Title: The Ultimate Criminal
Author: Archibald Henry Grimké
Release date: February 17, 2010 [eBook #31299]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stephanie Eason, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
It is the fashion nowadays for every one with a stone in his hand to takea shy at the poor Negro on account of his sins of commission and omission.It is enough that some member of the race is caughtflagrante delicto ormerely on suspicion of evil doing to get himself into the public pilloryand the rest of the colored people into our national rogues’ gallery,where they evoke instantly the loud lamentation of white saints andsinners alike, and the statistical and sophistical conclusions of a lot offools and hypocrites. Now do not misunderstand me. I do not deny thatNegroes commit crimes. Not at all, for I know full well that theydo—altogether too many for their own good. But what I object to amongother things is that America, because of the crimes of individual Negroesor because of the suspected crimes of individual Negroes, draws an omnibusindictment against the moral character of the whole race, which ismonstrously unjust and wicked.
Who cares to inquire into the origin of Negro crime, or into the causeswhich have contributed mightily to produce the Negro criminal? The book ofthe Genesis of this man’s crimes awaits to be written by an impartial andsympathetic seeker after truth. The causes which have operated for fiftyyears to produce Negro criminals will some day, I trust, be traced withoutfear or bias to their source. I do not pretend to possess any scientificqualification for such a task, but I do intend in these imperfect remarksto try to indicate in outline merely the dismal stream of these causesduring the last half century, hoping thereby to cast a little light on adark and difficult subject: namely, how out of hostile and unequal social,industrial and political conditions Negro crime emerged and why Negrocriminals abound.
To say that individuals and races are the creatures of circumstances—thatthey are the products of their social heredity and environment—is tostate a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It istherefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance inthe life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery.For it furnished for two and a half centuries both his social heredity andhis environment, and so shaped his growth and character along moral,religious and industrial lines. Chattel slaves had no rights, the mostrudimentary, which their southern masters were bound to respect. They didnot, for example, possess that most elementary of rights, the ownership ofself and of the products of their labor. They were the legal property ofothers and so were the products of their labor. They did not own the[Pg 4]cabins they slept in or the clothes they wore or the food they ate or thetools they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank orthe bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did thecattle of those self same masters. The slave system owned the minds andbodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, orto the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of themasters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaveswere rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production ofwealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuitof happiness. Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded andmoral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, overthe souls of masters and slaves alike. And in this moral mud there bredapace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny andfear—the black brood of man’s inhumanity to man.
At the close of the war which destroyed slavery the two races emergedtogether into the midst of vast changes. The old social structure had beendisrupted in the civil convulsion, and the old political order likewise.The slave half of the national house had tumbled about former masters andslaves. The slave race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen thanthey had possessed or known as slaves. Yes, they possessed themselves andthe hard hands which God had given them for their support. But beinglandless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the oldmaster class. This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a laborclass on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power ofthe old master class. The outlook for the new freedmen under thesecircumstances was not propitious. All the same these people, poor andignorant and at the mercy of a ruthless employer class, were happy aschildren in the delight of their newfound freedom. The sound of theirchildlike joy was heard in the land amid the grim desolations of war andthe sullen faces of their old masters. Care free and fear free, in spiteof unfriendly conditions and a threatening outlook, they gave themselvesup to such joy as God has rarely given in the history of the world to fourmillions of people. Now no race can pass through such a spiritualexperience without being the better for it. For great happiness like greatsuffering operates oftentimes as a moral purifier. Before the overwhelmingfact that they could no longer be bought and sold—that they could nolonger be separated from their loved ones, these simple black folk fell intransports of gratitude before God, their mighty deliverer, theireverlasting Father. Love was in their mouths and love was in their hearts.Cheerful they were by nature and hopeful, and gifted withal with anextraordinary amount of the milk of human kindness. Service was naturaland easy for them, and the cherishing of friends and foes in their need;but resentfulness and revenge moved them hardly at all during their longyears of bondage. Comparatively few crimes against persons or property hadbeen recorded against them before emancipation.[Pg 5] The few slaveinsurrections or attempted slave insurrections were exceptions to thegeneral tenor of their peaceable disposition and conduct, to the uniformand singular absence of ill-will, of a spirit of revenge in them as arace.
This gentle trait was strikingly illustrated during the war of therebellion. They had opportunity enough and provocation enough, God knows,to attack the property and the lives of the defenseless families of theirhard task-masters during those four dreadful years of sectional strife.But in their beautiful simplicity and kindness of heart and fidelity tothe sacred and amazing trust reposed in them—the most sacred and amazingever reposed in a slave race by a master race in the history of theworld—they let their terrible opportunity for revenge pass them by andseized instead the noble one to feed and cherish the helpless women andchildren of masters who were fighting to rivet the chains of slavery onthem and on their children forever. This behavior of the slaves is thesupreme example which American Christianity has yet given of the vitalpresence of the spirit of its divine founder in its midst. No other act inits whole history approaches it in simple grandeur of forgiveness andservice. And it came literally out of the humble lives of a much oppressedand long suffering race.
This simple and kindly black folk issued then out of their two and a halfcenturies of bondage without malice toward the whites, without any of theviolent emotions which lead to the commission of great crimes. The onlyviolent emotion which stirred their child-like minds, which filled almostto bursting their kindly hearts was deep thankfulness to God and to Mr.Lincoln for their deliverance—an emotion which no pen can describe and notongue can put into words. Out of such kindly hearts, out of such deep andholy emotions crime does not come and it would not have come had therebeen no injection into the race soul of the Negro of new and bitterexperiences of wrong at the hands of the whites. But this is exactly whatactually took place. On the simple and kindly hearts of the new freedmenthe old master class might have graven large the law of peace andgoodwill. All that this child-like race needed at this initial stage oftheir education and forming character were wise and sympathetic guidanceand treatment on the part of the whites in order to convert all their deepand holy emotions into moral and civic values, into social and industrialservice to the South and to the nation at one and the same time. Did theblacks get this wise and sympathetic guidance and treatment at the handsof the whites? To answer this question is to open up the whole subject ofthe causation of Negro crime during the last fifty years. And this I willtry to do as concisely and clearly as possible.
The first act of the South after the war was most unfriendly to theblacks. For it was state legislation which remanded them to a new speciesof bondage. Southern slaves they had been but by the new labor legislationthey were transformed into Southern[Pg 6] serfs, chained to the soil bycunningly devised laws to regulate their labor and movement. Force andviolence toward the blacks were relied upon to put through thislegislative and administrative program. This program was the cause ofNorthern interference in the Southern situation at this juncture. But whenCongress intervened by its reconstruction measures to defeat thereactionary program of the South, there swept over that section acrime-storm of devastating fury. The old master class organized theirpurpose in respect to the Negro, and their hatred of everything Northerninto a secret society known as the “Ku Klux Klan,” which was nothing elsethan a gigantic conspiracy for the commission of crime. Lawlessness andviolence filled the land, and terror stalked abroad by day and night. The“Ku Klux Klan” burned and murdered by day, and it burned and murdered bynight. The Southern states had actually relapsed into barbarism. Duringthat period a new generation was conceived and born to the South by bothraces—a generation that was literally conceived in lawlessness and borninto crime-producing conditions. Lawlessness was its inheritance and thered splotch of violence its birthmark.
The period covered by this crime-storm was a bad way to begin theeducation of the Negroes in respect for law, in self control and incivilization. For they found no law strong enough to protect them in theirlives or property or freedom from the murderous attacks of that terriblesecret organization. Education in self-control, and in respect forconstituted authority became impossible where the dominating feeling ofthe Negroes was one of terror. And as for civilization it was beaten downby the red hand of violence. The blacks during these years were crushedbetween two irreconcilable forces, two antagonistic governments which werelocked in a death grapple for possession of that section. The onegovernment was open and regular, while the other was secret and lawless.The first was supported by a few native and Northern whites and by thegreat body of the blacks, and the second was upheld by the great body ofthe native whites under the trained and ruthless leadership of the oldmaster class, who would have no government, no social order which was notset up by themselves.
During those dark years the blacks were much more sinned against thansinning. They were sinned against by their white leaders, who in the mainused them to advance their personal and party interest, and who employedthe positions they thus gained to steal the people’s money, to enrichthemselves at the expense of the states. There were colored leaders whofollowed closely in the footsteps of the white leaders in pervertingpublic trusts to corrupt ends, but the chief malefactors, the biggestscoundrels were members of the white race. In these circumstances theblacks were the helpless victims of the misrule of their own leaders andof the organized lawlessness of the Southern whites. In their need theyasked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic[Pg 7] andwise leadership and were handed instead a bunch of scorpions. They prayedfor peace and for that happiness which goes with freedom, and there sweptover them for six dreadful years a crime-storm which filled their nightsand days, the season of their planting and the season of their reapingwith terror and destruction, and they just out of the house of bondage.They were able in these circumstances to get from the whites no lesson inobedience to law, in reverence for constituted authority, for as we haveseen those selfsame whites were everywhere breaking the law and beatingdown and destroying constituted authority. Nor did they get any trainingin personal and civic righteousness from their own leaders of either race.For those leaders initiated them promptly by the power of example into thegreat and flourishing American art and industry of graft.
This much however ought to be said in justice to the carpet-baggovernments, namely, that bad as they were the lawlessness and violence ofthe Southern whites were a great deal worse. For while some good can beplaced to the credit of those governments nothing but bad can possibly beset down to the account of Southern lawlessness and violence. To thecarpet-bag governments belongs the introduction into the South for thefirst time of the democratic principles of equality, and of the right ofeach child in the state, regardless of race or color, to an education atthe hands of the state. These are two vital things which the South neededthen and which it needs to-day but which the old master class opposed thenand which their successors oppose to-day. That is what the whites did toeducate the blacks during the most impressionable period of their newfreedom in orderly government and in civilization. That was the way theireducation in citizenship and character building began and that was the wayit proceeded until the year 1876.
In that year the two irreconcilable governments grappled in a finalstruggle at the polls for mastery and possession of that section. When thesmoke of battle cleared over South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, theSouthern forces of re-action were in complete possession of those states,and the solid South had become an accomplished fact. Nothing stood nowbetween the blacks and their ancient enemy. They were again at the mercyof the old master class, who returned promptly to the execution of theirinterrupted program of inequality and injustice. As the whites could notnow reestablish constitutionally their old slave system, or directly theirnew serf system they proceeded to do the next best thing, that is toconstruct a caste system based on race and color. Such a system, oncefirmly established, would fix the status of the blacks as a permanentlyinferior caste, and to that extent would render nugatory the three greatamendments to the constitution. For members of an inferior caste would bythe force of circumstances, law, or no law, be deprived of certain rightscivil and political enjoyed by members[Pg 8] of the superior caste. Citizenshipof the one caste would not mean the same thing as citizenship of theother. The lower caste could not possibly possess the samerights—constitution or no constitution—which the upper caste possessed.Inequality became thus the chief corner stone of the new Southern edifice.Under this society there grew up two moral standards and two legalstandards for the government of the races. For example what under such asystem is bad for a black man to do to a member of the white race mightnot be regarded as bad at all if done by a white man to a member of theblack race. The cruel and iniquitous sex relations of the races in theSouth has grown out of this caste system. Under it we have the doublemoral standard and the double legal standard operating throughout thatsection with a vengeance. A white man cannot with impunity seduce anotherwhite man’s daughter or wife in the South. But were he to seduce a coloredman’s daughter or wife the case would be wholly different. No bastardyprocess lies in favor of the colored girl as lies in favor of her whitesister under like circumstances, and no maintenance could she possiblyobtain for her child from the white man who wronged her. Intermarriagebetween the races has been made illegal by every Southern state and bysome Northern states also. Such a law makes colored women the safe quarryof white men, and nowhere in the South do law or public opinion imposeupon them any deterrent punishment, moral or legal, for their crime, butquite the opposite. For such men do not lose standing in Southern societyor the church or the state in consequence of their sin. In all this sexualinequality and iniquity the South has eyes but sees not and ears but hearsnot what is taking place everywhere in its midst.
On the other hand what happens to the black man who ventures to look upona white woman with love or carnal desire, or who is even suspected ofdoing so? Ask Judge Lynch, ask the blind and murderous sex fury of whitemen, the red male rage of Southern mobs. Nevertheless black men cannot bemade to see the difference between the lust of black men and the lust ofwhite men, or to acknowledge the justice of such a distinction. Hold theblacks responsible by all means for the crimes they commit, but hold thewhites responsible also for creating social and legal conditions whichlead directly to the growth of crime among both races. Race and color notefficiency and character are the basis of the Southern caste system, andsuch a system produces unavoidably ill-will, oppressions, and resentmentsbetween the races which lead directly or indirectly to the commission ofcrime. For all those who are black, regardless of what nature andeducation intend them to be are born into a fixed state of social andpolitical inferiority, and all those who are white, regardless of whatnature and education intend them to be are born into a fixed state ofsocial and political superiority, and for no other or better reason thanthat those of the first class are black, and those of the second class arewhite. Civilization[Pg 9] finds it well nigh impossible to advance under suchiron bound conditions and against such a fatal obstruction to progress,while civic righteousness must certainly share the same fate. Such socialinjustice is as sure to provoke crime as stagnant water is to producedisease. Yet, in spite of this iniquitous caste system the leaven ofdemocracy, of equality has found lodgment in the black man’s mind, and hecraves the chance to become all that the white man has become and to doall that the white man does by virtue of his American freedom andcitizenship. Nothing less than this is going to satisfy the blacks, theSouthern caste system and appearances in spots among the blacksthemselves, to the contrary notwithstanding.
But there is yet another aspect of the same subject, which tends toproduce the same result. I refer to the Southern policy of civil andpolitical repression and oppression of its colored population in order tokeep them within their caste of inferiority and subordination to thewhites. Discontent under such oppressive conditions is sure to arise amongthe colored people, and this because of their growth and of the existenceof the hard and fast lines within which this growth must go on. For thiskind of discontent the South has no vent such as free institutionsprovide. Its caste system sits upon this safety valve of democracy. Muchof the crime committed by oppressed peoples is in the nature of fullnessof life seeking greater freedom, of pent up energies seeking an outlet,and much of the crime committed by oppressors is in the nature ofattempts, perilous always, to sit upon this safety valve of populargovernments, which is intended to relieve dangerous pressure within thesteam-chest of human expansion and progress. But the South is determinedto keep the Negro down however great may be his effort to rise. He is tobe kept down by brute force if he cannot be kept down in any other way,below the social and industrial and political level of the lowest and mostworthless of the whites, because he is black and because they are white.
This is the meaning of the Southern movement for segregating the races, ofits jim-crow car laws and waiting-rooms. This is the meaning of theNegro’s exclusion from dining-cars and from restaurants along the line ofSouthern railroads. He pays the same fare as the white passenger but he isgiven inferior accommodations and in many instances these accommodationsare monstrously unequal and inferior. He is black and therefore the samelaw which protects the white passenger against bad accommodations does notapply to him. He is at the mercy of railroads, which may treat him asbadly as they choose, and there is none to say them nay. Why? Because allthese iniquitous distinctions and discriminations serve to teach coloredmen and women, however intelligent and wealthy and respectable, that theirintelligence and wealth and respectability do not entitle them to equaltreatment with the most vicious and worthless of the whites. At the moralretchings and manly revolt of the victim against this unequal treatmentthe South either sneers or else grows angry, because it affects to see inthem the Negro’s[Pg 10] ambition for social equality, his secret desire to leavehis class and to enter that of the whites and to marry white women. And sodown on the safety valve which free institutions provide, and regardlessof the steam pressure within, the South has planted its brutal might withreckless and insolent disregard of consequences.
Everywhere the treatment of the Negro is the same, and everywhere thepurpose of the South is plain. What with its contract labor laws andemigration laws and vagrancy laws and convict-lease and plantation-leaseand credit systems the South is working mightily, night and day, to reducethe Negro laborer to wage slavery, to fix him in an industrial positionwhere he shall have no rights which the white employer class is bound torespect. Negro labor toils and produces without adequate reward orprotection against the rapacity of Southern employers. What it gets as itsshare bears no comparison with what the employer gets as his share. Theemployer gets wealth while the Negro gets a bare subsistence. I amspeaking of course broadly, for there are many Negroes who get more than abare subsistence out of the products of their labor, and that in spite ofbad and unequal laws and conditions. But the great mass of Negroagricultural labor is exploited and plundered by the white employer class,and kept poor, because being poor they are esteemed less capable of givingthe South trouble. It is the only labor class in the South that isdeprived of the right to vote, and so is rendered powerless to influencelegislation and administration and the courts in its favor. If the povertyof Negro labor renders it as a class less capable of giving the employerclass trouble this poverty is at the same time a crime breeder and a hugecrime breeder into the bargain.
Take this case which has just been decided favorably for the coloredlaborer by the United States Supreme Court, as a fair example of whatSouthern law and administration are doing to reduce the Negro to acondition of helpless industrial slavery:
An Alabama case, involving charges of peonage in connection with theoperation of a convict labor law, now is before the Supreme Court,where its disposition may have an important bearing on similarstatutes in other Southern States. The government contends that theAlabama statute permits peonage in violation of the FederalConstitution.
The test case is that of a colored man named E. W. Fields, who wasconvicted in Monroe County of larceny. Upon his failure to pay hisfine, J. A. Reynolds, a plantation owner, became surety for him, and,as permitted by the Alabama law, contracted to work out hisindebtedness during nine months at the rate of $6 a month and keep.The government charges that Reynolds later had Fields arrested forfailing to complete the contract. As a result of the arrest, Fields,in court, entered into contract to work fourteen months for G. W.Broughton, another plantation owner.
Both Reynolds and Broughton were indicted by the Federal government,but the Federal district court for southern Alabama held that peonagehad not been committed.
[Pg 11]I want to ask your attention in passing to a few points about this case.First the Negro laborer is convicted on a charge of larceny. This chargemight have been trumped up by some white person who wanted the Negro’sservice. I do not know. I would not take the word of a Southern Court onthis point. At any rate the Negro laborer is convicted and a fine isimposed upon him, which he is unable to pay. Now comes the opportunity ofthe white employer, who happens to be conveniently in Court, to come tothe rescue of the poor Negro. He pays the fine and the Negro contracts topay him back by giving him nine months of his labor. The Negro thereuponenters upon the performance of this contract, but fails for some reason,not stated, to finish it. How long he worked does not appear either, butthis much does. He is haled into Court a second time and a second time afine is imposed upon him. And again an employer, who is opportunelypresent at the second trial, pays the fine. The Negro now binds himself tothe service of this second man for fourteen months, which, to use a slangexpression, is surely “going some.” At this stage of the game, however,the United States Government stepped into the case, otherwise a thirdcharge might have been preferred in due time, and again the term ofinvoluntary service lengthened, and so on ad infinitum until deathreleased the victim. This is a well-known Southern method for multiplyingNegro criminals to meet the demands of Southern employers of cheap labor.It is a danger to which every colored man is exposed in the South, becauseSouthern Courts are as a rule administered in the interest of the employerclass wherever the Negro is concerned. There have been a few notableinstances of Southern Judges who have refused to lend their Courts to thisiniquitous business, like Judge Emory Speer, of Georgia, and the lateJudge Jones, of Alabama, but such examples are like angels’ visits—fewand far between in that land of race repression and oppression.
Take another and different case, which is common enough in the South also.It is, like the preceding clipping, taken from theWashington Post:
LYNCHED BY MOB OF 1,000.
Little Girl’s Assailant Dragged From Jail as Troops Are Assembling.
Shreveport, La., May 12.—Edward Hamilton, colored, held on thecharge of attacking a 10-year old white girl, was taken from theparish jail shortly after noon and lynched.
For three hours a mob of 1,000 men and boys stood in the rain outsidethe jail doors, hammering away with a heavy railroad iron at thebarrier. Steel saws finally were used, and entrance was gained by themob. Sheriff J. P. Flourney had telegraphed the governor for troopsand orders had been sent the Shreveport company of the national guardto report for service. Before the company could be assembled theprisoner had been taken from the jail. A rope was placed aboutHamilton’s neck and he was dragged half a block from the jail to atelephone pole opposite the parish courthouse, and strung up. A knifewas left sticking in the body.
[Pg 12]Here we have Judge Lynch’s Court in full operation in the execution of onesuspected Colored criminal and the manufacture at the same time of athousand white criminals. This Colored man was only suspected of the usualcrime. There was no trial of him to find the facts, not even by JudgeLynch himself. Edward Hamilton might have been guilty and then again hemight have been innocent. I think that a private inquiry into his casesubsequent to his murder, pointed to his probable innocence. But he was anobject of suspicion, and that was enough to justify the act of hismurderers. If the mob failed to lynch the guilty and lynched instead aninnocent man, it was so much the worse for the innocent man, not at allfor the mob, however red their hands were with that innocent man’s blood.Why? Because that innocent man was black, and because his murder helps touphold white supremacy over millions of people whose only offense is thatthey are black. Into the violent death of a man like Hamilton there mightnot be instituted any official inquiry at all in many parts of the Southany more than if he had been a horse or a dog. But if there happens to bean official inquiry the usual verdict is that “the deceased came to hisdeath by the hands of a person or persons unknown,” and that ends thematter so far as the Negro is concerned. But it does not end the matter sofar as the South is concerned, for the Devil will exact his share of theblack deed from that section to the uttermost farthing. What has such amob done? In the murder of one black man, whether innocent or guilty, theSouth has, as in the case of Hamilton, made hundreds of white criminals,has tainted the blood of whole communities like Shreveport with the virusof lawlessness and crime. In this same Shreveport there were five coloredmen lynched in ten days and eight in a year, and one white woman testifiedat an investigation conducted by the attorney general’s office that sherode in an automobile crowded with men eighteen miles to see an oldcolored man burned at the stake! Like begets like, and crime crime, andthere is no help for it. Because what a state sows that it shall surelyreap. If it sow sin it shall reap suffering and shame, and if it sow thewind it shall likewise reap the whirlwind. Is not the South sowing intothe souls of both races the seeds of sin and violence, and shall it notthen reap its full crop of crime and misery, the wild and anarchic harvestof the whirlwind?
Hard indeed is the lot of the Negro whether in the country or the city ofthe South, and in those of the North too for that matter. For wherever hegoes he carries the marks of his race with him, and that is the essence ofhis offense in America. His lot is practically the same everywhere. Hefaces either in city or country the white man’s courts and police powerand race prejudice and his industrial and residential exclusiveness andjealousies, but above all he faces the white man’s church with itsundisguised color-phobia, with its virtual rejection of the brotherhood ofman in respect to all races who happen not to be white. They are in the[Pg 13]regard of this church unclean and socially beyond the pale of itsChristian fellowship. They are salvable to be sure but from afar bymissionary efforts, the farther away the better, in China and Japan, inIndia and Africa. For there this church is in no danger of racecontamination in its pews and at its altars and in its homes. The Americanchurch is saying with the spirit of the unseeing Peter of old, “Not soLord, we have never accepted any man who is brown or black or yellow asreally our brother, for we are white and Thou hast made us of differentclay, of purer blood than all these millions of brown and black and yellowpeoples. Thou hast made us white and white we mean to remain, Thy commonfatherhood and the brotherhood of all these alien races to the contrarynotwithstanding. We try to be humble Lord, but we have never yet succeededin humbling the proud blood which Thou hast given us to the level ofbrotherhood with these strange dark peoples.”
That is the spirit which the Negro encounters in the American church; thatis the spirit which crushes him down and crowds him back whenever he triesto rise and advance. He and his are denied the White man’s chance to makethe best of themselves and to get the most out of themselves. And whenmany of them fail, as fail they must, they are beaten with many bitterwords by this so-called Christian people because of this failure, and whensome succeed in spite of the gates of this hell of race hatred andoppression they are beaten with even more bitter words and sometimes withbitter blows, and told to stay where they are put behind the poorest andmost worthless of the whites in America’s long procession of progress andcivilization. Is it any wonder that crime emerges out of such cruel andunequal conditions? The wonder is that the colored criminal class is notlarger and more dangerous to person and property. Take a glance into thealleys of misery, into the ghettos of wrong where human beings beaten byother human beings stronger than they in the battle of life are penned intheir destitution and wretchedness to live and die like poisoned rats in ahole, a prey to heat in summer and cold in winter and disease the yearround, a prey to vice, a prey to the saloons which the white man thrustsupon them to steal away their last nickel and the remnant of their selfrespect. One need not be a prophet to foresee that out of all thisinjustice and inequality God’s avenging angel will come some day withsword, double-edged and deadly with disease and crime, to smite and toblight this land where white people having eyes refuse to see whither alltheir race injustice is leading, and ears but who are deaf to the prayerof Christ’s little ones crying for a man’s chance to get with others intothe sun and to grow the free and beautiful life which God intended them togrow when first they came into the world, and that whether they are blackor red or brown or yellow.
In the matter of education, to recur again to the South in particular, theblacks are most outrageously discriminated against in favor of the whites,who have more and better school buildings, more[Pg 14] and better paid teacherseven where the blacks out-number them, longer school terms and a muchhigher per capita rate of the public school funds than have the childrenof the blacks. The problem of the South appears to be not how mucheducation but how little it can possibly give the blacks in comparisonwith what it gives the whites. In all this educational business the Southreasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites,because they are to remain a permanently inferior class. That section isnot anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and toraise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorantlabor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one. Ignoranceis indeed apt to be stolid and submissive under circumstances in whichintelligence becomes restless and discontented. Therefore the South haslittle love or use for an intelligent labor class, but desires above allthings an ignorant one, and does what in it lies to hinder educationalprogress among its colored population. But ignorance is a breeder of crimejust as poverty is. They are the parents of much of the crime committed bythe Negroes just as they are the parents of much of the crime committed bythe whites. Our criminal classes do many things which the law forbids tobe done not because they are of one race or color or of another race orcolor, but mainly because they are poor and ignorant. Who then in thesecircumstances are the ultimate criminal, those who are unwillingly poorand ignorant, or those who make and keep them so by bad and unequal laws,by bad and unequal treatment?
Such is the story of what the whites did to educate the blacks at the mostimpressionable period of their freedom in democracy, in orderly governmentand Christian civilization. And it is the story of that education duringthe last fifty years. There was never kindness to the blacks and sympathyfrom the Southern whites as of men to men. The human touch which makes, orwhich ought to make, all men brothers has been woefully wanting in thewhites as a race towards the blacks as a race. There has been kindness andperhaps much kindness from individual white people to individual Coloredpeople, but never from the mass of the whites to the mass of the blacks,but just the contrary. Instead of kindness of the one race to the otherthere has been increasing ill-will and active injustice as of one enemy toanother. If crime there has been in consequence of this deplorable, thisterrible fact who is the ultimate criminal? At the bar of history and atthe bar of God, I ask, Who is the ultimate criminal?
Transcriber’s Note: Printer’s inconsistencies in the use of “childlike” and “child-like” have been retained.
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