Part 46

It is curious, once a man (any man, white or black) learns to do his job well, how he finds himself in a democratic relationship with other men. I remember asking a prominent white citizen of a town in Central Georgia if he knew anything about Tuskegee. He said,--

'Yes: I had rather a curious experience last fall. I was building a hotel and couldn't get any one to do the plastering as I wanted it done. One day I saw two Negro plasterers at work in a new house that a friend of mine was building. I watched them for an hour. They seemed to know their trade. I invited them to come over and see me. They came, took the contract for my work, hired a white man to carry mortar at a dollar a day, and when they got through it was the best job of plastering in town. I found that they had learned their trade at Tuskegee. They averaged four dollars a day each in wages. We tried to get them to locate in our town, but they went back to school.'

When I was in Mississippi a prominent banker showed me his business letter-heads.

'Good job, isn't it?' he said. 'A Negro printer did it. He wrote to me asking if he might bid on my work. I replied that although I had known him a long time I couldn't give him the job merely because he was a Negro. He told me to forget his color, and said that if he couldn't do as good a job and do it as reasonably as any white man could, he didn't want it. I let him try, and now he does most of our printing.'

Out of such points of contact, then, encouraged by such wise leaders as Booker T. Washington, will grow an ever finer and finer spirit of association and of common and friendly knowledge. And that will inevitably lead to an extension upon the soundest possible basis of the Negro franchise. I know cases where white men have urged intelligent Negroes to come and cast their ballots, and have stood sponsor for them, out of genuine respect. As a result, to-day, the Negroes who vote in the South are, as a class, men of substance and intelligence, fully equal to the tasks of citizenship.

Thus, I have boundless confidence not only in the sense of the white men of the South, but in the innate capability of the Negro, and that once these two come really to know each other, not at sore points of contact, but as common workers for a common country, the question of suffrage will gradually solve itself along the lines of true democracy.

Another influence also will tend to change the status of the Negro as a voter. That is the pending break-up of the political solidarity of the South. All the signs point to a political realignment upon new issues in this country, both South and North. Old party names may even pass away. And that break-up, with the attendant struggle for votes, is certain to bring into politics thousands of Negroes and white men now disfranchised. The result of a real division on live issues has been shown in many local contests in the South, as in the fight against the saloons, when every qualified Negro voter, and every Negro who could qualify, was eagerly pushed forward by one side or the other. With such a division on new issues the Negro will tend to exercise more and more political power, dividing, not on the color line, but on the principles at stake.

Thus in spite of the difficulties which now confront the Negro, I cannot but look upon the situation in a spirit of optimism. I think sometimes we are tempted to set a higher value upon the ritual of a belief than upon the spirit which underlies it. The ballot is not democracy: it is merely the symbol or ritual of democracy, and it may be full of passionate social, yes, even religious significance, or it may be a mere empty and dangerous formalism. What we should look to, then, primarily, is not the shadow, but the substance of democracy in this country. Nor must we look for results too swiftly; our progress toward democracy is slow of growth and needs to be cultivated with patience and watered with faith.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES -----------------------

SOJOURNER TRUTH, THE LIBYAN SIBYL by Harriet Beecher Stowe Atlantic Monthly 11 (April 1863): 473-481.

RECONSTRUCTION by Frederick Douglass Atlantic Monthly 18 (1866): 761-765.

AN APPEAL TO CONGRESS FOR IMPARTIAL SUFFRAGE by Frederick Douglas Atlantic Monthly 19 (Jan. 1867): 112-117.

THE NEGRO EXODUS by James B. Runnion Atlantic Monthly 44 (1879): 222-230.

MY ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY by Frederick Douglass The Century Illustrated Magazine 23, n.s. 1 (Nov. 1881): 125-131.

THE GOOPHERED GRAPEVINE by Charles W. Chesnutt Atlantic Monthly 60 (Aug. 1887): 254-260.

PO' SANDY by Charles W. Chesnutt Atlantic Monthly 61 (1888): 605-611.

DAVE'S NECKLISS by Charles W. Chesnutt Atlantic Monthly 64 (1889): 500-08.

THE AWAKENING OF THE NEGRO by Booker T. Washington Atlantic Monthly 78 (1896): 322-328.

THE STORY OF UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Charles Dudley Warner Atlantic Monthly 78 (1896): 311-321.

STRIVINGS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLE by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois Atlantic Monthly 80 (1897): 194-198.

THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH by Charles W. Chesnutt Atlantic Monthly 82 (1898): 55-61.

THE BOUQUET by Charles W. Chesnutt Atlantic Monthly 84 (1899): 648-654.

THE CASE OF THE NEGRO by Booker T. Washington Atlantic Monthly 84 (1899): 577-587.

HOT-FOOT HANNIBAL by Charles W. Chesnutt Atlantic Monthly 83 (1899): 49-56.

A NEGRO SCHOOLMASTER IN THE NEW SOUTH by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois Atlantic Monthly 83 (1899): 99-104.

THE CAPTURE OF A SLAVER by J. Taylor Wood Atlantic Monthly 86 (1900): 451-463.

MR. CHARLES W. CHESNUTT'S STORIES by W. D. Howells Atlantic Monthly 85 (1900): 699-701.

PATHS OF HOPE FOR THE NEGRO PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS OF A SOUTHERNER by Jerome Dowd Century Magazine 61.2 (Dec. 1900): 278-281.