This review naturally prompts reflection as to the whole function of the Negro laborer in the South.  In the first place, what is he worth, and especially what is he worth in honest Southern opinion?  It was said after the Civil War that he would not work except under compulsion; just how had he come to be regarded in the industry of the New South?  In 1894 a number of large employers were asked about this point. 50 per cent said that in skilled labor they considered the Negro inferior to the white worker, 46 per cent said that he was fairly equal, and 4 per cent said that, all things considered, he was superior.  As to common labor 54 per cent said that he was equal, 29 per cent superior, and 17 per cent inferior to the white worker.  At the time it appeared that wages paid Negroes averaged 80 per cent of those paid white men.  A similar investigation by the Chattanooga Tradesman in 1902 brought forth five hundred replies.  These were summarized as follows:  “We find the Negro more useful and skilled in the cotton-seed oil-mills, the lumber-mills, the foundries, brick kilns, mines, and blast-furnaces.  He is superior to white labor and possibly superior to any other labor in these establishments, but not in the capacity of skillful and ingenious artisans.”  In this opinion, it is to be remembered, the Negro was subjected to a severe test in which nothing whatever was given to him, and at least it appears that in many lines of labor he is not less than indispensable to the progress of the South.  The question then arises:  Just what is the relation that he is finally to sustain to other workingmen?  It would seem that white worker and black worker would long ago have realized their identity of interest and have come together.  The unions, however, have been slow to admit Negroes and give them the same footing and backing as white men.  Under the circumstances accordingly there remained nothing else for the Negro to do except to work wherever his services were desired and on the best terms that he was able to obtain.

6. Defamation:  Brownsville

Crime demands justification, and it is not surprising that after such violence as that which we have described, and after several states had passed disfranchising acts, there appeared in the first years of the new century several publications especially defamatory of the race.  Some books unfortunately descended to a coarseness in vilification such as had not been reached since the Civil War.  From a Bible House in St. Louis in 1902 came The Negro a Beast, or In the Image of God, a book that was destined to have an enormous circulation among the white people of the poorer class in the South, and that of course promoted the mob spirit.[1] Contemporary and of the same general tenor were R.W.  Shufeldt’s The Negro and W.B.  Smith’s The Color Line, while a member of the race itself, William Hannibal Thomas, published a book, The American Negro, that was without either faith or ideal and as a denunciation of the Negro in America unparalleled in its vindictiveness and exaggeration.[2]