dress, the dance, and travel. They secure employment which takes them away from home, or they marry, or they fall victims to the glare of the red lights.

Under these untoward conditions, the ties that bind the members of a family together will be weak. Professor Odum declares: "The Negro has little home conscience or love of home, no local attachment of the better sort. He does not know in many cases for months or years the whereabouts of his brother and sister or even parents, nor does he concern himself about their welfare." 5 "The statement is a common one-and there is much to substantiate it-that the members of the negro families are more separated now than in the time of slavery."

6

These statements by Prof. Odum, being based chiefly on his study of urban Negroes, do not apply generally to Negroes in the country.

Negro families in the same neighborhood live very much aloof from each other, and rarely form those intimacies with frequent interchange of favors which characterize most neighborhoods of white people. Professor Shaler says, "I have never known an instance of lasting sacrificial friendship between two blacks.”

Among the Negroes who occupy the more crowded quarters of our cities the conditions of life are such as to render very difficult the development or preservation of any human virtue. In Southern as in Northern cities, the Negro quarter is often adjacent to the worst redlight district of the whites. The examples that environ the young people are mostly those of evil, and Negro girls are early initiated into a life of sensuality. A physician in a Southern town remarks, "Many girls under twelve years of age seen by me cohabit with men and are frequently found with venereal troubles." The prevalence of sexual diseases among both Negro men and women is a large factor in their high death-rate and declining birth-rate.

Because of the low moral state of the Negro's family life, Thomas, a Negro author, believed that it would be a good thing to separate all Negro children from their parents and raise them up in orphanages. The rate of illegitimacy among Negro women is from ten to fifteen Op. cit., p. 39.

'Odum, op. cit., p. 162. The Neighbor, p. 141. Odum, op. cit., p. 172.

Op. cit., p. 386.

times as great as that among white women,10 and Professor Mecklin thinks that it is probably greater than it was in the days of slavery."

The white people are generally skeptical in regard to the virtue of any Negro woman, and the remark is often made that there is no such thing as a chaste Negro woman. This disparaging estimate of Negro women is the outcome of the general tendency of the white people everywhere to attribute to all Negroes the characteristics of the worst type of Negro. The fact is that, among the Negroes as among the whites, there are good and bad people, and that in rural districts and in every city in the South, there are many virtuous Negro women. In rural communities, especially among the property-owning class, there are thousands of married Negro women whose fidelity is above suspicion, and in all the cities, especially among the home-owning class who are able to separate themselves from the slum influences, there are young Negro girls and mothers whose chastity is untainted. One of the reasons why the white people have such a skeptical attitude toward the virtue of Negro women is that they come in contact with only the lowest class of them, i.e., the poor and uneducated, whose occupation is that of domestic service. They see and know very little of the educated Negro women who enter the better-paid occupations, such as that of teaching, or who are the wives of educated and prosperous Negro men. A teacher who has had fourteen years' experience in the Black Belt of Mississippi says:

"The number of homes where the pure ideal of family life exists has increased constantly since I have been in the South. There are some pure homes among the poor and illiterate. Among those who are educated the dishonored homes are few." 12 The greatest progress that the Negro has made since his emancipation has been the elevating of the moral status of the Negro girl and that of the Negro mother. His credit for this is all the greater because sexual incontinence is a race heritage, and, during the slave régime and since, the environmental conditions have all been unfavorable to his overcoming this predisposition.

The Negroes generally are more social in disposition and more absorbed in social life than the white people. They are great talkers, delighting to be in a crowd; consequently their social life is so or

10 Mecklin, Democracy and Race Friction, p. 60; Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, p. 237.

"Op. cit., p. 64.

"Quoted by Mecklin, op. cit., p. 216.

ganized as to furnish many and varied occasions for coming together. The Negroes take a great interest in their churches, not only because the services are times of social intermingling, but also because in connection with the churches there are numerous societies which frequently draw the people together.

Outside the church, the Negro finds an outlet for his social cravings in a great variety of secret societies. Many of these have insurance features providing sick benefits, burial expenses and the erection of tombstones, and so forth; others are primarily fraternal with incidental benevolent provisions. All of them have rituals and furnish occasions for their members to parade the streets in rich regalia and with gilded and many-colored banners. The names of some of these societies are as follows: Grand Accepted Order of Brothers and Sisters of Love and Charity; Knights of Peter Claver; Grand Toe Touch at Mt. Sinai, connected with the Baptist Church, Mobile; American Woodmen; Jndependent Order of Sons and Daughters of Jacob; Knights of Canaan; Mosaic Templars of America.

The following are the names of some of the Knights of Pythias lodges in Mississippi: The Bell of Delta, New Moon, Queen Esther, Lily of Valley, Rose of Sharon, Weeping Willow, Bear Garden, Hickory Tree, Gloomy Rose, Gold Eagle, and Sweet Pink.

In a town of only 500 Negro population there may be fifteen or twenty societies or lodges. Many Negroes of the town belong to from three to five of these societies, and a majority of the members belong to more than one society.13 Most of the societies meet fortnightly, their programs frequently including box suppers, musicals, and dances, and they hold forth often until midnight.

These societies, beside furnishing an innocent means of recreation, have a tendency to promote thrift and high ideals. Most of them limit their membership to persons who are "moral and upright, dealing in no illegal business and of good reputation." 14

Beside the secret societies, the Negro women have their clubs and federation of clubs. In the homes of the well-to-do Negroes there is much hospitality and much formal entertaining. The Negro newspapers devote a large part of their space to the doings of the colored social world.

Since an elevated family life is fundamental to the progress of any people, the most important task of the Southern Negro has been 13 Odum, op. cit., p. 109.

16 Ibid., p. 143.

the bringing together and binding together of those blood relations which constitute the human family. The task has been difficult because neither the family traditions handed down from Africa, nor the family conditions imposed upon him as a slave to the white man, have been favorable to the development of family virtues or family stability; and further because of the demoralizing environment in which generally he has been compelled to live.

In view of his handicaps we can but admire what he has accomplished in the elevation of his home life within the short period of his emancipation. Nor can we fail to view with charity the faults which his family life still retains and extend to him a helping hand (by providing better housing conditions, and better protection to his home), in his effort to overcome those faults.

CHAPTER 13

THE NEGRO AS A POLITICAL FACTOR

Strength of the Negro Vote and Possibilities of Negro Domination-Franchise Laws Limiting the Negro Vote-Reasons for the Grandfather Clause-Result of Removal of the Negro Menace in Bringing a Better Class of White Men into Politics

HE political aspect of the Negro problem in the South can be understood only by taking into account the number and distribution. of the Negroes in that section.

According to the 1920 census, there were nearly 9,000,000 Negroes in the Southern states, 27 percent of the total population. In the South Atlantic States the Negroes are 30.9 percent of the total; in the East South Central, 28.4 percent ; and in the West South Central, 20.2 percent. The Negroes constitute nearly a third of the total population in Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas and more than a third in Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida. There are 264 counties in the South in which Negroes preponderate. These counties lie in the eastern section of Virginia and North Carolina, the Tidewater and Piedmont section of South Carolina, central Georgia and Alabama, the delta region of Mississippi and Louisiana, northern Florida, and a small coastal region of Texas. In two states, Mississippi and South Carolina, the blacks out-) number the whites. There are six counties in Mississippi in each of which the whites form less than ten percent of the population.

There are thirty-two counties in the South which have no Negro population, of which twenty-eight are in Texas, two in Oklahoma, one in Arkansas, and one in North Carolina.

"There are more Negroes in Mississippi," says Stone, "than in Cape Colony, or Natal, even with the great territory of Zululand annexed to the latter; more than in the Transvaal, and not far from as many as in both the Boer colonies combined; more than in Jamaica and Barbadoes combined; more than in Trinidad and all the remaining English islands combined (excluding those just named); more than in Cuba and Porto Rico combined; more than in either Haiti or San Domingo."1 Mississippi contains more Negroes than all the states 'Studies in the American Race Problem, p. 471.