The Ultimate Criminal

It is the fashion nowadays for every one with a stone in his hand to take a shy at the poor Negro on account of his sins of commission and omission. It is enough that some member of the race is caught flagrante delicto or merely on suspicion of evil doing to get himself into the public pillory and the rest of the colored people into our national rogues' gallery, where they evoke instantly the loud lamentation of white saints and sinners alike, and the statistical and sophistical conclusions of a lot of fools and hypocrites. Now do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that Negroes commit crimes. Not at all, for I know full well that they do--altogether too many for their own good. But what I object to among other things is that America, because of the crimes of individual Negroes or because of the suspected crimes of individual Negroes, draws an omnibus indictment against the moral character of the whole race, which is monstrously unjust and wicked.

Who cares to inquire into the origin of Negro crime, or into the causes which have contributed mightily to produce the Negro criminal? The book of the Genesis of this man's crimes awaits to be written by an impartial and sympathetic seeker after truth. The causes which have operated for fifty years to produce Negro criminals will some day, I trust, be traced without fear or bias to their source. I do not pretend to possess any scientific qualification for such a task, but I do intend in these imperfect remarks to try to indicate in outline merely the dismal stream of these causes during the last half century, hoping thereby to cast a little light on a dark and difficult subject: namely, how out of hostile and unequal social, industrial and political conditions Negro crime emerged and why Negro criminals abound.

To say that individuals and races are the creatures of circumstances--that they are the products of their social heredity and environment--is to state a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It is therefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance in the life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery. For it furnished for two and a half centuries both his social heredity and his environment, and so shaped his growth and character along moral, religious and industrial lines. Chattel slaves had no rights, the most rudimentary, which their southern masters were bound to respect. They did not, for example, possess that most elementary of rights, the ownership of self and of the products of their labor. They were the legal property of others and so were the products of their labor. They did not own the cabins they slept in or the clothes they wore or the food they ate or the tools they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank or the bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did the cattle of those self same masters. The slave system owned the minds and bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the masters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaves were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuit of happiness. Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded and moral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, over the souls of masters and slaves alike. And in this moral mud there bred apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and fear--the black brood of man's inhumanity to man.

At the close of the war which destroyed slavery the two races emerged together into the midst of vast changes. The old social structure had been disrupted in the civil convulsion, and the old political order likewise. The slave half of the national house had tumbled about former masters and slaves. The slave race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen than they had possessed or known as slaves. Yes, they possessed themselves and the hard hands which God had given them for their support. But being landless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the old master class. This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a labor class on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power of the old master class. The outlook for the new freedmen under these circumstances was not propitious. All the same these people, poor and ignorant and at the mercy of a ruthless employer class, were happy as children in the delight of their newfound freedom. The sound of their childlike joy was heard in the land amid the grim desolations of war and the sullen faces of their old masters. Care free and fear free, in spite of unfriendly conditions and a threatening outlook, they gave themselves up to such joy as God has rarely given in the history of the world to four millions of people. Now no race can pass through such a spiritual experience without being the better for it. For great happiness like great suffering operates oftentimes as a moral purifier. Before the overwhelming fact that they could no longer be bought and sold--that they could no longer be separated from their loved ones, these simple black folk fell in transports of gratitude before God, their mighty deliverer, their everlasting Father. Love was in their mouths and love was in their hearts. Cheerful they were by nature and hopeful, and gifted withal with an extraordinary amount of the milk of human kindness. Service was natural and easy for them, and the cherishing of friends and foes in their need; but resentfulness and revenge moved them hardly at all during their long years of bondage. Comparatively few crimes against persons or property had been recorded against them before emancipation. The few slave insurrections or attempted slave insurrections were exceptions to the general tenor of their peaceable disposition and conduct, to the uniform and singular absence of ill-will, of a spirit of revenge in them as a race.