The previous chapter sought to show that the economics of civilization in
contact with colored races must be racialized for the purpose of preserving the
white type, if cultural progress is to continue. We are now to observe the
influence of certain religious and political teachings in their bearing upon
the culture and race purity of the white man in contact with the colored.
The enquiry into the influence of religion in its bearing upon interracial
relations will affect religious sociology rather than theology, for it
is the teaching with regard to man's relation to man which concerns us. The
Christian religion strikes direct at the "ape and tiger" in human nature,
and the races of mankind are ever in need of its social teaching. The Negro in
Northern and Central Africa is turning a deaf ear to the teaching of Christ,
which is unwelcome because it inhibits natural propensities; turning from
Christianity and in great numbers espousing Mohammedanism. The latter does not
curb lust, does not require high cultural standards, and is winning Africa by
the millions; while Christianity, laboriously taught, is claiming a few
thousands.
But in Southern Africa, because of the presence of European civilization and
the absence of Mohammedan missionaries, the natives have come nominally under
Christian influence. The slave owners of South Africa, like those of the United
States, were genuinely intent upon teaching their religion to their slaves, and
at the time of the abolition of slavery in these countries many Negroes were
Christian converts.
At the time of emancipation of the slaves, there poured into South Africa a
horde of European missionaries possessing various Christian creeds, but unified
generally in one respect. They believed in the essential, the practical, and
the immediate equality of blacks and whites. (The Wesleyans were possibly an
exception, especially so with regard to their immediately practical program. Certain
representatives of the London Missionary Society were the greatest offenders.
This organization, through influence in England, assumed practical dictatorship
in the colony. Some of its members, objecting to its political activities,
withdrew from it.) The coming of these missionaries was at first welcomed by
the colonials, but their subsequent activities produced a deep hatred in the
heart of the white race in Africa toward "Christianity," as
interpreted by Europe.
South Africans believed in the Christian's God, but rejected the
missionaries' social teaching. The present missionary movement is better
organized than the former, has less objectionable social teaching, and is
headed by educated and earnest leaders; but the colonial is still uneasy, and
at the first breaking out of trouble with the natives the colonial condemns the
missionary.
As a heritage of past missionary influence, the Negro has the idea drilled
into him that there is no difference, save that of skin and hair, between the
Negro and the Caucasian. At first the Negro accepted the rule of the white man
as the natural right of a highly constituted race over an inferior one; but he
gradually came to believe that the white man's superiority was cultural only,
and that he, the Negro, was the natural equal of the white man and that the
white man was oppressing him by not recognizing this equality, or, in the
opinion of some of the more ignorant, the black man's superiority.
In South Africa, as in the United States, the teaching of equality led the
Negro to despise the white man and his authority. He became unruly and
aggressive and ended, in the one country as in the other, a ravisher of the
women of the white man.
Constituted authority of the white race has not served to deter the black
criminal. Black assailants of white women have become so numerous and their
detection so difficult, in South Africa, at this crime has assumed proportions
which threaten the supremacy of the white race immediately. The criminals are
hidden in the native villages by their compatriots or are spirited away to
native territory. Their detection is an impossibility and the white homes are
in a state of siege. Every Negro will not commit the crime, but most of them
will palliate it, and few, if any, aid in detecting the criminal.
White men accompanying white women are assailed and their women seized and
assaulted. The Negro, or a group of Negroes, enters the homes of white men
during the absence of the men and assaults the women. Numerous white women have
been maimed for life, others have been killed. During the author's residence of
two years in South Africa, three white women shot and killed their black
assailants, but no white man exacted life by reason of his women being
dishonored. British rule has established law in South Africa, as elsewhere, but
many black criminals cannot be apprehended and punished. Law, if not effective,
is not synonymous with order.
It was the policy of the South African press to suppress reports of assaults
by Negroes upon white women, for fear that excitement following publicity would
imperil the law; but the coming of an English negrophilist (seemingly so), as
Governor General of the colony, marked a departure in this respect. A Rhodesian
jury condemned to death the convicted black ravisher of a local white woman.
The Governor General (Lord Gladstone, son of the famous British statesman of
that name) commuted the sentence. This official was not of the political
sympathies of the majority of South Africans, and the event was seized upon by
his opponents and led to a general publicity with regard to the extent of such
Negro crime in order to condemn the European official. South Africa suddenly
realized that the crime was nation-wide. Intense excitement prevailed, mass
meetings were held, and the citizens threatened but did not take the law into
their own hands. Encouraged by negrophilism and undeterred by the threats of
the whites, the Negro increased, rather than diminished, the number of assaults
upon white women.
A large and conservative newspaper of the Transvaal (The Rand Daily Mail),
in order to prevent lawlessness and, if possible, to stay the Negro's brutal
passion, circulated a petition in Johannesburg and vicinity, the purpose of
which was to pray the nation's parliament for relief. Without the aid of a paid
canvasser, the small white population of the gold fields furnished 51,925
signatures to this petition, which read in part as follows:
Petition To
the Honorable the Speaker and the Honorable Members of the House of Assembly.
The Petition of the Undersigned Citizens of the Witwaterstrand
Humbly Sheweth:
"1. That your petitioners
desire to direct your attention to the prevalence of native crime, more
especially of outrages on women and children throughout the Witwaterstrand
District. 2. That, in consequence of these outrages, neither the life nor the
honor of white women in this district can be safe; more especially in the
numerous suburbs, which are at the present time practically unpoliced, and
therefore the favorite resort of native criminals. 3. That the number of cases
of rape and attempted rape (nearly all occurring in this area) reported for
1910 in the Transvaal was 208, and that your petitioners are of opinion that
the cases which did not come before the courts of this country are at least
equal in number."
Parliament received this petition and some of its members
wept. It appointed a commission to make a nation-side investigation of the
crime, which was done, the commission's report being published in the summer of
1913. (See the Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire Into Assaults
on Women, 1913) This commission was constituted of eight members, three of
whom were women, headed by Melius de Villiers, lately Chief Justice of the
Orange Free State. Another of the commissioners was the famous Boer general, De
Wett. The following is a brief summary of the recommendations of the
commission: With regard to miscegenation,
Continuing, the report recommends the suppression of
indecent publications, the "closed," rather than the "open"
mine compounds. (In a closed compound a native may not leave the enclosure
during his period of employment). It proposes to encourage the employment of
white female domestic servants in the white households, and by this measure,
eliminate the chief danger, the so-called "house-boy" -- a male
native employed in South Africa by white families to do the service usually
allotted to white women servants in Europe and America. It was further proposed
to print and distribute a circular warning newly arrived European women of The
danger of assaults from the male Negro. These printed precautions should
contain among others the following points:
About the time that the "black peril" (term used
to designate the phenomenon of Negro assaults upon white women) was engrossing
the minds of South Africans, an additional menace occurred in the form of a
resolution in the German Reichstag, which requested the German Colonial Office
to abolish the laws which prevented whites from marrying blacks in the German
colonies. German Southwest Africa (now British territory) borders in part on
the Union of South Africa, and the whites of South Africa feared a reflected
influence and feared further than the German resolution presaged a revival of
European negrophilism.
"Black Peril" and the German resolution caused white South Africa
to analyze and seek the source of the danger which menaced every white home.
The Negro, at one time easily controlled, was now threatening social order.
Opposition to the European missionary had been ever latent in the social mind,
and at this juncture there reappeared bitter criticism of the missionary
activities which, by a subtle influence upon the mind of the Negro, had created
presumption and insolence on his part. Smarting from what was believed to be
unjust condemnation, the Transvaal Missionary Association, composed of nineteen
separate sectarian missionary organizations, met at Johannesburg and issued an
address to the public in which it was stated that if the missionaries were condemned,
Christianity itself was condemned.
The German resolution praying for the privilege for whites to marry blacks
in the German colonies had been secured by a combined vote of the clericals
and socialists, and with this resolution, and the European missionary
influence in mind, the author, seeking to show that not Christianity but a
false social teaching of certain Christians, was the object of criticism, wrote
the following address to the Transvaal Missionary Association while still in
South Africa: "
There has been a tendency in teachers of Christianity to
utilize its social tenets to level races and cultures. But Buddhism did this,
and so did Mohammedanism. The last named arose among a white people and
threatened to attain world domination, but its influence gradually waned as its
white custodians interbred with colored races.
In Africa, in China, in India, in
Near Asia, in Latin America; in these countries, some of them evangelized by
the Apostles, Christianity has been implanted by the white man and has not
survived the white man. Two thousand years of Christian activities seem to
establish that the white race as white is custodian of the Gospel of Jesus and
that to the white man as white is entrusted the spreading of the Gospel.
A gospel of equality of races
cannot but end in free miscegenation of races. Europe preaches the gospel of
equality of races, with the result that white men and white women come to the
colonies and marry colored men and women. Let us examine Christianity as a
religion and detect the sources of this uncritical interpretation of its
tenets, so uncritical and so momentous in final results as to imperil the white
race and its culture.
Accusations of this kind
practically amount to an indictment of Christianity itself, and if substantiated,
would really mean the condemnation of that religion among all classes,
irrespective of color'. Extract from the address of the Transvaal Missinary
Association, the purport of which was to show that it was not the missionaries'
teaching of Christianity to the native that caused the native to assault white
women.)
The fundamental assumption
underlying this statement is antagonistic to the history of the Christian
Church. It assumes that Christianity in all of its manifestations is one and
the same. This is not so. Let us ask these various organizations represented in
the Transvaal Missionary Association whose Christianity they have in mind. Do
the Methodists have in mind Baptist Christianity? Or do the Baptists have in
mind Presbyterian Christianity? It appears that there are at least nineteen
varieties of Christianity represented in this report and protest concerning
Christianity's relation to 'black peril.'
These Christian organizations,
when content to meet in unity of spirit, stress the theology of Christianity.
They hold that the fellowship of the Christian mind is through the spiritual
brotherhood wrought by the vicarious sacrifice of the incarnate Second Person
of the Trinity. Admit that the theology of the discordant creeds is unified,
what then is the justification for their divisions? Is it not clear that if
their theology is unified, justification for their division must arise from
their sociology, or from their theology as it affects mankind? Discordant
social teachings are the sole justification for the existence of the various
Christian sects as separate entities, and is it not probable that out of the
nineteen varieties of sociology there might be one or more which is adjudged
inimical to South African civilization, without South Africa being culpable of
attempting to discredit the spiritual conceptions of Christianity and to
condemn that creed among all classes, irrespective of color'? (The question of
church polity is here regarded as a sociological question.)
No specific Christianity is named
in this report, so we must ask whether the Christianity of that of Arius or
that of Athanasius? Is it Greek or Roman? Roman or Protestant? Do these
missionaries identify themselves with Greek Christianity, with its Holy Fire at
Eastertide, or with Roman Christianity, with its immaculate Virgin and
infallible Pope? Or do they hold that the numerous creeds of Protestant
Christianity have no justification as separate entities?
Whose Christianity is indicted?
White men of South Africa may indict the negrophile sentiment of the
Christianity' of the clericals of the German Reichstag, who plead for the
privilege of miscegenation, and yet not indict the Christianity of an American
bishop, who declared Though the Negro be as holy as John the Divine, I will not
marry his sister.'
What Christianity, my brethren,
is indicted? Is it blasting at the Rock of Ages or tinkering with the Trinity
to oppose the social teaching of your predecessor, Vanderkempt, who came to
South Africa and married a Negress? Will the crystal stream become diluted, or
the ethics of the Galilean violated, if white Africa remove the fangs from the
Christianity' of Dr. Philip, who established Basutoland in an inaccessible
range of mountains? (Basutoland, established and perpetuated by missionary
influence in the very heart of the Union, is a negro territory, a grave menace
to the white occupation of South Africa. Dr. Philip became almost dictator of
Cape Colony in the early days of negrophilism. His is the most illustrious name
in the history of the London Missionary Society, if we except that of
Livingstone, who withdrew from that society.) Let the missionary understand
that the essence of Christianity is not negrophilism. Has there not been an
eisegesis of the Gospel of Christ as well as an exegesis? Nineteen sects in the
Transvaal alone seem to imply that there has been. Christianity interpreted in
such way as to aid civilization in Africa will be acceptable to the colonial
who, himself, from the first, has earnestly taught his religion to the native.
It will not injure, but actually
promote the missionary influence in South Africa for the well meaning
missionaries to admit the errors of their movement: The political errors of
their influence, such as the forbidding of outraged colonists to retaliate
against the thieving and always impudent Xosa clans; giving the territory east
of the Great Fish river to the Kaffir, when it rightfully belonged to the
white; establishing Basutoland in a mountain fastness to remain a perpetual
menace to the white; placing white colonists under the jurisdiction of
half-breed chiefs; giving unracialized suffrage to Cape Colony. The economic
sins of their number who came as spiritual advisers and remained as commercial
exploiters. Their social sins, such as the perpetual and pitiless
misrepresentations of the Boer civilizers of South Africa; the failure to warn
against and prevent by legal mandate the marriage of European men and women to
Negro men and women; the endless harping upon the nobility of colored races and
the depravity of the white; the licensing of co-racial schools and the
persuasion of ignorant and poverty-stricken white parents to send their
children to these schools to receive utterly false teaching in matters
concerning equality of races; the placing of white children with black ones,
forming them in public parade, the children carrying banners inscribed Ex uno
sanguine' (of one blood); the refusal to permit the word color' to be used in
co-racial schools, when it is inscribed indelibly in human history; the citing
of the willing prostitution of women of the black race to men of the white as
parallel to and offsetting black men's forceful assaults upon white
women."
These "errors" of the missionary apply mainly to
the past. (They are based upon the history of South Africa as written by
British writers, See list of references given at the close of Chapter 8.) Not
so, however, the last one enumerated. The missionary type has changed for the
better, and also the social teaching of the missionary. The present missionary
teaches of the same God as the former, the same Redeemer, but there is much
modified negrophilism in his social teaching.
The British demand for miscegenation was in response to the spirit of the
social teachings of British "Christianity." The Germans reinforced
religious sanctions to miscegenation by adding those of German socialism. In
Germany, the religious party, the clericals, combined their vote with
the socialists to pass the resolution praying the Colonial Office to
permit whites to marry blacks in the German colonies.
The German clericals interpreted Christianity as encouraging intermarriage
between Negroes and white people, and sought to repeal the German colonial laws
which, together with those of the Boers and the North Americans, are The only
instances of the white ideal being strengthened and made possible by legal
prohibition of interracial marriage.
It is evident that those posing as custodians of a Gospel whose genius is
missionary, whose scope is universal, and whose claim is exclusive, may be of
great harm to the cause they misrepresent by placing literal constructions upon
the anthropomorphisms of a spiritual religion. Why place an interpretation upon
the "Fatherland of God and brotherhood of man" ideal of the Christian
religion which nature and human history have proved to be fallacious? Why
literalize "brotherhood of man" and spiritualize "fatherhood of
God?" If the brotherhood through Christ is physical, then so is the
fatherhood through God.
Let those who believe themselves chosen to evangelize the world understand
that, up to the present time. after nearly two thousand years of Christian
activity, apparently God has entrusted the heralding of the Gospel to the white
race, not to the Negro or to the mixbreed. Christianity, times without number,
has been implanted by white taches among colored races, bu the Christian
religion has never survived the white teachers. When the whites have departed
or become eliminated through miscegenation, the Christian region has been
abandoned altogether, or has degenerated into crass superstition. This is a
cold fact that is verifiable. It may not be a welcome fact to European
Christianity.
The Apostles turned to the white man and to the colored. The white man
perpetuated the Apostles' teaching and made the Christian religion ascendant
among the creeds of the world. Had the Apostles confined their activities to
Negroid Africa, how different would have been the result! The Christian Fathers
came to Africa and taught and suffered martyrdom. There the blood of the
martyrs did not prove to be the seed of the Church. Christianity perished in
the soil of Africa, but the Christian religion is becoming universal through
the blood of Europe.
The German churchmen would hybridize the races by biologizing a spiritual
ideal. These churchmen interpret a spiritual "brotherhood in Christ"
to the end that they destroy the race that has proved itself the custodian of
Christ's spiritual and ethical teaching. The German socialists, omitting the
"fatherhood of God" conception of the Christina, but borrowing his
"brotherhood of man" ideal, do, without the former, give identical
interpretation to the latter.
The God of these churchmen saw fit to make some men white and some men
black; to endow the white and potentialities, the realization of which would,
in fullness of time, conceive an ethical monotheism and a spiritual brotherhood
of mankind. What God has done, the churchmen may succeed in undoing, but that
which the churchmen seek to do god cannot undo. The churchmen may succeed in
hybridizing the white and the black. The God of the churchmen will not
transform the hybrid into its original elements. If the churchmen are making a
mistake, it is irremediable.
The German socialists affirm that all men are brothers and that all
men shall be brothers-in-law. Those who boast of German culture being
the hope of the world seek blood admixture with a people who have no cultural
history. While asserting Teutonic ascendancy they crave the hand of the
Negress.
The clericals would incorporate the Negro in the white race to hasten the
millennium, the socialists to utopianize the earth. The blood of civilization
is torpid. It needs revivification by the juice of the jungle. (An American
abolitionist actually advanced the theory that the blood of the white man was
become dry, and that the white race was in need of the extra sap or juice that
flowed inteh blood of the Negro. An English abolitionist of national fame
affirmed that the Pygmy and the Bushmen were originally tall Negroes who became
dwarfed through the white man's cruelty, and if these stunted races were kindly
treated they would resume their former stature. Is it not seen that the German
clericals and socialists have no monopoly in ignorance of ethnological law?)
The clericals and the socialists are at last agreed. The one party teaches
that Christ is God, the other would supplant Christianity with a social
religion. But the lion has lain down with the lamb, the impossible has been
attained, unison accomplished, in this one desire to marry Negroes. The
erstwhile implacable enemies have met in a great political arena and have
forgotten the past in a reveling over the future. Politics have made strange
bed-fellows in the German Reichstag and promise to attain similar results in
Darkest Africa.
Possibly no phase of the political problem arising from the white man's
contact with the colored has given the white race as much anxiety as suffrage.
Those portions of the white race which dwell with the colored are subject to
those of their own race who dwell apart from the colored. The whites who dwell
apart from the colored races have, in general, imposed their conceptions of the
color problem and its remedial measures upon their less numerous brethren.
Those whites who live apart from the Negro, by mistaken conceptions as to what
constitutes the Negro problem, have sought to give the Negro an authoritative
voice in determining the activities of Caucasian civilization, hoping that the
sense of responsibility engendered by authority conferred would, in some way
never made clear, add to the Negro's ability.
Suffrage may be used to level artificial ranks in society, but if in
the leveling process the ballot is used to reduce a progressive race to the
status of a non-progressive, then the most optimistic democrat may well
hesitate to further such a program under peril of a recession in culture. It is
just this that non-racialized suffrage brings about. Civilization's every
pulse-beat is Caucasian. Its source is in the white race, and it cannot
continue apart form the white race. Unracialized suffrage conditions the
advancement of one race to the choice of the other race. The Negro has not
produced civilized culture, as we know it, nor, as yet, proved himself capable
of sustaining it.
Civilization is but the lengthened shadow of the institutions of the
Caucasians who have gone before us, supplemented by our own additions. That
the colored races do not originate is the most solemn fact of human history,
the only fact that bodes ill for the future. To affirm that the
non-creative races shall have a voice in determining the use of the productions
of a creative people is stretching the principles of brotherly generosity to
the breaking point, and implies that the non-creative blacks have no cause for
complaint if denied a voice in the white race's civilization. A race that has
not made contribution to cultural achievement may not be said to have natural,
moral or social right to the control of civilization. While all white men do
not evince capacity to inaugurate new movements, and some do not appear readily
to appreciate or sustain new contributions, there is inherent within the white
race a genius for inventions and for the application of inventions. Each white
individual does not manifest creative capacity, but there is bound up with the
race, transmissible by the laws governing heredity, the potentiality of
creative genius.
If we judge by results of racial efforts; and no other standard is
satisfactory, the white races, if not the sole custodian of creative genius, is
certainly its highest expression. No other race is second. The gap between the
Caucasian and the Mongolian is not filled. The white man is the sun that lights
the world; the luster of other races is but reflected glory. The white man is
in fact what the negrophilist is in theory; the voice of the Almighty upon
earth.
The political question is this: If the Negro does not initiate progress,
shall he condition the progress of the white man? If he does not create, shall
he be given a voice in deciding the manner and extent of distribution? If he
does not sow, shall he have the right to determine the time and methods of
reaping?
Let it be conceded that the Negro has no natural right to a voice in control
of the things he cannot create, and we are then confronted with the question of
expediency in conferring upon him such control. It seems that this matter
should be settled without sentiment for or against the Negro as such, or the
white man as such. If civilization shall profit most by the Negro having
exclusive control of all its activities, then give to the Negro exclusive
control. If civilization profits most by giving the Negro partial control in
determining progress which arises from the white man, then make the Negro a
co-partner with the white man. But if civilization is safest when entrusted to
the exclusive control of the race that creates and sustains it, then let this
race have the exclusive voice in determining its limits and activities. In
deciding such a momentous issue, let us act with the welfare of our
civilization only in mind. We agree that the Negro has not been a creative
race, that he has not invented, has not set on foot new measures to benefit
mankind. Here there can be no difference of opinion, for we have knowledge of
six thousand years of Negro history, during which period he has not contributed
to cultural attainments.
As the question of the Negro's value as a creative factor in cultural
development may be removed from the realm of speculation by appeal to history,
so may we, in the same manner, determine his value as a sustaining factor when
in possession of the culture of the white race. We have noted his depressing
and devolutionary influence upon the cultures of the early white man in contact
with his race, and we now have before us the Negro in large numbers in the
white man's civilization in South Africa, Latin America and in the United
States. We have observed that the intensity of civilization is in inverse ratio
to the numerical preponderance of the Negro in the population. Of this there is
no doubt, nor can there be any dispute, for that the whites now in contact with
colored races "feed out of the hand" of the whites who are apart from
the colored races is as verifiable as any other unquestioned fact. It is the
white, not the mixed, civilizations of the world that lead in cultural
advancement. In the mixed populations, the colored man's presence and influence
prohibit the higher attainments. The white man in contact with the black cannot
compete with the white apart from the black, for the black man limits the
progress of the white.
On the other hand, we have the Negro self-governments of Haiti, and Santo
Domingo from which to measure the Negro's capacity to sustain the white man's
culture when he is left to his own resources. Within a brief period the white
inhabitants of Haiti were driven out or put to death by the free half-breeds
and the enslaved full blacks. It was but little more than a century ago when
this, the most splendid of the French colonies, fell into the hands of the
Africans, with the result that the plantations are weed and forest grown,
mansions have deteriorated and none have taken their place, secret rites of the
West Coast of Africa have been revived, and with difficulty have grave-robbing
and cannibalism been suppressed. Haiti, and Santo Domingo, after a century of
independence, are threatened with bankruptcy, and to protect them from their
creditors and to stay the retrogressive forces, the United States has had to
take over their government. During the past century these independencies were
aided by white nations in many ways, but they have not been able to maintain
the white man's culture.
We see then that those who hold that the Negro may not be safely entrusted
with a share in the control of our culture, base such conclusion upon the known
cultural history of that race, both as to its creative and sustaining capacity.
They are able to take the Negro's measure as a cultural factor without
sentiment. His specific gravity within white civilization is determinable from
this effect upon the culture of the white man with which he is in contact, and
further by his failure to carry on the white man's culture which he inherited
in those countries once white but now black.
In South Africa, in the United States, and wherever else the Negro has voice
in the control of the civilization of the white man, such privilege was not
attained by the Negro's initiative, but was conferred upon the Negro by the
whites who were not in contact with the Negro. It was done under a
misapprehension of the cultural value of the colored races, and without doubt
was intended to result in benefit to civilization.
When the British realized their mistake, they extended Crown control to
those colonies upon which they had enforced Negro suffrage. Crown control
displaced home rule, and by doing so reinstated white ascendancy in the
colonies. The United States has silently acquiesced in certain legislation of
the Southern States, the sole intent of which was to eliminate temporarily the
Negro from politics.
There is generally throughout the South a growing number of Democrat
politicians who seek the Negro vote if they themselves may control the Negro vote.
Politicians of this class would submerge the civilization of the South if, by
so doing, they could enjoy a brief ascendancy. They are willing for the Negro
to vote if he will vote the Democratic ticket. They place party above race and
civilization. The white Republicans of the North who have assented to the
disfranchisement of the black Republicans of the South in behalf of the race
and culture of the white man, may have just cause for complaint if the white
South "bullies" the Negro out of the Republican party and seeks to
"bully" into the Democratic party. However, the number of politicians
who would use the Negro for personal gain are few, and are opposed by an
overwhelming majority of Southerners.
Southern prosperity was brought about in large measure by freeing the South
from the Negro's influence in government; and the great moral reforms that
characterize Southern ideals, such as pioneering the prohibition movement in
the nation, are possible of attainment only by reason of the black being denied
the ballot.
The most significant, as it is the newest, development of the political
Negro problem of the South is seen in the rise of a "Lily White"
Republican party. Sanctioned by the inner circles of the Republican party, this
movement disallows authoritative voice to the Negro in the councils of the
party, though he may, if he choose, vote the party ticket. The astute leaders
of the Republican party, sanctioning the purpose of the Southern members to
align themselves with the Democrat party of the South in maintaining a white
oligarchy in a theoretical democracy, have revealed the sympathy of the white
North with the white South, and have at the same time made possible the triumph
of the Republican principles in the Southern States.