trolled or utilized._ The South has
to deal with him as an industrial and economic factor and _is
forced to assert its control over him in sheer self-defense_."[19]

Thus Negro labor must be managed, and control must be asserted over him.
His possession of the ballot would make him a free laborer and would
enable him to demand the wages of free labor. It is truly an "economic
problem," in which not only the Negro of the South is concerned, but
also the interests of free labor in every section of this country.

These disfranchising enactments in that they lower the legal and
economic status of the black man, also tend to lower his educational and
social status. The political and economic supremacy of the southern
oligarchy is dependent upon the ignorance and the social degradation of
the Negro. It is, therefore, not surprising that the politicians now
dominant in the South assert that education disqualifies him as a field
hand,--as a manageable factor,--and that consequently there must be a
decrease in the amount of money expended for his education or that his
education must be directed along lines which will make him more
adaptable to management as an economic factor for their sole benefit.
The educated Negro is not more desirable now than he was fifty years
ago. It is a marvel how the great body of southern white people, a great
many of whom are favorable to the advancement of the Negro, will permit
men of the type of the average politicians who now exercise control
among them to stand thus in the way of the true progress of the South.

First, it is asserted that the right to vote destroys his usefulness as
a laborer; then, that education turns his head and makes him
discontented with the plantation where wages reach the high water mark
of six dollars a month, which may or may not be paid according to the
whim of his employer; and finally that the privilege of respectable
accommodations furnished by common carriers which enjoy unusual public
franchises makes him impudent, noisy and self-respecting, the proper
remedy for which is a system of "Jim Crow Cars." Thus with the passing
away of the Negro's right to vote, begins the reappearance of the odious
system of Black Laws which are designed to degrade the womanhood and
manhood of the Negro race. The whole trend of southern legislation is to
fix what has been termed the "proper status of the Negro--subordination
to the superior race." Not a single line has bee