other laws have been passed in the Southern states which are designed to keep the Negro on the land, and having[Pg 81] him there, to make him work. The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is an excellent example—which I shall discuss more fully in the next chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also passed a stringent game law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.

[Pg 81]

Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity

One of the most significant things I saw in the South—and I saw it everywhere—was the way in which the white people were torn between their feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they yet want him to work for them; they can’t get along without him. In one impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is becoming educated, acquiring property and “getting out of his place”; and in the next impulse laws are passed or other remarkable measures taken to keep him at work—because the South can’t get along without him. From the Atlanta Georgian I cut recently a letter which well illustrates the way in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.

TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK

But aren’t there two sides to every question? Here we are out here in the country, right in the midst of hundreds of Negroes, and do you know, sir, that all this talk about lynching and ku-kluxing is frightening the farm hands to such[Pg 82] an extent we begin to fear that soon the farmers will sustain a great loss of labour, by their running away? Already it is beginning to have its effect. After night the Negroes are afraid to leave their farm to go anywhere on 

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