The Souls of Black Folk
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W. E. B. Du Bois. >> The Souls of Black Folk
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"Hello!" cried my driver,--he has a most imprudent way
of addressing these people, though they seem used to it,
--"what have you got there?"
"Meat and meal," answered the man, stopping. The meat
lay uncovered in the bottom of the wagon,--a great thin side
of fat pork covered with salt; the meal was in a white bushel
bag.
"What did you pay for that meat?"
"Ten cents a pound." It could have been bought for six or
seven cents cash.
"And the meal?"
"Two dollars." One dollar and ten cents is the cash price
in town. Here was a man paying five dollars for goods which
he could have bought for three dollars cash, and raised for
one dollar or one dollar and a half.
Yet it is not wholly his fault. The Negro farmer started
behind,--started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the
crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering
along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war inter-
ludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were
dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to
emerge.
In the year of low-priced cotton, 1898, out of three hun-
dred tenant families one hundred and seventy-five ended their
year's work in debt to the extent of fourteen thousand dollars;
fifty cleared nothing, and the remaining seventy-five made a
total profit of sixteen hundred dollars. The net indebtedness
of the black tenant families of the whole county must have
been at least sixty thousand dollars. In a more prosperous
year the situation is far better; but on the average the majority
of tenants end the year even, or in debt, which means that
they work for board and clothes. Such an economic organiza-
tion is radically wrong. Whose is the blame?
The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of
the nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the
widespread opinion among the merchants and employers of
the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro
be kept at work. Without doubt, some pressure was necessary
at the beginning of the free-labor system to keep the listless
and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the Negro
laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern labor-
ers. Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty
and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to
take refuge. And to all this must be added the obvious fact
that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not
improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black
laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been
just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of
the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking
about it. Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the
inevitable results of this pondering. I see now that ragged
black man sitting on a log, aimlessly whittling a stick. He
muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said:
"White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night
and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin' down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better
classes of Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two
things: if any way possible, they buy land; if not, they
migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for
the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so
to-day there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers.
In considerable parts of all the Gulf States, and especially in
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on the
plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced
labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in
districts where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant
class of poor whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of
schools and intercourse with their advancing fellows. If such
a peon should run away, the sheriff, elected by white suf-
frage, can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return
him, and ask no questions. If he escape to another county, a
charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon to
secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person insist
upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his con-
viction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be
bought by the master. Such a system is impossible in the
more civilized parts of the South, or near the large towns and
cities; but in those vast stretches of land beyond the telegraph
and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment is
sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic depths of
the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and
condition of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic
progress from the modern serfdom.
Even in the better-ordered country districts of the South the
free movement of agricultural laborers is hindered by the
migration-agent laws. The "Associated Press" recently in-
formed the world of the arrest of a young white man in
Southern Georgia who represented the "Atlantic Naval Sup-
plies Company," and who "was caught in the act of enticing
hands from the turpentine farm of Mr. John Greer." The
crime for which this young man was arrested is taxed five
hundred dollars for each county in which the employment
agent proposes to gather laborers for work outside the State.
Thus the Negroes' ignorance of the labor-market outside his
own vicinity is increased rather than diminished by the laws
of nearly every Southern State.
Similar to such measures is the unwritten law of the back
districts and small towns of the South, that the character of all
Negroes unknown to the mass of the community must be
vouched for by some white man. This is really a revival of
the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the
new-made freedman was put. In many instances this system
has been of great good to the Negro, and very often under the
protection and guidance of the former master's family, or
other white friends, the freedman progressed in wealth and
morality. But the same system has in other cases resulted in
the refusal of whole communities to recognize the right of a
Negro to change his habitation and to be master of his own
fortunes. A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia, for
instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public
highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of
any white interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or
seems too independent or "sassy," he may be arrested or
summarily driven away.
Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by
written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migra-
tion of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over
large areas. Besides this, the chance for lawless oppression
and illegal exactions is vastly greater in the country than in
the city, and nearly all the more serious race disturbances of
the last decade have arisen from disputes in the count be-
tween master and man,--as, for instance, the Sam Hose
affair. As a result of such a situation, there arose, first, the
Black Belt; and, second, the Migration to Town. The Black
Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of
labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily
a huddling for self-protection,--a massing of the black popu-
lation for mutual defence in order to secure the peace and
tranquillity necessary to economic advance. This movement
took place between Emancipation and 1880, and only par-
tially accomplished the desired results. The rush to town
since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in
the economic opportunities of the Black Belt.
In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the
results of this experiment in huddling for protection. Only ten
per cent of the adult population was born in the county, and
yet the blacks outnumber the whites four or five to one. There
is undoubtedly a security to the blacks in their very numbers,--a
personal freedom from arbitrary treatment, which makes hun-
dreds of laborers cling to Dougherty in spite of low wages
and economic distress. But a change is coming, and slowly
but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to
town and leaving the broad acres behind. Why is this? Why
do not the Negroes become land-owners, and build up the
black landed peasantry, which has for a generation and more
been the dream of philanthropist and statesman?
To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to
understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure
hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries,--to
such men very often the whole trouble with the black field-
hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia's word, "Shift-
less!" They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw last
summer. We were riding along the highroad to town at the
close of a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows
passed us in a muleteam, with several bushels of loose corn in
the ear. One was driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows
on his knees,--a happy-go-lucky, careless picture of irrespon-
sibility. The other was fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon.
As we passed we noticed an ear of corn fall from the wagon.
They never saw it,--not they. A rod farther on we noted
another ear on the ground; and between that creeping mule
and town we counted twenty-six ears of corn. Shiftless? Yes,
the personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those
boys: they are not lazy; to-morrow morning they'll be up with
the sun; they work hard when they do work, and they work
willingly. They have no sordid, selfish, money-getting ways,
but rather a fine disdain for mere cash. They'll loaf before
your face and work behind your back with good-natured
honesty. They'll steal a watermelon, and hand you back your
lost purse intact. Their great defect as laborers lies in their
lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exer-
tion. They are careless because they have not found that it
pays to be careful; they are improvident because the im-
provident ones of their acquaintance get on about as well as
the provident. Above all, they cannot see why they should
take unusual pains to make the white man's land better, or to
fatten his mule, or save his corn. On the other hand, the
white land-owner argues that any attempt to improve these
laborers by increased responsibility, or higher wages, or
better homes, or land of their own, would be sure to result in
failure. He shows his Northern visitor the scarred and wretched
land; the ruined mansions, the worn-out soil and mortgaged
acres, and says, This is Negro freedom!
Now it happens that both master and man have just enough
argument on their respective sides to make it difficult for
them to understand each other. The Negro dimly personifies
in the white man all his ills and misfortunes; if he is poor, it
is because the white man seizes the fruit of his toil; if he is
ignorant, it is because the white man gives him neither time
nor facilities to learn; and, indeed, if any misfortune happens
to him, it is because of some hidden machinations of "white
folks." On the other hand, the masters and the masters' sons
have never been able to see why the Negro, instead of settling
down to he day-laborers for bread and clothes, are infected
with a silly desire to rise in the world, and why they are
sulky, dissatisfied, and careless, where their fathers were
happy and dumb and faithful. "Why, you niggers have an
easier time than I do," said a puzzled Albany merchant to his
black customer. "Yes," he replied, "and so does yo' hogs."
Taking, then, the dissatisfied and shiftless field-hand as a
starting-point, let us inquire how the black thousands of
Dougherty have struggled from him up toward their ideal,
and what that ideal is. All social struggle is evidenced by the
rise, first of economic, then of social classes, among a homo-
geneous population. To-day the following economic classes
are plainly differentiated among these Negroes.
A "submerged tenth" of croppers, with a few paupers;
forty per cent who are metayers and thirty-nine per cent of
semi-metayers and wage-laborers. There are left five per cent
of money-renters and six per cent of freeholders,--the "Up-
per Ten" of the land. The croppers are entirely without
capital, even in the limited sense of food or money to keep
them from seed-time to harvest. All they furnish is their
labor; the land-owner furnishes land, stock, tools, seed, and
house; and at the end of the year the laborer gets from a third
to a half of the crop. Out of his share, however, comes pay
and interest for food and clothing advanced him during the
year. Thus we have a laborer without capital and without
wages, and an employer whose capital is largely his employ-
ees' wages. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for hirer
and hired, and is usually in vogue on poor land with hard-
pressed owners.
Above the croppers come the great mass of the black
population who work the land on their own responsibility,
paying rent in cotton and supported by the crop-mortgage
system. After the war this system was attractive to the freedmen
on account of its larger freedom and its possibility for making
a surplus. But with the carrying out of the crop-lien system,
the deterioration of the land, and the slavery of debt, the
position of the metayers has sunk to a dead level of practi-
cally unrewarded toil. Formerly all tenants had some capital,
and often considerable; but absentee landlordism, rising rack-
rent, and failing cotton have stripped them well-nigh of all,
and probably not over half of them to-day own their mules.
The change from cropper to tenant was accomplished by
fixing the rent. If, now, the rent fixed was reasonable, this
was an incentive to the tenant to strive. On the other hand, if
the rent was too high, or if the land deteriorated, the result
was to discourage and check the efforts of the black peas-
antry. There is no doubt that the latter case is true; that in
Dougherty County every economic advantage of the price of
cotton in market and of the strivings of the tenant has been
taken advantage of by the landlords and merchants, and
swallowed up in rent and interest. If cotton rose in price, the
rent rose even higher; if cotton fell, the rent remained or
followed reluctantly. If the tenant worked hard and raised a
large crop, his rent was raised the next year; if that year the
crop failed, his corn was confiscated and his mule sold for
debt. There were, of course, exceptions to this,--cases of
personal kindness and forbearance; but in the vast majority of
cases the rule was to extract the uttermost farthing from the
mass of the black farm laborers.
The average metayer pays from twenty to thirty per cent of
his crop in rent. The result of such rack-rent can only be
evil,--abuse and neglect of the soil, deterioration in the
character of the laborers, and a widespread sense of injustice.
"Wherever the country is poor," cried Arthur Young, "it is
in the hands of metayers," and "their condition is more
wretched than that of day-laborers." He was talking of Italy a
century ago; but he might have been talking of Dougherty
County to-day. And especially is that true to-day which he
declares was true in France before the Revolution: "The
metayers are considered as little better than menial servants,
removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to
the will of the landlords." On this low plane half the black
population of Dougherty County--perhaps more than half the
black millions of this land--are to-day struggling.
A degree above these we may place those laborers who
receive money wages for their work. Some receive a house
with perhaps a garden-spot; then supplies of food and cloth-
ing are advanced, and certain fixed wages are given at the
end of the year, varying from thirty to sixty dollars, out of
which the supplies must be paid for, with interest. About
eighteen per cent of the population belong to this class of
semi-metayers, while twenty-two per cent are laborers paid
by the month or year, and are either "furnished" by their
own savings or perhaps more usually by some merchant who
takes his chances of payment. Such laborers receive from
thirty-five to fifty cents a day during the working season.
They are usually young unmarried persons, some being women;
and when they marry they sink to the class of metayers, or,
more seldom, become renters.
The renters for fixed money rentals are the first of the
emerging classes, and form five per cent of the families. The
sole advantage of this small class is their freedom to choose
their crops, and the increased responsibility which comes
through having money transactions. While some of the rent-
ers differ little in condition from the metayers, yet on the
whole they are more intelligent and responsible persons, and
are the ones who eventually become land-owners. Their bet-
ter character and greater shrewdness enable them to gain,
perhaps to demand, better terms in rents; rented farms, vary-
ing from forty to a hundred acres, bear an average rental of
about fifty-four dollars a year. The men who conduct such
farms do not long remain renters; either they sink to meta-
yers, or with a successful series of harvests rise to be
land-owners.
In 1870 the tax-books of Dougherty report no Negroes as
landholders. If there were any such at that time,--and there
may have been a few,--their land was probably held in the
name of some white patron,--a method not uncommon
during slavery. In 1875 ownership of land had begun with
seven hundred and fifty acres; ten years later this had in-
creased to over sixty-five hundred acres, to nine thousand
acres in 1890 and ten thousand in 1900. The total assessed
property has in this same period risen from eighty thousand
dollars in 1875 to two hundred and forty thousand dollars in
1900.
Two circumstances complicate this development and make
it in some respects difficult to be sure of the real tendencies;
they are the panic of 1893, and the low price of cotton in
1898. Besides this, the system of assessing property in the
country districts of Georgia is somewhat antiquated and of
uncertain statistical value; there are no assessors, and each
man makes a sworn return to a tax-receiver. Thus public
opinion plays a large part, and the returns vary strangely from
year to year. Certainly these figures show the small amount
of accumulated capital among the Negroes, and the conse-
quent large dependence of their property on temporary pros-
perity. They have little to tide over a few years of economic
depression, and are at the mercy of the cotton-market far
more than the whites. And thus the land-owners, despite their
marvellous efforts, are really a transient class, continually
being depleted by those who fall back into the class of renters
or metayers, and augmented by newcomers from the masses.
Of one hundred land-owners in 1898, half had bought their
land since 1893, a fourth between 1890 and 1893, a fifth
between 1884 and 1890, and the rest between 1870 and 1884.
In all, one hundred and eighty-five Negroes have owned land
in this county since 1875.
If all the black land-owners who had ever held land here
had kept it or left it in the hands of black men, the Negroes
would have owned nearer thirty thousand acres than the
fifteen thousand they now hold. And yet these fifteen thou-
sand acres are a creditable showing,--a proof of no little
weight of the worth and ability of the Negro people. If they
had been given an economic start at Emancipation, if they
had been in an enlightened and rich community which really
desired their best good, then we might perhaps call such a
result small or even insignificant. But for a few thousand
poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling
market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred
thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous
effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social
class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle
with the world such as few of the more favored classes know
or appreciate.
Out of the hard economic conditions of this portion of the
Black Belt, only six per cent of the population have suc-
ceeded in emerging into peasant proprietorship; and these are
not all firmly fixed, but grow and shrink in number with the
wavering of the cotton-market. Fully ninety-four per cent have
struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless
serfdom. For these there is one other avenue of escape toward
which they have turned in increasing numbers, namely, mi-
gration to town. A glance at the distribution of land among
the black owners curiously reveals this fact. In 1898 the
holdings were as follows: Under forty acres, forty-nine fami-
lies; forty to two hundred and fifty acres, seventeen families;
two hundred and fifty to one thousand acres, thirteen fami-
lies; one thousand or more acres, two families. Now in 1890
there were forty-four holdings, but only nine of these were
under forty acres. The great increase of holdings, then, has
come in the buying of small homesteads near town, where
their owners really share in the town life; this is a part of the
rush to town. And for every land-owner who has thus hurried
away from the narrow and hard conditions of country life,
how many field-hands, how many tenants, how many ruined
renters, have joined that long procession? Is it not strange
compensation? The sin of the country districts is visited on
the town, and the social sores of city life to-day may, here in
Dougherty County, and perhaps in many places near and far,
look for their final healing without the city walls.
IX
Of the Sons of Master and Man
Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.
MRS. BROWNING.
The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of
men is to have new exemplification during the new century.
Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European
civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples. Whatever
we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it
certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to
look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and
debauchery,--this has again and again been the result of
carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the
sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether
satisfy the conscience of the modern world to be told compla-
cently that all this has been right and proper, the fated
triumph of strength over weakness, of righteousness over
evil, of superiors over inferiors. It would certainly be sooth-
ing if one could readily believe all this; and yet there are too
many ugly facts for everything to be thus easily explained
away. We feel and know that there are many delicate differ-
ences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude
social measurements are not yet able to follow minutely,
which explain much of history and social development. At
the same time, too, we know that these considerations have
never adequately explained or excused the triumph of brute
force and cunning over weakness and innocence.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth
century to see that in the future competition of races the
survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the
beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for
future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong,
and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence
and cruelty. To bring this hope to fruition, we are compelled
daily to turn more and more to a conscientious study of the
phenomena of race-contact,--to a study frank and fair, and
not falsified and colored by our wishes or our fears. And we
have in the South as fine a field for such a study as the world
affords,--a field, to be sure, which the average American
scientist deems somewhat beneath his dignity, and which the
average man who is not a scientist knows all about, but
nevertheless a line of study which by reason of the enormous
race complications with which God seems about to punish
this nation must increasingly claim our sober attention, study,
and thought, we must ask, what are the actual relations of
whites and blacks in the South? and we must be answered,
not by apology or fault-finding, but by a plain, unvarnished
tale.
In the civilized life of to-day the contact of men and their
relations to each other fall in a few main lines of action and
communication: there is, first, the physical proximity of home
and dwelling-places, the way in which neighborhoods group
themselves, and the contiguity of neighborhoods. Secondly,
and in our age chiefest, there are the economic relations,
--the methods by which individuals cooperate for earning a
living, for the mutual satisfaction of wants, for the production
of wealth. Next, there are the political relations, the cooperation
in social control, in group government, in laying and paying
the burden of taxation. In the fourth place there are the less
tangible but highly important forms of intellectual contact and
commerce, the interchange of ideas through conversation and
conference, through periodicals and libraries; and, above all,
the gradual formation for each community of that curious
tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely allied with
this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life,
in travel, in theatres, in house gatherings, in marrying and
giving in marriage. Finally, there are the varying forms of
religious enterprise, of moral teaching and benevolent en-
deavor. These are the principal ways in which men living in
the same communities are brought into contact with each
other. It is my present task, therefore, to indicate, from my
point of view, how the black race in the South meet and
mingle with the whites in these matters of everyday life.
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