[Pg 87] [Pg 87] CHAPTER V RACE RELATIONSHIPS IN THE SOUTH I Generally speaking, the sharpest race prejudice in the South is exhibited by the poorer class of white people, whether farmers, artisans, or unskilled workers, who come into active competition with the Negroes, or from politicians who are seeking the votes of this class of people. It is this element which has driven the Negroes out of more than one community in the South and it commonly forms the lynching mobs. A similar antagonism of the working classes exists in the North wherever the Negro has appeared in large numbers—as I shall show when I come to write of the treatment of the Northern Negro. Generally On the other hand, the larger landowners and employers of the South, and all professional and business men who hire servants, while they dislike and fear the Negro as a race (though often loving and protecting individual Negroes), want the black man to work for them. More than that, they must have him: for he has a practical monopoly on labour in the South. White men of the employing class will do almost anything to keep the Negro on the land and his wife in the kitchen—so long as they are obedient and unambitious workers. “Good” and “Bad” Landlords But I had not been very long in the black belt before I began to see that the large planters—the big employers of labour—often pursued very different methods in dealing with the Negro. In the feudal middle ages there were good and bad barons; so in the South to-day there are “good” and “bad” landlords (for lack of a better designation) and every gradation between them. The good landlord, generally speaking, is the one who knows by inheritance how a feudal system should be operated. In other words, he is the old slave-owner or his descendant, who not only feels the ancient responsibility of slavery times, but believes[Pg 88] that the good treatment of tenants, as a policy, will produce better
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