Forgotten Legacy by Benjamin R. Justesen;

Author:Benjamin R. Justesen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Three days after his angry response to Daniels’s attack, White took a brief break from congressional duties to testify before the Industrial Commission on the labor and economic status of North Carolina’s black population. The commission, established by McKinley in 1898, was mandated to investigate railroad pricing policy, industrial concentration, and the impact of immigration on labor markets, among many subjects; its four major areas of investigation were agriculture, manufacturing and general business, transportation, and mining; it was completely nonpartisan, and discussion of political issues was strictly prohibited. White’s testimony was a key component of its report on agriculture and agricultural labor.50

The Industrial Commission was unique and controversial, having been vetoed by President Cleveland before final approval by McKinley. Its nineteen members included five U.S. senators and five House members—selected primarily from the membership of each house’s labor committee—and nine citizens selected by McKinley, mostly businessmen, with three representatives of organized labor, as noted by early commission member Simon North’s 1899 article. North expected the subject of black southern laborers—and implications of their emigration to other regions of the country—to be particularly important: “The presence of great masses of colored labor in the South presents another phase of the problem which is certain to grow more troublesome and more insistent as time passes. It is a body of labor which accepts lower wages than white labor, and is constantly pushing itself into new fields of competition with white labor. The negro problem, in its political phase, is the perplexity of this generation: its industrial phase is to become the perplexity of the next.”51

Witnesses included both volunteers and experts selected with great care; White was the only member of Congress on the list of some ninety witnesses to testify before the agriculture subcommittee, and one of only a handful of blacks to appear, even though issues applicable to African Americans were discussed by at least forty witnesses.52 As an influential member of the House agriculture committee, White’s appearance was anticipated and closely watched by many observers. His final testimony lasted several hours, covering questions offered by presiding vice chairman Thomas Phillips; Rep. John Gardner (R-N.J.) from the House Labor Committee; overall commission chairman Albert Clarke, and public members John Kennedy, Michael Ratchford, and John Farquhar. The thousand-page final report, issued in 1902, appeared as one of nineteen Commission volumes.53

Most of White’s extremely detailed testimony dealt with specific questions posed by commissioners on economic conditions facing southern black laborers that were decidedly noncontroversial. But on several important issues, including internal emigration of blacks from the South, which he saw as a sort of a practical “safety valve” economically and a possible solution to the “race problem,” his thoughts were both realistic and unconventional. He opposed wholesale colonization of black Americans, either in designated sections of the United States or abroad, as supported by Bishop Henry Turner (“whom I know to be a very able man” with “an underlying purpose to accomplish”); he instead favored “a gradual thinning out” of southern black populations

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