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by
booker t. washington
BEING COMMENTS ON
"The Basis of Ascendancy"
BY
edgar gardner murphy
Committee of Twelve
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE INTERESTS OF THE NEGRO RACE
CHEYNEY, PA.
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by
booker t. washington
BEING COMMENTS ON
"The Basis of Ascendancy"
BY
edgar gardner murphy
Committee of Twelve
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE INTERESTS OF THE NEGRO RACE
CHEYNEY, PA.
The Negro and the "Solid South"
(Courtesy of "The Independent")
By Booker T. Washington.
A few weeks ago I made an extended trip thru the State
of Virginia, spending seven days in visiting the different cities
and towns along the line of the new Virginia Railway, which
runs from Deepwater, W. Va., to Norfolk, Va. During the
course of that visit I had an opportunity to observe for myself
the condition of the colored people in the places thru which
we passed and also to talk with a number of prominent and
influential white people in regard to the progress of the Negroes
living in that section of the country.
One of the things that imprest me most upon this journey
was the number and the character of the young white men I
met who seemed to have, not only a very definite knowledge
of, but a very sympathetic interest in the success and the prog¬
ress of the colored people about them.
One of these men, for example, told me that, after finish¬
ing his studies in a Virginia college, he had traveled all over
the North and West, hoping to find a place where he could
settle down and go to work. After looking the whole country
over he had decided to return to Virginia, where he was born
and reared. He had settled in one of the little towns that have
sprung up along the line of the new railway, and is now seek¬
ing, as he told me, to lay the foundation for his own fortune
by doing what he is able to build up both races. He was one
of many Southern men I have met recently who have discov¬
ered that their own success and that of the South lies, not in
the direction of holding the black man down, but in building
him up, making him strong, mentally, morally and econom¬
ically.
A few days after my return from Virginia there came into
my hands a book, written by one of this same younger genera¬
tion of Southern white men to which I have referred. In this
book I found all that I had heard upon my trip thru Virginia
and much that I had heard elsewhere, written out and ex¬
pounded in a systematic way, making of the casual statements
I had heard a sort of philosophy.
In no book which has ever come into my hands have I ever
found the policy advocated by some, which seeks to solve the
problem of the Southern States by keeping the Negro ignorant,
3
so clearly analyzed and described, and nowhere, I may add,
have I found this policy so thoroly discredited and condemned
as in this latest volume of Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of
Montgomery, Ala., to which he has given the title, "The Basis
of Ascendancy."
The thing that makes the book significant, however, is not
so much the fact that it condemns and discredits the policy
which would deny to the Negro the opportunity to advance
along the lines in which he has the capacity to do so, but be¬
cause it shows the futility of it, and outlines a policy which is
based upon mutual good will, and gives to both races an oppor¬
tunity to share in the upbuilding of the new South.
As the title of this book suggests, it is addressed particu¬
larly to the white people of the Southern States and seeks to
define the terms upon which the Southern people can maintain
the ascendancy of the white man in the South and regain for
the Southern people that large influence in the affairs of the
country and of the world that they once held.
In the course of his argument the author points out that
the Negro question is not, in its widest significance, a local
nor a national question, but is one of the problems that in one
way or another touches every people in the world. In the
larger sense it is the problem of so adjusting the relations of
the different peoples and races of the world that all can live
side by side in peace and prosper. In such a world, however,
the only chance for a superior race is that it should lift the
races and peoples that are down. In no other way, says Mr.
Murphy in effect, can the superior race prove its superiority
and maintain its ascendancy.
In order to show that this is a stubborn practical fact and
not a mere sentimental idea, Mr. Murphy begins his book by
showing how closely interwoven are the moral and material
interests of both races in the South. Whether the white man
desires it or not, every element of the white man's civilization
has, to some extent and in some way or other, become the
heritage of the black man. In some way or other, and to much
greater degree than is generally supposed, the character of the
white man's civilization is determined by the uses he makes
of it in his relations with the other race. The author says:
"Just as the black man has the use of every street, of every
well-constructed country road, of every railway, of every pub¬
lic utility of every sort—facilities chiefly demanded and sup¬
ported by the commerce and intercourse of the stronger race—
so he enters, also, however humbly or indirectly, into the heri¬
tage of every intellectual and moral asset of the country. If
4
there be freedom of the press; if there be a press fit or unfit
to be free; if there be a vital and spiritual religion; if there be
books, artists, poets; if there be an historic and responsive
language; if there be stable banks, equitable markets, courts
accessible and for the most part just; physicians, hospitals, and
by no means least—the kindly interest of the widest and kind¬
liest of a more highly developed population—these are the
Negro's."
And then he continues, and these words suggest the cen¬
tral theme of all the succeeding pages:
"In so far as they are ours, they are his; in so far as they
are not his, they tend, in subtle, inexorable fashion, not to be
our own. In the fundamental sense we can no more make a
bi-racial division of these things than we can of the sunshine,
the rain, the returning seasons. It is the fate of the land. It
is the tragedy of those of long ago, North and South, who tried
at its birth to divide their labors without dividing their liber¬
ties. We but confront the fiat of reversal. Labor and free¬
dom are indivisible."
Much has been said in recent years of a growing bitterness
between the races. Mr. Murphy has described in detail the
origin and development of this reactionary movement. Many
people in the North and the South have been inclined to look
upon this antagonism between the races as something mys¬
terious and inevitable, which must continue to grow and in¬
crease until it ended in some frightful disaster. Mr. Murphy
does not share this pessimistic view. He says:
"And yet this movement is among us. I have already
dwelt upon the significant intolerance of its logic as it has
viewed the interests of our Negro masses. Its mere radical
spokesmen have proceeded by easy stages from an undiscrimi-
nating attack upon the Negro's ballot to a like attack upon his
schools, his labor, his life—from the contention that no Negro
shall vote to the contention that no Negro shall learn, that no
Negro shall labor, and (by implication) that no Negro shall
live. Weaker groups, if they remain at all, remain to serve
rather than to share."
But this plan is not altogether practicable. "It is the old
effort," as Mr. Murphy says, "to begin where the land began,
but to ignore its history and its sins." He continues:
"There are some things which are not found among the
established privileges of men. No man may choose his pa¬
rents, nor may he choose his native soil. He cannot remake
5
his country's past, nor alter the assumptions or the principles
which have become his civil heritage. More important still,
he may not put these principles into operation upon Monday,
repeal them or modify them on Tuesday, and reimpose them
on Wednesday.
"The fundamental political constitution of a people can¬
not be perpetually readjusted between meals by devices of
application. It cannot be so altered, from instance to instance,
as that it may 'hit the Negro' in one case and in the next may
let the white man off. The thing cannot be done. 'Accidents'
will surely happen. The man who declares boldly that he
will have one law for the white man and another law for the
Negro would like us to believe that the only opposition to his
program lies in the Negro, or in the 'interference of the North,'
or in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution.
But the real obstacle is something else. It is in the very na¬
ture of things; it is in the bone and being of the country; and—
little as he may at first believe it—it is in himself.
"No American, North or South, white or black or yellow,
wants that sort of country. We know, if we know anything
at all, that our own experience is, somehow, the final authority
against arbitrary methods.
"Moreover, the very institutions which our discrimina¬
tions were at first invented to protect are soon, by the increas¬
ing bias of these very discriminations, emasculated of their
proper power. If it is hard to convict a white man of the mur¬
der of a Negro, it soon becomes equally hard to convict him
of the murder of a white man. Courts which find themselves
unable to punish the crimes of a stronger class against a weak¬
er class discover that the legal precedents and the social habit
which have stood between the strong and the weak are likely
at the last to stand between man and man thru all the classes
of the strong. And the failure to punish means the inability
to protect. In any society human life in general tends to be¬
come as cheap as the life of its humblest representative."
Not only is the repression of the Negro, as it has been pro¬
posed by some of the more violent political leaders, imprac¬
ticable, but it is impossible and the South does not want it.
Mr. Murphy says:
"An attitude of unreasoning and permanent repression is
to us more intolerable than to the Negro. We are too busy,
too much interested in other things, too eager for larger enter¬
prises and freer minds, to be consumingly engaged in the busi¬
ness of keeping some one down. The thing, moreover, is im-
possible. Not only is the Negro daily growing stronger, but
the whole world will daily add to his strength in direct propor¬
tion to the repression which he suffers. The universe—like
the peacemaker in the streets—cannot hear our quarrel till the
strong man let the weak man go. The South will never have
its hearing till the fury goes out of certain eyes and the noise
of certain of our public men is stilled. As the world takes the
Negro's part, as the Negro gains in strength, as the South
wearies of its more morbid preoccupations, as the cruder poli¬
cies of repression begin to tremble in the rigid framework of
their terms, the representatives of our reactionary leadership—
in the honest but pitiful hysteria of their fears—would seek
the remedy in more repression, and would attempt by the
shrieking rancor of their appeals to galvanize into further life
the old terrors, and to banish into still fainter distances the
better angels of our age."
There is in the South today a class of sincere and honest
men who have little or no interest in politics, who believe that
the race problem would be solved if Negroes would not merely
acknowledge their present racial weakness, but accept a posi¬
tion of permanent inferiority, without hope or ambition of ris¬
ing to a position of greater usefulness or importance than that
which the masses of them now occupy in the Southern States.
Mr. Murphy does not believe that the caste system is in any
respect a solution of the racial problem. He says:
"A policy of fixt political humiliation toward any class
of our population comports even less with our instincts than
with our interests and our laws. There is no place in our
American system for a helot class. Our country is a democ¬
racy; and whether we will or no we are the inheritors of a
Constitution. This is the second irreducible factor of our
problem. Not only is the Negro a Negro, and not only is that
fact among the realities, but it is also among the realities that
the re-creation of our institutions and the transformation of
the political and social assumptions of our age are not among
our privileges. Nor are such enterprises among our conjec¬
tures or desires. We want no fixt and permanent populations
of 'the inferior.' We may in every personal or social sense
desire separation—that is an issue of personal reserve. It
trenches upon no legal or social right. It inflicts no degrada¬
tion of personal, industrial or political status. It is a dogma,
not of repression, but of self-protection and self-development.
But to legislate the permanent and indiscriminate political
proscription of a whole population is to attempt the refounding
7
of a country which is not exclusively our own, and the revival
and reconstitution of an epoch of class autocracy which Jef¬
ferson, Washington and Marshall had themselves surpassed.
Indeed, our own greater preference is our greater country.
The men of the South—whatever may be their political ex¬
pedients of the moment—have seriously no more interest in
the reactionary philosophies of caste than in the political con¬
ceptions of Nicholas II. If the conscious and deliberate
acceptance of such a status by the weaker group be the only
condition of 'peace,' then we had better have something less
than peace, for it would indicate an absence of manhood in
the weaker population far more serious than an inadequate or
belated political capacity, and an absence of moral sagacity in
the stronger far more costly than any of the conceivable con¬
sequences of racial or political disturbance. To rear the popu¬
lation of a stronger race surrounded by an environment of the
lowly and the menial is difficult enough, but to rear such a
population—virile" in spirit and sensitive to the finer instinct
of self-dependence—thronged by the deliberately menial, by
those who are not only inferior, but who have made a com¬
pact to be so, by those whose lot is an accepted subordination
and a consenting subserviency, would be more difficult by far.
The stronger group within the South, as I have already tried
to illustrate, has suffered indescribably from being pressed
upon, from either side, by a weaker racial life; yet this 'fate
of the strong' has been light compared to the fate involving
that higher racial group which thru long periods of time should
be subjected to the personal, domestic and industrial contact
of a race of men and women wearing the self-accepted and
self-approving status of general proscription. It would in¬
volve a peril to everything in our life that is self-resourceful,
wholesomely self-respecting and soundly strong. For the
member of a weaker race to accept the plain personal fact, in
this instance or that, that his race is inferior, that it has in¬
capacities or weaknesses, is one thing; for a whole race delib¬
erately to accept a fixt legal and collective inequality of status
in a democracy is quite another thing; a thing as injurious
to a stronger group as to a weaker; a thing, moreover, which
there is a Constitution to prevent, and (should the Constitu¬
tion sleep) the quick instinct of the South itself to weigh and
to reject."
The remedy which Mr. Murphy proposes for present con¬
ditions in the South is, as has already been suggested, nothing
fanciful nor even wholly new. The hope of the South is not
8
ill holding the Negro down, but in lifting him up; not in de¬
grading him, but in making him self-respecting. Like most
other thoughtful men in the South, he believes in the education
of the Negro. In regard to the kind of education the Negro
needs, he says:
"As men are educated more largely by their occupations
than by their schools, there can be no ultimate education of
society until the educational significance of economic situa¬
tions and of economic employments—in their reactions upon
individual and social character—are more consciously and
more directly included among the policies of the State."
People who have been disappointed in the results of Negro
education in the South should consider in the first place the
meager quality of the education which the Negro now receives
in some parts of the South. They should consider, also, how
very few Negroes have thus far received a thoro or a practically
valuable education of any kind. But education, the ordinary
education, in and of itself is not sufficient. Says Mr. Murphy:
"Education will not instantly avail. The intelligent do
not at once make more intelligent followers (or leaders) than
the ignorant. The first effect of education in any social group,
whether among the poor of Russia or among the Negroes of
America, will be distracting and divisive. There must be ex¬
perience also; and education is a necessity, not as a substitute
for experience, . . . but because it is the one force which
makes experience available."
Few people consider what this experience is like, particu¬
larly in the case of the Negro who has received some education
and has begun to enter into the larger world that is opened to
him thru the knowledge which enables him to read. On this
point Mr. Murphy says:
"This, after all, is the most significant aspect of the actual
education which a stronger group gives to a weaker. It may
not be amiss if, in a single sentence, the case be overstated to
give it clearness; to teach any group of human beings to read,
and then—in the daily press which encompasses it—to give it
little to read concerning itself except the flaring records of its
crimes or monotonous comments upon its faults; to awaken a
mind (and the very contact of our time is awakening the Negro
mind, whether we give it a school or not), and then to touch
it only with contempt; sharply to demand the development of
high character, and then to class it with the lowest; to insist
9
upon thrift, and then to tolerate such conditions of disadvant¬
age or insecurity to the life and property of the weak as to
take from thrift its deepest economic basis—all this consti¬
tutes an 'education' which cannot be expected to train any
race, much less a weaker one, into the life of a highly useful
or happy population. This, after all, is our question. It is
not a mere question as to the 'rights' of the Negro, as to aca¬
demic and outworn contentions of 'the North' or as to the
controversial justification of this or that political party. It
is a question of practical and fundamental policy. Is the
Negro race at the South, a large and persistent factor in our
economic and political organization, to be, in every funda¬
mental sense, a retrogressive or a co-operative population?
The Negro masses need the schools, but they need even more
profoundly that sort of education, that form of unconscious
training, which is found in the quickening of the fundamental
economic motives—in the renewal of hope, the arousal of ele¬
mentary ambitions, the stimulation of those industrial ten¬
dencies (such as economy, tenacity, frugality) which spring
from a larger sense of security, from a more general confidence
in the average rewards of industry and from the simpler satis¬
faction of educational and civic opportunity. So to touch
them and so to use them in the larger policy of our affairs is
to increase both their power to produce and their power to pur¬
chase, and is to add increasingly to the forces which must
contribute to the common development of the South."
Much has been said and written in regard to the manner
and the extent to which the South has suffered because of the
presence of the Negro as a slave and a free man. Mr. Murphy
has certainly not tried to minimize these disadvantages. He
has pointed out that the very weakness of the black man has
been a constant source of temptation to the white man to take
advantage of and wrong him. Says Mr. Murphy:
"It is not a good thing for any race to be perpetually
dealing with another race with which it does not have to argue,
which it may control without explanation, for whom it may
think without an attempt at persuasion, and for whom it may
act without any real partnership in responsibility."
Notwithstanding this fact, the same weakness of the
Negro which tempts the white man to wrong him, gives to the
white man an opportunity to help him. The author continues:
"In each weakness of every lower social group there lies
an opportunity for exploitation; but in each weakness there
10
lies also an opportunity to help. You may use the weak man
or the weaker group in the one way or in the other, and by
the nature of the use of this man or this group your capacities
and faculties (which take their quality from use) are yielded
to an education which assumes descending and contractive—
or ascending and expanding—forms.
"This is the reason why, altho the average man deterior¬
ates under habitual contact with weaker groups, the excep¬
tional man—in whom the occasions of weakness have devel¬
oped the co-operative rather than the coercive instinct—is,
whether alone, as was Livingstone in Central Africa, or sub¬
merged in the slums of our greater cities, the highest human
type we know. Nor is this the least of the reasons why the
exceptional citizen of the 'Black Belt' of the South is so often
regarded as a most adequate representative of our gentler and
nobler life."
It is from this point of view that Mr. Murphy believes he
is able to define the real issue before the South today. The
South has the opportunity, by dealing with the Negro wisely,
justly, and in a spirit at once of humanity and justice, of re¬
gaining that position of ascendancy it once held in the affairs
of the country and of the world. Says he :
"The issue is always there, for the stronger race so to
dwell with the weaker as to upbuild a common state upon the
basis of the common welfare, and expressive of the common
happiness, may be called the distinctive task of the democratic
imperialism, or of an imperial democracy. Yet it is—in either
case—the supreme problem just now challenging the political
capacity of modern peoples."
This, Mr. Murphy thinks, is the distinctive task, so far as
the United States is concerned, of the South. And he adds:
"We may dislike the task, and may shrink from it, may
much prefer to deal with the issues peculiar to other localities
and peoples, but we cannot escape it; it is the problem which,
in the phrase of the period, is 'up to us.'"
I have sought in this brief review to present the question
discussed in this book in the spirit and, as far as possible, in
the words of the author. I cannot hope that I have succeeded,
in the few quotations I have made, in giving a complete and
wholly satisfactory review of what is, in many ways, the most
searching examination that I remember to have read of the
racial question.
11
In conclusion, I cannot do better than quote the final para¬
graph of Mr. Murphy's book, in which he says:
"Those lands which are conscious of a great difficulty are
not poor. The poor land is that which, having no great diffi¬
culty, busies itself with the fictions of its importance; or the
land having a great difficulty, but finding no way out of its
imperturbable complacency. It was thru the Negro in our ex¬
perience that the South once lost her mastery, not over him
alone, but over those opportunities for a national leadership
and for an uninterrupted enunence of service to which her
capacities entitled her. It may be that thru this same strange
waiting, baffling factor in her life, her ascendancy, in higher
forms, may again return—in forms not threatening the estate
and dignity of labor, the sway of freedom, the instinct and
custom of our age, but bestowed by a labor which she has
freed, and by an age and a democracy which, in her service
to their profoundest task, she has supremely justified."
Tuskegee, Ala.
press of
e. A. WRIGHT BANK NOTE CO.
i 108 Chestnut street
Philadelphia. Pa
12
3Us(t of publications! of tfje Committer of Itoeltte
Anyone may obtain copies of these publications now in print by
writing to the Secretary of the Committee of Twelve, Hugh M. Browne,
Cheyney, Pa., and enclosing for each publication desired a two-cent
paper wrapper, addressed to himself:
♦To the Colored Men of Voting Age in Alabama.
Can the South Solve the Negro Problem? Carl Schurz
Why Disfranchisement is Bad Archibald H. Grimke
♦Voting Instructions to Maryland Voters.
♦What A Colored Man Should Do To Vote.
♦Garrison Centenary Leaflet.
Slavery and the Race Problem in the South. .Hon. Wm. H.Fleming
The Atlanta Riot Ray Stannard Baker
The Negro in America Andrew Carnegie
Address Before the North Carolina Society in New York,
William H. Taft
♦Work of the Colored Law and Order League of Baltimore, Md.,
James H. N. Waring
♦Study of the Negro's Progress in Jackson, Miss...P. W. Woodard
*Negro Self-Help in Education R. R. Wright, Jr.
Negro Self-Help in Home Getting Kelly Miller
Negro Self-Help in Hospital Work George C. Hall, M. D.
Public Taxation and Negro Schools Charles L. Coon
The Negro and the "Solid South" Booker T. Washington
Paragraph
Some Successful Negro Business Men.
Business Co-operation Between White and Neg"ro Men in Helena,
Ark.
East Bessemer, Ala.
Negro Banks in Mississippi.
Over 200,000 of the above articles have been circulated.
*Out of Print.
"My personal experience of the South, small as it is com¬
pared with that of many Northern men who have been from
the first, and still are, leaders in the work of elevating the
Negro, leads me to endorse the opinion of one of the best-
known and foremost of these, the Rev. Lyman Abbott, editor
of the "Outlook," who has recently declared that "never in the
history of man has a race made such educational and material
progress in forty years as the American Negro."
ANDREW CARNEGIE.