CHAPTER II

THE NEGRO IN ECONOMIC LIFE

Negro Landowners, Tenants, and Wage Workers in the Field of Agriculture

Rural Negro Homes-Decline in Number of Negroes in Domestic ServiceIncreasing Opportunities for the Negro in Manufacturing and Mechanical Industries

ANY one traveling by rail from a Northern or Western state into the

South will, if he is at all observant, notice an increasing number of loafing Negroes from station to station as he approaches the Black Belt, and he will probably get the impression that the Negroes are a lazy and idle people. And, if he sojourn in the Black Belt for several days, he will find much evidence tending to confirm his first impression. In the Negro quarters of a town he will observe groups of idle Negroes in barber shops and pool-rooms and on street corners, and he will probably hear some white man remark, in the phraseology formerly applied to free Negroes from Massachusetts to Georgia, that the Negroes are "idle and slothful" or "improvident and indolent." 1

Furthermore, he may even hear the Negroes themselves expressing opinions to the same effect, for it is not uncommon for Negro leaders to speak frankly of the weaknesses of their race. William E. Holmes, president of the colored college at Macon, Georgia, said, at one of the Workers' Conferences at Tuskegee, that "at the present time we furnish a larger number of loafers than any race of people on this continent." 2

If this evidence were not sufficient to convince one of the Negro's propensity to loaf, additional inquiry would disclose the fact that charity work throughout the South is mostly a matter of relief to people of color and that an amazing number of them are buried at public expense.

However, when all of the facts are taken into consideration, it will not be at all manifest that the Negroes are as lazy and thriftless as a superficial view would lead one to believe. There are a number of

'Belknap Papers, p. 206; Northrup, The Negro in New York, p. 270. 'Quoted by Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 60.

facts which would strongly support the theory that the Negroes are constitutionally no more lazy than any other people. As longshoremen they are unsurpassed for energy and speed, and as workers in fertilizer and tobacco factories or for construction companies they set a pace which men of any other race find it difficult to keep up with. It is a common observation that Negro women as cooks, and Negro men as waiters in private homes, in hotels, and on dining cars, work with astonishing snap and dexterity. And, when it comes to cake-walks and dances, no other race can even equal them for spirited action and endurance.

While the Negroes, upon the whole, spend a lot of their time in idleness and vagabondage, they do so from lack of proper stimulus and not from innate lassitude. They may not respond as sensitively to stimulation, nor to the same kind of stimulation, as the white man, but, wherever the conditions are favorable, they display both energy and thrift. On Saturday evenings in the cities throughout the South, one may see Negroes lined up at the windows of savings banks and building and loan associations, awaiting their turn to deposit.

If now we glance at statistics for light on the industrial status of the Negroes, we observe, as the most outstanding fact, that the Negroes are engaged chiefly in the cultivation of the soil.

In 1924, 74.7 percent of them lived in the country, which is ten percent less than the proportion living in the country in 1890.

Of the Negroes employed in agriculture 76.6 percent are tenants; 23.2 percent, owners; and 0.2 percent, managers. In twenty years the percentage of Negro tenants has increased 1.3 percent and the percentage of owners has decreased to the same extent. During the same period there has been a similar decrease in percentage of white owners and increase of white tenants.

The value of the land and buildings owned by the Negro farmers of the South in 1920 was $522,178,137, an increase in ten years of $248,676,472 or ninety-one percent. 3 The Negroes raise 39.0 percent of the cotton crop of the United States; 3.5 of the corn; 9 percent of the rice; 21 percent of the sweet potatoes; and 10 percent of the tobacco.

Agriculture in the South is congenial to the Negro because the work is seasonal and irregular, and it furnishes an easy means of making a living. The Negro landowners are scattered over the South upon 'Negro Year Book, 1921-22, p. 321.

4

* Ibid., p. 327.

The

tracts varying in size from a quarter of an acre to 1,000 acres. predominance of mulattoes as landowners is very noticeable. A tour through the rural South will bring one to many districts in which the Negroes seem to be living in comfort and prosperity. 1

Referring to a Negro rural community in Alabama, Sir Harry H. Johnston says: "The log-huts on the borders of the beautiful pine forests were picturesque, and not at all slovenly. Affixed to each dwelling house would be a chimney of clay to serve the kitchen hearth. Occasionally the interior of the house was rather rough. But the beds were ample, comfortable, and seemed to be spotlessly clean, with most artistic patchwork quilts. These large log cabins were surrounded by outbuildings, also of logs, erected for live-stock, cows, horses, mules, donkeys, poultry, and pigs.

"In the better class of negro homesteads the dwelling-house was neatly built of grey planks, the roof of grey shingles, with glass windows, green shutters, and green veranda rails. . . . The front garden of these negro houses was always fenced off from the road by a plantation, and nearly always divided into flower-beds. These at the time of my visit (November) were still gay with chrysanthemums, and bordered by violet plants in full bloom, scenting the air deliciously. The garden might also contain a rough pergola of pea-vine and ornamental clumps of tall pampas grass, or of the indigenous Erianthus reed; there would almost certainly be wooden beehives, and beyond the flower beds a kitchen garden containing cabbages, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, gourds, and the vegetables. In the back premises there was an abundantly furnished poultry yard of fowls, guinea-fowls, turkeys, and geese-the latter being licensed wanderers, requiring no supervision. There was sure to be a pigsty, for the pig is as necessary to the Negro farmer as to the Irish peasant. Then there would be stables for mules and horses, cowsheds, barns, and stacks of hay. A plantation of cotton might extend for ten to a hundred acres around the homestead.

"The interior of these houses was almost always neat and clean, and divided into at least two bedrooms, a hall, a kitchen, and a parlour. The big wooden bedsteads not only had clean linen, but were spread with handsome quilts of gay colours worked by the mistress of the house. Some of these patchwork quilts-as in Liberia-exhibited real artistic talent. . . . There are usually many pictures on the walls: chiefly coloured prints from newspapers. It was almost invariable to Stone, Studies in the American Race Problem, p. 113.

see in these negro homes (all over America) portraits of Booker Washington, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. DuBois, of Presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt, and even of the late King Edward VII and Queen Victoria. . . . In several farmhouses the housewife would show me with pride her china cabinet. . . . Besides a large family Bible there might be a number of other books, some of which were manuals dealing with the cultivation of cotton and maize, or the fertilization of the soils. . . . Most of the farmers I visited had a substantial sum in the local bank.

"Truly, there is beauty in the South: the sleepy South. A sense of well being, a quiet satisfaction with the climate, the food, the temperature, the lonely surroundings, the absence of all external worry which should go far not only to appease race quarrels, but to make the natives of Alabama, Southern Georgia and Northern Louisiana sensible to their privileges in being the citizens of such a delightful region. Here there is just enough of winter, just a sufficient touch of frost in the air between January and March to keep the resident vigorous and to check the excessive growth of vegetation. Then comes the spring with a riot of loveliness in wild flowers, which must surely touch the heart even of the stolid negro. The summer may be very hot, but it is dry and there is always the shade of the ineffably beautiful wood, with magnolias two hundred feet in height, starred with their huge creamy-white flowers, while the aromatic scent of the pines pervades the whole state. with a wholesome and pungent perfume. . . .

"How often I have contrasted in my mind the life of those Negroes in the Southern States with that of our English poor: how often I felt it to be greatly superior in comfort, happiness, and even in intellectuality, for many of these peasant proprietors of Alabama had a greater range of reading, or were better supplied with newspapers, than is the case with the English peasantry, except in the home counties. . . .8

"Some of the 'old time' colonial mansions of the ante-bellum period are now owned by negroes or mulattoes, in one or two instances actual descendants of the slaves on the estate which the 'great house' dominated. In one instance pointed out to me the handsome old dwelling with its avenue of liveoaks had been purchased from his former white master by the slave boy grown up to be a prosperous farmer."