FOLLOWING THE COLOUR LINE IN THE NORTH
Having followed the colour line in the South, it is of extraordinary
interest and significance to learn how the Negro fares in the North. Is he
treated better or worse? Is Boston a more favourable location for him than
Atlanta or New Orleans? A comparison of the "Southern attitude" and the
"Northern attitude" throws a flood of light upon the Negro as a national
problem in this country.
Most of the perplexing questions in the North pertain to the city, but in
the South the great problems are still agricultural. In the South the
masses of Negroes live on the land; they are a part of the cotton, sugar,
lumber and turpentine industries; but in the North the Negro is
essentially a problem of the great cities. He has taken his place in the
babel of the tenements; already he occupies extensive neighbourhoods like
the San Juan Hill district in New York and Bucktown in Indianapolis, and,
by virtue of an increasing volume of immigration from the South, he is
overflowing his boundaries in all directions, expanding more rapidly,
perhaps, than any other single element of urban population. In every
important Northern city, a distinct race-problem already exists, which
must, in a few years, assume serious proportions.
Country districts and the smaller cities in the North for the most part
have no Negro question. A few Negroes are found in almost all localities,
but an examination of the statistics of rural counties and of the lesser
cities shows that the Negro population is diminishing in some localities,
increasing slightly in others. In distinctly agricultural districts in the
North the census exhibits an actual falling off of Negro population of 10
per cent. between 1880 and 1900. Cass County in Michigan, which has a
famous Negro agricultural colony--one of the few in the North--shows a
distinct loss in population. From 1,837 inhabitants in 1880 it dropped to
1,568 in 1900. A few Negro farmers have done well in the North (at
Wilberforce, Ohio, I met two or three who had fine large farms and were
prosperous), but the rural population is so small as to be negligible.
_Negroes of Small Northern Towns_
Most of the Negroes in the smaller towns and cities of the North are of
the stock which came by way of the underground railroad just before the
Civil War or during the period of philanthropic enthusiasm which followed
it. They have come to fit naturally into the life of the communities where
they live, and no one thinks especially of their colour. There is, indeed,
no more a problem with the Negro than with the Greek or Italian. In one
community (Lansing, Mich.) with which I have been long familiar, the
Negroes are mostly mulattoes and their numbers have remained practically
stationary for thirty years, while the white population has increased
rapidly. At present there are only about 500 Negroes in a city of 25,000
people.
As a whole the coloured people of Lansing are peaceful and industrious, a
natural part of the wage-working population. Individuals have become
highly prosperous and are much respected. A few of the younger generation
are idle and worthless.
So far as comfortable conditions of life are concerned, where there is
little friction or discrimination and a good opportunity for earning a
respectable livelihood, I have found no places anywhere which seemed so
favourable to Negroes as these smaller towns and cities in the North and
West where the coloured population is not increasing. But the moment there
is new immigration from the South the conditions cease to be Utopian--as I
shall show.
The great cities of the North present a wholly different aspect; the
increases of population there are not short of extraordinary. In 1880
Chicago had only 6,480 coloured people; at present (1908) it has about
45,000, an increase of some 600 per cent. The census of 1900 gives the
Negro population of New York as 60,666. It is now (1908) probably not less
than 80,000. Between 1890 and 1900 the Negroes of Philadelphia
increased by 59 per cent., while the Caucasians added only 22 per cent.,
and the growth since 1900 has been even more rapid, the coloured
population now exceeding 80,000.
[Illustration: A NEGRO CABIN WITH EVIDENCES OF ABUNDANCE]
[Illustration: OFF FOR THE COTTON FIELDS]
It is difficult to realise the significance of these masses of coloured
population. The city of Washington to-day has a greater community of
Negroes (some 100,000) than were ever before gathered together in one
community in any part of the world, so far as we know. New York and
Philadelphia both now probably have as many Negroes as any Southern city
(except Washington, if that be called a Southern city). Nor must it be
forgotten that about a ninth of the Negro population of the United States
is in the North and West. Crowded communities of Negroes in Northern
latitudes have never before existed anywhere. Northern city conditions
therefore present unique and interesting problems.
I went first to Indianapolis because I had heard so much of the political
power of the Negroes there; afterward I visited Cincinnati, Philadelphia,
New York, Boston, Chicago and several smaller cities and country
neighbourhoods. In every large city both white and coloured people told me
that race feeling and discrimination were rapidly increasing: that new and
more difficult problems were constantly arising.
Generally speaking, the more Negroes the sharper the expression of
prejudice.
While the Negroes were an inconsequential part of the population, they
passed unnoticed, but with increasing numbers (especially of the lower
sort of Negroes and black Negroes), accompanied by competition for the
work of the city and active political power, they are inevitably kindling
the fires of race-feeling. Prejudice has been incited also by echoes of
the constant agitation in the South, the hatred-breeding speeches of
Tillman and Vardaman, the incendiary and cruel books and plays of Dixon,
and by the increased immigration of Southern white people with their
strong Southern point of view.
_Pathetic Expectations of the Negro_
One finds something unspeakably pathetic in the spectacle of these untold
thousands of Negroes who are coming North. To many of them, oppressed
within the limitations set up by the South, it is indeed the promised
land. I shall never forget the wistful eagerness of a Negro I met in
Mississippi. He told me he was planning to move to Indianapolis. I asked
him why he wanted to leave the South.
"They're Jim Crowin' us down here too much," he said; "there's no chance
for a coloured man who has any self-respect."
"But," I said, "do you know that you will be better off when you get to
Indianapolis?"
"I hear they don't make no difference up there between white folks and
coloured, and that a hard-working man can get two dollars a day. Is that
all so?"
"Yes, that's pretty nearly so," I said--but as I looked at the fairly
comfortable home he lived in, among his own people, I felt somehow that he
would not find the promised land all that he anticipated.
And after that I visited Indianapolis and other cities and saw hundreds of
just such eager Negroes after they had reached the promised land. Two
classes of coloured people came North: the worthless, ignorant,
semi-criminal sort who find in the intermittent, high-paid day labour in
the North, accompanied by the glittering excitements of city life, just
the conditions they love best. Two or three years ago the Governor of
Arkansas, Jeff Davis, pardoned a Negro criminal on condition that he would
go to Boston and stay there! The other class is composed of
self-respecting, hard-working people who are really seeking better
conditions of life, a better chance for their children.
And what do Negroes find when they reach the promised land?
In the first place the poorer sort find in Indianapolis the alley home, in
New York the deadly tenement. Landowners in Indianapolis have been
building long rows of cheap one-story frame tenements in back streets and
alleys. The apartments have two or three rooms each. When new they are
brightly painted and papered and to many Negroes from the South,
accustomed to the primitive cabin, they are beautiful indeed.
Even the older buildings are more pretentious if not really better than
anything they have known in the rural South; and how the city life, nearly
as free to the coloured man as to the white, stirs their pulses! No
people, either black or white, are really free until they feel free. And
to many Negroes the first few weeks in a Northern city give them the first
glimpses they have ever had of what they consider to be liberty.
A striking illustration of this feeling came to my notice at Columbia,
South Carolina. One of the most respected Negro men there--respected by
both races--was a prosperous tailor who owned a building on the main
street of the city. He was well to do, had a family, and his trade came
from both races. I heard that he was planning to leave the South and I
went to see him.
"Yes," he said, "I am going away. It's getting to be too dangerous for a
coloured man down here."
It was just after the Atlanta riot.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"I think I shall go to Washington," he said.
"Why Washington?"
"Well, you see, I want to be as near the flag as I can."
_What the Negro Really Finds in the Promised Land_
But they soon begin to learn things! It is true that the workingman can
get high wages, and the domestic servant is paid an amount which
astonishes her, but on the other hand--a fact that somehow never occurs to
many of these people, or indeed to the foreigners who come flocking to our
shores--the living cost is higher. For his gaudy tenements the landlord
extorts exorbitant rentals. Ignorance is ever roundly and mercilessly
taxed! I saw a double house built for white people just on the edge of a
Negro neighbourhood and held at a rental of $18 a month, but not being
able to secure white tenants the landlord rented to Negroes for $25 a
month.
When he came North the Negro (even though he had lived in cities in the
South, as many of the immigrants have) never dreamed that it would require
such an amount of fuel to keep him through the long Northern winter, or
that his bill for lights, water, and everything else would be so high. And
in the South many Negro families of the poorer sort are greatly assisted
by baskets of food brought from the white man's kitchen and the gift of
cast-off clothes and shoes, to say nothing of tobacco, and even money--a
lingering loose survival of the relationships of slavery. But in the
North the Negro finds himself in an intense industrial atmosphere where
relationships are more strictly impersonal and businesslike. What he gets
he must pay for. Charity exists on a large scale, as I shall show later,
but it is the sharp, inquiring, organised charity of the North.
In short, coming North to find a place where he will be treated more like
a man and less like a serf, the Negro discovers that he must meet the
competitive struggle to which men of the working class are subjected in
the highly developed industrial system of the North.
_Sufferings of the Northern Negro_
In the South the great mass of Negroes have lived with their doors open,
fireplaces have kept their homes ventilated, they could leave the matter
of sanitation to fresh air and sunshine. And the Negro's very lack of
training for such an environment as that of the North causes him untold
suffering. To save fuel, and because he loves to be warm and sociable, he
and his family and friends crowd into one close room, which is kept at
fever temperature, not by a healthful fireplace, but by a tight stove.
This, with the lack of proper sanitary conveniences, often becomes a
hotbed of disease. Even in mild weather I have been in Negro houses in the
North where the air was almost unendurably warm and impure.
I know of nothing more tragic than the condition of the swarming newer
Negro populations of Northern cities--the more tragic because the Negro is
so cheerful and patient about it all. I looked into the statistics closely
in several of them, and in no instance does the birth-rate keep pace with
the death-rate. Even allowing for the fact that birth statistics are not
very accurately kept in most cities it is probable that if it were not for
the immigration constantly rolling upward from the South the Negro
population in Northern cities would show a falling off. Consumption and
the diseases of vice ravage their numbers. One of the ablest Negro
physicians I have met, Dr. S. A. Furniss, who has practised among his
people in Indianapolis for many years, has made a careful study of
conditions. In a paper read before a medical association Dr. Furniss
says:
"The reports of the Indianapolis Board of Health show that for no month in
the last ten years has the birth-rate among Negroes equalled the
death-rate."
Here are the statistics from 1901 to 1905:
Deaths Births
1901 332 279
1902 329 280
1903 448 283
1904 399 327
1905 443 384
_"Race Suicide" Among Negroes_
From inquiries that I have made everywhere in the North there would seem,
indeed, to be a tendency to "race suicide" among Negroes as among the old
American white stock. Especially is this true among the better class
Negroes. The ignorant Negro in Southern agricultural districts is
exceedingly prolific, but his Northern city brother has comparatively few
children. I have saved the record from personal inquiry of perhaps two
hundred Northern Negro families of the better class. Many have no children
at all, many have one or two, and the largest family I found (in Boston)
was seven children. I found one Negro family in the South with twenty-one
children! Industrialism, of course, is not favourable to a large
birth-rate. All Northern cities show a notable surplus, according to the
statistics, of Negro women over Negro men. Many of these are house
servants and, like the large class of roving single men who do day labour
on the streets and railroads, they are without family ties and have no
children.
Dr. Furniss finds that the deaths of Negroes from tuberculosis constitute
over half the total deaths from that cause in the city of Indianapolis,
whereas, in proportion to Negro population, they should constitute only
one-eighth.
His observations upon these startling facts are of great interest:
"I believe the reason for these conditions is plain. First of all it is
due to Negroes leaving the country and crowding into the larger cities,
especially in the North, where they live in a climate totally different
from that with which they have been familiar. They occupy unsanitary
homes; they are frequently compelled to labour with insufficient food and
clothing and without proper rest. Of necessity they follow the hardest
and most exposed occupations in order to make a livelihood. I regret to
say that intemperance and immorality play a part in making these figures
what they are. They easily fall victim to the unusual vices of the city.
"Another reason for increased mortality is improper medical attention. Not
only among the ignorant but among the intelligent we find too much trust
put in patent medicines; the belief, latent it is true in many cases, but
still existing among the ignorant, in the hoodoo militates against the
close following of the doctor's orders.
"What shall we do about it?" asks Dr. Furniss. "We must urge those around
us to more personal cleanliness, insist on a pure home life, and less
dissipation and intemperance: to have fewer picnics and save more money
for a rainy day. Tell the young people in the South not to come to
Northern cities, but to go to the smaller towns of the West, where they
can have a fair chance. Unless something is done to change existing
conditions, to stop this movement to our Northern cities, to provide
proper habitations and surroundings for those who are already here, it
will be only a question of time until the problem of the American Negro
will reach a solution not at all desirable from our point of view."
Of course a doctor always sees the pathological side of life and his view
is likely to be pessimistic. I saw much of the tragedy of the slum Negroes
in the cities of the North, and yet many Negroes have been able to
survive, many have learned how to live in towns and are making a success
of their lives--as I shall show more particularly in the next chapter. It
must not be forgotten that Negro families in Boston and Philadelphia
(mostly mulattoes, it is true) as well as in Charleston, Savannah, and New
Orleans, have lived and thrived under city conditions for many
generations. Not a few Negroes in Indianapolis whose homes I visited are
housed better than the average of white families.
_Sickness Among Northern Negroes_
Not only is the death-rate high in the North, but the Negro is hampered by
sickness to a much greater degree than white people. Hospital records in
Philadelphia show an excess of Negro patients over whites, according to
population, of 125 per cent. About 5,000 Negroes passed through the
hospitals of Philadelphia last year, averaging a confinement of three
weeks each. Mr. Warner, in _American Charities_, makes sickness the chief
cause of poverty among coloured people in New York, Boston, New Haven, and
Baltimore. The percentage of sickness was twice or more as high as that of
Germans, Irish, or white Americans.
Such are the pains of readjustment which the Negroes are having to bear in
the North.
A question arises whether they can ever become a large factor of the
population in Northern latitudes. They are certainly not holding their own
in the country or in the smaller cities, and in the large cities they are
increasing at present, not by the birth-rate, but by constant immigration.
Hostile physical conditions of life in the North are not the only
difficulties that the Negro has to meet. He thought he left prejudice
behind in the South, but he finds it also showing its teeth here in the
North. And, as in the South, a wide difference is apparent between the
attitude of the best class of white men and the lower class.
_How Northerners Regard the Negro_
One of the first things that struck me when I began studying race
conditions in the North was the position of the better class of white
people with regard to the Negro. In the South every white man and woman
has a vigorous and vital opinion on the race question. You have only to
apply the match, the explosion is sure to follow. It is not so in the
North. A few of the older people still preserve something of the war-time
sentiment for the Negro; but the people one ordinarily meets don't know
anything about the Negro, don't discuss him, and don't care about him. In
Indianapolis, and indeed in other cities, the only white people I could
find who were much interested in the Negroes were a few politicians,
mostly of the lower sort, the charity workers and the police. But that, of
course, is equally true of the Russian Jews or the Italians. One of the
first white men with whom I talked (at Indianapolis) said to me with some
impatience:
"There are too many Negroes up here; they hurt the city."
Another told me of the increasing presence of Negroes in the parks, on the
streets, and in the street cars. He said:
"I suppose sooner or later we shall have to adopt some of the restrictions
of the South."
He said it without heat, but as a sort of tentative conclusion, he hadn't
fully made up his mind.
_Race Prejudice in Boston_
In Boston, of all places, I expected to find much of the old sentiment. It
does exist among some of the older men and women, but I was surprised at
the general attitude which I encountered. It was one of hesitation and
withdrawal. Summed up, I think the feeling of the better class of people
in Boston (and elsewhere in Northern cities) might be thus stated:
We have helped the Negro to liberty; we have helped to educate him; we
have encouraged him to stand on his own feet. Now let's see what he can do
for himself. After all, he must survive or perish by his own efforts.
In short, they have "cast the bantling on the rocks."
Though they still preserve the form of encouraging the Negro, the spirit
seems to have fled. Not long ago the Negroes of Boston organised a concert
at which Theodore Drury, a coloured musician of really notable
accomplishments, was to appear. Aristocratic white people were appealed to
and bought a considerable number of tickets; but on the evening of the
concert the large block of seats purchased by white people was
conspicuously vacant. Northern white people would seem to be more
interested in the distant Southern Negro than in the Negro at their doors.
Before I take up the cruder and more violent expressions of prejudice on
the part of the lower class of white men in the North I want to show the
beginnings of cold-shouldering as it exists in varying degrees in Northern
cities, and especially in Boston, the old centre of abolitionism.
Superficially, at least, the Negro in Boston still enjoys the widest
freedom; but after one gets down to real conditions he finds much
complaint and alarm on the part of Negroes over growing restrictions.
Boston exercises no discrimination on the street cars, on railroads, or in
theatres or other places of public gathering. The schools are absolutely
free. A coloured woman, Miss Maria Baldwin, is the principal of the
Agassiz school, of Cambridge, attended by 600 white children. I heard her
spoken of in the highest terms by the white people. Eight Negro teachers,
chosen through the ordinary channels of competitive examination, teach in
the public schools. There are Negro policemen, Negro firemen, Negro
officeholders--fully as many of them as the proportion of Negro population
in Boston would warrant. A Negro has served as commander of a white post
of the Grand Army.
_Prosperous Negroes in Boston_
Several prosperous Negro business men have won a large white patronage.
One of the chief merchant-tailoring stores of Boston, with a location on
Washington Street which rents for $10,000 a year, is owned by J. H. Lewis.
He has been in business many years. He employs both white and Negro
workmen and clerks and he has some of the best white trade in Boston. Not
long ago he went to North Carolina and bought the old plantation where his
father was a slave, and he even talks of going there to spend his old age.
Another Negro, Gilbert H. Harris, conducts the largest wig-making
establishment in New England. I visited his place. He employs coloured
girls and his trade is exclusively white. Another Negro has a school of
pharmacy in which all the students are white; another, George Hamm, has a
prosperous news and stationery store. A dentist, Dr. Grant, who has a
reputation in his profession for a cement which he invented, was formerly
in the faculty of the Harvard dentistry school and now enjoys a good
practice among white people. The real estate dealer who has the most
extensive business in Cambridge, T. H. Raymond, is a Negro. He employs
white clerks and his business is chiefly with white people. Two or three
Negro lawyers, Butler Wilson in particular, have many white clients. Dr.
Courtney, a coloured physician from the Harvard Medical School, was for a
time house physician of the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, in which the
patients were practically all white, and has now a practice which includes
both white and coloured patients. Dr. Courtney has also served on the
School Board of Boston, an important elective office. The Negro poet,
William Stanley Braithwaite, whose father took a degree at Oxford
(England), is a member of the Authors' Club of Boston. His poems have
appeared in various magazines, he has written a volume of poems, a
standard anthology of Elizabethan verse, and he is about to publish a
critical study of the works of William Dean Howells. Several of these men
meet white people socially more or less.
I give these examples to show the place occupied by the better and older
class of Boston Negroes. Most of those I have mentioned are mulattoes,
some very light. It shows what intelligent Negroes can do for themselves
in a community where there has been little or no prejudice against them.
But with crowding new immigration, and incited by all the other causes I
have mentioned, these conditions are rapidly changing.
A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now
several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not
serve Negroes, even the best of them. The discrimination is not made
openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no
accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he
does not come again. A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and
houses in many white neighbourhoods to coloured people. The Negro in
Boston, as in other cities, is building up "quarters," which he occupies
to the increasing exclusion of other classes of people. The great Negro
centre is now in the South End, a locality once occupied by some of the
most aristocratic families of Boston. And yet, as elsewhere, they struggle
for the right to live where they please. A case in point is that of Mrs.
Mattie A. McAdoo, an educated coloured woman, almost white, who has
travelled abroad, and is a woman of refinement. She had a flat in an
apartment house among white friends. One of the renters, a Southern woman,
finding out that Mrs. McAdoo had coloured blood, objected. The landlord
refused to cancel Mrs. McAdoo's lease and the white woman left, but the
next year Mrs. McAdoo found that she could not re-rent her apartment. The
landlord in this instance was the son of an abolitionist. He said to her:
"You know I have no prejudice against coloured people. I will rent you an
apartment in the building where I myself live if you want it, but I can't
let you into my other buildings, because the tenants object."
An attempt was even made a year or so ago by white women to force Miss
Baldwin, the coloured school principal to whom I have referred, and who is
almost one of the institutions of Boston, to leave Franklin House, where
she was living. No one incident, perhaps, awakened Boston to the existence
of race prejudice more sharply than this.
_Churches Draw the Colour Line_
One would think that the last harbour of prejudice would be the churches,
and yet I found strange things in Boston. There are, and have been for a
long time, numerous coloured churches in Boston, but many Negroes,
especially those of the old families, have belonged to the white churches.
In the last two years increased Negro attendance, especially at the
Episcopal churches, has become a serious problem. A quarter of the
congregation of the Church of the Ascension is coloured and the vicar has
had to refuse any further coloured attendance at the Sunday School. St.
Peter's and St. Philip's Churches in Cambridge have also been confronted
with the colour problem.
A proposition is now afoot to establish a Negro mission which shall
gradually grow into a separate coloured Episcopal Church, a movement which
causes much bitterness among the coloured people. I shall not soon forget
the expression of hopelessness in the face of a prominent white church
leader as he exclaimed:
"What _shall_ we do with these Negroes! I for one would like to have them
stay. I believe it is in accordance with the doctrine of Christ, but the
proportion is growing so large that white people are drifting away from
us. Strangers avoid us. Our organisation is expensive to keep up and the
Negroes are able to contribute very little in proportion to their
numbers. Think about it yourself: What shall we do? If we allow the
Negroes to attend freely it means that eventually all the white people
will leave and we shall have a Negro church whether we want it or not."
In no other city are there any considerable number of Negroes who attend
white churches--except a few Catholic churches. At New Orleans, I have
seen white and coloured people worshipping together at the cathedrals.
White ministers sometimes have spasms of conscience that they are not
doing all they should for the Negro.
Let me tell two significant incidents from Philadelphia. The worst Negro
slum in that city is completely surrounded by business houses and the
homes of wealthy white people. Within a few blocks of it stand several of
the most aristocratic churches of Philadelphia. Miss Bartholomew conducts
a neighbourhood settlement in the very centre of this social bog. Twice
during the many years she has been there white ministers have ventured
down from their churches. One of them said he had been troubled by the
growing masses of ignorant coloured people.
"Can't I do something to help?"
Miss Bartholomew was greatly pleased and cheered.
"Of course you can," she said heartily. "We're trying to keep some of the
Negro children off the streets. There is plenty of opportunity for helping
with our boys' and girls' clubs and classes."
"Oh, I didn't mean that," said the minister; "I thought, in cases of death
in their families, we might offer to read the burial service."
And he went away and did not see the humour of it!
Another minister made a similar proposition: he wanted to establish a
Sunday School for coloured people. He asked Miss Bartholomew anxiously
where he could hold it.
"Why not in your church in the afternoon?"
"Why, we couldn't do that!" he exclaimed; "we should have to air all the
cushions afterward!"
But to return to Boston. A proposition was recently made to organise for
coloured people a separate Y. M. C. A., but the white members voted
against any such discrimination. Yet a coloured man said to me
hopelessly:
"It's only delayed. Next time we shall be put off with a separate
institution."
_Colour Line at Harvard_
Even at Harvard where the Negro has always enjoyed exceptional
opportunities, conditions are undergoing a marked change. A few years ago
a large class of white students voluntarily chose a brilliant Negro
student, R. C. Bruce, as valedictorian. But last year a Negro baseball
player was the cause of so much discussion and embarrassment to the
athletic association that there will probably never be another coloured
boy on the university teams. The line has already been drawn, indeed, in
the medical department. Although a coloured doctor only a few years ago
was house physician at the Boston Lying-in-Hospital, coloured students are
no longer admitted to that institution. One of them, Dr. Welker (an Iowa
coloured man), cannot secure his degree because he hasn't had six
obstetrical cases, and he can't get the six cases because he isn't
admitted with his white classmates to the Lying-in-Hospital. It is a
curious fact that not only the white patients but some Negro patients
object to the coloured doctors. In a recent address which has awakened
much sharp comment among Boston Negroes, President Eliot of Harvard
indicated his sympathy with the general policy of separate education in
the South by remarking that if Negro students were in the majority at
Harvard, or formed a large proportion of the total number, some separation
of the races might follow.
And this feeling is growing, notwithstanding the fact that no Negro
student has ever disgraced Harvard and that no students are more orderly
or law-abiding than the Negroes. On the other hand, Negro students have
frequently made distinguished records for scholarship: last year one of
them, Alain Leroy Locke, who took the course in three years, won the first
of the three Bowdoin prizes (the most important bestowed at Harvard) for a
literary essay, and passed for his degree with a _magna cum laude_. Since
then he has been accepted, after a brilliant competitive examination, for
the Rhodes scholarship from the state of Pennsylvania.
Such feeling as that which is developing in the North comes hard, indeed,
upon the intelligent, educated, ambitious Negro--especially if he happens
to have, as a large proportion of these Negroes do have, no little white
blood. Many coloured people in Boston are so white that they cannot be
told from white people, yet they are classed as Negroes.
Accompanying this change of attitude, this hesitation and withdrawal of
the better class of white men, one finds crude sporadic outbreaks on the
part of the rougher element of white men--who have merely a different way
of expressing themselves.
_White Gangs Attack Negroes_
In Indianapolis the Negro comes in contact with the "bungaloo gangs,"
crowds of rough and lawless white boys who set upon Negroes and beat them
frightfully, often wholly without provocation. Although no law prevents
Negroes from entering any park in Indianapolis, they are practically
excluded from at least one of them by the danger of being assaulted by
these gangs.
The street cars are free in all Northern cities, but the Negro
nevertheless sometimes finds it dangerous to ride with white people.
Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., himself a Negro, and an acute observer of
Negro conditions, tells this personal experience:
"I came out on the car from the University of Pennsylvania one evening in
May about eight o'clock. Just as the car turned off Twenty-seventh to
Lombard Street, a crowd of about one hundred little white boys from six to
about fourteen years of age attacked it. The car was crowded, but there
were only about a dozen Negroes on it, about half of them women. The mob
of boys got control of the car by pulling off the trolley. They threw
stones into the car, and finally some of them boarded the car and began to
beat the Negroes with sticks, shouting as they did so, 'Kill the nigger!'
'Lynch 'em!' 'Hit that nigger!' etc. This all happened in Philadelphia.
Doubtless these urchins had been reading in the daily papers the cry 'Kill
the Negro!' and they were trying to carry out the injunction."
While I was in Indianapolis a clash of enough importance to be reported in
the newspapers occurred between the races on a street car; and in New
York, in the San Juan Hill district, one Sunday evening I saw an incident
which illustrates the almost instinctive race antagonism which exists in
Northern cities. The street was crowded. Several Negro boys were playing
on the pavement. Stones were thrown. Instantly several white boys sided
together and began to advance on the Negroes. In less time than it takes
to tell it thirty or forty white boys and young men were chasing the
Negroes down the street. At the next corner the Negroes were joined by
dozens of their own race. Stones and sticks began to fly everywhere, and
if it hadn't been for the prompt action of two policemen there would have
been a riot similar to those which have occurred not once but many times
in New York City during the past two years. Of course these instances are
exceptional, but none the less significant.
_Bumptiousness as a Cause of Hatred_
Some of the disturbances grow out of a characteristic of a certain sort of
Negro, the expression of which seems to stir the deepest animosity in the
city white boy. And that is the bumptiousness, the airiness, of the
half-ignorant young Negro, who, feeling that he has rights, wants to be
occupied constantly in using them. He mistakes liberty for licence.
Although few in numbers among thousands of quiet coloured people, he makes
a large showing. In the South they call him the "smart Negro," and an
almost irresistible instinct exists among white boys of a certain class to
take him down. I remember walking in Indianapolis with an educated
Northern white man. We met a young Negro immaculately dressed; his
hat-band was blue and white; his shoes were patent leather with white
tops; he wore a flowered waistcoat, and his tread as he walked was
something to see.
"Do you know," said my companion, "I never see that young fellow without
wanting to step up and knock his head off. I know something about him. He
is absolutely worthless: he does no work, but lives on the wages of a
hard-working coloured woman and spends all he can get on his clothes. I
know the instinct is childish, but I am just telling you how I feel. I'm
not sure it is racial prejudice; I presume I should feel much the same way
toward a Frenchman if he did the same thing. And somehow I can't help
believing that a good thrashing would improve that boy's character."
I'm telling this incident just as it happened, to throw a side-light on
one of the manifestations of the growing prejudice. One more illustration:
Miss Eaton conducts a social settlement for Negroes in Boston. One day a
teacher said to one of the little Negro boys in her class:
"Please pick up my handkerchief."
The boy did not stir; she again requested him to pick up the handkerchief;
then she asked him why he refused.
"The days of slavery are over," he said.
Now, this spirit is not common, but it exists, and it injures the Negro
people out of all proportion to its real seriousness.
In certain towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the borders of the old
South, the feeling has reached a stage still more acute. At Springfield,
O., two race riots have occurred, in the first of which a Negro was
lynched and in the second many Negroes were driven out of town and a row
of coloured tenements was burned. There are counties and towns where no
Negro is permitted to stop over night. At Syracuse, O., Lawrenceburg,
Ellwood, and Salem, Ind., for example, Negroes have not been permitted to
live for years. If a Negro appears he is warned of conditions, and if he
does not leave immediately, he is visited by a crowd of boys and men and
forced to leave. A farmer who lives within a few miles of Indianapolis
told me of a meeting, held only a short time ago by thirty-five farmers in
his neighbourhood, in which an agreement was passed to hire no Negroes,
nor to permit Negroes to live anywhere in the region.
_Story of a Northern Race Riot_
I stopped at Greensburg, Ind., on my way East and found there a remarkable
illustration showing just how feeling arises in the North. Greensburg is a
comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern
Indiana. Many of the residents are retired farmers. The population of
7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin. And
yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot. I made
careful inquiries as to conditions there and I was amazed to discover how
closely this small disturbance paralleled the greater riot at Atlanta
which I have already written about. Negroes had lived in Greensburg for
many years, a group of self-respecting, decent, prosperous men and women.
They were known to and highly regarded by their white neighbours. One of
them, named Brooks, owned a barber shop and was janitor for the
Presbyterian Church and for one of the banks. Another, George W. Edwards,
whom I met, has been for years an employee in the Garland Mills.
"There isn't a better citizen in town than Edwards," a white lawyer told
me; and I heard the same thing from other white men.
Another Negro, George Guess, is an engineer in the electric light plant.
Of the local Negro boys, Robert Lewis, the first coloured graduate of the
local schools, is now teaching engineering at Hampton Institute. Oscar
Langston, another Negro boy, is a dentist in Indianapolis. These and other
Negroes live in good homes, support a church and have a respectable
society of their own. I found just such a body of good coloured people in
Atlanta.
Well, progress brought an electric railroad to Greensburg. To work on this
and on improvements made by the railroad hundreds of labourers were
required. And they were Negroes of the ignorant, wandering, unlooked-after
sort so common in similar occupations in the South. When the work was
finished a considerable number of them remained in Greensburg. Now
Greensburg, like other American cities, was governed by a mayor who was a
"good fellow," and who depended on two influences to elect him: party
loyalty and the saloon vote. He allowed a Negro dive to exist in one part
of the town, where the idle and worthless Negroes congregated, where a
murder was committed about a year before the riot. Exactly like Decatur
Street in Atlanta! A rotten spot always causes trouble sooner or later.
Good citizens protested and objected--to no purpose. They even organised a
Good Citizenship League, the purpose of which was to secure a better
enforcement of law. But the saloon interests were strong and wanted to
sell whiskey and beer to the Negroes, and the city authorities were
complaisant.
"Who cares," one of them asked, "about a few worthless Negroes?"
But in a democracy people _must_ care for one another.
_A Negro Crime in the North_
One day last April a Negro labourer who had been working for Mrs. Sefton,
a highly respected widow who lived alone, appeared in the house in broad
daylight and criminally assaulted her. His name was John Green, a Kentucky
Negro; he was not only ignorant, but half-witted; he had already committed
a burglary and had not been punished. He was easily caught, convicted, and
sentenced. But the town was angry. On April 30th a crowd of men and boys
gathered, beat two or three Negroes, and drove many out of town. They
never thought of mobbing the city officials who had allowed the Negro
dives to exist. And, as in Atlanta, the decent Negroes suffered with the
criminals: a crowd broke windows in the home of George Edwards, and
threatened other respectable coloured men. As in Atlanta, the better white
people were horrified and scandalised; but, as in Atlanta, the white men
who made up the mob went unpunished (though Atlanta did mildly discipline
a few rioters). As in Atlanta, the newspaper reports that were sent out
made no distinction between the different sorts of Negroes. The entire
Negro population of Greensburg was blamed for the crime of a single
ignorant and neglected man. I have several different newspaper reports of
the affair from outside papers, and nearly all indicate in the headlines
that all the Negroes in Greensburg were concerned in the riot and were
driven out of town, which was not, of course, true. As a matter of fact
the respectable Negroes are still living in Greensburg on friendly terms
with the white people.
_Human Nature North and South_
In fact, the more I see of conditions North and South, the more I see that
human nature north of Mason and Dixon's line is not different from human
nature south of the line.
Different degrees of prejudice, it is true, are apparent in the two
sections. In the South the social and political prejudice the natural
result of the memories of slavery and reconstruction, of the greater mass
of Negro population and of the backward economic development, is stronger.
In the North, on the other hand, comparatively little social and political
prejudice is apparent; but the Negro has a hard fight to get anything but
the most subservient place in the economic machine.
Over and over again, while I was in the South, I heard remarks like this:
"Down here we make the Negro keep his place socially, but in the North you
won't let him work."
This leads me to one of the most important phases of race-relationship in
the North--that is, the economic struggle of the Negro, suddenly thrown,
as he has been, into the swift-moving, competitive conditions of Northern
cities. Does he, or can he, survive? Do the masses of Negroes now coming
North realise their ambitions? Is it true that the North will not let the
Negro work?
These questions must, perforce, be discussed in another chapter.