Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915. The Negro in the South; His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development; Being the William Levi Bull Lectures for the Year 1907.

The Negro in the South; His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral
and Religious Development; Being the William Levi Bull Lectures for the Year 1907:
Electronic Edition.

Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915 and W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963

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(title page) The Negro in the South; His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development; Being the William Levi Bull Lectures for the Year 1907
(spine) The Negro in the South
Booker T. Washington and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
222 p.
Philadelphia
George W. Jacobs & Company Publishers
1907
Call number (T) E185.6 .W316 (Treasure Room Collection, James E. Shepard Memorial Library, North Carolina Central University)

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The Negro in the South

His Economic Progress in Relation to
His Moral and Religious Development

Being the William Levi Bull
Lectures for the Year 1907

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Of the Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute
and
W. E. BURGHARDT DUBOIS
Of the Atlanta University

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Page 2

Copyright, 1907, by
GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY
Published, June, 1907
All rights reserved
Printed in U. S. A.

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The Letter Establishing the Lectureship

Bishop Whitaker presented the Letter of Endowment of the Lectureship on Christian Sociology from Rev. William L. Bull as follows:

For many years it has been my earnest desire to found a Lectureship on Christian Sociology, meaning thereby the application of Christian principles to the Social, Industrial, and Economic problems of the time, in my Alma Mater, the Philadelphia Divinity School. My object in founding this Lectureship is to secure the free, frank, and full consideration of these subjects, with special reference to the Christian aspects of the question involved, which have heretofore, in my opinion, been too much neglected in such discussion. It would seem that the time is now ripe and the moment an auspicious one for the establishment of this Lectureship, at least tentatively.

After a trial of three years, I again make the offer, as in my letter of January 1, 1901, to continue these Lectures for a period of three years, with the hope that they may excite such an interest, particularly among the undergraduates of the Divinity School, that I shall be justified, with the approval of the authorities of the Divinity School, in placing the Lectureship on a more permanent foundation.

I herewith pledge myself to contribute the sum of six hundred dollars annually, for a period of three years, to the payment of a lecturer on Christian Sociology, whose duty it shall be to deliver a course of not less than four lectures to

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the students of the Divinity School, either at the school or elsewhere, as may be deemed most advisable, on the application of Christian principles to the Social, Industrial, and Economic problems and needs of the times; the said lecturer to be appointed annually by a committee of five members: the Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania; the Dean of the Divinity School; a member of the Board of Overseers, who shall at the same time be an Alumnus; and two others, one of whom shall be myself and the other chosen by the preceding four members of the committee.

Furthermore, if it shall be deemed desirable that the Lectures shall be published, I pledge myself to the additional payment of from one to two hundred dollars for such purpose.

To secure a full, frank, and free consideration of the questions involved, it is my desire that the opportunity shall be given from time to time to the representatives of each school of economic thought to express their views in these Lectures.

The only restriction I wish placed on the lecturer is that he shall be a believer in the moral teachings and principles of the Christian Religion as the true solvent of our Social, Industrial, and Economic problems. Of course, it is my intention that a new lecturer shall be appointed by the committee each year, who shall deliver the course of Lectures for the ensuing year.

WILLIAM LEVI BULL.

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I. THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO RACE IN SLAVERY By Booker T. Washington . . . . . 7
II. THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO RACE SINCE ITS EMANCIPATION By Booker T. Washington . . . . . 43
III. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH By W. E. Burghardt DuBois . . . . . 77
IV. RELIGION IN THE SOUTH By W. E. Burghardt DuBois . . . . . 123
NOTES TO CHAPTERS III AND IV . . . . . 193

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CHAPTER I

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE
NEGRO RACE IN SLAVERY

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CHAPTER I

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO
RACE IN SLAVERY

WE are now, I think, far enough removed from the period of slavery to be able to study the influence of that institution objectively rather than subjectively. Surely if any Negro who was a part of the institution itself can do so, the remaining portion of the American people ought to be able to do so, whether they live at the North or at the South.

My subject naturally leads me to a discussion of the Negro as he was in slavery. We must all acknowledge, whatever else resulted from slavery that, first of all, it was the economic element involved that brought the Negro to America, and it was largely this consideration that held the race in slavery for a period of about 245 years.

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But, in this discussion, I am not to consider the economic value of the Negro as a slave, as such, but only the influence of his industrial training while in slavery in the development of his moral and religious life.

In my opinion, it requires no little effort on the part of a man who was once himself a slave to be able to admit this. If any Negro who was a part of the institution of slavery itself can so far rid himself of the prejudices of the same, it seems to me other people, living in whatever section, should be able to do so.

I have been a slave once in my life--a slave in body. But I long since resolved that no inducement and no influence would ever make me a slave in soul, in my love for humanity, and in my search for truth.

At the same time slaves were being brought to the shores of Virginia from their native land, Africa, the woods of Virginia were swarming with thousands of another dark-skinned race. The question naturally

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arises: Why did the importers of Negro slaves go to the trouble and expense of going thousands of miles for a dark-skinned people to hew wood and draw water for the whites, when they had right among them a people of another race who could have answered the purpose? The answer is that the Indian was tried and found wanting in the commercial qualities which the Negro seemed to possess. The Indian, as a race, would not submit to slavery and in those instances where he was tried, as a slave, his labor was not profitable and he was found unable to stand the physical strain of slavery. As a slave, the Indian died in large numbers. This was true in San Domingo and in other parts of the American continent.

The two races, the Indian and the Negro, have been often compared to the disadvantage of the Negro. It is often said of the Negro that he is an imitative race. That, in a large degree, is true. That element has

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its disadvantages and it also has its advantages. Very often the Negro imitates the worst element in the white man; on the other hand I believe that the masses of our people imitate the best they find in the white man.

I have said more than once that one of the unfortunate conditions of the Negro in the North is that,--because of the large proportion of our people who are in menial service, their duties bring them in contact with the worst. They, for example, are waiters in clubs and in various organizations, and being engaged in that capacity makes it necessary for them to touch the white man at his weakest point. In the city of Philadelphia, there are hundreds, I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I were to say thousands, who are serving the white man as a waiter in some club or similar organization. When that white man was at work in his factory, in his counting-room, in his bank, he was far removed

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from him. When he was at his best the Negro did not come into touch with him. In the evening when he lays aside the working dress, takes matters easy, and gets his cigar and perhaps champagne, the Negro comes into contact with him, not to an advantage, but at his weakest point rather than at his strongest.

In the South, as in most parts of America, during slavery and after, the Negro has gotten something from the white man that has made him more valuable as a citizen. In most cases he imitates the best rather than the worst. For example, you never see a Negro braiding his hair in the same way as a Chinaman braids his, but he cuts his like the white man. The Negro is seeking out the highest and best as to quality.

It has been more than once stated that the Indian proved himself the superior race in not submitting to slavery. We shall see about this. In this respect it may be that the Indian secured a temporary advantage in

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so far as race feeling or prejudice is concerned; I mean by this that he escaped the badge of servitude which has fastened itself upon the Negro,--not only upon the Negro in America, but upon that race wherever found, for the known commercial value of the Negro has made him a subject of traffic in other portions of the globe during many centuries.

The Indian refused to submit to bondage and to learn the white man's ways. The result is that the greater portion of the American Indians have disappeared, the greater portion of those who remain are not civilized. The Negro, wiser and more enduring than the Indian, patiently endured slavery; and contact with the white man has given him a civilization vastly superior to that of the Indian.

The Indian and the Negro met on the American continent for the first time at Jamestown, in 1619. Both were in the darkest barbarism. There were twenty

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Negroes and thousands of Indians. At the present time there are between nine and ten million Negroes and two hundred and eighty-four thousand and seventy-nine Indians. The annual tax upon the Government on account of the Indian is $14,236,078.71 (1905); the cost from 1789 to 1902, inclusive, reached the sum of $389,282,361.00. The one in this case not only decreased in numbers and failed to add anything to the economic value of his country, but has actually proven a charge upon the state.

The Negro seems to be about the only race that has been able to look the white man in the face during the long period of years and live--not only live, but multiply. The Negro has not only done this, but he has had the good sense to get something from the white man at every point where he has touched him--something that has made him a stronger and a better race.

Let me say in the beginning that nothing

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which I shall say should be taken as an endorsement of the enslavement of my race. The experience of the world's civilization teaches that the final and net result of slavery is bad--bad for the enslaved, and perhaps worse for the enslaver. If permitted a choice, I think I should prefer being the first to being the last. But in the case of the Negro in America no one, willing to be frank and fair, can fail to see that the Negro did get certain benefits out of slavery; at the same time he was, as I have stated, harmed. But in this connection we must deal with the facts and not with prejudice, either for or against the race.

Let me make this statement with which you may or may not agree: In my opinion, there cannot be found in the civilized or uncivilized world ten millions of Negroes whose economic, educational, moral and religious life is so advanced as that of the ten millions of Negroes within the United States. If this statement be true, let us find

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the cause thereof, especially as regards the Negro's moral and Christian growth. In doing so, let credit be given wherever it is due, whether to the Northern white man, the Southern white man, or the Negro himself. If, as stated, the ten millions of black people in the United States have excelled all the other groups of their race-type in moral and Christian growth, let us trace the cause, and in doing so we may get some light and information that will be of value in dealing with the Negro race in America and elsewhere, and in elevating and Christianizing other races.

In order to determine the influence of economic or industrial training upon the moral and Christian life of the Negro, we must begin with slavery and trace the development of the black man, noticing in a brief manner his development through slavery to freedom, and to the present time.

This involves, then, the period of slavery,

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and the period of freedom. To begin with, let me repeat that at first, at least, the underlying object of slavery was an economic, and an industrial one. The climatic and other new conditions required that the slave should wear clothing, a thing, for the most part, new to him. It has perhaps already occurred to you that one of the conditions requisite for the Christian life is clothing. So far as I know, Christianity is the only religion that makes the wearing of clothes one of its conditions. A naked Christian is impossible--and I may add that I have little faith in a hungry Christian.

Some years ago we were holding the Tuskeegee Annual Negro Conference, and I remember on several occasions there was one old fellow who tried to get the floor without success. He tried continually to get recognition from the chair, and, finally, was recognized. He said: "Mr. Washington, we's making great progress in our

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community. It is not the same as it used to be. We's making great progress. We's getting to the point where nearly all the people in my community owns their own pigs." I asked him why he was so much interested in his neighbors owning their own pigs. He said: "I feel that when all my neighbors own their own pigs, I can always sleep better every night." There is a good deal of philosophy underlying that remark.

The economic element not only made it necessary that the Negro slave should be clothed for the sake of decency and in order to preserve his health, but the same considerations made it necessary that he be housed and taught the comforts to be found in a home. Within a few months, then, after the arrival of the Negro in America, he was wearing clothes and living in a house--no inconsiderable step in the direction of morality and Christianity. True, the Negro slave had worn some kind of

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garment and occupied some kind of hut before he was brought to America, but he had made little progress in the improvement of his garments or in the kind of hut he inhabited. As we shall perhaps see later, his introduction into American slavery was the beginning of real growth in the two directions under consideration.

There is another important element. In his native country, owing to climatic conditions, and also because of his few simple and crude wants, the Negro, before coming to America, had little necessity to labor. You have, perhaps, read the story, that it is said might be true in certain portions of Africa, of how the native simply lies down on his back under a banana-tree and falls asleep with his mouth open. The banana falls into his mouth while he is asleep and when he wakes up he finds that all he has to do is to chew it--he has his meal already served.

Notwithstanding the fact that, in most

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cases, the element of compulsion entered into the labor of the slave, and the main object sought was the enrichment of the owner, the American Negro had, under the regime of slavery, his first lesson in anything like continuous, progressive, systematic labor. I have said that two of the signs of Christianity are clothes and houses, and now I add a third, "work."

In the early days of slavery the labor performed by the slave was naturally of a crude and primitive kind. With the growth of civilization came a demand for a higher kind of labor, hence the Negro slave was soon demanded as a skilled laborer, as well as for ordinary farm and common labor. It soon became evident that from an economic point of view it paid to give the Negro just as high a degree of skill as possible--the more skill, the more dollars. When an ordinary slave sold for, say seven hundred dollars, a skilled mechanic would easily bring on the auction block from fourteen

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hundred to two thousand dollars. It is strangely true that when a black man would bring two thousand dollars a white man would not bring fifty cents.

As the slave grew in the direction of skilled labor, he was given an increased amount of freedom. This was practiced by some owners to such an extent that the skilled mechanic was permitted to "hire" his own time, working where and for whom he pleased, and for what wage, on condition that he pay his owner so much per month or year, as agreed upon. Not a few masters found that this policy paid better than the one of close personal supervision; many female slaves were trained not only in ordinary house duties, but on every large plantation there was at least one high class seamstress.

I have made a search but have not yet been able to find a single case of abuse of confidence, and the policy to which I have referred was practiced very largely in Virginia

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and especially in West Virginia--the policy of permitting those slaves who were skilled laborers to work for whom they pleased, on condition that they pay their masters a fixed sum each month or each year. I have never yet heard of a single case of failure at the end of the month or at the end of the year to bring and place in his master's hands the stipulated sum of money.

A discussion of this subject calls to mind one of those curious changes in public opinion and custom with regard to races which often occur in the United States. At the period to which I am now referring, a great number of the Negroes in the South were compelled to follow a trade, and they seem to have no difficulty in pursuing trades there to-day. In the North where the agitation for the Negro's freedom began, it is in most cases difficult, and often impossible, for a black man to find an opportunity to work at any kind of skilled labor. I

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sometimes wonder which man is the greater sinner,--the man who by force compels the Negro to work without pay, or the man who by physical force and through the force of public sentiment prevents the Negro from working for him, when he is ready, willing, and fit to do so.

I do not overstate the matter when I say that I am quite sure that in one county in the South during the days of slavery there were more colored youths being taught trades than there are members of my race now being taught trades in any of the larger cities of the North.

Before I go further, I ought, in justice, to add that as slavery spread and the owners came to know their slaves better, there appeared in nearly every section of the South, especially in Virginia and South Carolina, a considerable number of slave-holders who rose above the mere idea of economic and selfish gain; and thus, through the medium of slavery, the opportunity to train the

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Negro in morality and Christianity presented itself in many sections of the South. During the days of slavery regular religious services were provided for the slaves, the same minister who served the white congregation preached to the blacks. In some of the most aristocratic families, the Negro children were taught in the Sunday-school; this was true of the Lees and Jacksons of Virginia, and of the family of Bishop Capers and other men of that type in South Carolina.

At the end of the period of slavery, about two hundred and fifty years, the Negro race as a whole had learned, as I have stated, to wear clothes, to live in a home, to work with a reasonable degree of regularity and system, and a few had learned to work with a high degree of skill. Not only this, the race had reached the point where, from speaking scores of dialects, it had learned to speak intelligently the English language. It had also a fair knowledge of American

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civilization and had changed from a pagan into a Christian race. Further, at the beginning of his freedom, the Negro found himself in possession of--in fact had a monopoly of--the common and skilled labor throughout the South; not only this, but, by reason of the contact of whites and blacks during slavery, the Negro found business and commercial careers open to him at the beginning of his freedom.

Such conditions were unusual in the case of a race that had been occupying so low a place in the civilization of another people. They resulted from the fact that in slavery when the master wanted a pair of shoes made, he went to the Negro shoemaker for those shoes; when he wanted a suit of clothes, he went to the Negro tailor for those clothes; and when he wanted a house built, he consulted the Negro carpenter and mason about the plans and cost--thus the two races learned to do business with each other. It was an easy step from this to a

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higher plane of business, hence immediately after the war the Negro found that he could become a dry goods merchant, a grocery merchant, start a bank, go into real estate dealing, and secure the trade not only of his own people, but also of the white man, who was glad to do business with him and thought nothing of it.

In my own town of Tuskeegee there is a colored merchant who, not excepting any other merchant, has the largest trade in that county in retail groceries, and in a recent conversation with him he said that for thirty-five years his customers had been among the best white families of the county. More than a dozen times have I met the man who owned this Negro in the days of slavery and he expressed himself as more than pleased that his former slave had attained the honor of being the most successful grocery dealer in the town of Tuskeegee.

You would be surprised, if you were to

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inquire into the facts, to know how the Negro has grown in this direction. In the Southern states there are one hundred and fifteen drug stores owned by Negroes. In Anniston, Alabama, there are two large drug stores owned by black people, and in one section a wholesale drug store owned and operated successfully by a black man. The Negro who to-day owns and operates that large wholesale drug store, selling drugs to the white as well as colored retail druggists, was a slave, I think, until he was twelve or fifteen years of age. It is interesting to know that more banks have been organized in the last three years in the state of Mississippi than ever before. There have been ten banks organized since Vardaman became governor of the state.

For the reasons I have mentioned, the Negro in the South has not only found a practically free field in the commercial world, but in the world of skilled labor. Such a field is not open to him in such a

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degree in any other part of the United States, or perhaps in the world, as is open in the South. All of this has had a tremendously strong bearing in developing the Negro's moral and Christian life.

In proportion to their numbers, I question whether so large a proportion of any other race are members of some Christian Church as is true of the American Negro. In many cases their practical ideas of Christianity are crude, and their daily practice of religion is far from satisfactory; still the foundation is laid, upon which can be builded a rational, practical and helpful Christian life.

Let me illustrate the value of the economic and industrial training of the Negro: If one chooses, let him try this plan which I have tried on a good many occasions. Go into any village or town, North or South, enter their Baptist and Methodist churches--for the most part they belong to the Baptist Church--and ask their pastors to point

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out to you the most reliable, progressive and leading colored man in the community, the man who is most given to putting his religious teachings into practice in his daily life, and in a majority of cases one will have pointed out to him a Negro who learned a trade or got some special economic training during the days of slavery,--in all probability an individual who has become the owner of a little piece of land, who lives in his own house.

Now what lessons for the work that is before us can you and I learn from what I have attempted to say? The lesson suggested in the elevation of the black race in America will apply with equal force, in my opinion, to the inculcating of moral and Christian principles into any race, regardless of color, that is in the same relative stage of civilization. Here let me add that in all my advocacy of the value of industrial training I have never done so because my people are black; I would advocate the

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same kind of training for any race that is on the same plane of civilization as our people are found on at the present time.

But as to the lesson which may prove of direct interest, so far as you are concerned. In the old days, the method of converting the heathen to Christianity was very largely abstract. The Bible was, in most cases, the only argument. In the conversion of the heathen to Christianity or in raising the standard of moral and Christian living for any people, I argue that in the use of the economic element and the teaching of the industries we should be guided by the same rules that are now used in the most advanced methods of ordinary school-teaching--that is, to begin with the known and gradually advance to the unknown; we should advance from the concrete to the abstract. In doing this, industrial education, it seems to me, furnishes a tremendously good opportunity.

Let me illustrate: Not long ago a missionary

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who was going into a foreign field very kindly asked of me advice as to how he should proceed to convert the people to Christianity. I asked him, first, upon what the people depended mostly for a living in the country where he was to labor; he replied that for the most part they were engaged in sheep raising. I said to him at once that if I were going into that country as a missionary, I should begin my efforts by teaching the people to raise more sheep and better sheep. If he could convince them that Christianity could raise more sheep and better sheep than paganism, he would at once get a hold upon their sympathy and confidence in a way he could not do by following more abstract methods of converting them.

The average man can discern more quickly the difference between good sheep and bad sheep, than he can the difference between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism.

If the Christian missionary can gradually

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teach the heathen how to build a better house than he has used, how to make better clothes, how to grow, prepare and secure better food for his daily meals, the missionary will have gone a long way, may I repeat, toward securing the confidence of the heathen and will have laid the foundation in this concrete manner for interesting the pagan in a higher moral life and in getting him to appreciate the difference between the heathen life and the Christian life. In teaching the child to read we use the objective method; in converting the heathen we should employ the same method--and this means the economic or industrial method.

Some six years ago a group of Tuskeegee graduates and former students went to Africa for the purpose of giving the natives in a certain territory of West Africa training in methods of raising American cotton. They did not go there primarily as missionaries, nor was their chief end the conversion

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of these pagans to Christianity. Naturally, they began their work by training the natives how to cultivate their land differently, how and when to plant the crop, and when to harvest it, and gradually taught them how to use a small hand gin in getting the cotton ready for market.

Largely through the leadership of this group of Tuskeegee students, there is shipped from this section of Africa to the Berlin market each year many bales of cotton. The natives have learned through the teaching of these men to grow more cotton and better cotton. They have learned to use their time, have learned that by working systematically and regularly they can increase their income and thus add to their independence and supply their wants. Not only this, but in order that these people might be fitted for continuous and regular service in the cotton field, their houses have been improved and the natives have been taught how to take better care of their

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bodies. In a word, during the years that these Tuskeegee people have been in the community they have improved the entire economic, industrial, and physical life of the people in this immediate territory.

The result is, as one of the men stated on his last visit to Tuskeegee, there is little difficulty now in getting the children of these people to attend Sunday-school and the older people to attend church; in fact, in a natural, logical manner they seem to have been converted to the idea that the religion practiced by these Tuskeegee men is superior to their own. They believe this firmly, because they have seen that better results have been produced through the Christian influence of these Tuskeegee men than has been produced when they had no such leadership. If these Tuskeegee people had gone there as missionaries of the old type and had confined themselves to abstract teachings of the Bible alone, it would have required many years to have brought about

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the results which have been attained within a few years.

Some time ago in Montgomery, Alabama, there was a church, attended by members of my race, which happened to be located not very far from the residence of a white family. The cook who served in this white family attended this church to which I refer. The members of the church made considerable noise in their singing, shouting, and praying, and after a while the white family grew rather exasperated because of this noise. One Sunday the church services were prolonged until an unusual hour and there was more noise than usual; so the next morning when the cook came, the lady of the house called her into the sitting-room, and said: "Jane, why in the world do you make so much noise in your worship, in your singing, praying, and shouting? Why don't you be orderly, quiet, and systematic in your worship? Why, Jane, in the Bible we read that in

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the building of Solomon's Temple, no noise pervaded the silence of the builders. Why can you not worship in the same way?" The old colored woman looked at her mistress for a few moments and said: "Lordy, missus, you don't know what we's doing; Lordy, missus, you don't know what we's striving at; we's just blasting out de stone for de foundation ob de Temple." So, my friends, when you hear us laying so much emphasis upon the moral and economic training, upon home-getting and all those things, remember we are simply trying to teach our people to blast out the foundation of the temple in which we are to grow and be useful.

Says the Psalmist: "O Lord, how manifold are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all; the earth is full of Thy riches." I believe that a wise Providence means that we shall use all the material riches of the earth: soil, wood, minerals, stones, water, air, and what not, as a means

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through which to reach God and glorify Him.

I have thus briefly dealt with the problem of slavery in its relations to the economic and moral growth of my people. Each one of these periods has presented a problem of tremendous importance and seriousness to your race and to my race.

If more attention had been given to the economic and industrial development of Liberia in the early stages of the history of that republic, Liberia would be far in advance of its present condition both in morals and religion, to say nothing of commercial prosperity. In Liberia there is an immense territory rich with resources. Notwithstanding this, there are no improved or advanced methods of agriculture; the soil is scarcely stirred; there are no carts, wagons or other wheeled vehicles, practically no public roads, no bridges, no railroads; the mineral wealth and the timber wealth remain almost untouched;

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and I am told on good authority that, in spite of all this wealth right at the very door of these people, even school-teachers and ministers wear clothing manufactured in the United States or in Europe, and eat canned goods that come from Chicago or Germany.

It requires no argument to impress the fact that the most practical missionary work would have been in the direction of teaching these people how to cultivate the soil in the best manner with the very best implements, how to get the wealth out of their forests and water and mines, how to build roads, decent bridges and decent houses; in a word, how to take hold of the material riches with which Providence has blessed the land and turn these riches into moral and religious growth. This, in my opinion, would have represented the very highest kind of missionary work.

I do not grow discouraged or despondent by reason of great and serious problems.

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On the contrary, I deem it a privilege to be permitted to live in an age when great, serious, and perplexing problems are to be met and solved. I would not care to live in a period when there was no weak part of the human family to be helped up and no wrongs to be righted. It is only through struggle and the surmounting of difficulties that races, like individuals, are made strong, powerful, and useful.

This is the road the Negro should travel; this is the road, in my opinion, the Negro will travel. I sometimes fear that in our great anxiety to push forward we lay too much stress upon our former condition. We should think less of our former growth and more of the present and of the things which go to retard or hinder that growth. In one of his letters to the Galatians, St. Paul says: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance; against such there is no law."

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I believe that it is possible for a race, as it is for an individual, to learn to live up in such a high atmosphere that there is no human law that can prevail against it. There is no man who can pass a law to affect the Negro in relation to his singing, his peace, and his self-control. Wherever I go I would enter St. Paul's atmosphere and, living through and in that spirit, we will grow and make progress and, notwithstanding discouragements and mistakes, we will become an increasingly strong part of the Christian citizenship of this republic.

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CHAPTER II

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE
NEGRO RACE SINCE ITS EMANCIPATION

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CHAPTER II

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO
RACE SINCE ITS EMANCIPATION

IN the preceding chapter, I referred to some of the things which the Negro brought with him out of slavery into his life of freedom that he used to his advantage. I shall now discuss those things that were to his disadvantage.

We must bear in mind that one of the influences of slavery was to impress upon both master and slave the fact that labor with the hand was not dignified, was disgraceful, that labor of this character was something to be escaped, to be gotten rid of just as soon as possible. Hence, it was very natural that the Negro race looked forward to the day of freedom as being that period when it would be delivered from all necessity of laboring with the hand. It was

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natural that a large proportion of the race, immediately after its freedom, should make the mistake of confusing freedom with license. Under the circumstances, any other race would have acted in the same manner.

One of the first and most important lessons, then, to be taught the Negro when he became free was the one that labor with the hand or with the head, so far from being something to be dreaded and shunned, was something that was dignified and something that should be sought, loved, and appreciated. Here began the function of the industrial school for the education of the Negro. This was the uppermost idea of General Armstrong, the father of industrial education of the Negro. And permit me to say right here, that, in my opinion, General Armstrong, more than any other single individual, is the father of industrial education not only for the Negro, but in a large measure for the entire United States. For

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you must always bear in mind that, prior to the establishment of such institutions as the Hampton Institute, there was practically no systematic industrial training given for either black or white people, either North or South. At the present time more attention is being paid to this kind of education for white boys and girls than is being given to black boys and girls.

It is an interesting thought that this kind of education, started thirty-five years ago for the education of the Negro, has spread throughout the United States, in the North and West, and has taken hold upon the people who once enslaved the Negro in our Southern states.

When industrial schools were first established in the South for the education of members of my race, stubborn objection was raised against them on the part of black people. This was the experience of Hampton, and this in later years was the experience of the Tuskeegee Institute.

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I remember that for a number of years after the founding of the Tuskeegee Institute, objection on the part of parents and on the part of students poured in upon me from day to day. The parents said that they wanted their children taught "the book," but they did not want them taught anything concerning farming or household duties. It was curious to note how most of the people worshiped "the book." The parent did not care what was inside the book; the harder and the longer the name of it, the better it satisfied the parent every time, and the more books you could require the child to purchase, the better teacher you were. His reputation as a first-class pedagogue was added to very largely in that section if the teacher required the child to buy a long string of books each year and each month. I found some white people who had the same idea.

They reminded me further that the Negro for two hundred and fifty years as a slave

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had been worked, and now that the race was free they contended that their children ought not to be taught to work and especially while in school. In answer to these objections I said to them that it was true that the race had been worked in slavery, but the great lesson which we wanted to learn in freedom was to work. I explained to them that there was a vast difference between being worked and working. I said to them that being worked meant degradation, that working meant civilization.

We have gone on at Tuskeegee from that day until this, emphasizing the difference between being worked and working, until, I am glad to say, every sign of opposition against any form of industrial education has completely disappeared from among parents and students; and I but state the truth when I say that industrial education, whether on the farm or in the carpenter shop or in the cooking class, is even more sought after at Tuskeegee than is training in

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purely academic branches. It has been ten years since I have had a single application for other than a form of industrial training. On the contrary, this kind of training is so popular among them that we have many applications from other students who live in other states who wish to devote themselves wholly to the industrial side of education.

From Hampton and Tuskeegee and other large educational centres the idea of industrial education has spread throughout the South, and there are now scores of institutions that are giving this kind of training in a most effective and helpful manner; so that, in my opinion, the greatest thing that we have accomplished for the Negro race within the last twenty-five years has been to rid his mind of all idea of labor's being degrading. This has been no inconsiderable achievement. If I were asked to point out the greatest change accomplished for the Negro race, I would say that it was

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not a tangible, physical change, but a change of the spirit,--the new idea of our people with respect to Negro labor.

Industrial education has had another value wherever it has been put into practice, that is in starting the Negro off in his new life in a natural, logical, sensible manner instead of allowing him to be led into temptation to begin life in an artificial atmosphere without any real foundation.

All races that have reached success and have influenced the world for righteousness have laid their foundation at one stage of their career in the intelligent and successful cultivation of the soil; that is, have begun their free life by coming into contact with earth and wood and stone and minerals. Any people that begins on a natural foundation of this kind, rises slowly but naturally and gradually in the world.

In my work at Tuskeegee and in what I have endeavored to accomplish in writing and in speaking before the public, I have

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always found it important to stick to nature as closely as possible, and the same policy should be followed with a race. If you will excuse my making a personal reference, just as often as I can when I am at home, I like to get my hoe and dig in my garden, to come into contact with real earth, or to touch my pigs and fowls. Whenever I want new material for an address or a magazine article, I follow the plan of getting away from the town with its artificial surroundings and getting back into the country, where I can sleep in a log cabin and eat the food of the farmer, go among the people at work on the plantations and hear them tell their experiences. I have gotten more material in this way than I have by reading books.

Many of these seemingly ignorant people, while not educated in the way that we consider education, have in reality a very high form of education--that which they have gotten out of contact with nature. Only a

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few days ago I heard one of these old farmers, who could neither read nor write, give a lesson before a Farmers' Institute that I shall never forget. The old man got up on the platform and began with this remark: "I'se had no chance to study science, but I'se been making some science for myself," and then he held up before the audience a stalk of cotton with only two bolls on it. He said he began his scientific work with that stalk. Then he held up a second stalk and showed how the following year he had improved the soil so that the stalk contained four bolls, and then he held up a third stalk and showed how he had improved the soil and method of cultivation until the stalk contained six bolls, and so he went through the whole process until he had demonstrated to his fellow farmers how he had made a single stalk of cotton produce twelve or fourteen bolls. At the close of the old man's address somebody in the audience asked what his name was. He

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replied, "When I didn't own no home and was in debt, they used to call me old Jim Hill, but now that I own a home and am out of debt, they call me 'Mr. James Hill.' "

In the previous chapter I referred to the practical benefit that could be achieved in foreign mission fields through economic and industrial development. Now that industrial education is understood and appreciated by the Negro in America, the question which has the most practical value to you and to me is what effect has this kind of development had upon the moral and religious life of the Negro right here in America since the race became free.

By reason of the difficulty in getting reliable and comprehensive statistics, it is not easy to answer this question with satisfaction, but I believe that enough facts can be given to show that economic and industrial development has wonderfully improved the moral and religious life of the Negro race in

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America, and that, just in proportion as any race progresses in this same direction, its moral and religious life will be strengthened and made more practical.

Let me first emphasize the fact that in order for the moral and religious life to be strengthened we must of necessity have industry, but along with industry there must be intelligence and refinement. Without these two elements combined, the moral and religious lives of the people are not very much helped.

A few months ago I was in a mining camp composed largely of members of my race who were, for the most part, ignorant and uncultivated, who had had little opportunities in the way of education, but they had been taught to mine coal. The operators of this mine complained that, notwithstanding the unusually high wages being paid during that season, these miners could not be induced to work more than three or four days out of six. The difficulty

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was right here; these miners were so ignorant that they had few wants, and these were simple and crude. Their wants could be satisfied by working a few days out of each week, and when they had satisfied their wants they could not understand why it was necessary to work any longer, and we must all acknowledge that there is a good deal of human nature in this point of view.

In a case of this kind, what is needed is not only to have the individual educated in industry but to have his hand so trained that he will become ambitious; as one man put it not long ago, "He will want more wants." We should get the man to the point where he will want a house, where his wife will want carpet for the floor, pictures for the walls, books, a newspaper and a substantial kind of furniture. We should get the family to the point where it will want money to educate its children, to support the minister and the church. Later, we

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should get this family to the point where it will want to put money in the bank and perhaps have the experience of placing a mortgage on some property. When this stage of development has been reached, there is no difficulty in getting individuals to work six days during the week.

I have in mind now an old colored man who lived some four miles from the Institution. I first noticed him a number of years ago as I took my daily exercise after my day's work. I found him and his wife living in a little broken-down cabin and resolved to try an experiment on them to see if I could not get them to realize that that kind of life proved of no benefit. When I began, their wants were for the bare necessities of life only. I gradually began to talk to his wife and urge her to see the importance of living a different kind of life. Without the old man's knowing it, I took pains to tell her of how some of their neighbors were living and about some of the

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things her neighbors were owning. Some had two-room houses, glass windows, new furniture, and little pieces of carpet, and had whitewashed their houses. Finally she became quite interested.

When I began with the man he was working about three days in the week. The old fellow grew interested and began to work a little longer, until the last time I rode by that house the old man was working nearly every day in the week, while they were living in a two-room house and everything had changed. The hardest task I had was to get him to put up a chimney for the second room, finally he put up one and although it was a pretty rickety, crooked affair, yet it answered the purpose and he felt proud of it. When I left this time he informed me that by the time I came back he would try to have both of those rooms whitewashed. I am not through with that family yet. I am going to work on that woman until through her I will get

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the old man to work five and six days out of the week.

It should always be borne in mind that, for any person of any race, literary education alone increases his want; and, if you increase these wants without at the same time training the individual in a manner to enable him to supply these increased wants, you have not always strengthened his moral and religious basis.

The same principle might be illustrated in connection with South Africa. In that country there are six millions of Negroes. Notwithstanding this fact, South Africa suffers to-day perhaps as never before for lack of labor. The natives have never been educated by contact with the white man in the same way as has been true of the American Negro. They have never been educated in the day school nor in the Sunday-school nor in the church, nor in the industrial school or college; hence their ambitions have never been awakened, their wants have

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not been increased, and they work perhaps two days out of the week and are in idleness during the remaining portion of the time. This view of the case I had confirmed in a conversation with a gentleman who had large interests in South Africa.

How different in the Southern part of the United States where we have eight millions of black people! Ask any man who has had practical experience in using the masses of these people as laborers and he will tell you that in proportion to their progress in the civilization of the world, it is difficult to find any set of men who will labor in a more satisfactory way. True, these people have not by any means reached perfection in this regard, but they have advanced on the whole much beyond the condition of the South Africans. The trained American Negro has learned to want the highest and best in our civilization, and as we go on giving him more education, increasing his industrial efficiency and his love of labor,

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he will soon get to the point where he will work six days out of each week.

But as to the results of industrial training. Following the example of the modern pedagogue, let me begin with that which I know most about, the Tuskeegee Institute. This institution employs one of its officers who spends a large part of his time in keeping in close contact with our graduates and former students. He visits them in their homes and in their places of employment and not only sees for himself what they are doing, but gets the testimony of their neighbors and employers, and I can state positively that not ten per cent. of the men and women who have graduated from the Tuskeegee Institute or who have been there long enough to understand the spirit and methods of that institution can be found today in idleness in any part of the country. They are at work because they have learned the dignity and beauty and civilizing influence and, I might add, Christianizing power

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of labor; they have learned the degradation and demoralizing influence of idleness; they have learned to love labor for its own sake and are miserable unless they are at work. I consider labor one of the greatest boons which our Creator has conferred upon human beings.

Further, after making careful investigation, I am prepared to say that there is not a single man or woman who holds a diploma from the Tuskeegee Institute who can be found within the walls of any penitentiary in the United States.

I have learned that not more than a score of the graduates of the fifteen oldest and largest colleges and industrial schools in the entire South have been sent to prison since these institutions were established. Those who are guilty of crime for the most part are individuals who are without education, without a trade, who own no land, who are not taxpayers, who have no bank account, and who have made no

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progress in industrial and economic development.

The following extracts from a letter written by a Southern white man to the Daily Advertiser, of Montgomery, Alabama, contains most valuable testimony. The letter refers to convicts in Alabama, most of whom are colored:

"I was conversing not long ago with the warden of one of our mining prisons, containing about 500 convicts. The warden is a practical man, who has been in charge of prisoners for more than fifteen years, and has no theories of any kind to support. I remarked to him that I wanted some information as to the effect of manual training in preventing criminality, and asked him to state what per cent. of the prisoners under his charge had received any manual training, besides acquaintance with the crudest agricultural labor. He replied: 'Perhaps about one per cent.' He added: 'No, much less than that. We have here at present only one mechanic; that is, there is one man who claims to be a house painter.'

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"'Have you any shoemakers?'

"'Never had a shoemaker.'

"'Have you any tailors?'

"'Never had a tailor.'

"'Any printers?'

"'Never had a printer.'

"'Any carpenters?'

"'Never had a carpenter. There is not a man in this prison that could saw to a straight line.'"

Now these facts seem to show that manual training is almost as good a preventative of criminality as vaccination is of smallpox.

The records of the South show that ninety per cent. of the colored people in prisons are without knowledge of trades, and sixty-one per cent. are illiterate.

There are few higher authorities on the progress of the Negro than Joel Chandler Harris, of the Atlanta Constitution, of "Uncle Remus" fame. Mr. Harris had opportunity to know the Negro before the war, and he has followed his progress closely in freedom.

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In a printed statement made some time ago Mr. Harris says:

"The point I desire to make is that the overwhelming majority of the Negroes in all parts of the South, especially in the agricultural regions, are leading sober and industrious lives. A temperate race is bound to be industrious, and the Negroes are temperate when compared with the whites. Even in the towns the majority of them are sober and industrious."

Dr. Frissell makes the same statement regarding Hampton Institute. Not more than a score of the graduates have been sent to prison since these institutions were established. The majority is among those who are without training and who have made no progress in industrial and economic development. The idle and criminal classes among them make a great show in the police court records, but right here in Atlanta the respectable and decent Negroes far outnumber those who are on the lists

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of the police as old or new offenders. I am bound to conclude from what I see all about me, and what I know of the race elsewhere, that the Negro, notwithstanding the late start he has made in civilization and enlightenment, is capable of making himself a useful member in the communities in which he lives and moves, and that he is become more and more desirous of conforming to all the laws that have been enacted for the protection of society.

Some time ago I sent out letters to representative Southern men, covering each ex-slave state, asking them to state, judging by their observation in their own communities, what effect industrial education has upon the morals and religion of the Negro. To these questions I received 136 replies as follows:

Has education improved the morals of the black race?

Answers--Yes, 97; No, 20; Unanswered, 19.

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Has it made his religion less emotional and more practical?

Answers--Yes, 101; No, 16; Unanswered, 19.

Is it, as a rule, the ignorant or the educated who commit crime?

Answers--Ignorant, 115; Educated, 3; Unanswered, 18.

Does crime grow less as education increases among the colored people?

Answers--Yes, 102; No, 19; Unanswered, 15.

Do not these figures speak for themselves?

If possible I want to give you an idea of the progress of the Negro race in a single county in one of the Southern States. For this purpose I select Gloucester County, Virginia. I take this one for the reason that I had the privilege of visiting it a number of years ago, just about the time when interest in the education of the colored people was beginning to be aroused,

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and for the further reason that this is one of the counties in Virginia and the South that has been longest under the influence of graduates of the Hampton Institute, or of men and women trained in other centres of education.

Gloucester County is the tide-water section of Eastern Virginia. According to the census of 1890, Gloucester County contained a total population of 12,832, a little over one-half being colored, and both sets of schools are in session from five and a half to six months, and the pay of the two sets of teachers is about the same. The majority of the colored teachers in this county were trained at Hampton, and have been teaching in this county a number of years. For the most part, the teachers of Gloucester County are not mentally superior, but what they lack in methods of teaching and mental alertness is more than made up for by the moral earnestness and the example they set. Most of the teachers are natives

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of the county, and, what is more important, most of them own property in the county.

Now, what is the economic or material result in one county where the Negro has been given a reasonable chance to make progress? I say "reasonable" because it must be kept in mind that the great body of white people in America, with whom the Negro is constantly compared, have schools that are in session from eight to nine months in the year. Note especially what I am going to say now. According to the public records, the total assessed value of the land in Gloucester County is $666,132.33. Of the total value of the land, the colored people own $87,953.55. The buildings in the county have an assessed valuation of $466,127.05. The colored people pay taxes upon $79,387.00 of this amount. To state it differently, the Negroes of Gloucester County, beginning about forty years ago in poverty, have reached the point where they now own and pay taxes upon one-sixth of

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the real estate in this county. This property is very largely in the shape of small farms, varying in size from ten to one hundred acres. A large proportion of the farms contain about ten acres.

It is interesting to note the influence of this material growth upon the home life of the people. It is stated upon good authority that about twenty-five years ago at least three-fourths of the colored people lived in one-roomed cabins. Let a single illustration tell the story of the growth. In a school where there were thirty pupils ten testified that they lived in houses containing six rooms, and only one said that he lived in a house containing but a single room.

I repeat, I have always believed that in proportion as the industrial, not omitting the intellectual, condition of my race is improved, in the same degree would their moral and religious life improve.

Some years ago, before the home life and

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economic condition of the people had improved, bastardy was common in Gloucester County. In 1903 there were only eight cases of bastardy reported in the whole county, and two of those were among the white population. During the year 1904 there was only one case of bastardy within a radius of ten miles of the court house. Another gratifying evidence of progress is shown by the fact that there is very little evidence of immoral relations existing between the races. In the whole county, during the year 1903, about twenty-five years after the work of education had gotten under way, there were only thirty arrests for misdemeanors; of these sixteen were white, fourteen colored. In 1904 there were fifteen such arrests--fourteen white and one colored. In 1904 there were but seven arrests for felonies; of these two were white and five were colored.

In one point at least the colored people in Gloucester County have set an example

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for the rest of the religious world that ought to receive attention. It is in this regard: there is only one religious denomination in all of this county, and that is the Baptist. No over-multiplying, no overlapping, no denominational wrangling and wasting of money and energy.

My I add that, out of my own observation and experience in the heart of the South during the last twenty-five years, I have learned that the man of my race who has some regular occupation, who owns his farm, is a taxpayer and perhaps has a little money in the bank, is the most reliable and helpful man in the Sunday-school, in the church, and in all religious endeavor. The man who has gotten upon his feet in these directions is almost never charged with crime, but is the one who has the respect and the confidence of both races in his community.

I can give you no better idea of the tremendous advance which the Negro has

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made since he became free than to say that largely through the influence of industrial education the race has acquired ownership in land that is equal in area to the combined countries of Belgium and Holland. This, for a race starting in poverty and ignorance forty years ago, it seems to me is a pretty good record.

I would not have you understand that I emphasize material possessions as the chief thing in life or as an object within itself. I emphasize economic growth because the civilization of the world teaches that the possession of a certain amount of material wealth indicates the ability of a race to exercise self-control, to plan to-day for to-morrow, to do without to-day in order that it may possess to-morrow. In other words, a race, like an individual, becomes highly civilized and useful in proportion as it learns to use the good things of this earth, not as an end, but as a means toward promoting its own moral and religious growth

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and the prosperity and happiness of the world. This is what I advocate for my race; it is what I would advocate for any race.

The average white man of America, in passing judgment upon the black race, very often overlooks the fact that geographically and physically the semi-barbarous Negro race has been thrown right down in the centre of the highest civilization that the world knows anything about. Consciously or unconsciously, you compare the Negro's progress with your progress, forgetting, when you are doing it, that you are placing a pretty severe test on the members of my race. If, for example, we were compared with the civilization of the Oriental countries, the test would not be so severe. But we have been placed in the midst of a pushing, surging, restless, conquering, successful civilization, and you must acknowledge that when the American white man wants to lead, no other race can go far ahead. In

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fact, he would have the whole field to himself. The progress of the Negro will be in proportion as they learn to get the material things of this world, consecrate them, and weave them into the service of our Heavenly Father.

In conclusion, may I say that I hope the people of this country, North and South, will learn to pray more and more; and, as they pray, to put their hands upon their hearts and then ask God if they were placed in the Negro's state, how, under the circumstances, would they like to be treated by their fellows. Conscience will answer the question.

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CHAPTER III

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN THE
SOUTH

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CHAPTER III

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH

Two questions may be asked of any group of human beings: first, How do they earn their living, and secondly, What is their attitude toward life? The first relates to the economic history and condition of that people; the second is a study of their religion. In these two essays I am to treat the first of these questions under the subject: The Economic Revolution in the South, and the second under the subject: Christianity in the South.

The last century was notable because of the great change in method and organization of human work and we call the early part of the nineteenth century the time of economic revolution in Europe and to some extent in America. The southern United States, however, while profoundly

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influenced by this revolution from the first, has not until to-day actually felt its full effect. The new factory system of the early nineteenth century is just to-day appearing in the South, and yet its appearance in England and New England seventy-five years ago made the South a part of the world industrial organization by making it the seat of cotton culture (see Note 1).

Two diverse developments resulted: In England and the North came a change from household industry to social industry, a step forward which led to an era of machinery, to a curious concentration of individuals and wealth and the necessities of living in certain great centres. That very concentration led to a wonderful contact of man with man which sharpened mind and sharpened thought and in the long run made the Europe of to-day. On the other hand, the southern United States, though really a part of this great system through its work of furnishing raw cotton, did not come into the

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whirl of the new industry because she had an industrial system which forbade machinery, discouraged human contact, and shackled thought.

Why did this system of slavery persist so long in the South as to be caught in the vortex of the new industrial movement and rendered almost inextricable?

If the South had been a place of intelligent farmers on small farms, we could imagine a development which would have been the wonder of the world; but because the fathers of the United States were so busy with large questions that they forgot larger ones, so busy settling matters of commerce and representation and politics that they forgot matters of work and justice and human rights--because of this we have in the South one of those curious back eddies of human progress that twist and puzzle advance and thought.

The very forward forces of industry that fastened slavery on the South were weaving

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a social system which made the enslavement of laborers impossible and unprofitable. Consequently at the very time when the South ought to have been increasing in intelligence, law and order, the use of machinery, industrial concentration, and the intensive culture of land with the rest of the world, she lost a half century in a development backward toward a dispersing of population, extensive rather than intensive land culture, increased and compulsory ignorance of the laboring class, and the rearing of a complete system of caste and aristocracy (see Note 2).

Evils there were to be sure in the new factory system of Europe and the North, evils which southern leaders did not fail to note and gloat over, but they were evils of another and newer industrial era, which did not stop progress, but gave it added incentive.

The industrial back-set of the South meant of course but one thing: the discovery

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of the paradox of slavery, the turning from the mistake, and the adoption of remedial measures which should usher into the South the same industrial revolution in methods of work which Europe saw begin a century ago. This is exactly what has happened, and to-day the Industrial Revolution is beginning south of Mason and Dixon's line. The forecast of change was apparent by 1850. Slavery still paid then--was still an economic success, but only under conditions which became more and more impossible of realization because of the factory system and the new industrial conditions in the rest of the world (see Note 3).

It was, in other words, an attempt at an industrial system with the lowest wages, the most oppressive labor laws, and the best natural advantages. Such a system at such a time carried its own sentence of death: fertile land was becoming scarce in the forties, the horrors of the slave trade had shocked even the eighteenth century, and

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southern labor laws which made knowledge a crime and migration of laborers a capital offense, simply could not be enforced. It was in vain that the solidly united capitalistic classes of the South threw themselves bodily into the fray--raped Mexico, filibustered in Cuba and Central America, encouraged slave-smuggling (see Note 4), and bullied the hesitating North; their economic doom was written even if militant Abolitionism had not appeared.

The economic student could have foretold and did foretell easily in the forties and fifties that slavery in the South was doomed (see Note 5): even if all available territory had been thrown wide to the slave system, slavery could not possibly have stayed in Kansas and Utah, in New Mexico or in Arizona; it could have stayed only temporarily in Missouri and in Texas. It had already reached its territorial limit, it was bound to have evolved something different. It will always be an interesting

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speculation as to how soon this economic necessity would have been recognized; whether the South would have had the acumen eventually to see the end, and what sort of gradual change could have come about, had it not been for the political crisis precipitated in 1861.

Then came the war--that disgraceful episode of civil strife when, leaving the arguments of men, the nation appealed to the last resort of dogs, murdering and ravishing each other for four long shameful years (see Note 6).

When this nightmare had passed there came, after the resulting period of disorder, a new régime, a new problem of labor, a new industrial order. Not only that, but gradually in the decade 1870-1880 there were added to the South four new economic activities: first, the iron industry; second, the manufacture of cotton cloth; third, the transportation of these goods to, from, and through the South; and fourth, the general

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exchange of goods in this growing Southern industrial population--in other words, the Industrial Revolution was beginning in the South. So that the South of the 80's was a different South from the South of the 60's, not simply by reason of emancipation but by reason of new economic possibilities.

However, this change could not go on unhindered by the mistakes of the past. With all that was new in the South, there was also much that was old, and of these old things the most important were the Ideals which slavery handed down--ideals of government, of labor, of caste.

Consequently when the South tried to use its new freed labor on its new industrial possibilities, it went to the problem full of the ideals of slavery, and it made four separate attempts. In the first place it was perfectly natural for a land which had said for generations that free Negro labor was an impossibility, and free Negro citizens unthinkable, to cherish a very distinct

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idea that the way to get along with the emancipated Negro was to make him a slave in fact if not in name. The idea that was back of the first apprentice laws and the various labor codes passed directly after Lee's surrender was that the labor of the blacks belonged to the former white owners by right and could be directed only by force under a nominal wage system. These labor codes therefore attempted to reëstablish slavery without a slave trade (see Note 7).

These ill-advised attempts were frustrated by the Fifteenth Amendment which made the freedmen voters. The Thirteenth Amendment did not abolish slavery--it directed its abolition and the answer to it was the labor codes. The Fourteenth Amendment gave the freedmen civil rights and put a premium on granting them political rights, but the premium was not accepted and the civil rights remained unenforced. The Fifteenth Amendment went to

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the root of the matter by putting local political power into the hands of the freedmen and their friends and this made slavery and the slave system impossible.

What the nation had before it then was not the nice academic question as to whether it would be better to have as voters men of intelligence or men of ignorance, whether it would be better to throw into the electorate of a great modern country a mass of slaves or a mass of college graduates--no such question came before the country; it was, as we are fond of saying, a situation and not a theory that confronted the country and that situation was this: here in the South we had attempted to abolish slavery by act of legislature--it was not abolished. The people who hitherto held power did not believe in its real abolishment; a great and growing economic revolution fronted them, cotton was still king. They were about to solve that problem--to meet the Revolution--according to their former labor ideals.

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One could not expect any other outcome. One could not in justice ask them voluntarily to accept free black labor; the only possible way to insure the solving of that economic problem with labor really free was to put in the South a political power which should make slavery in fact or inference forever impossible. This truth the great Thaddeus Stephens saw, and with a statesmanship far greater than Lincoln's he forced Negro suffrage on the South.

Although the new voters thus introduced in the South were crude and ignorant, and in many ways ill-fitted to rule, nevertheless in the fundamental postulates of American freedom and democracy they were sane and sound. Some of them were silly, some were ignorant, and some were venal, but they were not as silly as those who had fostered slavery in the South, nor as ignorant as those who were determined to perpetuate it, and the black voters of South Carolina never stole half as much as the white

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voters of Pennsylvania are stealing today.

The eternal monument to these maligned victims of a nation's wrong is the fact that they began the abolition of slavery in fact and not merely attack it in theory, they established free schools, and they passed laws on all subjects under which the white South is still content to live (see Note 8). If these men had been protected in their legal rights by the strong arm of the government, they would have been able to protect themselves in a generation or so. They would have increased in intelligence, responsibility, and power, and this the South was determined to prevent. The North wavered; having put its hand to the plow it looked back, and gradually allowed the black peasantry of the South to be almost completely disfranchised. What happened?

The time had passed for a reëstablishment of slavery, but serfdom and peonage were

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still possible and probable. When you have the leading classes of a country with the ideal of slavery in their minds and the laboring classes ignorant and without political power, there is but one system that can ensue and that is serfdom, and through serfdom was the second way in which the South strove to meet its great post-bellum economic problem.

Given these premises the economic answer of the South was, from a business standpoint, perfectly sound. The men who, starting poor after a miserable war, went into the development of the South, went in to make money--to use the great American thesis, they were "not in business for their health." They were going to grant to the laborer just as little as they must; the laborer was unused to a system of free labor, he was not a steady workman, he was not a skilled workman, he had been for two or three hundred years driven to his work, he took no pride in his

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work--how could he take pride in that which hitherto had been the badge of his shame?

Now it was not considered the business of the new Southern business man to develop and train the working man. It was his business, as I have said, from the American point of view, to make money. And the consequence was that he evolved a peculiarly ingenious system of land serfdom, which bears many likenesses to the serfdom that replaced slavery in Europe. The land belonged to the landlord--it was rented out to the serf; the serf was nominally free, but as a matter of fact he was not free at all; he was held to his labor: he rose with the morning work bell of slavery days, he was driven to his labor by mounted riders, he was whipped for delinquencies, he received no stipulated return, but on the contrary the owner of the land made the contract, kept the accounts, and gave him

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enough once or twice a year to make him not too dissatisfied.

After a time this changed somewhat; instead of the land owner himself undertaking the advancing of supplies, a third party, the merchant with capital, came in. In order to enforce such a system it needed to be backed by a peculiar law system--therefore the business men went into politics in the South with the same result as when business men go into politics in the North. Things were done quickly and quietly; they were done not for the good of people who had no political voice, but for the good of those who wielded the political power, i. e., the business men and land owners. The laws were made to favor the landlord and the merchant and to make it easy to exploit the tenant and laborer.

This system, which still is the rule of agricultural labor in the black belt of the South, is not a system of free labor; it is

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simply a form of peonage. The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile regions. Judge and jury are in honor bound to hold him down; if by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a land-holder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob. The power of the individual white patron to protect colored men is still great and is often exercised, but this is but another argument against the system: it is undemocratic and un-American, and stamps on the serf system its most damning criticism.

Moreover, this second attempt to meet the economic revolution of the South is failing, and its failure is shown by the scarcity of farm labor, the migration of Negroes, and the increase of crime and lawlessness.

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Serfdom like slavery demands ignorance and strict laws. The decade of Negro voting and Northern benevolence had however given the Negro schools and aspiration.

What now has been the reaction of this group on the environment thrown around it since slavery days?

The slaves had their select classes in the house servants and the artisans. After freedom came, the Negro made four distinct efforts to reach economic safety. The first effort was by means of the select house-servant class; the second, by means of competitive industry; the third, by land-owning; and the fourth, by what I shall call the group economy.

First, let us look at the effort of the house servants. The one person under the slave régime who came nearest to escaping from the toils of slavery and the disabilities of caste was the favorite house servant. This was because the house servant was

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brought into contact with the culture of the master and the family, because he had often the advantages of town and city life, was able to gain some smattering of education, and also because he was usually a blood relative of the master class. These house servants, therefore, became the natural leaders of the emancipated race and the brunt of the burden of reconstruction fell upon their shoulders. When the history of this period is carefully written it will show that few men ever made a more meritorious fight against overwhelming odds.

Under free competition it would have been natural for this class of house servants to enter the economic life of the nation directly. In some cases this happened, especially in the case of the barber and the caterer. For the most part, however, the black applicant was refused admittance to the economic society of the nation. He held his own in the semi-servile work of

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barber until he met the charge of color discrimination in his own race, and the competition of foreigners. The caterer was displaced by palatial hotels in which he could have no part.

On the whole, then, the mass of house servants soon found the doors in their own lines closed in their faces. They could remain good servants but they could not by this means often escape into higher walks of life. The better tenth of them went gradually into professions and thus found economic independence for themselves and their children. The mass of them either remained house servants or turned toward industry.

The second attempt of the freedmen toward economic safety lay in industry. It was a less ambitious effort than that of the house servants, and included larger numbers of men. It was characterized by a large migration to the towns. Here it was that the class of slave artisans made themselves

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felt in freedom and they were joined by numbers of unskilled workmen, such as steam railway hands, porters, hostlers, etc. This class attracted considerable attention and bore the brunt of the economic battle in competition with white working men. It is a class that is growing and in the future it is going to have a large development. At present, however, its fight is difficult.

The third effort of economic elevation was by land owning. This was the ideal toward which the great mass of black people looked. They at first thought that the government was going to help them, and the government did in a few instances, as when Sherman distributed land in Georgia and the government sold South Carolina lands for taxes. For the most part, however, the Negroes had to buy their own lands which they did in some cases by means of their bounty money for serving in the army or by means of special monies which they

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earned as workmen during the war or by the help of the former masters. Some too, by the share tenant system gained enough to buy land. In this way about 200,000 to-day own their farms and thus approximate economic independence.

The fourth and last effort, which I call the Group Economy, is of great importance, but is not very well understood. It consists of a coöperative arrangement of industry and service in a group which tends to make the group a closed economic circle, largely independent of surrounding whites. This development explains many anomalies in the situation of the Negro. Many people think that the colored barber is disappearing, yet there are more colored barbers in the United States to-day than ever before, but a larger number than ever cater to only colored trade. The Negro lawyer serves almost exclusively colored clientage, so that his existence is half forgotten by the white world. The new Negro business men are

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not successors of the old. There used to be Negro business men in Northern cities and a few even in Southern cities, but they catered to white trade; the Negro business man to-day caters to colored trade. So far has this gone to-day that in every city in the United States which has considerable Negro population, the colored group is serving itself in religion, medical care, legal advice and often educating its children. In growing degree also it is serving itself in insurance, houses, books, amusements.

So extraordinary has been this development that it forms a large and growing part in the economy of perhaps half the Negroes of the United States, and in the case of perhaps 100,000 town Negroes, representing at least 300,000 persons, the group economy approaches a complete system. To these we may add the bulk of 200,000 farmers who own their farms. Thus we have a group of half a million who are reaching

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economic safety by means of group economy (see Note 9).

Here then are the two developments--a determined effort at an established serfdom on the part of landholding capitalists, and a determined effort on the part of freedmen and their sons to attain economic independence.

While both these movements were progressing the full change of the industrial revolution, so long postponed, began to be felt all over the South; the iron and steel industry developed in Alabama and Tennessee, coal mining in Tennessee and West Virginia, and cotton manufacture in Carolina and Georgia; railways were consolidated into systems and extended, commerce was organized and concentrated. The greatest single visible result of this was the growth of cities. Towns of eight thousand and more had a tenth of the white Southerners in 1860; they held a seventh of a much larger population in

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1900, while a fifth were in cities and villages. Still more striking was the movement of Negroes; only four per cent. were in cities before the war, to-day a seventh are there.

The reason for this is clear: the oppression and serfdom of the country, the opportunities of the city. It was in the town and city alone that the emerging classes, outside the landholders, were successful, and even the landholders were helped by the earnings of the city; the house servants with the upper class of barbers and caterers, the artisans, the day laborers, the professional men, including the best of the teachers, were in the cities, and the new group economy was developed here.

On the other hand one of the inevitable expedients for fastening serfdom on the country Negro was enforced ignorance.

The Negro school system established by the Negro reconstruction governments

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reached its culmination in the decade 1870-1880. Since then determined effort has been made in the country districts to make the Negro schools less efficient. To-day these schools are worse than they were twenty years ago; the nominal term is longer and the enrolment larger, but the salaries are so small that only the poorest local talent can teach. There is little supervision, there are few appliances, few schoolhouses and no inspiration. On the other hand the city schools have usually improved. It was natural that the Negro should rush cityward toward freedom, education, and decent wages.

This migration resulted in two things: in the increase and intensification of the problems of the city, and in redoubled effort to keep the Negro laborer on the plantations.

To take the latter efforts first, we find that the efforts of the landlords to keep Negro labor varied from force to persuasion: force was used by the landlords to the

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extent of actual peonage, by which Negroes were held on plantations in large numbers; next to peonage for crime came debt peonage, which used the indebtedness of the Negro tenants to prevent their moving away; then came the system of labor contracts and the laws making the breaking of a labor contract a crime (see Note 10); after that came a crop of vagrancy laws aimed at the idle Negroes in city and town and designed to compel them to work on farms, going so far in several states as to reverse the common law principle and force the person arrested for vagrancy to prove his innocence (see Note 11).

In order that the farm laborers should not be tempted away by higher wages, penalties were laid on "enticing laborers away" and agents were compelled to take out licenses which ran as high as $2,000 for each county in some states (see Note 12). Such laws and their administration required, of course, absolute control of the government

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and courts. This was secured by manipulation and fraud, while at the same time the landlords of the black belt usually opposed the disfranchisement of Negroes lest such a measure reduce their political influence which was based on the Negro population.

All these measures were measures of force, while nothing was done to attract laborers to the land. The only real attraction of the Negro to the country was landowning. The Negroes had succeeded in buying land: by government gift and bounty money they held about three million acres in 1875, perhaps 8,000,000 in 1890, and 12,000,000 in 1900; but distinct efforts appeared here and there to stop their buying land.

There are still vast tracts of land in the South, that anybody, black or white, can buy for little or nothing, simply because it is worth little or nothing. Some time, of course, these lands will become valuable but they are not valuable to-day. Now the Negro cannot invest in this land as a

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speculation, for he is too poor to wait. He must have land which he knows how to cultivate, which is near a market, and which is so situated as to provide reasonable protection for his family. There are only certain crops which he knows how to cultivate. He cannot be expected to learn quickly to cultivate crops which he was not taught to cultivate in the past. He must be within reach of a market and he must have some community life with his own people and some protection from other people.

All these conditions are fulfilled chiefly in the black belt. That is the cotton region, the crop which he knows best how to raise; from certain parts of it he can get to the market and he has a great black population for company and protection. But it is precisely here in the black belt that it is most difficult to buy land. Capitalistic culture of cotton, the high price of cotton, and the system of labor peonage have made land

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high. Moreover in most of these regions it is considered bad policy to sell Negroes land because, as has been said, this "demoralizes" labor. Thus in the densest part of the black belt in the South, the percentage of land holding is usually low among Negroes.

The concentration of land-owning on the other hand in the hands of the single white proprietors has gone on to a much larger extent than the country realizes. This is shown not simply in the increase of the average size of farms in the last decade but it must also be remembered that the farms do not belong to single owners but are owned in groups of five, forty or fifty by single landed proprietors. There are 140,000 owners who own from two to fifty farms in the South and there are 50,000 owners who have over twenty farms apiece.

It is not true then to-day that land-buying for the average colored farmer in the South is an easy thing. The land which

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has been bought has been bought by the exceptional men or by the men who have had unusual opportunity, who have been helped by their former masters or by some other patrons, who have been aided by members of their own families in the North or in the cities, or who have escaped the wretched crop system by some sudden rise in the price of cotton, which did not enable the landlord to take the whole economic advantage. It is therefore in spite of the land system and not because of it that the Negroes to-day own 12,000,000 acres of land (see Note 13).

The net result of the whole policy of serfdom was so to deplete the ranks of laborers that a new solution of the labor problem must be found.

Here it was that the southern city came forward. The city had new significance, especially new cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and Chattanooga as contrasted with Charleston and Savannah. They saw a

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new industrial solution of the problem of Negro labor. It was a simple program: Industry and disfranchisement; the separation of the masses of the Negroes from all participation in government, and such technical training as should fit them to become skilled working men.

There was an arriere pensee here too, born in the minds of northern capitalists. The white southern working men were becoming unionized by northern agitators; here was a chance to keep them down to reasonable demands by black competition and the threat of more competition in the future. Moreover working men without votes would be far more docile and tractable. Politics had already spoiled the Negroes. Let the whites rule and the blacks work.

The plea was specious, it had the sanction of great names, of wealth and social influence, and it convinced not only those who wanted to be convinced but practically all Americans who were eager to be

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relieved of troublesome questions and difficult public duties.

All the more eagerly was this solution seized upon because of the definite and distinct promises which it made. Disfranchise the Negro, said the South, and the race problem is solved; there is no race problem save the menace of an ignorant and venal vote;--relieve us from this and the lion and the lamb will lie down together;--the Negro will go peacefully and contentedly to work and the whites will wax just and rich. We all remember with what confidence and absolute certainty of conviction this program was announced when Mississippi disfranchised her Negro voters seventeen years ago. It was repeated twelve years ago in South Carolina, ten years ago in Louisiana, and still more recently in North Carolina and Alabama.

What has been the result? Is the race problem solved? Is the Negro out of politics in the South? Has there been a

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single southern campaign in the last twenty years in which the Negro has not figured as the prime issue? Have the southern representatives in Congress any settled convictions or policy save hatred of black men, and can they discuss any other matter? Is it not the irony of fate that in the state that first discovered the legal fraud of disfranchisement a hot political battle is today waging on the old, old question: the right of black men to vote?

The reason for all this is not far to seek. In modern industrial democracy disfranchisement is impossible. The fate, wishes, and destiny of ten million human beings cannot be delivered, sealed and bound into the keeping of Dixon, Tillman, Vardaman, and Nelson Page. They are bound to vote even when disfranchised.

Disfranchised and voiceless though I am in Georgia to-day by the illegal White Primary system, there are still fifty congressmen in Washington fraudulently representing

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me and my fellows in the councils of the nation (see Note 14).

It was promised that disfranchisement would lead to more careful attention to the Negro's moral and economic advancement. It has on the contrary stripped them naked to their enemies; discriminating laws of all sorts have followed, the administration of other laws has become harsher and more unfair, school funds have been curtailed and education discouraged, and mobs and murder have gone on.

If the new policy has been a farce politically and socially, how much more has it failed as an economic cure-all! No sooner was it proclaimed from the house-tops than the rift in the lute appeared. "We do not want educated farmers," cried the landlords, "we want docile laborers." "We do not want educated Negro artisans," cried the white artisans, and they enforced their demands by their votes and by mob violence. "We do not want to raise the Negro;

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we want to put him in his place and keep him there," cried the dominant forces of the South. Then those northerners who had lightly embraced the fair sounding program of limited labor training and disfranchisement found themselves grasping the air.

Not only this, but the South itself faced a puzzling paradox. The industrial revolution was demanding labor; it was demanding intelligent labor, while the supposed political and social exigences of the situation called for ignorance and subserviency. It was an impossible contradiction and the South to-day knows it.

What is it that makes a successful laboring force? It is laborers of education and natural intelligence, reasonably satisfied with their conditions, inspired with certain ideals of life, and with a growing sense of self-respect and self-reliance. How is the caste system of the South influencing the Negro laborer? It is systematically restricting

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his development; it is restricting his education so that the public common schools of the South except in a few cities are worse this moment than they were twenty years ago; it is seeking to kill self-respect by putting upon the accident of color every mark of humiliation that it can invent; it is discouraging self-reliance by treating a class of men as wards and children; it is killing ambition by drawing a color line instead of a line of desert and accomplishment; and finally, through these things, it is encouraging crime, and by the unintelligent and brutal treatment of criminals, it is developing more crime.

This general attitude toward the main laboring class reflects itself less glaringly but as certainly in the treatment even of white laborers. So long as white labor must compete with black labor, it must approximate black labor conditions--long hours, small wages, child labor, labor of women, and even peonage. Moreover it

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can raise itself above black labor only by a legalized caste system which will cut off competition and this is what the South is straining every nerve to create.

The last fatal campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta Massacre was an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and farmers against the growing competition of black men, so that black men by law could be forced back to subserviency and serfdom. It succeeded so well that smouldering hate burst into flaming murder before the politicians could curb it.

There is, however, a limit to this sort of thing. The day when mobs can successfully cow the Negro to willing slavery is past. The Atlanta Negroes shot back and shot to kill, and that stopped the riot with a certain suddenness (see Note 15). The South is realizing that lawlessness and economic advance cannot coexist. If the

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wonderful industrial revolution is to develop unhindered, the South must have law and order and it must have intelligent workmen.

It is only a question of time when white working men and black working men will see their common cause against the aggressions of exploiting capitalists. Already there are signs of this: white and black miners are working as a unit in Alabama; white and black masons are in one union in Atlanta (see Note 16). The economic strength of the Negro cannot be beaten into weakness, and therefore it must be taken into partnership, and this the Southern white working man, befuddled by prejudice as he is, begins dimly to realize.

It is this paradox that brings us to-day in the South to a fourth solution of the problem: Immigration. The voice that calls foreign immigrants southward to-day is not single but double. First, the exploiter of common labor wishes to exploit this new labor just as formerly he exploited Negro

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labor. On the other hand the far-sighted ones know that the present freedom of labor exploitation must pass--that some time or other the industrial system of the South must be made to conform more and more to the growing sense of industrial justice in the North and in the civilized world. Consequently the second object of the immigration philosopher is to make sure that, when the rights of the laborer come to be recognized in the South, that laborer will be white, and just so far as possible the black laborer will still be forced down below the white laborer until he becomes thoroughly demoralized or extinct.

The query is therefore: If immigration turns toward the South as it undoubtedly will in time, what will become of the Negro? The view of the white world is usually that there are two possibilities. First, that the immigrants will crush the Negro utterly; or secondly, that by competition there will come a shifting which will

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lead to the survival of the best in both groups of laborers.

Let us consider these possibilities. First it is certain that so far as the Negroes are land holders, and so far as they belong to a self-employing, self-supplying group economy, no possible competition from without can disturb them. I have shown already how rapidly this system is growing. Further than that, there is a large group of Negroes who have already gained an assured place in the national economy as artisans, servants, and laborers. The worst of these may be supplanted, but the best could not be unless there came a sudden unprecedented and improbable influx of skilled foreign labor. A slow infiltration of foreigners cannot displace the better class of Negro workers; simply because the growing labor demand of the South cannot spare them. If then it is to be merely a matter of ability to work, the result of immigration will on the whole be beneficial and will

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differentiate the good Negro workman from the careless and indifferent.

But one element remains to be considered, and this is political power. If the black workman is to remain disfranchised while the white native and immigrant not only has the economic defense of the ballot, but the power to use it so as to hem in the Negro competitor, cow and humiliate him and force him to a lower plane, then the Negro will suffer from immigration.

It is becoming distinctly obvious to Negroes that to-day, in modern economic organization, the one thing that is giving the workman a chance is intelligence and political power, and that it is utterly impossible for a moment to suppose that the Negro in the South is going to hold his own in the new competition with immigrants if, on the one hand, the immigrant has access to the best schools of the community and has equal political power with other men to defend his rights and to assert his wishes,

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while, on the other hand, his black competitor is not only weighed down by past degradation, but has few or no schools and is disfranchised.

The question then as to what will happen in the South when immigration comes, is a very simple question. If the Negro is kept disfranchised and ignorant and if the new foreign immigrants are allowed access to the schools and given votes as they undoubtedly will be, then there can ensue only accentuated race hatred, the spread of poverty and disease among Negroes, the increase of crime, and the gradual murder of the eight millions of black men who live in the South except in so far as they escape North and bring their problems there as thousands will.

If on the contrary, with the coming of the immigrants to the South, there is given to the Negro equal educational opportunity and the chance to cast his vote like a man and be counted as a man in the councils of

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the county, city, state and nation, then there will ensue that competition between men in the industrial world which, if it is not altogether just, is at least better than slavery and serfdom.

There of course could be strong argument that the nation owes the Negro something better than harsh industrial competition just after slavery, but the Negro does not ask the payment of debts that are dead. He is perfectly willing to come into competition with immigrants from any part of the world, to welcome them as human beings and as fellows in the struggle for life, to struggle with them and for them and for a greater South and a better nation. But the black man certainly has a right to ask, when he starts into this race, that he be allowed to start with hands untied and brain unclouded (see Note 17).

Such in bare outline is the economic history of the South. It is the story of an attempt to degrade working men. It failed in

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1860, after it had sought for centuries to reduce laborers to the level of purchasable cattle; it failed in 1870, after a fearful catastrophe while endeavoring to revive this system under another name; it has failed since then satisfactorily to maintain the present rural serfdom or to establish a disfranchised caste of artisans; and it will fail in the future to keep the stubbornly up-struggling masses of black laborers down, by shackling their souls and loading immigrants atop of them. It will always fail unless indeed, as sometimes seems possible, both Church and State in America shall refuse longer to listen to the teaching of Jesus when He said: "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

"Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest for your souls.

"For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."

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CHAPTER IV

RELIGION IN THE SOUTH

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CHAPTER IV

RELIGION IN THE SOUTH

IT is often a nice question as to which is of greater importance among a people--the way in which they earn their living, or their attitude toward life. As a matter of fact these two things are but two sides of the same problem, for nothing so reveals the attitude of a people toward life as the manner in which they earn their living; and on the other hand the earning of a living depends in the last analysis upon one's estimate of what life really is. So that these two questions that I am discussing with regard to the South are intimately bound up with each other.

If we have studied the economic development of the South carefully, then we have already seen something of its attitude toward life; the history of religion in the

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South means a study of these same facts over which we have gone, from a different point of view. Moreover, as the economic history of the South is in effect the economics of slavery and the Negro problem, so the essence of a study of religion in the South is a study of the ethics of slavery and emancipation.

It is very difficult of course for one who has not seen the practical difficulties that surround a people at any particular time in their battle with the hard facts of this world, to interpret with sympathy their ideals of life; and this is especially difficult when the economic life of a nation has been expressed by such a discredited word as slavery. If, then, we are to study the history of religion in the South, we must first of all divest ourselves of prejudice, pro and con; we must try to put ourselves in the place of those who are seeking to read the riddle of life and grant to them about the same general charity and the

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same general desire to do right that we find in the average human being. On the other hand, we must not, in striving to be charitable, be false to truth and right. Slavery in the United States was an economic mistake and a moral crime. This we cannot forget. Yet it had its excuses and mitigations. These we must remember.

When in the seventeenth century there grew up in the New World a system of human slavery, it was not by any means a new thing. There were slaves and slavery in Europe, not, to be sure, to a great extent, but none the less real. The Christian religion, however, had come to regard it as wrong and unjust that those who partook of the privileges and hopes and aspirations of that religion should oppress each other to the extent of actual enslavement. The idea of human brotherhood in the seventeenth century was of a brotherhood of co-religionists. When it came to the dealing of Christian with heathen, however, the

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century saw nothing wrong in slavery; rather, theoretically, they saw a chance for a great act of humanity and religion. The slaves were to be brought from heathenism to Christianity, and through slavery the benighted Indian and African were to find their passport into the kingdom of God. This theory of human slavery was held by Spaniards, French, and English. It was New England in the early days that put the echo of it in her codes (see Note 18) and recognition of it can be seen in most of the colonies.

But no sooner had people adopted this theory than there came the insistent and perplexing question as to what the status of the heathen slave was to be after he was Christianized and baptized; and even more pressing, what was to be the status of his children?

The Negro in the South; His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development; Being the William Levi Bull Lectures for the Year 1907: Electronic Edition.

Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915 and W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963

The Negro in the South His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development

Being the William Levi Bull Lectures for the Year 1907

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Of the Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute and W. E. BURGHARDT DUBOIS Of the Atlanta University

PHILADELPHIA GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1907, by GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY Published, June, 1907 All rights reserved Printed in U. S. A.

The Letter Establishing the Lectureship

Contents

CHAPTER I

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO RACE IN SLAVERY

CHAPTER I

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO RACE IN SLAVERY

CHAPTER II

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO RACE SINCE ITS EMANCIPATION

CHAPTER II

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO RACE SINCE ITS EMANCIPATION

CHAPTER III

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH

CHAPTER III

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH

CHAPTER IV

RELIGION IN THE SOUTH

CHAPTER IV

RELIGION IN THE SOUTH

The Negro in the South; His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral
and Religious Development; Being the William Levi Bull Lectures for the Year 1907:
Electronic Edition.

The Negro in the South

His Economic Progress in Relation to
His Moral and Religious Development

Being the William Levi Bull
Lectures for the Year 1907

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Of the Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute
and
W. E. BURGHARDT DUBOIS
Of the Atlanta University

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1907, by
GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY
Published, June, 1907
All rights reserved
Printed in U. S. A.

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE
NEGRO RACE IN SLAVERY

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO
RACE IN SLAVERY

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE
NEGRO RACE SINCE ITS EMANCIPATION

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEGRO
RACE SINCE ITS EMANCIPATION

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN THE
SOUTH