CHAPTER XV

"THE VALE OF TEARS," 1890-1910

1. _Current Opinion and Tendencies_

In the two decades that we are now to consider we find the working

out of all the large forces mentioned in our last chapter. After a

generation of striving the white South was once more thoroughly in

control, and the new program well under way. Predictions for both a

broader outlook for the section as a whole and greater care for the

Negro's moral and intellectual advancement were destined not to be

fulfilled; and the period became one of bitter social and economic

antagonism.

All of this was primarily due to the one great fallacy on which the

prosperity of the New South was built, and that was that the labor of

the Negro existed only for the good of the white man. To this one source

may be traced most of the ills borne by both white man and Negro during

the period. If the Negro's labor was to be exploited, it was necessary

that he be without the protection of political power and that he be

denied justice in court. If he was to be reduced to a peon, certainly

socially he must be given a peon's place. Accordingly there developed

everywhere--in schools, in places of public accommodation, in the

facilities of city life--the idea of inferior service for Negroes;

and an unenlightened prison system flourished in all its hideousness.

Furthermore, as a result of the vicious economic system, arose the

sinister form of the Negro criminal. Here again the South begged the

question, representative writers lamenting the passing of the dear dead

days of slavery, and pointing cynically to the effects of freedom on the

Negro. They failed to remember in the case of the Negro criminal that

from childhood to manhood--in education, in economic chance, in legal

power--they had by their own system deprived a human being of every

privilege that was due him, ruining him body and soul; and then they

stood aghast at the thing their hands had made. More than that, they

blamed the race itself for the character that now sometimes appeared,

and called upon thrifty, aspiring Negroes to find the criminal and give

him up to the law. Thrifty, aspiring Negroes wondered what was the

business of the police.

It was this pitiful failure to get down to fundamentals that

characterized the period and that made life all the more hard for those

Negroes who strove to advance. Every effort was made to brutalize a man,

and then he was blamed for not being a St. Bernard. Fortunately before

the period was over there arose not only clear-thinking men of the race

but also a few white men who realized that such a social order could not

last forever.

Early in the nineties, however, the pendulum had swung fully backward,

and the years from 1890 to 1895 were in some ways the darkest that the

race has experienced since emancipation. When in 1892 Cleveland was

elected for a second term and the Democrats were once more in power, it

seemed to the Southern rural Negro that the conditions of slavery had

all but come again. More and more the South formulated its creed; it

glorified the old aristocracy that had flourished and departed, and

definitely it began to ask the North if it had not been right after all.

It followed of course that if the Old South had the real key to the

problem, the proper place of the Negro was that of a slave.

Within two or three years there were so many important articles on the

Negro in prominent magazines and these were by such representative men

that taken together they formed a symposium. In December, 1891, James

Bryce wrote in the _North American Review_, pointing out that the

situation in the South was a standing breach of the Constitution, that

it suspended the growth of political parties and accustomed the section

to fraudulent evasions, and he emphasized education as a possible

remedy; he had quite made up his mind that the Negro had little or no

place in politics. In January, 1892, a distinguished classical scholar,

Basil L. Gildersleeve, turned aside from linguistics to write in the

_Atlantic_ "The Creed of the Old South," which article he afterwards

published as a special brochure, saying that it had been more widely

read than anything else he had ever written. In April, Thomas Nelson

Page in the _North American_ contended that in spite of the $5,000,000

spent on the education of the Negro in Virginia between 1870 and 1890

the race had retrograded or not greatly improved, and in fact that the

Negro "did not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery."

Later in the same year he published _The Old South_. In the same month

Frederick L. Hoffman, writing in the _Arena_, contended that in view of

its mortality statistics the Negro race would soon die out.[1] Also in

April, 1892, Henry Watterson wrote of the Negro in the _Chautauquan_,

recalling the facts that the era of political turmoil had been succeeded

by one of reaction and violence, and that by one of exhaustion and

peace; but with all his insight he ventured no constructive suggestion,

thinking it best for everybody "simply to be quiet for a time." Early in

1893 John C. Wycliffe, a prominent lawyer of New Orleans, writing in

the _Forum_, voiced the desires of many in asking for a repeal of the

Fifteenth Amendment; and in October, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, writing

in the same periodical of a recent and notorious lynching, said, "It

was horrible to torture the guilty wretch; the burning was an act of

insanity. But had the dismembered form of his victim been the dishonored

body of my baby, I might also have gone into an insanity that might have

ended never." Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of

forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to

their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and

ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that

the politician made capital of choice propaganda.

[Footnote 1: In 1896 this paper entered into an elaborate study, _Race

Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro_, a publication of the

American Economic Association. In this Hoffman contended at length that

the race was not only not holding its own in population, but that it was

also astonishingly criminal and was steadily losing economically. His

work was critically studied and its fallacies exposed in the _Nation_,

April 1, 1897.]

In this chorus of dispraise truth struggled for a hearing, but then as

now traveled more slowly than error. In the _North American_ for July,

1892, Frederick Douglass wrote vigorously of "Lynch Law in the South."

In the same month George W. Cable answered affirmatively and with

emphasis the question, "Does the Negro pay for his education?" He showed

that in Georgia in 1889-90 the colored schools did not really cost the

white citizens a cent, and that in the other Southern states the Negro

was also contributing his full share to the maintenance of the schools.

In June of the same year William T. Harris, Commissioner of Education,

wrote in truly statesmanlike fashion in the _Atlantic_ of "The Education

of the Negro." Said he: "With the colored people all educated in schools

and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all

forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so

improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its

quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated

in a Christian theology interpreted in a missionary spirit, and finding

its auxiliaries in modern science and modern literature; with these

educational essentials the Negro problem for the South will be solved

without recourse to violent measures of any kind, whether migration,

or disfranchisement, or ostracism." In December, 1893, Walter H. Page,

writing in the _Forum_ of lynching under the title, "The Last Hold of

the Southern Bully," said that "the great danger is not in the first

violation of law, nor in the crime itself, but in the danger that

Southern public sentiment under the stress of this phase of the race

problem will lose the true perspective of civilization"; and L.E.

Bleckley, Chief Justice of Georgia, spoke in similar vein. On the whole,

however, the country, while occasionally indignant at some atrocity, had

quite decided not to touch the Negro question for a while; and when in

the spring of 1892 some representative Negroes protested without avail

to President Harrison against the work of mobs, the _Review of Reviews_

but voiced the drift of current opinion when it said: "As for the

colored men themselves, their wisest course would be to cultivate the

best possible relations with the most upright and intelligent of their

white neighbors, and for some time to come to forget all about politics

and to strive mightily for industrial and educational progress."[1]

[Footnote 1: June, 1892, p. 526.]

It is not strange that under the circumstances we have now to record

such discrimination, crime, and mob violence as can hardly be paralleled

in the whole of American history. The Negro was already down; he was now

to be trampled upon. When in the spring of 1892 some members of the race

in the lowlands of Mississippi lost all they had by the floods and the

Federal Government was disposed to send relief, the state government

protested against such action on the ground that it would keep the

Negroes from accepting the terms offered by the white planters. In

Louisiana in 1895 a Negro presiding elder reported to the _Southwestern

Christian Advocate_ that he had lost a membership of a hundred souls,

the people being compelled to leave their crops and move away within ten

days.

In 1891 the jail at Omaha was entered and a Negro taken out and hanged

to a lamp-post. On February 27, 1892, at Jackson, La., where there was

a pound party for the minister at the Negro Baptist church, a crowd of

white men gathered, shooting revolvers and halting the Negroes as they

passed. Most of the people were allowed to go on, but after a while the

sport became furious and two men were fatally shot. About the same time,

and in the same state, at Rayville, a Negro girl of fifteen was taken

from a jail by a mob and hanged to a tree. In Texarkana, Ark., a Negro

who had outraged a farmer's wife was captured and burned alive, the

injured woman herself being compelled to light the fire. Just a few days

later, in March, a constable in Memphis in attempting to arrest a Negro

was killed. Numerous arrests followed, and at night a mob went to the

jail, gained easy access, and, having seized three well-known Negroes

who were thought to have been leaders in the killing, lynched them, the

whole proceeding being such a flagrant violation of law that it has not

yet been forgotten by the older Negro citizens of this important city.

On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal

crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record. Henry

Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a

policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received,

seized the officer's three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore

her body to pieces. He was tortured by the child's father, her uncles,

and her fifteen-year-old brother, his eyes being put out with hot irons

before he was burned. His stepson, who had refused to tell where he

could be found, was hanged and his body riddled with bullets. Thus the

lynchings went on, the victims sometimes being guilty of the gravest

crimes, but often also perfectly innocent people. In February, 1893, the

average was very nearly one a day. At the same time injuries inflicted

on the Negro were commonly disregarded altogether. Thus at Dickson,

Tenn., a young white man lost forty dollars. A fortune-teller told him

that the money had been taken by a woman and gave a description that

seemed to fit a young colored woman who had worked in the home of a

relative. Half a dozen men then went to the home of the young woman and

outraged her, her mother, and also another woman who was in the house.

At the very close of 1894, in Brooks County, Ga., after a Negro named

Pike had killed a white man with whom he had a quarrel, seven Negroes

were lynched after the real murderer had escaped. Any relative or other

Negro who, questioned, refused to tell of the whereabouts of Pike,

whether he knew of the same or not, was shot in his tracks, one man

being shot before he had chance to say anything at all. Meanwhile the

White Caps or "Regulators" took charge of the neighboring counties,

terrifying the Negroes everywhere; and in the trials that resulted the

state courts broke down altogether, one judge in despair giving up the

holding of court as useless.

Meanwhile discrimination of all sorts went forward. On May 29, 1895,

moved by the situation at the Orange Park Academy, the state of Florida

approved "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Youth from being Taught

in the same Schools." Said one section: "It shall be a penal offense

for any individual body of inhabitants, corporation, or association to

conduct within this State any school of any grade, public, private, or

parochial, wherein white persons and Negroes shall be instructed or

boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class or at the

same time by the same teacher." Religious organizations were not to be

left behind in such action; and when before the meeting of the Baptist

Young People's Union in Baltimore a letter was sent to the secretary of

the organization and the editor of the _Baptist Union_, in behalf of the

Negroes, who the year before had not been well treated at Toronto, he

sent back an evasive answer, saying that the policy of his society was

to encourage local unions to affiliate with their own churches.

More grave than anything else was the formal denial of the Negro's

political rights. As we have seen, South Carolina in 1895 followed

Mississippi in the disfranchising program and within the next fifteen

years most of the other Southern states did likewise. With the Negro

thus deprived of any genuine political voice, all sorts of social and

economic injustice found greater license.

2. _Industrial Education: Booker T. Washington_

Such were the tendencies of life in the South as affecting the Negro

thirty years after emancipation. In September, 1895, a rising educator

of the race attracted national attention by a remarkable speech that

he made at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. Said Booker T.

Washington: "To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition

in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating

friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door

neighbor, I would say, 'Cast down your bucket where you are'--cast it

down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by

whom we are surrounded.... To those of the white race who look to the

incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the

prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to

my own race, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' Cast it down among

8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you

have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of

your fire-sides.... In all things that are purely social we can be as

separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to

mutual progress."

The message that Dr. Washington thus enunciated he had already given in

substance the previous spring in an address at Fisk University, and even

before then his work at Tuskegee Institute had attracted attention.[1]

The Atlanta Exposition simply gave him the great occasion that he

needed; and he was now to proclaim the new word throughout the length

and breadth of the land. Among the hundreds of addresses that he

afterwards delivered, especially important were those at Harvard

University in 1896, at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in 1898, and before the

National Education Association in St. Louis in 1904. Again and again in

these speeches one comes upon such striking sentences as the following:

"Freedom can never be given. It must be purchased."[2] "The race, like

the individual, that makes itself indispensable, has solved most of its

problems."[3] "As a race there are two things we must learn to do--one

is to put brains into the common occupations of life, and the other is

to dignify common labor."[4] "Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not

strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the

top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State

Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill."[5]

"The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth

infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera

house."[6] "One of the most vital questions that touch our American life

is how to bring the strong, wealthy, and learned into helpful contact

with the poorest, most ignorant, and humblest, and at the same time

make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the

other."[7] "There is no defense or security for any of us except in the

highest intelligence and development of all."[8]

[Footnote 1: See article by Albert Shaw, "Negro Progress on the Tuskegee

Plan," in _Review of Reviews_, April, 1894.]

[Footnote 2,3: Speech before N.E.A., in St. Louis, June 30, 1904.]

[Footnote 4: Speech at Fisk University, 1805.]

[Footnote 5,6,8: Speech at Atlanta Exposition, September 18, 1895.]

[Footnote 7: Speech at Harvard University, June 24, 1896.]

The time was ripe for a new leader. Frederick Douglass had died in

February, 1895. In his later years he had more than once lost hold on

the heart of his people, as when he opposed the Negro Exodus or seemed

not fully in sympathy with the religious convictions of those who looked

to him. At his passing, however, the race remembered only his early

service and his old magnificence, and to a striving people his death

seemed to make still darker the gathering gloom. Coming when he did,

Booker T. Washington was thoroughly in line with the materialism of his

age; he answered both an economic and an educational crisis. He also

satisfied the South of the new day by what he had to say about social

equality.

The story of his work reads like a romance, and he himself has told it

better than any one else ever can. He did not claim the credit for

the original idea of industrial education; that he gave to General

Armstrong, and it was at Hampton that he himself had been nurtured. What

was needed, however, was for some one to take the Hampton idea down to

the cotton belt, interpret the lesson for the men and women digging in

the ground, and generally to put the race in line with the country's

industrial development. This was what Booker T. Washington undertook to

do.

He reached Tuskegee early in June, 1881. July 4 was the date set for the

opening of the school in the little shanty and church which had been

secured for its accommodation. On the morning of this day thirty

students reported for admission. The greater number were school-teachers

and some were nearly forty years of age. Just about three months

after the opening of the school there was offered for sale an old and

abandoned plantation a mile from Tuskegee on which the mansion had been

burned. All told the place seemed to be just the location needed to

make the work effective and permanent. The price asked was five hundred

dollars, the owner requiring the immediate payment of two hundred and

fifty dollars, the remaining two hundred and fifty to be paid within a

year. In his difficulty Mr. Washington wrote to General J.F.B. Marshall,

treasurer of Hampton Institute, placing the matter before him and asking

for the loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. General Marshall replied

that he had no authority to lend money belonging to Hampton Institute,

but that he would gladly advance the amount needed from his personal

funds. Toward the paying of this sum the assisting teacher, Olivia A.

Davidson (afterwards Mrs. Washington), helped heroically. Her first

effort was made by holding festivals and suppers, but she also canvassed

the families in the town of Tuskegee, and the white people as well as

the Negroes helped her. "It was often pathetic," said the principal, "to

note the gifts of the older colored people, many of whom had spent their

best days in slavery. Sometimes they would give five cents, sometimes

twenty-five cents. Sometimes the contribution was a quilt, or a quantity

of sugarcane. I recall one old colored woman, who was about seventy

years of age, who came to see me when we were raising money to pay for

the farm. She hobbled into the room where I was, leaning on a cane. She

was clad in rags, but they were clean. She said, 'Mr. Washington, God

knows I spent de bes' days of my life in slavery. God knows I's ignorant

an' poor; but I knows what you an' Miss Davidson is tryin' to do. I

knows you is tryin' to make better men an' better women for de colored

race. I ain't got no money, but I wants you to take dese six eggs,

what I's been savin' up, an' I wants you to put dese six eggs into de

eddication of dese boys an' gals.' Since the work at Tuskegee started,"

added the speaker, "it has been my privilege to receive many gifts for

the benefit of the institution, but never any, I think, that touched me

as deeply as this one."

It was early in the history of the school that Mr. Washington conceived

the idea of extension work. The Tuskegee Conferences began in February,

1892. To the first meeting came five hundred men, mainly farmers, and

many woman. Outstanding was the discussion of the actual terms on which

most of the men were living from year to year. A mortgage was given on

the cotton crop before it was planted, and to the mortgage was attached

a note which waived all right to exemptions under the constitution and

laws of the state of Alabama or of any other state to which the tenant

might move. Said one: "The mortgage ties you tighter than any rope and a

waive note is a consuming fire." Said another: "The waive note is good

for twenty years and when you sign one you must either pay out or die

out." Another: "When you sign a waive note you just cross your hands

behind you and go to the merchant and say, 'Here, tie me and take

all I've got.'" All agreed that the people mortgaged more than was

necessary, to buy sewing machines (which sometimes were not used),

expensive clocks, great family Bibles, or other things easily dispensed

with. Said one man: "My people want all they can get on credit, not

thinking of the day of settlement. We must learn to bore with a small

augur first. The black man totes a heavy bundle, and when he puts it

down there is a plow, a hoe, and ignorance."

It was to people such as these that Booker T. Washington brought hope,

and serving them he passed on to fame. Within a few years schools on the

plan of Tuskegee began to spring up all over the South, at Denmark, at

Snow Hill, at Utica, and elsewhere. In 1900 the National Negro Business

League began its sessions, giving great impetus to the establishment of

banks, stores, and industrial enterprises throughout the country, and

especially in the South. Much of this progress would certainly have been

realized if the Business League had never been organized; but every one

granted that in all the development the genius of the leader at

Tuskegee was the chief force. About his greatness and his very definite

contribution there could be no question.

3. _Individual Achievement: The Spanish-American War_

It happened that just at the time that Booker T. Washington was

advancing to great distinction, three or four other individuals were

reflecting special credit on the race. One of these was a young scholar,

W.E. Burghardt DuBois, who after a college career at Fisk continued

his studies at Harvard and Berlin and finally took the Ph.D. degree

at Harvard in 1895. There had been sound scholars in the race before

DuBois, but generally these had rested on attainment in the languages or

mathematics, and most frequently they had expressed themselves in rather

philosophical disquisition. Here, however, was a thorough student of

economics, and one who was able to attack the problems of his people and

meet opponents on the basis of modern science. He was destined to do

great good, and the race was proud of him.

In 1896 also an authentic young poet who had wrestled with poverty and

doubt at last gained a hearing. After completing the course at a high

school in Dayton, Paul Laurence Dunbar ran an elevator for four dollars

a week, and then he peddled from door to door two little volumes of

verse that had been privately printed. William Dean Howells at length

gave him a helping hand, and Dodd, Mead & Co. published _Lyrics of Lowly

Life_. Dunbar wrote both in classic English and in the dialect that

voiced the humor and the pathos of the life of those for whom he spoke.

What was not at the time especially observed was that in numerous poems

he suggested the discontent with the age in which he lived and thus

struck what later years were to prove an important keynote. After he had

waited and struggled so long, his success was so great that it became a

vogue, and imitators sprang up everywhere. He touched the heart of his

people and the race loved him.

By 1896 also word began to come of a Negro American painter, Henry O.

Tanner, who was winning laurels in Paris. At the same time a beautiful

singer, Mme. Sissieretta Jones, on the concert stage was giving new

proof of the possibilities of the Negro as an artist in song. In the

previous decade Mme. Marie Selika, a cultured vocalist of the first

rank, had delighted audiences in both America and Europe, and in 1887

had appeared Flora Batson, a ballad singer whose work at its best was of

the sort that sends an audience into the wildest enthusiasm. In 1894,

moreover, Harry T. Burleigh, competing against sixty candidates, became

baritone soloist at St. Georges's Episcopal Church, New York, and just a

few years later he was to be employed also at Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth

Avenue Jewish synagogue. From abroad also came word of a brilliant

musician, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who by his "Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast"

in 1898 leaped into the rank of the foremost living English composers.

On the more popular stage appeared light musical comedy, intermediate

between the old Negro minstrelsy and a genuine Negro drama, the

representative companies becoming within the next few years those of

Cole and Johnson, and Williams and Walker.

Especially outstanding in the course of the decade, however, was the

work of the Negro soldier in the Spanish-American War. There were at

the time four regiments of colored regulars in the Army of the United

States, the Twenty-fourth Infantry, the Twenty-fifth Infantry, the

Ninth Cavalry, and the Tenth Cavalry. When the war broke out President

McKinley sent to Congress a message recommending the enlistment of more

regiments of Negroes. Congress failed to act; nevertheless colored

troops enlisted in the volunteer service in Massachusetts, Indiana,

Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The

Eighth Illinois was officered throughout by Negroes, J.R. Marshall

commanding; and Major Charles E. Young, a West Point graduate, was in

charge of the Ohio battalion. The very first regiment ordered to the

front when the war broke out was the Twenty-fourth Infantry; and Negro

troops were conspicuous in the fighting around Santiago. They figured in

a brilliant charge at Las Quasimas on June 24, and in an attack on July

1 upon a garrison at El Caney (a position of importance for securing

possession of a line of hills along the San Juan River, a mile and a

half from Santiago) the First Volunteer Cavalry (Colonel Roosevelt's

"Rough Riders") was practically saved from annihilation by the gallant

work of the men of the Tenth Cavalry. Fully as patriotic, though in

another way, was a deed of the Twenty-fourth Infantry. Learning that

General Miles desired a regiment for the cleaning of a yellow

fever hospital and the nursing of some victims of the disease, the

Twenty-fourth volunteered its services and by one day's work so cleared

away the rubbish and cleaned the camp that the number of cases was

greatly reduced. Said the _Review of Reviews_ in editorial comment:[1]

"One of the most gratifying incidents of the Spanish War has been the

enthusiasm that the colored regiments of the regular army have

aroused throughout the whole country. Their fighting at Santiago was

magnificent. The Negro soldiers showed excellent discipline, the highest

qualities of personal bravery, very superior physical endurance,

unfailing good temper, and the most generous disposition toward all

comrades in arms, whether white or black. Roosevelt's Rough Riders have

come back singing the praises of the colored troops. There is not a

dissenting voice in the chorus of praise.... Men who can fight for their

country as did these colored troops ought to have their full share of

gratitude and honor."

[Footnote 1: October, 1898, p. 387.]

4. _Mob Violence; Election Troubles; The Atlanta Massacre_

After two or three years of comparative quiet--but only _comparative_

quiet--mob violence burst forth about the turn of the century with

redoubled intensity. In a large way this was simply a result of the

campaigns for disfranchisement that in some of the Southern states were

just now getting under way; but charges of assault and questions of

labor also played a part. In some places people who were innocent of any

charge whatever were attacked, and so many were killed that sometimes

it seemed that the law had broken down altogether. Not the least

interesting development of these troublous years was that in some cases

as never before Negroes began to fight with their backs to the wall, and

thus at the very close of the century--at the end of a bitter decade and

the beginning of one still more bitter--a new factor entered into the

problem, one that was destined more and more to demand consideration.

On one Sunday toward the close of October, 1898, the country recorded

two race wars, one lynching, two murders, one of which was expected to

lead to a lynching, with a total of ten Negroes killed and four wounded

and four white men killed and seven wounded. The most serious outbreak

was in the state of Mississippi, and it is worthy of note that in not

one single case was there any question of rape.

November was made red by election troubles in both North and South

Carolina. In the latter state, at Phoenix, in Greenwood County, on

November 8 and for some days thereafter, the Tolberts, a well-known

family of white Republicans, were attacked by mobs and barely escaped

alive. R.R. Tolbert was a candidate for Congress and also chairman of

the Republican state committee. John R. Tolbert, his father, collector

of the port of Charleston, had come home to vote and was at one of the

polling-places in the county. Thomas Tolbert at Phoenix was taking the

affidavits of the Negroes who were not permitted to vote for his brother

in order that later there might be ground on which to contest the

election. While thus engaged he was attacked by Etheridge, the

Democratic manager of another precinct. The Negroes came to Tolbert's

defense, and in the fight that followed Etheridge was killed and Tolbert

wounded. John Tolbert, coming up, was filled with buckshot, and a

younger member of the family was also hurt. The Negroes were at length

overpowered and the Tolberts forced to flee. All told it appears that

two white men and about twelve Negroes lost their lives in connection

with the trouble, six of the latter being lynched on account of the

death of Etheridge.

In North Carolina in 1894 the Republicans by combining with the

Populists had secured control of the state legislature. In 1896 the

Democrats were again outvoted, Governor Russell being elected by a

plurality of 9000. A considerable number of local offices was in the

hands of Negroes, who had the backing of the Governor, the legislature,

and the Supreme Court as well. Before the November elections in 1898 the

Democrats in Wilmington announced their determination to prevent Negroes

from holding office in the city. Especially had they been made angry by

an editorial in a local Negro paper, the _Record_, in which, under date

August 18, the editor, Alex. L. Manly, starting with a reference to a

speaker from Georgia, who at the Agricultural Society meeting at Tybee

had advocated lynching as an extreme measure, said that she "lost sight

of the basic principle of the religion of Christ in her plea for one

class of people as against another," and continued: "The papers are

filled with reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent lynching

of the alleged rapists. The editors pour forth volleys of aspersions

against all Negroes because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers

and speakers of the other race would condemn the commission of crime

because it is crime and not try to make it appear that the Negroes

were the only criminals, they would find their strongest allies in the

intelligent Negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks would

root the evil out of both races.... Our experience among poor white

people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any

more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men

than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on

for some time until the woman's infatuation or the man's boldness brings

attention to them and the man is lynched for rape." In reply to this

the speaker quoted in a signed statement said: "When the Negro Manly

attributed the crime of rape to intimacy between Negro men and white

women of the South, the slanderer should be made to fear a lyncher's

rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers"--a method of

argument that was unfortunately all too common in the South. As election

day approached the Democrats sought generally to intimidate the Negroes,

the streets and roads being patrolled by men wearing red shirts.

Election day, however, passed without any disturbance; but on the next

day there was a mass meeting of white citizens, at which there were

adopted resolutions to employ white labor instead of Negro, to banish

the editor of the _Record_, and to send away from the city the

printing-press in the office of that paper; and a committee of

twenty-five was appointed to see that these resolutions were carried

into effect within twenty-four hours. In the course of the terrible

day that followed the printing office was destroyed, several white

Republicans were driven from the city, and nine Negroes were killed at

once, though no one could say with accuracy just how many more lost

their lives or were seriously wounded before the trouble was over.

Charles W. Chesnutt, in _The Marrow of Tradition_, has given a faithful

portrayal of these disgraceful events, the Wellington of the story being

Wilmington. Perhaps the best commentary on those who thus sought power

was afforded by their apologist, a Presbyterian minister and editor,

A.J. McKelway, who on this occasion and others wrote articles in the

_Independent_ and the _Outlook_ justifying the proceedings. Said he: "It

is difficult to speak of the Red Shirts without a smile. They victimized

the Negroes with a huge practical joke.... A dozen men would meet at a

crossroad, on horseback, clad in red shirts or calico, flannel or silk,

according to the taste of the owner and the enthusiasm of his womankind.

They would gallop through the country, and the Negro would quietly make

up his mind that his interest in political affairs was not a large one,

anyhow. It would be wise not to vote, and wiser not to register to

prevent being dragooned into voting on election day." It thus appears

that the forcible seizure of the political rights of people, the killing

and wounding of many, and the compelling of scores to leave their homes

amount in the end to not more than a "practical joke."

One part of the new program was the most intense opposition to Federal

Negro appointees anywhere in the South. On the morning of February 22,

1898, Frazer B. Baker, the colored postmaster at Lake City, S.C., awoke

to find his house in flames. Attempting to escape, he and his baby boy

were shot and killed and their bodies consumed in the burning house.

His wife and the other children were wounded but escaped. The

Postmaster-General was quite disposed to see that justice was done in

this case; but the men charged with the crime gave the most trivial

alibis, and on Saturday, April 22, 1899, the jury in the United States

Circuit Court at Charleston reported its failure to agree on a verdict.

Three years later the whole problem was presented strongly to President

Roosevelt. When Mrs. Minne Cox, who was serving efficiently as

postmistress at Indianola, Miss., was forced to resign because of

threats, he closed the office; and when there was protest against

the appointment of Dr. William D. Crum as collector of the port of

Charleston, he said, "I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to

office. So far as I legitimately can, I shall always endeavor to pay

regard to the wishes and feelings of the people of each locality; but I

can not consent to take the position that the door of hope--the door of

opportunity--is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely

upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to

my convictions, be fundamentally wrong." These memorable words, coming

in a day of compromise and expediency in high places, greatly cheered

the heart of the race. Just the year before, the importance of the

incident of Booker T. Washington's taking lunch with President Roosevelt

was rather unnecessarily magnified by the South into all sorts of

discussion of social equality.

On Tuesday, January 24, 1899, a fire in the center of the town of

Palmetto, Ga., destroyed a hotel, two stores, and a storehouse, on which

property there was little insurance. The next Saturday there was another

fire and this destroyed a considerable part of the town. For some weeks

there was no clue as to the origin of these fires; but about the middle

of March something overheard by a white citizen led to the implicating

of nine Negroes. These men were arrested and confined for the night of

March 15 in a warehouse to await trial the next morning, a dummy guard

of six men being placed before the door. About midnight a mob came,

pushed open the door, and fired two volleys at the Negroes, killing four

immediately and fatally wounding four more. The circumstances of this

atrocious crime oppressed the Negro people of the state as few things

had done since the Civil War. That it did no good was evident, for in

its underlying psychology it was closely associated with a double crime

that was now to be committed. In April, Sam Hose, a Negro who had

brooded on the happenings at Palmetto, not many miles from the scene

killed a farmer, Alfred Cranford, who had been a leader of the mob, and

outraged his wife. For two weeks he was hunted like an animal, the white

people of the state meanwhile being almost unnerved and the Negroes

sickened by the pursuit. At last, however, he was found, and on Sunday,

April 23, at Newnan, Ga., he was burned, his execution being accompanied

by unspeakable mutilation; and on the same day Lige Strickland, a Negro

preacher whom Hose had accused of complicity in his crime, was hanged

near Palmetto. The nation stood aghast, for the recent events in Georgia

had shaken the very foundations of American civilization. Said the

_Charleston News and Courier_: "The chains which bound the citizen, Sam

Hose, to the stake at Newnan mean more for us and for his race than the

chains or bonds of slavery, which they supplanted. The flames that lit

the scene of his torture shed their baleful light throughout every

corner of our land, and exposed a state of things, actual and potential,

among us that should rouse the dullest mind to a sharp sense of our true

condition, and of our unchanged and unchangeable relations to the whole

race whom the tortured wretch represented."

Violence breeds violence, and two or three outstanding events are yet to

be recorded. On August 23, 1899, at Darien, Ga., hundreds of Negroes,

who for days had been aroused by rumors of a threatened lynching,

assembled at the ringing of the bell of a church opposite the jail and

by their presence prevented the removal of a prisoner. They were later

tried for insurrection and twenty-one sent to the convict farms for a

year. The general circumstances of the uprising excited great interest

throughout the country. In May, 1900, in Augusta, Ga., an unfortunate

street car incident resulted in the death of the aggressor, a young

white man named Whitney, and in the lynching of the colored man, Wilson,

who killed him. In this instance the victim was tortured and mutilated,

parts of his body and of the rope by which he was hanged being passed

around as souvenirs. A Negro organization at length recovered the body,

and so great was the excitement at the funeral that the coffin was not

allowed to be opened. Two months later, in New Orleans, there was a most

extraordinary occurrence, the same being important because the leading

figure was very frankly regarded by the Negroes as a hero and his fight

in his own defense a sign that the men of the race would not always be

shot down without some effort to protect themselves.

One night in July, an hour before midnight, two Negroes Robert Charles

and Leonard Pierce, who had recently come into the city from Mississippi

and whose movements had interested the police, were found by three

officers on the front steps of a house in Dryades Street. Being

questioned they replied that they had been in the town two or three days

and had secured work. In the course of the questioning the larger of

the Negroes, Charles, rose to his feet; he was seized by one of the

officers, Mora, who began to use his billet; and in the struggle that

resulted Charles escaped and Mora was wounded in each hand and the hip.

Charles now took refuge in a small house on Fourth Street, and when he

was surrounded, with deadly aim he shot and instantly killed the first

two officers who appeared.[1] The other men advancing, retreated and

waited until daylight for reënforcement, and Charles himself withdrew to

other quarters, and for some days his whereabouts were unknown. With the

new day, however, the city was wild with excitement and thousands of men

joined in the search, the newspapers all the while stirring the crowd

to greater fury. Mobs rushed up and down the streets assaulting Negroes

wherever they could be found, no effort to check them being made by the

police. On the second night a crowd of nearly a thousand was addressed

at the Lee Monument by a man from Kenner, a town a few miles above the

city. Said he: "Gentlemen, I am from Kenner, and I have come down here

to-night to assist you in teaching the blacks a lesson. I have killed a

Negro before and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours I am

willing to kill again. The only way you can teach these niggers a lesson

and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of them as

an object lesson. String up a few of them. That is the only thing to

do--kill them, string them up, lynch them. I will lead you. On to the

parish prison and lynch Pierce." The mob now rushed to the prison,

stores and pawnshops being plundered on the way. Within the next few

hours a Negro was taken from a street car on Canal Street, killed, and

his body thrown into the gutter. An old man of seventy going to work in

the morning was fatally shot. On Rousseau Street the mob fired into a

little cabin; the inmates were asleep and an old woman was killed in

bed. Another old woman who looked out from her home was beaten into

insensibility. A man sitting at his door was shot, beaten, and left for

dead. Such were the scenes that were enacted almost hourly from Monday

until Friday evening. One night the excellent school building given by

Thomy Lafon, a member of the race and a philanthropist, was burned.

[Footnote 1: From this time forth the wildest rumors were afloat and

the number of men that Charles had killed was greatly exaggerated. Some

reports said scores or even hundreds, and it is quite possible that any

figures given herewith are an understatement.]

About three o'clock on Friday afternoon Charles was found to be in

a two-story house at the corner of Saratoga and Clio Streets. Two

officers, Porteus and Lally, entered a lower room. The first fell dead

at the first shot, and the second was mortally wounded by the next. A

third, Bloomfield, waiting with gun in hand, was wounded at the first

shot and killed at the second. The crowd retreated, but bullets rained

upon the house, Charles all the while keeping watch in every direction

from four different windows. Every now and then he thrust his rifle

through one of the shattered windowpanes and fired, working with

incredible rapidity. He succeeded in killing two more of his assailants

and wounding two. At last he realized that the house was on fire, and

knowing that the end had come he rushed forth upon his foes, fired one

shot more and fell dead. He had killed eight men and mortally wounded

two or three more. His body was mutilated. In his room there was

afterwards found a copy of a religious publication, and it was known

that he had resented disfranchisement in Louisiana and had distributed

pamphlets to further a colonization scheme. No incriminating evidence,

however, was found.

In the same memorable year, 1900, on the night of Wednesday, August

15, there were serious riots in the city of New York. On the preceding

Sunday a policeman named Thorpe in attempting to arrest a colored woman

was stabbed by a Negro, Arthur Harris, so fatally that he died on

Monday. On Wednesday evening Negroes were dragged from the street cars

and beaten, and by midnight there were thousands of rioters between

25th and 35th Streets. On the next night the trouble was resumed. These

events were followed almost immediately by riots in Akron, Ohio. On the

last Sunday in October, 1901, while some Negroes were holding their

usual fall camp-meeting in a grove in Washington Parish, Louisiana, they

were attacked, and a number of people, not less than ten and perhaps

several more, were killed; and hundreds of men, women, and children felt

forced to move away from the vicinity. In the first week of March, 1904,

there was in Mississippi a lynching that exceeded even others of

the period in its horror and that became notorious for its use of a

corkscrew. A white planter of Doddsville was murdered, and a Negro,

Luther Holbert, was charged with the crime. Holbert fled, and his

innocent wife went with him. Further report we read in the Democratic

_Evening Post_ of Vicksburg as follows: "When the two Negroes were

captured, they were tied to trees, and while the funeral pyres were

being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures.

The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a

time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The

ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his

skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung

by a shred from the socket.... The most excruciating form of punishment

consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the

mob. This instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and the woman,

in the arms, legs, and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing

out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn."

In the summer of this same year Georgia was once more the scene of a

horrible lynching, two Negroes, Paul Reed and Will Cato--because of the

murder of the Hodges family six miles from the town on July 20--being

burned at the stake at Statesville under unusually depressing

circumstances. In August, 1908, there were in Springfield, Illinois,

race riots of such a serious nature that a force of six thousand

soldiers was required to quell them. These riots were significant

not only because of the attitude of Northern laborers toward Negro

competition, but also because of the indiscriminate killing of Negroes

by people in the North, this indicating a genuine nationalization of the

Negro Problem. The real climax of violence within the period, however,

was the Atlanta Massacre of Saturday, September 22, 1906.

Throughout the summer the heated campaign of Hoke Smith for

the governorship capitalized the gathering sentiment for the

disfranchisement of the Negro in the state and at length raised the race

issue to such a high pitch that it leaped into flame. The feeling was

intensified by the report of assaults and attempted assaults by Negroes,

particularly as these were detailed and magnified or even invented by an

evening paper, the _Atlanta News_, against which the Fulton County Grand

Jury afterwards brought in an indictment as largely responsible for the

riot, and which was forced to suspend publication when the business men

of the city withdrew their support. Just how much foundation there was

to the rumors may be seen from the following report of the investigator:

"Three, charged to white men, attracted comparatively little attention

in the newspapers, although one, the offense of a man named Turnadge,

was shocking in its details. Of twelve such charges against Negroes in

the six months preceding the riot, two were cases of rape, horrible in

their details, three were aggravated attempts at rape, three may have

been attempts, three were pure cases of fright on the part of white

women, and in one the white woman, first asserting that a Negro had

assaulted her, finally confessed attempted suicide."[1] On Friday,

September 21, while a Negro was on trial, the father of the girl

concerned asked the recorder for permission to deal with the Negro with

his own hand, and an outbreak was barely averted in the open court.

On Saturday evening, however, some elements in the city and from

neighboring towns, heated by liquor and newspaper extras, became openly

riotous and until midnight defied all law and authority. Negroes

were assaulted wherever they appeared, for the most part being found

unsuspecting, as in the case of those who happened to be going home from

work and were on street cars passing through the heart of the city.

In one barber shop two workers were beaten to death and their bodies

mangled. A lame bootblack, innocent and industrious, was dragged from

his work and kicked and beaten to death. Another young Negro was stabbed

with jack-knives. Altogether very nearly a score of persons lost their

lives and two or three times as many were injured. After some time

Governor Terrell mobilized the militia, but the crowd did not take this

move seriously, and the real feeling of the Mayor, who turned on the

hose of the fire department, was shown by his statement that just so

long as the Negroes committed certain crimes just so long would they be

unceremoniously dealt with. Sunday dawned upon a city of astounded white

people and outraged and sullen Negroes. Throughout Monday and Tuesday

the tension continued, the Negroes endeavoring to defend themselves as

well as they could. On Monday night the union of some citizens with

policemen who were advancing in a suburb in which most of the homes were

those of Negroes, resulted in the death of James Heard, an officer, and

in the wounding of some of those who accompanied him. More Negroes were

also killed, and a white woman to whose front porch two men were chased

died of fright at seeing them shot to death. It was the disposition,

however, on the part of the Negroes to make armed resistance that really

put an end to the massacre. Now followed a procedure that is best

described in the words of the prominent apologist for such outbreaks.

Said A.J. McKelway: "Tuesday every house in the town (i.e., the suburb

referred to above) was entered by the soldiers, and some two hundred

and fifty Negroes temporarily held, while the search was proceeding and

inquiries being made. They were all disarmed, and those with concealed

weapons, or under suspicion of having been in the party firing on the

police, were sent to jail."[2] It is thus evident that in this case, as

in many others, the Negroes who had suffered most, not the white men who

killed a score of them, were disarmed, and that for the time being their

terrified women and children were left defenseless. McKelway also says

in this general connection: "Any Southern man would protect an innocent

Negro who appealed to him for help, with his own life if necessary."

This sounds like chivalry, but it is really the survival of the old

slavery attitude that begs the whole question. The Negro does not feel

that he should ask any other man to protect him. He has quite made up

his mind that he will defend his own home himself. He stands as a man

before the bar, and the one thing he wants to know is if the law and the

courts of America are able to give him justice--simple justice, nothing

more.

[Footnote 1: R.S. Baker: _Following the Colour Line_, 3.]

[Footnote 2: _Outlook_, November 3, 1906, p. 561.]

5. _The Question of Labor_

From time to time, in connection with cases of violence, we have

referred to the matter of labor. Riots such as we have described are

primarily social in character, the call of race invariably being the

final appeal. The economic motive has accompanied this, however, and

has been found to be of increasing importance. Says DuBois: "The fatal

campaign in Georgia which culminated in the Atlanta Massacre was

an attempt, fathered by conscienceless politicians, to arouse the

prejudices of the rank and file of white laborers and farmers against

the growing competition of black men, so that black men by law could be

forced back to subserviency and serfdom."[1] The question was indeed

constantly recurrent, but even by the end of the period policies had

not yet been definitely decided upon, and for the time being there were

frequent armed clashes between the Negro and the white laborer. Both

capital and common sense were making it clear, however, that the

Negro was undoubtedly a labor asset and would have to be given place

accordingly.

[Footnote 1: _The Negro in the South_, 115.]

In March, 1895, there were bloody riots in New Orleans, these growing

out of the fact that white laborers who were beginning to be organized

objected to the employment Of Negro workers by the shipowners for the

unloading of vessels. When the trouble was at its height volley after

volley was poured upon the Negroes, and in turn two white men were

killed and several wounded. The commercial bodies of the city met,

blamed the Governor and the Mayor for the series of outbreaks, and

demanded that the outrages cease. Said they: "Forbearance has ceased to

be a virtue. We can no longer treat with men who, with arms in their

hands, are shooting down an inoffensive people because they will not

think and act with them. For these reasons we say to these people that,

cost what it may, we are determined that the commerce of this city must

and shall be protected; that every man who desires to perform honest

labor must and shall be permitted to do so regardless of race, color, or

previous condition." About August I of this same year, 1895, there were

sharp conflicts between the white and the black miners at Birmingham,

a number being killed on both sides before military authority could

intervene. Three years later, moreover, the invasion of the North by

Negro labor had begun, and about November 17, 1898, there was serious

trouble in the mines at Pana and Virden, Illinois. In the same month

the convention of railroad brotherhoods in Norfolk expressed strong

hostility to Negro labor, Grand Master Frank P. Sargent of the

Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen saying that one of the chief purposes

of the meeting of the brotherhoods was "to begin a campaign in advocacy

of white supremacy in the railway service." This November, it will be

recalled, was the fateful month of the election riots in North and South

Carolina. _The People_, the Socialist-Labor publication, commenting upon

a Negro indignation meeting at Cooper Union and upon the problem in

general, said that the Negro was essentially a wage-slave, that it was

the capitalism of the North and not humanity that in the first place had

demanded the freedom of the slave, that in the new day capital demanded

the subjugation of the working class--Negro or otherwise; and it blamed

the Negroes for not seeing the real issues at stake. It continued with

emphasis: "It is not the _Negro_ that was massacred in the Carolinas;

it was Carolina _workingmen_, Carolina _wage-slaves_ who happened to

be colored men. Not as Negroes must the race rise;... it is as

_workingmen_, as a branch of the _working class_, that the Negro must

denounce the Carolina felonies. Only by touching that chord can he

denounce to a purpose, because only then does he place himself upon that

elevation that will enable him to perceive the source of the specific

wrong complained of now." This point of view was destined more and more

to stimulate those interested in the problem, whether they accepted

it in its entirety or not. Another opinion, very different and also

important, was that given in 1899 by the editor of _Dixie_, a magazine

published in Atlanta and devoted to Southern industrial interests. Said

he: "The manufacturing center of the United States will one day be

located in the South; and this will come about, strange as it may seem,

for the reason that the Negro is a fixture here.... Organized labor,

as it exists to-day, is a menace to industry. The Negro stands as

a permanent and positive barrier against labor organization in the

South.... So the Negro, all unwittingly, is playing an important part in

the drama of Southern industrial development. His good nature defies the

Socialist." At the time this opinion seemed plausible, and yet the very

next two decades were to raise the question if it was not founded on

fallacious assumptions.

The real climax of labor trouble as of mob violence within the period

came in Georgia and in Atlanta, a city that now assumed outstanding

importance as a battleground of the problems of the New South. In April,

1909, it happened that ten white workers on the Georgia Railroad who had

been placed on the "extra list" were replaced by Negroes at lower wages.

Against this there was violent protest all along the route. A little

more than a month later the white Firemen's Union started a strike that

was intended to be the beginning of an effort to drive all Negro firemen

from Southern roads, and it was soon apparent that the real contest was

one occasioned by the progress in the South of organized labor on the

one hand and the progress of the Negro in efficiency on the other. The

essential motives that entered into the struggle were in fact the same

as those that characterized the trouble in New Orleans in 1895. Said

E.A. Ball, second vice-president of the Firemen's Union, in an address

to the public: "It will be up to you to determine whether the white

firemen now employed on the Georgia Railroad shall be accorded rights

and privileges over the Negro, or whether he shall be placed on the same

equality with the Negro. Also, it will be for you to determine whether

or not white firemen, supporting families in and around Atlanta on a pay

of $1.75 a day, shall be compelled to vacate their positions in Atlanta

joint terminals for Negroes, who are willing to do the same work for

$1.25." Some papers, like the Augusta _Herald_, said that it was a

mistaken policy to give preference to Negroes when white men would

ultimately have to be put in charge of trains and engines; but others,

like the Baltimore _News_, said, "If the Negro can be driven from one

skilled employment, he can be driven from another; but a country that

tries to do it is flying in the face of every economic law, and must

feel the evil effects of its policy if it could be carried out." At any

rate feeling ran very high; for a whole week about June I there were

very few trains between Atlanta and Augusta, and there were some acts of

violence; but in the face of the capital at stake and the fundamental

issues involved it was simply impossible for the railroad to give way.

The matter was at length referred to a board of arbitration which

decided that the Georgia Railroad was still to employ Negroes whenever

they were found qualified and that they were to receive the same wages

as white workers. Some thought that this decision would ultimately tell

against the Negro, but such was not the immediate effect at least, and

to all intents and purposes the white firemen had lost in the strike.

The whole matter was in fact fundamentally one of the most pathetic that

we have had to record. Humble white workers, desirous of improving the

economic condition of themselves and their families, instead of assuming

a statesmanlike and truly patriotic attitude toward their problem,

turned aside into the wilderness of racial hatred and were lost.

This review naturally prompts reflection as to the whole function of the

Negro laborer in the South. In the first place, what is he worth, and

especially what is he worth in honest Southern opinion? It was said

after the Civil War that he would not work except under compulsion; just

how had he come to be regarded in the industry of the New South? In 1894

a number of large employers were asked about this point. 50 per cent

said that in skilled labor they considered the Negro inferior to the

white worker, 46 per cent said that he was fairly equal, and 4 per cent

said that, all things considered, he was superior. As to common labor 54

per cent said that he was equal, 29 per cent superior, and 17 per cent

inferior to the white worker. At the time it appeared that wages

paid Negroes averaged 80 per cent of those paid white men. A similar

investigation by the Chattanooga _Tradesman_ in 1902 brought forth five

hundred replies. These were summarized as follows: "We find the Negro

more useful and skilled in the cotton-seed oil-mills, the lumber-mills,

the foundries, brick kilns, mines, and blast-furnaces. He is superior

to white labor and possibly superior to any other labor in these

establishments, but not in the capacity of skillful and ingenious

artisans." In this opinion, it is to be remembered, the Negro was

subjected to a severe test in which nothing whatever was given to him,

and at least it appears that in many lines of labor he is not less than

indispensable to the progress of the South. The question then arises:

Just what is the relation that he is finally to sustain to other

workingmen? It would seem that white worker and black worker would long

ago have realized their identity of interest and have come together. The

unions, however, have been slow to admit Negroes and give them the same

footing and backing as white men. Under the circumstances accordingly

there remained nothing else for the Negro to do except to work wherever

his services were desired and on the best terms that he was able to

obtain.

6. _Defamation: Brownsville_

Crime demands justification, and it is not surprising that after such

violence as that which we have described, and after several states had

passed disfranchising acts, there appeared in the first years of the new

century several publications especially defamatory of the race. Some

books unfortunately descended to a coarseness in vilification such as

had not been reached since the Civil War. From a Bible House in St.

Louis in 1902 came _The Negro a Beast, or In the Image of God_, a book

that was destined to have an enormous circulation among the white people

of the poorer class in the South, and that of course promoted the

mob spirit.[1] Contemporary and of the same general tenor were R.W.

Shufeldt's _The Negro_ and W.B. Smith's _The Color Line_, while a member

of the race itself, William Hannibal Thomas, published a book, _The

American Negro_, that was without either faith or ideal and as a

denunciation of the Negro in America unparalleled in its vindictiveness

and exaggeration.[2]

[Footnote 1: Its fundamental assumptions were ably refuted by Edward

Atkinson in the _North American Review_, August, 1905.]

[Footnote 2: It was reviewed in the _Dial_, April 16, 1901, by W.E.B.

DuBois, who said in part: "Mr. Thomas's book is a sinister symptom--a

growth and development under American conditions of life which

illustrates peculiarly the anomalous position of black men, and the

terrific stress under which they struggle. And the struggle and the

fight of human beings against hard conditions of life always tends

to develop the criminal or the hypocrite, the cynic or the radical.

Wherever among a hard-pressed people these types begin to appear, it

is a visible sign of a burden that is threatening to overtax their

strength, and the foreshadowing of the age of revolt."]

In January, 1904, the new governor of Mississippi, J.K. Vardaman, in his

inaugural address went to the extreme of voicing the opinion of those

who were now contending that the education of the Negro was only

complicating the problem and intensifying its dangerous features. Said

he of the Negro people: "As a race, they are deteriorating morally every

day. Time has demonstrated that they are more criminal as freemen than

as slaves; that they are increasing in criminality with frightful

rapidity, being one-third more criminal in 1890 than in 1880." A

few weeks later Bishop Brown of Arkansas in a widely quoted address

contended that the Southern Negro was going backward both morally and

intellectually and could never be expected to take a helpful part in the

Government; and he also justified lynching. In the same year one of the

more advanced thinkers of the South, Edgar Gardner Murphy, in _Problems

of the Present South_ was not yet quite willing to receive the Negro on

the basis of citizenship; and Thomas Nelson Page, who had belittled the

Negro in such a collection of stories as _In Ole Virginia_ and in such a

novel as _Red Rock_[1] formally stated his theories in _The Negro: The

Southerner's Problem_. The worst, however--if there could be a worst in

such an array--was yet to appear. In 1905 Thomas Dixon added to a series

of high-keyed novels _The Clansman_, a glorification of the KuKlux Klan

that gave a malignant portrayal of the Negro and that was of such a

quality as to arouse the most intense prejudice and hatred. Within a

few months the work was put on the stage and again and again it threw

audiences into the wildest excitement. The production was to some

extent held to blame for the Atlanta Massacre. In several cities it was

proscribed. In Philadelphia on October 23, 1906, after the Negro

people had made an unavailing protest, three thousand of them made a

demonstration before the Walnut Street theater where the performance

was given, while the conduct of some within the playhouse almost

precipitated a riot; and in this city the play was suppressed the next

day. Throughout the South, however, and sometimes elsewhere it continued

to do its deadly work, and it was later to furnish the basis of "The

Birth of a Nation," an elaborate motion picture of the same general

tendency.

[Footnote 1: For a general treatment of the matter of the Negro as dealt

with in American Literature, especially fiction, note "The Negro in

American Fiction," in the _Dial_, May 11, 1916, a paper included in

_The Negro in Literature and Art_. The thesis there is that imaginative

treatment of the Negro is still governed by outworn antebellum types,

or that in the search for burlesque some types of young and uncultured

Negroes of the present day are deliberately overdrawn, but that there is

not an honest or a serious facing of the characters and the situations

in the life of the Negro people in the United States to-day. Since the

paper first appeared it has received much further point; witness the

stories by E.K. Means and Octavius Roy Cohen.]

Still another line of attack was now to attempt to deprive the Negro of

any credit for initiative or for any independent achievement whatsoever.

In May, 1903, Alfred H. Stone contributed to the _Atlantic_ a paper,

"The Mulatto in the Negro Problem," which contended at the same time

that whatever meritorious work the race had accomplished was due to the

infusion of white blood and that it was the mulatto that was constantly

poisoning the mind of the Negro with "radical teachings and destructive

doctrines." These points found frequent iteration throughout the period,

and years afterwards, in 1917, the first found formal statement in the

_American Journal of Sociology_ in an article by Edward Byron Reuter,

"The Superiority of the Mulatto," which the next year was elaborated

into a volume, _The Mulatto in the United States_. To argue the

superiority of the mulatto of course is simply to argue once more the

inferiority of the Negro to the white man.

All of this dispraise together presented a formidable case and one from

which the race suffered immeasurably; nor was it entirely offset in the

same years by the appearance even of DuBois's remarkable book, _The

Souls of Black Folk_, or by the several uplift publications of Booker T.

Washington. In passing we wish to refer to three points: (1) The effect

of education on the Negro; (2) the matter of the Negro criminal (and of

mortality), and (3) the quality and function of the mulatto.

Education could certainly not be blamed for the difficulties of the

problem in the new day until it had been properly tried. In no one of

the Southern states within the period did the Negro child receive a fair

chance. He was frequently subjected to inferior teaching, dilapidated

accommodations, and short terms. In the representative city of Atlanta

in 1903 the white school population numbered 14,465 and the colored

8,118. The Negroes, however, while numbering 35 per cent of the whole,

received but 12 per cent of the school funds. The average white teacher

received $745 a year, and the Negro teacher $450. In the great reduction

of the percentage of illiteracy in the race from 70 in 1880 to 30.4

in 1910 the missionary colleges--those of the American Missionary

Association, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the

Freedmen's Aid Society--played a much larger part than they are

ordinarily given credit for; and it is a very, very rare occurrence that

a graduate of one of the institutions sustained by these agencies,

or even one who has attended them for any length of time, has to be

summoned before the courts. Their influence has most decidedly been on

the side of law and order. Undoubtedly some of those who have gone forth

from these schools have not been very practical, and some have not

gained a very firm sense of relative values in life--it would be a

miracle if all had; but as a group the young people who have attended

the colleges have most abundantly justified the expenditures made in

their behalf, expenditures for which their respective states were not

responsible but of which they reaped the benefit. From one standpoint,

however, the so-called higher education did most undoubtedly complicate

the problem. Those critics of the race who felt that the only function

of Negroes in life was that of hewers of wood and drawers of water quite

fully realized that Negroes who had been to college did not care to work

longer as field laborers. Some were to prove scientific students of

agriculture, but as a group they were out of the class of peons. In this

they were just like white people and all other people. No one who has

once seen the light chooses to live always on the plane of the "man with

the hoe." Nor need it be thought that these students are unduly crowding

into professional pursuits. While, for instance, the number of Negro

physicians and dentists has greatly increased within recent years, the

number would still have to be four or five times as great to sustain

to the total Negro population the same proportion as that borne by

the whole number of white physicians and dentists to the total white

population.

The subjects of the criminality and the mortality of the race are in

their ultimate reaches closely related, both being mainly due, as we

have suggested, to the conditions under which Negroes have been forced

to live. In the country districts, until 1900 at least, there was little

provision for improvements in methods of cooking or in sanitation, while

in cities the effects of inferior housing, poor and unlighted streets,

and of the segregation of vice in Negro neighborhoods could not be

otherwise than obvious. Thus it happened in such a year as 1898 that in

Baltimore the Negro death rate was somewhat more and in Nashville just

a little less than twice that of the white people. Legal procedure,

moreover, emphasized a vicious circle; living conditions sent the

Negroes to the courts in increasing numbers, and the courts sent them

still farther down in the scale. There were undoubtedly some Negro

thieves, some Negro murderers, and some Negroes who were incontinent;

no race has yet appeared on the face of the earth that did not contain

members having such propensities, and all such people should be dealt

with justly by law. Our present contention is that throughout the period

of which we are now speaking the dominant social system was not only

such as to accentuate criminal elements but also such as even sought

to discourage aspiring men. A few illustrations, drawn from widely

different phases of life, must suffice. In the spring of 1903, and again

in 1904, Jackson W. Giles, of Montgomery County, Alabama, contended

before the Supreme Court of the United States that he and other Negroes

in his county were wrongfully excluded from the franchise by the new

Alabama constitution. Twice was his case thrown out on technicalities,

the first time it was said because he was petitioning for the right to

vote under a constitution whose validity he denied, and the second time

because the Federal right that he claimed had not been passed on in the

state court from whose decision he appealed. Thus the supreme tribunal

in the United States evaded at the time any formal judgment as to the

real validity of the new suffrage provisions. In 1903, moreover, in

Alabama, Negroes charged with petty offenses and sometimes with no

offense at all were still sent to convict farms or turned over to

contractors. They were sometimes compelled to work as peons for a length

of time; and they were flogged, starved, hunted with bloodhounds, and

sold from one contractor to another in direct violation of law. One

Joseph Patterson borrowed $1 on a Saturday, promising to pay the

amount on the following Tuesday morning. He did not get to town at the

appointed time, and he was arrested and carried before a justice of the

peace, who found him guilty of obtaining money under false pretenses. No

time whatever was given to the Negro to get witnesses or a lawyer, or to

get money with which to pay his fine and the costs of court. He was sold

for $25 to a man named Hardy, who worked him for a year and then sold

him for $40 to another man named Pace. Patterson tried to escape, but

was recaptured and given a sentence of six months more. He was then

required to serve for an additional year to pay a doctor's bill. When

the case at last attracted attention, it appeared that for $1 borrowed

in 1903 he was not finally to be released before 1906. Another case of

interest and importance was set in New York. In the spring of 1909

a pullman porter was arrested on the charge of stealing a card-case

containing $20. The next day he was discharged as innocent. He then

entered against his accuser a suit for $10,000 damages. The jury awarded

him $2,500, which amount the court reduced to $300, Justice P.H. Dugro

saying that a Negro when falsely imprisoned did not suffer the same

amount of injury that a white man would suffer--an opinion which the New

York _Age_ very naturally characterized as "one of the basest and most

offensive ever handed down by a New York judge."

In the history of the question of the mulatto two facts are outstanding.

One is that before the Civil War, as was very natural under the

circumstances, mulattoes became free much faster than pure Negroes;

thus the census of 1850 showed that 581 of every 1000 free Negroes

were mulattoes and only 83 of every 1000 slaves. Since the Civil War,

moreover, the mulatto element has rapidly increased, advancing from 11.2

per cent of the Negro population in 1850 to 20.9 per cent in 1910, or

from 126 to 264 per 1000. On the whole question of the function of this

mixed element the elaborate study, that of Reuter, is immediately thrown

out of court by its lack of accuracy. The fundamental facts on which

it rests its case are not always true, and if premises are false

conclusions are worthless. No work on the Negro that calls Toussaint

L'Ouverture and Sojourner Truth mulattoes and that will not give the

race credit for several well-known pure Negroes of the present day,

can long command the attention of scholars. This whole argument on the

mulatto goes back to the fallacy of degrading human beings by slavery

for two hundred years and then arguing that they have not the capacity

or the inclination to rise. In a country predominantly white the

quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend

did not have, from the time that one was a house-servant and the other a

field-hand; but no scientific test has ever demonstrated that the black

boy is intellectually inferior to the fair one. In America, however, it

is the fashion to place upon the Negro any blame or deficiency and

to claim for the white race any merit that an individual may show.

Furthermore--and this is a point not often remarked in discussions of

the problem--the element of genius that distinguishes the Negro artist

of mixed blood is most frequently one characteristically Negro rather

than Anglo-Saxon. Much has been made of the fact that within the society

of the race itself there have been lines of cleavage, a comparatively

few people, very fair in color, sometimes drawing off to themselves.

This is a fact, and it is simply one more heritage from slavery, most

tenacious in some conservative cities along the coast. Even there,

however, old lines are vanishing and the fusion of different groups

within the race rapidly going forward. Undoubtedly there has been some

snobbery, as there always is, and a few quadroons and octoroons have

crossed the color line and been lost to the race; but these cases are

after all comparatively few in number, and the younger generation is

more and more emphasizing the ideals of racial solidarity. In the future

there may continue to be lines of cleavage in society within the race,

but the standards governing these will primarily be character and merit.

On the whole, then, the mulatto has placed himself squarely on the side

of the difficulties, aspirations, and achievements of the Negro people

and it is simply an accident and not inherent quality that accounts for

the fact that he has been so prominent in the leadership of the race.

The final refutation of defamation, however, is to be found in the

actual achievement of members of the race themselves. The progress in

spite of handicaps continued to be amazing. Said the New York _Sun_

early in 1907 (copied by the _Times_) of "Negroes Who Have Made Good":

"Junius C. Groves of Kansas produces 75,000 bushels of potatoes every

year, the world's record. Alfred Smith received the blue ribbon at the

World's Fair and first prize in England for his Oklahoma-raised cotton.

Some of the thirty-five patented devices of Granville T. Woods, the

electrician, form part of the systems of the New York elevated railways

and the Bell Telephone Company. W. Sidney Pittman drew the design of

the Collis P. Huntington memorial building, the largest and finest at

Tuskegee. Daniel H. Williams, M.D., of Chicago, was the first surgeon to

sew up and heal a wounded human heart. Mary Church Terrell addressed in

three languages at Berlin recently the International Association for the

Advancement of Women. Edward H. Morris won his suit between Cook County

and the city of Chicago, and has a law practice worth $20,000 a year."

In one department of effort, that of sport, the Negro was especially

prominent. In pugilism, a diversion that has always been noteworthy for

its popular appeal, Peter Jackson was well known as a contemporary of

John L. Sullivan. George Dixon was, with the exception of one year,

either bantamweight or featherweight champion for the whole of the

period from 1890 to 1900; and Joe Gans was lightweight champion from

1902 to 1908. Joe Walcott was welterweight champion from 1901 to 1904,

and was succeeded by Dixie Kid, who held his place from 1904 to 1908. In

1908, to the chagrin of thousands and with a victory that occasioned

a score of racial conflicts throughout the South and West and that

resulted in several deaths, Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion

of America, a position that he was destined to hold for seven years. In

professional baseball the Negro was proscribed, though occasionally

a member of the race played on teams of the second group. Of

semi-professional teams the American Giants and the Leland Giants of

Chicago, and the Lincoln Giants of New York, were popular favorites,

and frequently numbered on their rolls players of the first order of

ability. In intercollegiate baseball W.C. Matthews of Harvard was

outstanding for several years about 1904. In intercollegiate football

Lewis at Harvard in the earlier nineties and Bullock at Dartmouth a

decade later were unusually prominent, while Marshall of Minnesota in

1905 became an All-American end. Pollard of Brown, a half-back, in 1916,

and Robeson of Rutgers, an end, in 1918, also won All-American honors.

About the turn of the century Major Taylor was a champion bicycle rider,

and John B. Taylor of Pennsylvania was an intercollegiate champion in

track athletics. Similarly fifteen years later Binga Dismond of Howard

and Chicago, Sol Butler of Dubuque, and Howard P. Drew of Southern

California were destined to win national and even international honors

in track work. Drew broke numerous records as a runner and Butler was

the winner in the broad jump at the Inter-Allied Games in the Pershing

Stadium in Paris. In 1920 E. Gourdin of Harvard came prominently forward

as one of the best track athletes that institution had ever had.

In the face, then, of the Negro's unquestionable physical ability and

prowess the supreme criticism that he was called on to face within the

period was all the more hard to bear. In all nations and in all ages

courage under fire as a soldier has been regarded as the sterling test

of manhood, and by this standard we have seen that in war the Negro had

more than vindicated himself. His very honor as a soldier was now to be

attacked.

In August, 1906, Companies B, C, and D of the Twenty-fifth Regiment,

United States Infantry, were stationed at Fort Brown, Brownsville,

Texas, where they were forced to exercise very great self-restraint in

the face of daily insults from the citizens. On the night of the 13th

occurred a riot in which one citizen of the town was killed, another

wounded, and the chief of police injured. The people of the town

accused the soldiers of causing the riot and demanded their removal.

Brigadier-General E.A. Garlington, Inspector General, was sent to find

the guilty men, and, failing in his mission, he recommended dishonorable

discharge for the regiment. On this recommendation President Roosevelt

on November 9 dismissed "without honor" the entire battalion,

disqualifying its members for service thereafter in either the military

or the civil employ of the United States. When Congress met in December

Senator J.B. Foraker of Ohio placed himself at the head of the critics

of the President's action, and in a ringing speech said of the

discharged men that "they asked no favors because they were Negroes, but

only justice because they were men." On January 22 the Senate authorized

a general investigation of the whole matter, a special message from

the President on the 14th having revoked the civil disability of the

discharged soldiers. The case was finally disposed of by a congressional

act approved March 3, 1909, which appointed a court of inquiry before

which any discharged man who wished to reënlist had the burden of

establishing his innocence--a procedure which clearly violated the

fundamental principle in law that a man is to be accounted innocent

until he is proved guilty.

In connection with the dishonored soldier of Brownsville, and indeed

with reference to the Negro throughout the period, we recall Edwin

Markham's poem, "Dreyfus,"[1] written for a far different occasion but

with fundamental principles of justice that are eternal:

[Footnote 1: It is here quoted with the permission of the author and

in the form in which it originally appeared in _McClure's Magazine_,

September, 1899.]

I

A man stood stained; France was one Alp of hate,

Pressing upon him with the whole world's weight;

In all the circle of the ancient sun

There was no voice to speak for him--not one;

In all the world of men there was no sound

But of a sword flung broken to the ground.

Hell laughed its little hour; and then behold

How one by one the guarded gates unfold!

Swiftly a sword by Unseen Forces hurled,

And now a man rising against the world!

II

Oh, import deep as life is, deep as time!

There is a Something sacred and sublime

Moving behind the worlds, beyond our ken,

Weighing the stars, weighing the deeds of men.

Take heart, O soul of sorrow, and be strong!

There is one greater than the whole world's wrong.

Be hushed before the high Benignant Power

That moves wool-shod through sepulcher and tower!

No truth so low but He will give it crown;

No wrong so high but He will hurl it down.

O men that forge the fetter, it is vain;

There is a Still Hand stronger than your chain.

'Tis no avail to bargain, sneer, and nod,

And shrug the shoulder for reply to God.

7. The Dawn of a To-morrow

The bitter period that we have been considering was not wholly without

its bright features, and with the new century new voices began to be

articulate. In May, 1900, there was in Montgomery a conference in

which Southern men undertook as never before to make a study of their

problems. That some who came had yet no real conception of the task and

its difficulties may be seen from the suggestion of one man that the

Negroes be deported to the West or to the islands of the sea. Several

men advocated the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. The position

outstanding for its statesmanship was that of ex-Governor William A.

McCorkle of West Virginia, who asserted that the right of franchise was

the vital and underlying principle of the life of the people of the

United States and must not be violated, that the remedy for present

conditions was an "honest and inflexible educational and property basis,

administered fairly for black and white," and finally that the Negro

Problem was not a local problem but one to be settled by the hearty

coöperation of all of the people of the United States.

Meanwhile the Southern Educational Congress continued its sittings from

year to year, and about 1901 there developed new and great interest in

education, the Southern Education Board acting in close coöperation with

the General Education Board, the medium of the philanthropy of John D.

Rockefeller, and frequently also with the Peabody and Slater funds.[1]

In 1907 came the announcement of the Jeanes Fund, established by Anna T.

Jeanes, a Quaker of Philadelphia, for the education of the Negro in the

rural districts of the South; and in 1911 that of the Phelps-Stokes

Fund, established by Caroline Phelps-Stokes with emphasis on the

education of the Negro in Africa and America. More and more these

agencies were to work in harmony and coöperation with the officials in

the different states concerned. In 1900 J.L.M. Curry, a Southern man of

great breadth of culture, was still in charge of the Peabody and Slater

funds, but he was soon to pass from the scene and in the work now to

be done were prominent Robert C. Ogden, Hollis B. Frissell, Wallace

Buttrick, George Foster Peabody, and James H. Dillard.

[Footnote 1: In 1867 George Peabody, an American merchant and patriot,

established the Peabody Educational Fund for the purpose of promoting

"intellectual, moral, and industrial education in the most destitute

portion of the Southern states." The John F. Slater Fund was established

in 1882 especially for the encouragement of the industrial education of

Negroes.]

Along with the mob violence, moreover, that disgraced the opening years

of the century was an increasing number of officers who were disposed

to do their duty even under trying circumstances. Less than two

months after his notorious inaugural Governor Vardaman of Mississippi

interested the reading public by ordering out a company of militia when

a lynching was practically announced to take place, and by boarding a

special train to the scene to save the Negro. In this same state

in 1909, when the legislature passed a law levying a tax for the

establishment of agricultural schools for white students, and levied

this on the property of white people and Negroes alike, though only the

white people were to have schools, a Jasper County Negro contested

the matter before the Chancery Court, which declared the law

unconstitutional, and he was further supported by the Supreme Court of

the state. Such a decision was inspiring, but it was not the rule, and

already the problems of another decade were being foreshadowed. Already

also under the stress of conditions in the South many Negroes were

seeking a haven in the North. By 1900 there were as many Negroes in

Pennsylvania as in Missouri, whereas twenty years before there had been

twice as many in the latter state. There were in Massachusetts more than

in Delaware, whereas twenty years before Delaware had had 50 per cent

more than Massachusetts. Within twenty years Virginia gained 312,000

white people and only 29,000 Negroes, the latter having begun a steady

movement to New York. North Carolina gained 400,000 white people and

only 93,000 Negroes. South Carolina and Mississippi, however, were not

yet affected in large measure by the movement.

The race indeed was beginning to be possessed by a new consciousness.

After 1895 Booker T. Washington was a very genuine leader. From the

first, however, there was a distinct group of Negro men who honestly

questioned the ultimate wisdom of the so-called Atlanta Compromise,

and who felt that in seeming to be willing temporarily to accept

proscription and to waive political rights Dr. Washington had given up

too much. Sometimes also there was something in his illustrations of the

effects of current methods of education that provoked reply. Those

who were of the opposition, however, were not at first united and

constructive, and in their utterances they sometimes offended by

harshness of tone. Dr. Washington himself said of the extremists in this

group that they frequently understood theories but not things; that in

college they gave little thought to preparing for any definite task in

the world, but started out with the idea of preparing themselves to

solve the race problem; and that many of them made a business of keeping

the troubles, wrongs, and hardships of the Negro race before the

public.[1] There was ample ground for this criticism. More and more,

however, the opposition gained force; the _Guardian_, a weekly paper

edited in Boston by Monroe Trotter, was particularly outspoken, and in

Boston the real climax came in 1903 in an endeavor to break up a meeting

at which Dr. Washington was to speak. Then, beginning in January, 1904,

the _Voice of the Negro_, a magazine published in Atlanta for three

years, definitely helped toward the cultivation of racial ideals.

Publication of the periodical became irregular after the Atlanta

Massacre, and it finally expired in 1907. Some of the articles dealt

with older and more philosophical themes, but there were also bright and

illuminating studies in education and other social topics, as well as a

strong stand on political issues. The _Colored American_, published in

Boston just a few years before the _Voice_ began to appear, also did

inspiring work. Various local or state organizations, moreover, from

time to time showed the virtue of coöperation; thus the Georgia Equal

Rights Convention, assembled in Macon in February, 1906, at the call of

William J. White, the veteran editor of the _Georgia Baptist_, brought

together representative men from all over the state and considered such

topics as the unequal division of school taxes, the deprivation of the

jury rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In

1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara

Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and

criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the

abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the

recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present

creed, the recognition of the highest and best training as the monopoly

of no class or race, a belief in the dignity of labor, and united effort

to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership. The time

was not yet quite propitious, and the Niagara Movement as such died

after three or four years. Its principles lived on, however, and it

greatly helped toward the formation of a stronger and more permanent

organization.

[Footnote 1: See chapter "The Intellectuals," in _My Larger Education_.]

In 1909 a number of people who were interested in the general effect

of the Negro Problem on democracy in America organized in New York the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.[1] It was

felt that the situation had become so bad that the time had come for

a simple declaration of human rights. In 1910 Moorfield Storey, a

distinguished lawyer of Boston, became national president, and W.E.

Burghardt DuBois director of publicity and research, and editor of the

_Crisis_, which periodical began publication in November of this year.

The organization was successful from the first, and local branches were

formed all over the country, some years elapsing, however, before the

South was penetrated. Said the Director: "Of two things we Negroes have

dreamed for many years: An organization so effective and so powerful

that when discrimination and injustice touched one Negro, it would touch

12,000,000. We have not got this yet, but we have taken a great step

toward it. We have dreamed, too, of an organization that would work

ceaselessly to make Americans know that the so-called 'Negro problem' is

simply one phase of the vaster problem of democracy in America, and that

those who wish freedom and justice for their country must wish it for

every black citizen. This is the great and insistent message of the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."

[Footnote 1: For detailed statement of origin see pamphlet, "How the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began," by

Mary White Ovington, published by the Association.]

This organization is outstanding as an effort in coöperation between

the races for the improvement of the condition of the Negro. Of special

interest along the line of economic betterment has been the National

League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, now known as the National

Urban League, which also has numerous branches with headquarters in New

York and through whose offices thousands of Negroes have been placed

in honorable employment. The National Urban League was also formally

organized in 1910; it represented a merging of the different agencies

working in New York City in behalf of the social betterment of the Negro

population, especially of the National League for the Protection

of Colored Women and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial

Conditions among Negroes in New York, both of which agencies had been

organized in 1906. As we shall see, the work of the League was to be

greatly expanded within the next decade by the conditions brought about

by the war; and under the direction of the executive secretary, Eugene

Kinckle Jones, with the assistance of alert and patriotic officers, its

work was to prove one of genuinely national service.

Interesting also was a new concern on the part of the young Southern

college man about the problems at his door. Within just a few years

after the close of the period now considered, Phelps-Stokes fellowships

for the study of problems relating to the Negro were founded at the

Universities of Virginia and Georgia; it was expected that similar

fellowships would be founded in other institutions; and there was

interest in the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Congress

and the University Commission on Southern Race Questions.

Thus from one direction and another at length broke upon a "vale of

tears" a new day of effort and of hope. For the real contest the forces

were gathering. The next decade was to be one of unending bitterness and

violence, but also one in which the Negro was to rise as never before to

the dignity of self-reliant and courageous manhood.