Mississippi Writers: An Anthology Book

The Negro citizens of Jacksonville took great pride in the part they played in both of the ceremonies I have referred to. They were especially pleased with the brave showing they made before General Grant. I suppose, if the truth were known, the taciturn Grant was greatly bored by the performances of both whites and blacks. It occurs to me that the Negro citizens of Jacksonville would not at the present time be accorded an equivalent degree of recognition and participation in ceremonies or celebrations of this kind. And that comment would apply, I think, to Southern communities generally. Mr. Will Alexander of Atlanta holds that this shift in attitude is principally due to the rise in power of the poor whites, between whom and the Negro there is an old antagonism based on the differences in their actual economic status under the slave system, an antagonism that then bore more heavily upon the poor whites than upon the blacks. Of course, the settling down from the temporary heights of Reconstruction must be taken into account, but I feel that Mr. Alexander is, in the main, right. Long after the close of the Reconstruction period Jacksonville was known far and wide as a good town for Negroes. When I was growing up, most of the city policemen were Negroes; several members of the city council were Negroes; one or two justices of the peace were Negroes. When a paid fire department was established, one station was manned by Negroes. I was in my teens when the city government was reorganized and Joseph E. Lee, a Negro and a very able man and astute politician, was made Judge of the Municipal Court. Many of the best stalls in the city market were owned and operated by Negroes; Davis and Robinson, a firm of Negro commission merchants, were land stewards for the Clyde Steamship Company; and there was no such thing as a white-owned barber shop. I know that there was a direct relation between that state of affairs and the fact that Jacksonville was controlled by certain aristocratic families, families like the L'Engels, Hartridges, and Daniels's, who were sensitive to the code, noblesse oblige. The aristocratic families have lost control and the old conditions have been changed. Jacksonville is today a one hundred per cent Cracker town, and each time I have been back there I have marked greater and greater changes.

In this is epitomized one of the paradoxes of American democracy that the Negro has to wrestle with. We are told and we tell ourselves that as a race we belong to the proletariat and that our economic and political salvation lies in joining hands with our white fellow workers. Notwithstanding, it is true that the black worker finds getting into most of the white labor unions no easier than getting an invitation to a white bourgeois dinner paty.

There is another fact that bears interestingly on Mr. Alexander's theory, perhaps to confirm it further, a fact that must strike every observant person who goes through the deep rural South: Among the white people of those regions, people who have not yet tasted social or political power nor yet possessed the rewards of industrialism or come within its brutal field of competition, active antagonism against the Negro is lowest; so low indeed, it would probably die out if it were not continuously and furiously stirred by the working classes and the politicians (the social factor is powerful and intransigent, but at this level is in abeyance); by the working classes, determined to hold certain grades of work for white men only, and by the politicians, bent on preserving their rotten oligarchy by keeping alive the sole political issue upon which the "Solid South" rests. An important part is played also by those intellectuals who write to uphold the present status, many of whom are, I know, conscious that the system is unjust and uncivilized but are too timid to oppose or even question it. Their timidity often sinks to pusillanimity.