It is not an easy task to plead in the courts of the oppressor against
oppression and wrong. It is not easy to get the judgement of the white
men of the world against the white man's injustice to the black. But
nevertheless the attempt must be made and made again until the seared
conscience of the civilized world's hall throbs with righteous
indignation at such outrage. "To sin by silence when we should protest
makes cowards out of men. The human race has climbed on protest. Had
no voice been raised against injustice, ignorance and lust, the
Inquisition yet would serve the law and guillotines decide our least
disputes. The few who dare must speak and speak again to right the
wrongs of many."
The urgent need of speaking out is shown by the following
communication from Mr. J. Ellis Barker of London in an interview given
to a correspondent of =The New York Age= and published in that paper
on December 29th 1910.
"We people in Europe," says Mr. Barker, "do not understand the race
problem, and we do not know the colored people, for the simple reason
that there are not any colored people in Europe. In London, where I
live, there are only a few hundred colored students whom one does not
meet. Before I came to the United States my prejudice against the
colored people was as great as that of any Southern planter. My
prejudice against your race, as I believe the prejudice of most white
people, was due rather to ignorance than to ill-will. I had been told
in the books and papers published in Europe that the colored people
were a race of barbarians and savages. I had been told that the
colored people were a worthless set of people, dressed in rags,
working a day or two during the week, and loafing during the rest of
the time. I was told that the colored people were idle, diseased and
vicious. So I imagined that all of them lived in slums and alleys and
that the aristocracy of the race consisted of the waiters and railway
porters.
I had been told that the colored people only played at science; that
their doctors and lawyers were charlatans. I had been told that the
people of a mixed race were even worse than pure Negroes; that the
mulattoes had lost the primitive virtues of the Negroes and had
acquired all of the vices of the whites. A chance encounter with a
cultured man of color induced me to look into the race problem and I
was perfectly amazed when I discovered how greatly the colored people
have been libelled and traduced. I have spent a considerable amount of
time with colored people and have met many who are highly cultivated.
I have found that among your race you have excellent lawyers, and some
of the foremost physicians and surgeons. I have been over a large
number of your elementary and higher grade schools and colleges and
over Howard University, and I have admired the earnest and resolute
determination with which your children try to improve their minds and
to raise themselves. In your night schools I have found old men and
women, former slaves, who are anxious to learn writing and reading. I
have been to the homes of many colored people and I have found them
cosy, comfortable, elegant, and peopled by happy and harmonious
families. I have come to the conclusion that the race is oppressed and
persecuted and very largely because it is not known."
But it is not in Europe alone that these baneful effects of calumny
appear. Here in America, and even in the south where the bulk of the
Negroes live in the midst of a people who resentfully declare that
they should be left to deal with the Negro because they alone know
him—even there the notion of the Negro, fostered by the press and
other agencies of public opinion is as wide of the truth as it can be.
To illustrate:
In the March number of Van Norden's Magazine in 1907 there appeared a
symposium on The Negro Question. It was composed of expressions of
opinion from twelve intelligent southerners, and was followed by an
article by Mr. Booker T. Washington. The humor of the think lay in
this, that these men were Southern college presidents and heads of
banks, had lived all their lives among Negroes, and were, by their own
words, proved to be either woefully or willfully ignorant of what the
Negro had done and was doing. The mordant irony of fate decreed that
Mr. Washington should be the one to present the facts that changed
their seeming sapience to Falstaffian farce. The president of
Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Va. set forth that the Negro will not
work regularly, that he needs but three dollars a week and, therefore,
works but three days to get it and "quits work to spend it." The
president of Howard College, Alabama declared that, "My deliberate
opinion is that the days of the Negro as a fair, honest laborer are
numbered, and are few at that. He is becoming daily more shiftless,
more unreliable, more restless, less inclined to work steadily." The
president of the University of South Carolina and the president of the
North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts re-echoed the
same doleful dictum while the president of the First National Bank of
Birmingham, Ala. and the president of the Bank of Lexington, N.C.
declared that it was a mistake to grant the rights of citizenship to
the Negro and that education was a curse to him. The president of
Guilford College repeated the "lazy, shiftless" argument while the
president of Randolph-Macon College, Va. said, "Reduce their wages so
that they shall have to work all the time to make a living and they
will become better workmen or disappear in the struggle for
existence," repeating in substance, the argument of his
brother-president of the Woman's college.
Mr. Washington's article did not show any sign that it had been
written as a reply of any sort. But it did show among other things,
that the census of 1900 proved that the Negro people =owned= in the
very states of these college presidents, "23,383 square miles of
territory, an area nearly as large as that of Holland and Belgium
combined"; that this represented only a quarter of the farms worked by
them; that, "after a searching investigation, I have not been able to
find that a single graduate of Tuskegee, Hampton or any of the Negro
colleges can now be found in the prisons of the South;" that in a
single county of Virginia-Gloucester Co.—Negroes were paying taxes on
land valued at 88 million dollars and on buildings assessed at 80
millions, and all this on the soil where they had been slaves forty
years before.
Is not this eloquent of the value of American opinion on the American
Negro as given in the American press? And the question suggested is,
whether such statements are published in ignorance or ill-will? In
either case it is equally damnatory.
In December 1907 Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., an eminent Negro
sociologist, published in McGirt's Magazine an article on "The
Newspapers and the Negro", showing how the Negro is being "done" by
headlines and other newspaper devices. The Horizon, at that time the
most brilliant Negro periodical, dealt with the subject in its issue
for April 1908. Under the caption, "The Color Line in the Press
Dispatches", it quoted approvingly these words of a Socialist
paper—The Appeal to Reason—"The hand that fakes the Associated Press
is the hand that rules the world." European readers who are acquainted
with the occasional diversions of Reuter's Hong Kong and Shanghai
correspondents will appreciate the point.
The Horizon was constrained to refer to the matter again in its August
issue. In both instances specific cases were cited and proof given.
Since that time the need of some formal protest has been growing in
the minds of all those thinking Negroes who are not compelled to
"crook the pregnant hinges of the Knee"; and it has grown largely
because the practices complained of have grown to alarming
proportions.
The newspapers of this country have many crimes to answer for. They
feature our criminals in bold head lines: our substantial men when
noticed at all are relegated to the agate type division. Their
methods, whether they obtain through set purpose or through
carelessness, constantly appeal to the putrid passion of race hatred.
They cause rapine to break loose by nurturing rancor. They help create
untold sorrow. They are week-kneed and apologizing when the hour is
bloody.
But how can such a protest be effectively put? Though Truth come hot
on the heels of Falsehood it could not quite undo its devil's work.
And the detractors of the weak and helpless are well aware of this.
But Truth in the Negro's case is not even unleashed. Truth, in fact,
is chained up and well guarded, and it is this terrible task of
setting Truth free that the Negro must essay in the very teeth of the
American press. It is not an easy task to voice an adequate protest,
for it needs the widest publicity. And since prejudice will oppose, it
needs prestige also. Any such effort must feel itself feeble, and yet
it must be made.
Transcriber's Note: Apparent typographical errors have been
changed. Bold denoted by equals signs.