Southern Civilization (1916)

The new Encyclopedia Britannica has listed the States of the Union according to the number of sets of that monumental work which have been sold in proportion to population. Where is the South in this list? Where would you expect it to be? At the end, of course, with Mr. Vardaman’s State leading the rear and Mr. Tillman’s State next to it and Georgia, Alabama and Texas, of lynching fame, ranking close to the end. This is not only the natural fruit of slavery; it is the fruit of present political and legal conditions in the South. We have it out of the South’s own mouth. The Macon Telegraph writes of the recent Primary in Georgia: “The ‘red shirt’ days in South Carolina; the rottenest days during the period of the Hamburg riot; the slime of the most nauseating politics ever known in Georgia—none of it even nearly borders on to the method of campaigning now going on in behalf of Hugh M. Dorsey.”

The Primary in South Carolina was just as bad if not worse. It is this kind of oligarchy that the South wants perpetuated; it is for this reason that the Southern women in the Suffrage convention at Atlantic City were so strenuously opposed to a National Suffrage Amendment. Suffrage based on National law will eventually be enforced by the National Government; but Suffrage based on Georgia law will be enforced as Georgia is now enforcing it. Yet the Northern women in the Suffrage convention were blind as bats as to the real animus behind the fight of Laura Clay and Kate Gordon. The woman correspondent of the New Republic grows enthusiastic, shrill and almost inarticulate over one of them: “We gloried in her. We revelled in her!”

Of course we did, and if some poor, old black woman, disfranchised and deprived of her rightful support by a lyncher’s mob which had made a mistake, had happened into that convention “we” would not have “gloried” or “revelled” in her. We would have passed the hat and told her to go home and not agitate for the “Impossible.”

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Citation: Du Bois, W.E.B. 1916. “Southern Civilization.” The Crisis. 13(1):11–12.