Historical voices

Their great defect as laborers lies in their lack of incentive beyond the mere pleasure of physical exertion.

They have no sordid, selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash.

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.

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?

But a change is coming, and slowly but surely even here the agricultural laborers are drifting to town and leaving the broad acres behind.

The rush to town since 1880 is the counter-movement of men disappointed in the economic opportunities of the Black Belt.

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 population for mutual defence in order to secure the…

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 county between…

Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas.

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.

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.

This is really a revival of the old Roman idea of the patron under whose protection the new-made freedman was put.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the inevitable results of this pondering.

Such is the situation of the mass of the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking about it.

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.

Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge.

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…

Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.