
laugh, " when it came to cleaning up, we had
to hustle to keep up with them.—We don't
expect much sickness in town this summer :
the place—the whole place—is clean."
And Negroes do not respond to ideals?
Let those who give them a chance—a grow¬
ing group among us—testify.
This North Carolina club is not alone. On
the Women's Club page of the Atlanta Con¬
stitution I read recently, in a single issue, ac¬
counts of three Georgia clubs which are co¬
operating with the Negroes of their respective
cities to keep their towns clean and health¬
ful.
The annual meetings of the Virginia State
Board of Charities and Correction are open
to both races. The Negroes report there
their work among their own people; and
the attitude of the Board is one of solicitude
and helpfulness towards all dependents and
delinquents in the commonwealth, rather
than towards those of one race.
It is a Virginia town, too, which is demon¬
strating the wisdom of another form of co¬
operation ; a form so simple, so needed, so
obviously Christian, that one feels it should
only be known to be adopted. I learned of
it from a chance acquaintance whose relatives
live in the town. The Protestant ministers of
STILLMAN INSTITUTE, TUSCALOOSA, ALA.
Southern Presbyterian Theological School for Negroes, officered by Southern whites.
Tuscaloosa, Ala.
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 209
the town, he said, both white and black, are
members of the Ministers' Alliance. They
meet once a month, as brothers of Him who
came to serve all races and all classes of
men, to pray and talk and plan for the spiri¬
tual uplift of the whole community. If Christ
came again in the flesh, surely nowhere could
He feel more at home than in a meeting-
place like that.
It is puzzling that the local churches, of all
denominations, all over the South, should
fail as they do in leadership in this matter.
Every large denomination has officially gone
on record, in its highest legislative body, as
recognizing the common brotherhood of the
races, the common duty of the strong race to
Serve the weak one. No voice has been
publicly lifted, in any denomination, to con¬
trovert this doctrine. White ministers have,
undoubtedly, the kindliest feelings to Negroes.
None of them, I think, would hesitate to ac¬
cept gladly any invitation to speak or preach
to a black audience. In my own denomina¬
tion, when one speaks to a conference body
of ministers about our duty to the Negroes
there is, of recent years, a deep, and often
moving, response; and the presiding bishop
never fails to press the duty home. And we
are not double-faced, nor cowards. But I
210 IN BLACK AND WHITE
doubt if, in any state, a dozen ministers
could be found, in all denominations put
together, who make a practice of preaching,
even once in two or three years, about race
relations, or our duty to our black poor, or
the connection between the Negro quarters
of our cities and the interests of the kingdom
of God. Yet these things enter into the
warp and woof of daily life in the South,
and help or hinder the growth in Christian
character of every member of every church.
It is true the leaders of the South's best
thought and action regarding the Negroes
are church-members, grown up under South¬
ern preachers; and in at least three great
denominations the head of the work for
Negroes is a minister, officially backed by
his church. Yet the pulpits of the South
rarely speak of those problems which press
upon us all, and for which there is no solu¬
tion outside the teachings of Christ. In this
as in other things, the country over, the
1 churches have yielded their crown of leader¬
ship to members who must do much of their
| work along lines largely ignored by the rank
and file of the ministry.
Yet there are exceptions, each one a shin¬
ing example of the leadership possible to our
pulpits. Not long ago, after an outburst of
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 211
race antagonism which was being chronicled
and condemned in all the papers, I asked a
Negro from a neighbouring state if such
feeling existed in his section.
"No, ma'am, it don't," he answered em¬
phatically ; " not for a long time."
" Then it used to exist ? "
"Oh, yes'm. We ain't had a thing but
trouble till these last few years."
" What stopped it ? "
" A white preacher stopped it. He thought
some of the things done weren't right; and
he got all the white preachers in town to
agree to preach about Christ's way of treat¬
ing coloured folks, all on the same day.
They all did it again a month later, and
once or twice more that year. And as long
as he stayed there they all preached about it
together that way, a time or two each year;
and there ain't any trouble since. I heard
tell two or three white folks got mad about
it; but the preachers stuck it out. And now
all the white folks treat us right, and we all
are behaving better, and everybody is pros¬
pering a heap better than they used to."
Instances like this will multiply as our
social conscience quickens. A fresh, clean
wind stirs over the South before which
old mists of prejudice are lifting. Insufficient
212 IN BLACK AND WHITE
and halting as the work of the churches has
been, it has yet testified to the Christian
duty of service and the Christian doctrine of
brotherhood. That all the churches must at
some points, perhaps at many, be readjusted
to conditions few who love them will deny: but
in England, and in America, North and South,
it is the churches which have created that
social conscience which some deem all-suffi¬
cient without the churches, and at which the
churches themselves sometimes look askance,
as at a rival which would usurp their domin¬
ion. The Southern Sociological Congress is
the first South-wide expression of this nascent
conscience; and no one who attended the
Congress meetings, in Nashville or in Atlanta,
could fail to be impressed with the religious
spirit in which men of many faiths had met
to consider their common duties to the un¬
privileged of the South.
Out of the first meeting of the section on
Race Relations came the appointment of
a Southern University Commission on the
Negro, with a representative from nearly
every Southern state university. This com¬
mission met for organization in December,
1912. It reported to the Atlanta Congress a
broad outline of investigation to be under¬
taken in regard to conditions—religious,
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 213
educational, hygienic, economic and civic;
the duty of whites in improving these condi¬
tions ; and the ideal of race-relations towards
which the South should work. No one who
has heard these men speak, as several have
already done in public, can doubt that large
hearts and clear brains are at work upon the
whole subject in a spirit of justice and service.
This is not the place to discuss the Con¬
gress at large; but it furnished many evi¬
dences of a social conscience at last astir on
all community interests. The sectional meet¬
ings on Race Relations were a dream come
true—a dream of a new South, with the old
spirit of sympathy once more in the heart of
the strong, and hands of human brotherhood
held out to the weaker race. The privileged
South has at last opened its doors of counsel
and invited the unprivileged to enter in and
talk over, men with men, the needs and duties
which confront them both in making the land
a home of justice and opportunity for all.
But that was not the whole story. With
Southern white and Southern black speaking
from the same platform, and seeing in so
many things eye to eye at last, were men of
that other class so long misunderstood and
misjudged among us—the men of the North
who came long ago to meet a great human
214 IN BLACK AND WHITE
need among those whom we, for the dark
time being, had closed our hearts against.
North and South and black and white met
there, and pledged their common service to
a common humanity, a common country,
and a common God.
We stood, for those brief days, on one of
those mountain tops from which the end is
seen, near and beautiful and real. After¬
wards, one turns to the rugged path again,
and faces the long, long road. But the end
is still real and beautiful, and as certain as
Love itself. And as for nearness, shall one
measure the life of the Race of Man by one's
own narrow years; or the world-wide victory
that awaits by one's tiny measure of personal
failure or success ? Though we ourselves
pass not over, yet shall our brothers possess
the land, and dwell there.
Sometimes a biologist, studying tissues
under the microscope, will stain some cells
and not others, that he may the better unravel
some of life's obscure interactions.
I think God has done that in the South,
dyeing our weak ones black, that it may be
clear to the most careless what the weak
have to suffer from the selfishness of the
strong. Once we begin to see, it ought to be
SERVICE AND COOPERATION 215
easier for us than for others to learn com¬
munity righteousness, because the effects of
evil are made so plain among us. And those
who look on from afar should, rather than
criticize us, watch more closely their own com¬
munity life, where the strong may wrong the
weak in less spectacular fashion.
It may be long before it is all stopped.
The evil is great everywhere ; and we of the
South have been slow to start our part of the
fight against it. But we have started now,
at last—not as individuals only, as heretofore;
but as a constantly-growing group of South¬
ern folk who feel the common obligation of
those who have to serve those who have not.
And having taken these first steps in rec¬
ognition of our share of a world-task the
main peculiarity of our Southern situation
has vanished. For we have joined hands,
we too, at last, with the privileged of earth
elsewhere, to set free those without privilege;
to serve our neighbour, not according to the
colour of his skin, but according to his need.
VII
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US
BEING parents is the deepest thing in
life. It runs away back of humanity,
out into the wild, free places, where
the bird broods high in air, and the weed pours
all its being into its seed, and dies. It is
doubtless this blood-kinship stirring in us
when we yearn for the woods, and the moun¬
tains, and the sea; some inarticulate inner
consciousness knows all these as homes of
life, our common heritage, our common trust.
With all the weight of suffering of those to
whom the highest honours of that trust have
been committed, and who have, as yet, failed
to be worthy of them, we turn back to these
haunts of simpler and more loyal forms of
life for rest, and for strength and courage for
the long road our feet have yet to go.
Parenthood is a thing to bind all life in
one. It is not merely that nothing human is
foreign to us afterwards : no life that grows
by sacrifice is alien ; and that is all the life
there is.
It seems the miracle of the ages that we,
216
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US 217
on the summit of life, we humans, should have
made this thing unclean : that the power to
pass on the torch of life, to call out of noth¬
ingness those who shall shape the future of
the race—that this, of all things, should be
the force to make men beasts again, and to
build for multitudes of the women of all races
an age-long hell on earth.
At least one good should come of it: it
should bind the women of the world in one,
Being a woman goes deeper than being of
this race or that, or of this or that social
station. Red, yellow, or black, or white, we
carry the world's sins on our shoulders, its
degradation and anguish in our hearts. It
all falls on the women, the lust, the degra¬
dation, the suffering. And what is a keener
agony, a more intolerable shame, it falls on
the women's daughters, whom they won
in the valley of death. Have we not
reason to stand together, we women of the
world ? A Chinese girl hawked publicly by
her owner on the streets of Shanghai, an
Indian maid betrayed in the forest, girls of our
own race by scores of thousands, Negro girls
whom men of no race reverence—where is
the difference ? They are women, women all;
and women bore them : women should stand
together for the womanhood of the world
218 IN BLACK AND WHITE
It burns like fire when first we grasp that
truth. It is inevitable, in the beginning,
when the knowledge of broken lives first
flares in our faces, and we reach hands of
fellowship to draw some poor outcast back
into the circle of human sympathy again, that
women's standing together should mean to
us their standing against the men. We are
quick to hate, when we are young ; and men
are an easy mark. Nothing excuses them to
us, nothing palliates. An honoured father, a
brother whom we trust, a husband well-be¬
loved—these are the accidents of the sex;
creatures in whom, by some great miracle, a
touch of their mothers' souls has turned dross
to gold : but for men . The sharpest
trial of faith is no mental question to a
woman ; it comes straight from the heart of
life, terrible and fierce : Would a good God
make women as women are made, and shut
them up in the same world with men ?
And then, into such a woman's life, is sent
a little son. He shall defy the law of his
sex; he shall be pure, though all men else
follow the common path.
She lives her son's life, and so she wins the
freedom of his world. It takes imagination,
and patience, and sympathy, and time. But
when he begins to run with other boys she
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US 219
has his confidence; and so she learns, as we
all must, by love, and not by hate.
What chance have they, these little boys,
any more than the girls whose lives they
poison ? Before they know the meaning of
words or acts their lives are poisoned, too.
We care for everything about them, bodies
and minds, except this highest thing, which
we call unclean, and hide. It is not a ques¬
tion of a child's being taught or not taught;
he learns, as surely as he lives and breathes.
It is a question of how he shall be taught: in
truth and cleanness, or in lies and filth. And
because this power is the highest intrusted to
us, because its perversion causes more misery
and degradation than everything else put to¬
gether, the right training of children in mat¬
ters of sex is a basal necessity for the world's
progress in righteousness. Shall we dare to
remain prudes when we see what silence
costs our children, sons and daughters both ?
Love takes no account of such childish shrink¬
ing, however much love may feel it: love
serves the beloved unashamed, and at any
cost. And love can find a way.
'•The future of both races in the South is
more deeply concerned in this than in any
other one thing. For to the pure all achieve¬
ment is possible ; and for the impure rotten-
220 IN BLACK AND WHITE
ness and decay are certain. There is no
reason whatever for believing that any one
country or section sins above the rest in this
matter. Where two races of different colours
dwell side by side, one strong, one weak, the
evidences of sin are not to be hidden: yet
the sin exists no less, though less visibly,
where strong and weak are of one skin. But
there is no section of any country which is
not implicated in the authorized statement of
physicians of world-repute that seventy per
cent, of the men of Christendom are, or have
been, sufferers from vice-diseases. The
meaning of such a statement staggers the
mind: the stunted bodies and souls of chil¬
dren, women's long-drawn-out torments, the
maiming of mind and flesh, the perverts, the
paupers, the insane I Shall we be ashamed
to remove burdens like these from those who
shall follow us ? Shall we shrink from send¬
ing the children of the South out unhandi-
capped, strong of body and pure in mind, to
build the homes of the future ; homes where
white folk dwell, where black folk dwell, each
secure from wrong and from fear ?
For it can be so. There is a new day
breaking. Old evils, hoary with the centuries
until we have accepted them as inseparable
from life itself, are being challenged, defied.
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US 221
The German Government believes the purity
of young men not impossible of attainment.
It orders the instruction in sex hygiene of
every college student in the land. At a re¬
cent annual meeting of the American Medical
Association one of their leading speakers, in
a formal address, called on the churches of
America to aid the doctors in their fight
against the social evil by the teaching of sex
hygiene. The doctors stood long, many of
them, for the necessity of " wild oats." As
an association they have now endorsed the
movement for social purity as a necessity for
personal and social health. That great, con¬
servative organization, the Church of Eng¬
land, has undertaken a year's-long campaign
against the social evil, with the avowed in¬
tention of uprooting it from English life.
Time was when we thought yellow fever
was providential. A providence which made
yellow fever an integral part of the scheme
of things would be benevolent indeed beside
a providence which made this loathsome can¬
cer a necessity of human life. We had yel¬
low fever because we had not learned to des¬
troy the breeding-places of the pests which
carry it. We have the social evil for exactly
the same reason.
Its breeding-places are in the unclean
222 IN BLACK AND WHITE
thoughts of children and young people who
were made to think cleanly. There is noth¬
ing more wonderful, more sacrificially pure,
than the great law of life by which life comes
from life, and like from like, strong life from
pure, and weak from foul, which runs through
all the organisms of earth. When a child be¬
gins to question he needs—and she—not lies,
but the clean truth. If the mother does not
answer somebody else will; and then the
poison will be at work.
A child can be taught unconsciously to rev¬
erence the life-giving power which he holds
in trust. When the stress of temptation
comes, swift and sharp, he may find himself
prepared. He need not battle in the dark,
ignorant of himself, of the meaning of life, of
its dangers and rewards. A girl can be pro¬
tected in all purity, that in time of danger she
may so remain. Our parents did not know :
but for an intelligent parent to send children
out to-day defenseless against the contagions
of school life is a neglect the child may find
it impossible to forgive.
There is a little book by Ellen Torrelle,
published by Heath, called " Plant and Animal
Children, and How They Grow." One need
not be botanist or biologist to make its stories
clear to children's minds; and a child who
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US 223
understands its facts is unconsciously fortified
against uncleanness. There is no room for
impurity concerning the origin of life, not
because it has been inveighed against, but
because its possible place has been filled with
thoughts beautiful and pure. Another book,
which all adults and every adolescent boy
should read, is Lavinia Dock's " Hygiene and
Morality," published by the Putnams. In ad¬
dition to these, and for many purposes, par¬
ents would do well to read Stanley Hall's
" Youth," published by Appleton. There are
many other books, large and small, a list of
which may be had from the National Vigi¬
lance Committee, in New York.
The time is not far distant when the teach¬
ing of such books as Miss Torrelle's will be
obligatory in the earlier grades of the public
schools; and when that is secured for those
who shall come after us, the poor man's
home, North, South and West, will be safer—
yes, and the homes of the privileged too.
For this hideous infection can never be con¬
fined, while it exists at all, to one economic
class, or to this or that locality. It breeds
misery and degradation for the community,
just so far as it breeds at all.
But education is not the only measure ; nor
need we wait for a new generation to grow
224 IN BLACK AND WHITE
up to introduce wide-spread reform. Health
laws should compel all physicians, as they al¬
ready do those of a few states in other sec¬
tions, to report not only cases of the lesser
contagions, such as scarlet fever, diphtheria
and the like ; but also the far more danger¬
ous contagions of the vice-diseases. With
this law goes a second, requiring a physi¬
cian's certificate to the applicant's freedom
from contagious disease before a marriage
license can be issued. These laws are being
widely advocated by physicians of the high¬
est standing, by social workers everywhere,
and by many health officers, parents, educa¬
tors and ministers.
Another law urgently needed in many
states, and in no section more than in our
own, is one raising the age of consent to at
least eighteen years. In some of our South¬
ern states it is ten years. The mere statement
of such a fact would come as a shock to
any but the most nascent social conscience.
What of morality can we hope to evolve in
the classes most in need of morality, white and
black, when the defenseless childhood of the
poor is held so cheap by law ?
But beyond all this, what can the privileged
mothers do for those unprivileged, the strong
to help the weak ? For women should stand
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US 225
together, for the manhood and the woman¬
hood of the world. Mothers cannot, if they
would, break the tie which binds them to
both sexes, to the whole human race.
Privilege exists for one end only—that it
may become the common servitor of all.
We pray such curious prayers sometimes, in
the pulpit and out of it—prayers which auto¬
matically prevent their own fulfillment. We
are so anxious for " especial" care and good,
for " peculiar" blessings, for things which
•would mark us as a folk apart, or a family,
or even an individual, sheltered from ordi¬
nary trials, lifted above the multitude who
hunger, separated from the common lot,
favoured of heaven beyond other folk!
A god who would answer prayers like
those it should be beneath one's self-respect
to pray to. If he be not equally the God of
all flesh, he is no god for any flesh to petition.
For there is a deep sense in which God Him¬
self must be thought of in terms of humanity,
so that no one who seeks fullness of life, which
is fullness of love, may dare ask any protec¬
tion, any mercy, any good for any aspect of our
many-sided life, the giving of which would
imply anything whatever " especial" in the
sense that it is not open, to the limit of his
need, to the least of all flesh who may ask for it.
226 IN BLACK AND WHITE
But more than that. When we get this
background of prayer in our minds, this true
perspective of our own needs in relation to
those of the rest of the world, we see the
basis of justice on which the fulfilling of those
needs must rest. It is for lack of justice in
our petitions that we have so largely been, in
all the ages,
" Bafflers of our own prayers, from youth to life's
last scenes."
Mothers should understand, because love
costs them more, and so they should be wiser
in its ways. There can be no safe basis for
prayer for one's child except this basis of
justice. If we desire protection for our
daughters, or purity for our sons, strong
bodies for them and trained minds, a place
for happy play, freedom and joy in work, a
life made rich by love and service, it is
strange that we should dare to ask these
things of a just God except as we pledge our
full strength to effort to secure like good for
all the children, the world around, to whom
it is denied.
What things that we desire for our children
do Negro children lack? I do not mean the
luxuries, nor even many of the comforts of life :
but those basal necessities to any clean, effi-
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US 227
cient, hopeful life, however humble and poor:
abundant water and fresh air, with a knowl¬
edge of their uses ; houses where homes are
possible ; sanitary surroundings; school train¬
ing which really trains; a chance for clean
play ; mothers who can approximate a moth¬
er's duties; religious instruction related to
daily life. Without these things, what kind
of people are they foredoomed to be ? And
whose is the responsibility ?
But more than that. Women make the
standards for every community in our land.
North, South and West, community morals
and ideals are exactly what, consciously or
unconsciously, the consciences of the priv¬
ileged women of that community permit. If
the morality of the daughters of the very poor
is to be safeguarded anywhere, it must be
done by the privileged women primarily.
And our very poor are black.
We need, in the first place, to see the
women of our poor as women first, and black
afterwards. We need a new respect for them
in our own minds, as children of the one
Father, even as we. We need more faith in
the possibilities of the poorest life which is
born with a capacity, however limited, for
divine things. We need to use our imagina¬
tions, to put ourselves in the Negro woman's
228 IN BLACK AND WHITE
place. We will find the exercise as broaden¬
ing to our own lives as it will be beneficial to
the Negro's. We need to think of Negro
womanhood as sacred, as the womanhood, of
all the world must be. Thinking so, we will
begin to honour its possibilities, and try to
bring them out. And if we hold up that
standard, our men will come to it; they can¬
not help themselves. It is women who rule
the world—or who can rule it, always, if only
they will stand together. It is not merely
that we have the men when they are babies.
Beyond that tremendous fact men are depend¬
ent on women as women are not upon men.
When women fix the terms on which men
may secure their companionship and their
love men must meet the conditions: they
have no escape. Only, women must stand
together, for womanhood, and for the race.
Let us plan the future of the South we love
under a wide sky. Let us plan, not for our
children merely, nor for our race, else can the
plans never bear full fruit. All that we want
for our own let us plan for the children of the
South, rich and poor, high and low, black
and white : strong bodies, clean minds, hands
skilled to labour, hearts just and kind and
wise. Children do not grow like that of
themselves, any more than roses grow
THOSE WHO COME AFTER US 229
double in the swamps: it is the children's
power to respond to cultivation which lays
upon us the duty of giving it.
I knew a family once where there were
several normal children, and one little child,
the youngest, whom epilepsy had reduced
almost to idiocy. He was most repulsive
to me when I first saw him, before I under¬
stood. He seemed that awful thing which
some imagine they see in the world's un¬
developed races—something in human shape
without human capacity.
But his parents loved him so much 1 Their
tenderness never failed for him, their care
never abated. They loved the other children
dearly, too; but this child needed them so
much : they loved him according to his need.
Think of them for a moment—the hordes of
the unprivileged of every race; those cut off
from joy ; the folk whose years are filled only
with a great emptiness, with immeasurable
ignorance and want; the mass of men and
women, really, the vast majority of the human
race. And God so loves the world—just so:
according to the need.
VIII
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
I CAN NOT close this little book without
a word concerning those whose child¬
hood is behind them, and who are soon
to take their places in that great array of
toilers whose hands are moulding the world's
life in the present. Life looms before them
as the Great Adventure, wherein difficulties
and trials may await them, but which, in
some unknown, far-off place, shall issue in
achievement; in something which shall win
them a place and honour which their own
effort has secured for them, well-deserved.
We older people, the mass of us at least,
look on as the raw recruits pass out, and
smile, some of us kindly, some pityingly,
some with bitterness, seeing their young
enthusiasms, the high resolves and hopes
which drive them, the gleam of the half-
formed ideals which lure them on. Life will
grip these over-confident children, we think,
and trim them all to one sober pattern by the
time they reach middle age. They will learn
230
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 231
fast enough to accept its drudgery and to
bow to its yoke. In the valley of old age
they will stand much as their fathers stood,
moulded by life, not moulding it, their
laughter done ; strong perhaps, but strong
chiefly to accept and to bear the inevitable.
Is that the normal end of youth, the natural
outcome of the Great Adventure ; or are we
so ill-adjusted to our environment that the
abnormal is the usual and the normal the un¬
common outcome of the quest ?
Surely power is never intended for futility,
and only ignorance can unmoved see it turned
to waste. Yet if we measure in terms of hu¬
man energy the advance of any one genera¬
tion, and compare it with the force originally
applied to secure advance, with that fund of
energy, of hope and joy which we sum up as
youth, the waste of power is staggering. It
is only the smallest fraction of it which has
been utilized : the rest has been absorbed by
frictions which have largely wrecked the
generators themselves. The energy of youth
has gone to the destruction of all that makes
youth young and wonderful. The one-time
possessors of it stand broken, exhausted,
numbed, in the valley of the Shadow ; and
the world they intended to lift has turned by
a hair's breadth, and no more.
232 IN BLACK AND WHITE
Yet some find youth but a gateway into a
life which knows no age. Their bodies grow
older, but only to reveal to the puzzled looker-
on how very little years are concerned with
either age or youth. Down to the very last
their hearts are young, their fine enthusiasms
unspent, their sympathies quick and keen,
their joy unbroken, their hope a light no
shadow can quench. Out of a long life filled,
as we may know, chiefly with drudgeries and
trials like our own, they come with young,
eager eyes, out of which still looks the spirit
of high adventure. Their message to youth
is one of courage and hope :
" Grow old along with me !
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made."
Surely that is the normal attitude of age,
the natural outcome of youth and endeavour
and hope. Wherever we see it, even the
dullest of us, it appeals to some deep thing
in us which, despite all our pessimism, justi¬
fies it, even against our will. It is so beauti¬
ful we know it must be true: all age was
meant to be like that.
But how shall youth attain it ? What
subtle force has turned one life into this flash¬
ing diamond, and left another only dull, black
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 233
coal, though they are both alike compact of
a common humanity, and share its common
lot ? How shall we gear the spirit of youth,
how band the individual to life in such man¬
ner that he may serve it without being broken
by it; that he may drive on towards the ful¬
fillment of his dreams, nor lose his hope, nor
despair of the far achievement, but keep even
in age
" The rapture of the forward view,"
and the spirit of immortal joy ? If life be the
Great Adventure how may one achieve it
greatly, and know one's self a victor, even in
the midnight of defeat ?
One must live the normal human life to
secure all that. We cannot expect human
issues from a life lived on the animal's plane.
An animal which is only an animal may come
to the best of itself in isolation, an unrelated
unit of its race. A young colt, or pig, or
calf, left on an island where no other animal
life existed, but provided with food and shelter
the primal animal needs, would be as perfect
an animal as one reared in association with
droves of its own kind. But a creature which
is an animal and something more never
comes to the best of itself when only those
needs are met which may be satisfied in
234 IN BLACK AND WHITE
isolation. There are several authentic rec¬
ords of wolf-raised human young, and they
have all reverted to the animal type. Kip¬
ling's Mowgli, fascinating as he is, is in¬
spired by his creator's own imagination ; a
real Mowgli could never have taken his place
among human beings again, even on the
edge of the jungle. Real wolf-children are
like the Wild Man of Auvergne, whom a wise-
hearted scientist laboured with so patiently
over a hundred years ago. Cut off from hu¬
man association the human in us atrophies
beyond recall. For the primal law of human
life is that to be truly human it must be shared
with its kind.
When we get down to principles of life we
are prone, unconsciously, to fall into Biblical
phraseology ; the roots of principles seem to
run in that direction. It is literally true that
no man liveth or dieth to himself: humanity,
is made that way. Whatever lives and dies
some other way is not human, but animal.
We live, we draw on the sources of life, we
nourish and strengthen it, in exact measure
as we share it with the race.
This is the secret of our wasted joy, our
lost enthusiasms, our broken hopes : we have
failed of the normal human life, the life of
race-association, the life of brotherhood.
POOR HOUSING CONDITIONS IN THE SOUTH
(Courtesy of Tl-J. Tr. fitokes Fellow, University of Georgia.)
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 235
The drop of water has lost itself and perished
in the desert of individual desire, instead of
finding itself in the stream of community life
which trickles down through ever-widening
associations to the great ocean of the Life of
Man. In a most vital sense, the normal man,
full-grown, has nothing to do with sections or
boundaries, except as they help him to un¬
derstand those of his brothers whom they
dwarf and bind. For himself, he is a citizen
of the world ; and nothing in human life is
foreign to him, past, present, or to come.
The sense of race-life in himself, one atom of
the mass, of the race-life whose laws govern
atom and mass alike, opens all life to him,
steadies his courage, heals his wounds, re¬
news his youth, and feeds the flame of hope.
One's individual joy may be clouded so
easily, and so soon ; it is such a small, weak
thing, taken by itself. It is part of the law
of life that it should be so ; for he who would
be man and not animal must be welded into
one with his fellows; and love itself is not
enough, without pain.
Suffering is so inexplicable, at first; it sets
one apart while life sweeps by. But one has
to be apart to get the perspective of life, to
see small and great in their true proportions,
to learn the unshakable things, and to get
236 IN BLACK AND WHITE
one's own small personality properly related
to them. At first, with all of us, it is the old
cry : Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow,
or difficulty like to mine ?—That is the cry
of ignorance, of weakness, of selfishness,
of egotism and provincialism, the world
around. It has gone up in all ages, and will
go up for ages yet to come.
But if one turns from one's atom-sorrow
for a moment to take the race-wide, age-long
look, one sees that always, everywhere, such
sorrows have been. They are part of the
race-lot. And everywhere there are, and
have been, men and women who have borne
them bravely, and lived and died without bit¬
terness or complaint. Their lives are part of
the race inheritance ; their courage lifts us up.
What man has done we can do ; they fought
their battles not for themselves alone. The
strength of the race flows into us : we too can
greatly bear ; we too can wear the badge of
courage to hearten those who stumble by the
way. If the race must advance through suf¬
fering we will walk that path. We would
not be exempt, cut off. Shall we alone, of all
the multitudes, bear no scars ?
Personal success means something differ¬
ent after that. The Adventure itself is differ¬
ent ; greater, and more worth while. The
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 237
quest one would achieve is fullness of life;
the path to it matters not so much. And full¬
ness of life is never personal, but human.
One has cast in one's lot with the race; and
in doing that, whatever struggles are yet to
come, the visible can no longer master the
unseen. One is delivered from that poverty
of soul.
The greatest danger of education is that it
may be twisted, just like ignorance, to the
service of intellectual arrogance, and so may
breed spiritual decay. We all need world-
association ; but especially those need it who
are unusually gifted, that they may escape
the catastrophe of an emasculating egotism.
The man who is the mental superior of all his
associates can neutralize that dangerous mis¬
fortune only by finding his equals and his
superiors wherever, in the race-life, they have
blossomed to the light. He must break the
shackles of time and place to commune with
the mind of the race ; and through that com¬
munion must learn the humility inevitable to
him who measures himself by universal,
rather than by provincial standards. Thus
disciplined, he may add his atom of force to
the race-impetus towards righteousness with¬
out pride and without shame.
In such an association the race gains in-
238 IN BLACK AND WHITE
finitesimally: the individual gains the eman¬
cipation of his individuality, and walks hence¬
forth at liberty and with joy. The sting is
gone from the thwarting narrowness of
life; for the small task, set in its large rela¬
tions, is at once worth while. He is lifted
enough above pettiness, his own and that of
others, to know it for what it is, and to be
safe from the hurt of it. Personal defeat, too,
loses its bitterness. However his individual
life goes down in ruins, the great powers of
truth and brotherhood to which he has com¬
mitted himself remain ; that for which he
struggled will triumph yet. His life, defeated
though it be, is part of the victory of the race.
One's sense of joy is widened. Indeed, it
has to be, or one could not endure the shar¬
ing of the sorrows of mankind. But the race
is achieving, always. Each day sees some¬
thing done which stirs the blood in the long
" World-war of dying flesh against the life."
Each day somewhere the curtains of the
dark are lifted, and new knowledge gives
new light. Each day men and women of all
races, plain, simple folk like ourselves, are
meeting difficulties with high hearts, unknown
heroes in unguessed fights. And we are a
part of all of it; we all work to one end.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 239
Seen from the narrow window of a de¬
tached personal experience, life is confusing,
baffling, coming no-whence, going no-
whither, bound blind to the wheel of chance,
and broken as it turns. It is the race-look
which reveals the truth. The confusions are
temporary, local, born of continued readjust¬
ments to higher levels. Whatever its weak¬
ness or its ignorance, life tends up. Men die,
and races pass ; but Man rises. One is no
longer afraid of changes, though to the atom's
unrelated consciousness the very foundations
seem threatened. There is a Power that
guides: and in the end, that which was
planned from the beginning shall be.
So it is that the consciousness of race-life
forms the rich background of our own small
existence, giving depth and colour to our
thin personalities, enriching and beautifying
the poorest life which may be set against it.
It saves us, too, in those times which come
to all of us, when a sense of the futility of life
descends upon us like a great black frost,
shrivelling effort which had promised fruit¬
age, and numbing the sources of energy and
hope. It is then that we warm our hearts at
the hearthstone of humanity, folded deep in
the consciousness of a life which bears our
tiny being on its breast, and which moves
240 IN BLACK AND WHITE
unerringly, if slowly, through seed-time and
harvest, summer and winter, to one sure,
high, far-off goal.
But the race-life is not only shelter and sol¬
ace in days of suffering or defeat: it is also
our inspiration and joy.
To him who walks in love among his
neighbours in the little happenings of every
day, and out into love's wider paths of com¬
munity service, there comes, sooner or later,
a day when every cloud is withdrawn; when
he sees back to the low beginnings of life,
and on, to its far fulfillment. He sees human¬
ity in its first home, there in the mud and
slime of things, pushing feebly forward here
and there, driven by sharp necessity, inch by
inch, dyeing the path with its own blood, yet
slowly accumulating, out of its own suffer¬
ings, forces which purify and lift it. It be¬
gins to live not by bread alone: each least
advance is purchased for it by some sacrifi¬
cial life. From every rank of the vast savage
mass the Givers come, offering up man's life
for the Life of Man. Seer and sage and war¬
rior, king and peasant, master and slave,
mothers whom no man may number, they
pour out life like water, and thereby fructify
the barren souls of the multitude, and create
ideals for the race.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 241
What else should life be for ? What trace
is left of all the beast-lives lived solitary in the
mass, smothered in egotism, cut off by self¬
ishness—what, but an added weight for
these, the Givers, to lift ?
Love is the motive force of life, and it
gathers, more and more. Out of the mass
emerge those races whose growing powers
endue them with the greatest capacity for
sacrifice, for following the ideal at all costs.
However the majority of even these foremost
races may fall short, however the hard-won
earnings of the race are perverted by the
many to personal ends, Love does make
headway, slowly. All that the Givers would
win for men of liberty, of knowledge, of jus¬
tice, of joy, filters down unceasingly from
class to class, until already some of the most
precious things of life grow as common to
them all as the air we breathe.
Is not the life of the Givers well-spent?
In all the long, long ages is anything else so
well worth while ? They lost life only to find
it; and being dead, they yet speak to us.
Their voices go up
1' A cry above the conquered years,"
and the deepest things in us stir in answer.
In such an hour we know life for what it
242 IN BLACK AND WHITE
really is—the power which comes in all its
glorious fullness only to those who hold it in
trust for every soul that needs.
Is there room for egotism any more, or
pride—those two chief stranglers of human
joy ? Can one be afraid of " losing caste " by
service ? One lives in a world so far removed
from all that—the world of fullness of life ; a
world wide with freedom, and rich with love,
and bright with victory, however one's own
small fortunes may rise or fall. For the soul
has come into its own, and found its home,
close to the heart of God, in the needs of
humankind.
Shall we fail of this wide, free life here in
the South because of old prejudice, and black
skins over the needs ? Shall we, who were
once so low, who have risen, not through
decades but through centuries, risen by life
poured out, reaping our gain from the sacrifice
of the ages, heirs in direct spiritual succes¬
sion of all foregone races of men, shall we,
of all mankind, withhold our bread from
the hungry, and justice from the oppressed?
We are so ready to use what we have
inherited, not for service, but for pride. If
humanity be like the earth, we say, we are
its mountain-peaks, the Himalayas of the
race.—But the seas rolled over the mountains
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 243
once; and seas may roll there again. To
the long look, the true look, the look to which
a thousand years are but a day, mountains
have risen before, and have disappeared.
" The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves, and go."
The earth alone abides, mother of all moun¬
tains that ever were, or will be.
If life is not to grow dull to us, young or
old, or its glamour fade; if we are one day
to stand on those heights which belong to
age rather than on the dull, flat barrens at
their base ; if life is to remain the Great
Adventure, full of promise and wonder even
in that last twilight before the eternal dawn,
we must live it normally, through the years,
despising no service that sets another heart
at ease or opens a rift of opportunity to the
poorest and least.
The beginnings of all great things are
small. Indeed, most great things are small
all the way through, made up of trifles, and
great only in their accumulated results. Only
the fewest people have great gifts or oppor¬
tunities ; and often they are not the ones who
achieve the greatest things. A world filled
244 IN BLACK AND WHITE
with ordinary folk and based on justice
necessitates a broad path straight from the
commonplaces of every day up to the highest
heights. And we have just that. The basal
necessity is not knowledge, nor power, but
love; and that is the greatest and the most
freely attained of all human possessions.
Rich or poor or ignorant or learned, the
Great Adventure shall be achieved by all who
walk in love.
Printed in the United States of America
2