RICH AND POOR
Of the many nations and races that dwell in New York none, with the
exception of the Chinese, is so aloof from us in its social life as the
Negro. The childish recollection of an old school friend, recently
related to me, well illustrates this. Across the way from where she
lived there was a house occupied by a family of mulattoes. They were the
quietest and least obtrusive people on the block, and the wife, who was
known to be very beautiful, on the rare occasions when she left her
home, was always veiled. The husband was little seen, and the child, a
shy boy, never played on the street. For years the family lived aloof
from their neighbors, the subject of hushed and mysterious questioning.
Probably had one of the white women dropped in some day to say
good-morning or to borrow a recipe book, the mystery would have been
wholly dispelled,--a pity surely for the children. Few of New York's
citizens are so American as the colored, few show so little that is
unusual or picturesque. The educated Italian might have in his home some
relic of his former country, the Jew might show some symbol of his
religion; but the Negro, to the seeker of the unusual, would seem
commonplace. The colored man in New York has no associations with his
ancient African home, no African traditions, no folk lore. The days of
slavery he wishes completely to forget, even to the loss of his
exquisite plantation music. He is ambitious to be conventional in his
manners, his customs, striving as far as possible to be like his
neighbor--a distinctly American ambition. In consequence, after
indicating the lines along which he has achieved economic success, one
finds little to describe in the lives of the well-to-do that will be of
interest. And yet this sketch would be open to criticism if, after so
long a survey of the working class, it gave no space to those Negroes
who have achieved a fair degree of wealth and leisure; and perhaps the
very recital of the likeness of these people to those about them may be
of importance, for the great mass of white Americans are like a
vivacious Kentuckian of my acquaintance, who, on learning something of a
well-to-do Negro family, assured me that she knew less of such people
than she did of the Esquimaux.
Mr. William Archer, in his book, "Through Afro-America," describes a
round of visits to southern Negro homes, where, with touching pride, his
hostesses show their material wealth, or rather the material wealth of
their race as embodied in drawing-room, dining-room, and bedroom. There
seemed to be nothing remarkable about the rooms unless their very
existence was remarkable. So the interiors of colored homes in New York
would reveal nothing to mark them from the homes of their neighbors,
save perhaps the universal presence of some musical instrument. In
Brooklyn, the Bronx, and in the Jersey suburbs, Negroes buy and rent
houses, sometimes with a few of their race in close proximity, sometimes
with white neighbors only on the block. Brooklyn seems always to have
shown less race antagonism than Manhattan (where, indeed, anything but
the apartment is beyond the pocket-book of people of modest means), and
it has been in Brooklyn for the past three generations that the
well-to-do colored families with their children have chiefly been found.
Much pleasant hospitality and entertainment take place behind these
modest doors. Visitors are common, relatives from the east and west and
south, and little dinner and supper parties are numerous. If church
discipline does not interfere, the women have their afternoons of
whist, and despite church discipline, dancing is very common, few
entertainments proving successful without it. To play well upon some
musical instrument is almost a universal accomplishment, and, as with
the Germans, families and friends meet the oftener for this harmonious
bond.
The social life of the well-to-do colored family generally centres about
the church, and with a regularity unusual among the white people, father
and mother and children attend the Sunday and week-day meetings.
Colored society is also at the period of the bazaar and fair, the
concert and dramatic entertainment. Money is raised by this means for
the church, the private charity, or to supplement the dues of the mutual
benefit society. There are a number of Negroes in the different large
cities who support themselves by concerts and readings, appearing at
benefits in the North and South, where they receive a third or a half of
the receipts. Amateur performances are also common. A young New York
college man, one winter evening, saw two refined, remarkably
well-dressed colored women turn in at the entrance of the Grand Central
Palace. Purchasing a ticket for the benefit, as it proved, of a colored
day nursery (the entertainment netted $2300), he followed them to find
himself in the Afro-American social world. For while the amateur dancing
and singing upon the stage were pretty and attractive, the young man was
far more interested in the audience. "And the disappointing thing about
it," he remarked in telling of it afterwards, "was that they were
exactly like other people." To use the newspaper phrase, "there was no
'story.'" They were a group of Americans, trained in the social
conventions of their own land.
There are many secret and benefit societies among the Negroes in New
York. The Masons have nine meeting places; the Elks, ten lodges. The Odd
Fellows have twenty-two places of meeting. The United Order of True
Reformers, a strong Negro organization in the South, where it conducts
large business enterprises, has forty-four head-quarters in church and
hall and private house, where meetings are held twice a month. Many
benefit societies are closely associated with the churches. Colored men
and women are very busy with their multitudinous church and society and
benefit meetings. I remember once attending an evening service at a
colored church when the minister preached the sermon to the benefit
orders of St. Luke's and the Galilean Fishermen. The officers, some of
them carrying spears with blue and red and white trimmings, marched down
the aisle and took their seats at the front of the pulpit. Their leader
was in purple, wearing a huge badge like a breastplate with yellow and
green stones. The women, equally prominent with the men, were dressed
one in yellow with green over it, and broad purple bands, two in white
with golden crowns. The pageant was very pretty, even beautiful, but too
artless in its simple enjoyment of color and display for the
conventional society of New York, and the colored "four hundred" were
not in it.
Who are the four hundred in New York's colored society? An outsider
would be very bold who should attempt to answer. Twenty-five years ago
the New Yorker born, especially the descendant of some prominent
anti-slavery worker, would have held foremost social position. The taint
of slavery was far removed from these people, who looked with scorn upon
arrivals from the South. Many were proud of their Indian blood, and told
of the freedom that came to their black ancestors who married Long
Island Indians. But these old New York colored families, sometimes
bearing historic Dutch and English names, have diminished in size and
importance as have the old white families beside them. The younger
generation has gone west, or has died and left no issue. And into the
city has come a continual stream of Southerners and more recently West
Indians, some among them educated, ambitious men and women, full of the
energy and determination of the immigrant who means to attain to
prominence in his new home. These new-comers occupy many of the pulpits,
are admitted to the bar, practise medicine, and become leaders in
politics, and their wives are quite ready to take a prominent part in
the social world. They meet the older residents, and the various groups
intermingle, though not without some friction. Like a country village,
the New York Negro social world knows the happenings of its neighbors,
gossips over their shortcomings, rejoices, though with something of
jealousy, over their successes, and has its cliques, its many leaders,
but also its broad-minded spirits who strive to bring the whole village
life into harmony.
As we have learned from a study of the occupational life of the Negro,
the majority of men and women of means are in the professional class, or
in the city or federal service. Such positions do not carry with them
large incomes, and remembering the high cost of living in New York, and
the exorbitant rental paid by black men, we can see that, gauged by the
white man's standard, the Negro with his two or three or four thousand
dollars a year is poor. Yet with his very limited income the demands
upon him are enormous. In the first place, he must educate his children,
and this means a large expenditure, for only in the technical schools or
the college can his boy or girl be prepared for a successful career. The
white boy may find some business firm that will give him a chance of
advancement, but the colored boy must receive such an education as shall
fit him to start an enterprise by himself, unless he enters public
service. So the trade or professional school or college absorbs the
savings of many years.
The church is another large recipient of the Negro's slender means.
Watching the dimes and quarters drop into the contribution plate as the
dark-faced congregation files past the pulpit on a Sunday evening, one
wonders whether any other people in America willingly give so large an
amount of their income to their religious organizations. And not only
will money be requested for the church's need, but special offerings
will be given to home and foreign mission work. In 1907, the African
Methodist Church alone raised $36,000 for home and foreign missions. The
Baptists raised $44,000. Educational work demands a share: the African
Methodists support twenty schools, the African Zion twelve, and the
Negro Baptists one hundred and twenty. The other denominations do their
share, and the Negroes also give to the schools conducted by white
churches for their people. This money comes from all over the country,
and the well-to-do New York Negro must contribute his part.
Home charities also help to drain the Negro's purse. Manhattan and
Brooklyn have a number of colored philanthropies, orphan asylums, old
people's homes, rescue missions, Young Men's and Young Women's Christian
Associations, and social settlements. Some are supported entirely by
white people, but the greater number receive some contributions from the
colored, and a few are dependent for money upon that race alone.
Thousands of dollars are raised yearly, among the well-to-do New York
Negroes, for these institutions.
Yet, with all these various philanthropic activities, one too frequently
hears that the Negro does not support his own charities. As though
anything of the sort could be expected of him! A little time ago, in
asking for money for settlement work among Negroes, I was asked in turn
by the exquisitely dressed woman before me, whose furs and gown and
jewels must have represented a year's salary of a school-teacher, the
type of wealthy woman among the colored, why the well-to-do Negroes did
not support the settlement themselves. No such question is asked when we
demand money for work among the Italians or the Jews, who have
incomparably larger means. Indeed, one may question whether the Negro is
not too generous for the materialistic city of New York, whether his
successes would not be greater were he niggardly toward himself and
others. He lives well, dresses well, enjoys a good play, strives to give
every advantage to his children, helps the poor of his race. To hold his
own today in this civilization, he needs to be taught to seek first
riches, waiting until much treasure has been laid up before he allows
philanthropy to draw upon his bank account.
The traveller to the British West Indies finds three divisions among the
inhabitants, white, colored, and black, each group having a distinct
social status. In the United States, on the other hand, there are but
two groups, white and colored, or as the latter is now more frequently
designated, Negro, the term thus losing its original meaning, and
becoming a designation for a race. But while the white race usually
makes no social distinction between the light and the dark Negro,
classing all alike, social lines are drawn within the color line. Years
ago these were more common than they are now. Charles W. Chesnutt, the
novelist, tells some amusing and pathetic stories of distinctions
between colored and black. One of his mulatto heroes, upon finding, as
he thinks, that the congressman who is to call upon his daughter is a
jet black Negro instead of the mulatto he was supposed to be, to prevent
a breach of hospitality, invents a case of diphtheria in the family
and quarantines the house, only to learn later, to his intense
mortification, that he has committed a mistake of identification, and
that the congressman is light after all. But this story belongs with the
last generation. Black men, if they are distinguished citizens, can
enter any colored society, and they not infrequently marry light wives.
Success, a position of probity and importance, these are attributes that
count favorably for the suitor, and as they are quite as often in the
man of strong African lineage as in the mulatto, they gain the desired
end.
Within this little colored world of a few thousand souls, a drop in the
city's human sea, there is great upheaval and turmoil. The North is the
Negro's centre for controversy regarding his rightful position in the
commonwealth; and in the large cities, in Boston and Chicago,
Philadelphia and New York, the battle rages. The little society is
often divided into hostile camps regarding party politics or the
acceptance of a government position that brings the suspicion of a
bribe. Political, economic, educational matters as they affect the black
race, these are the subjects that fill the mind of the thoughtful
colored man and woman.
In his "Souls of Black Folk," Dr. Du Bois describes the white man's
tactlessness when, as always, he approaches the Negro with a question
regarding his race. But the Negro, apart from his personal home
affairs, impresses the outsider as having little else as subject for
conversation. World politics, these concern him only as they affect the
race question. Australia is a country where the government excludes
Africans. England rules in South Africa and has lately recognized the
right of African disfranchisement. Germany in Africa is cruel to black
men. The Latin people know no color line. At home, the conflict of
capital and labor is important as the Negro wins or loses in the
economic struggle; the enfranchisement of woman is wise or unwise as it
would affect Negro enfranchisement, one colored thinker arguing against
it since it would double the white vote in the South where the Negro has
no political rights; literature is the poetry of Dunbar, the writing of
Washington and Du Bois, the literature of the Negro question, and art is
largely comprised in Tanner's paintings.
This picture should not imply that the colored people of means are
without the possibility of wide culture and sympathy. They are perhaps
more sympathetic by nature than the white people about them. But each
year, as the white American grows increasingly conscious of race, as he
argues on racial differences, the Negro feels his dark face, is
sensitive to every disdainful look, and separates himself from the
people about him and their problems.
There is a struggle against this. The majority of white people have
heard, in a vague way, that there is a difference of opinion in the
Negro world; and again, vaguely, that it takes the form of opposition to
Dr. Booker T. Washington and industrial training. But the difference of
opinion among the Negroes is a difference of ideals, and reaches far
beyond the controversy of industrial or cultural training, or the
question of individual leadership. It is difficult to formulate,
inasmuch as few, if any, Negroes hold logically to one ideal wholly to
the exclusion of the other. They cannot be logical and live. But their
division into radical and conservative is too important to omit;
especially since, as we have seen, there is nothing in their social life
to distinguish them from their neighbors; only in their thoughts are
they aloof from us--aliens upon whose shoulders is the problem of a
race.
How can one explain these two ideals? Roughly, they accept or reject
segregation. The first looks upon the black man in America, for many
generations at least, as a race apart. Recognizing this, the race must
increasingly grow in self-efficiency. It must run its own businesses,
own its banks, its groceries, its restaurants, have its dressmakers,
milliners, tailors; it must establish factories where it shall employ
only colored men and women; its children shall be brought into the
world by colored doctors, taught by colored teachers, buried by colored
undertakers. Education, along industrial lines, shall help train the
worker to this efficiency, and a proper race pride shall give him the
patronage of the Negroes about him. When, as will of course happen in
the majority of cases, the Negro works for the white man, he must
consider himself and his race. He must not go out on strike when the
white man strives for higher wages; he is justified, if he is willing to
risk a broken head, in filling the place of the striking workman, for he
has to look after his own concerns.
The second point of view resists segregation. It believes that the Negro
should never cease to struggle against being treated as a race apart,
that he should demand the privileges of a citizen, free access to all
public institutions, full civil and political rights. As a workman, he
should have the opportunity of other workmen, his training should be the
training of his white neighbor, and in business and the professions he
should strive to serve white as well as black. And just as in the
battle-field he fights in a common cause with his white comrade, so in
the struggle for better working class conditions he should stand by the
side of the laborer, regardless of race. Believing these things and
finding that America fails to meet his demands, he thinks it should be
his part to struggle for his ideal, vigorously to protest against
discrimination, and never, complacent, to submit to the position of
inferiority.
As I have said, few men hold logically to either of these ideals, and as
that of acquiescence to present conditions is naturally popular with the
whites, who are themselves responsible for discrimination, material
success sometimes means a departure from the aggressive to the
submissive attitude. However, the whole question of the Negro as a wage
earner is yet scarcely understood by this small professional and
business class. They are in turmoil, in a virile struggle, harsh,
bewildering, baffling.
"I cannot conceive what it would mean not to be a Negro," a prominent
New York colored man once said to me. "The white people think and feel
so little; their life lacks an absorbing interest."
This is the characteristic fact of the life of the well-to-do Negro in
New York. He is not permitted to go through the city streets in easy
comfort of body or mind. Some personal rebuff, some harsh word in
newspaper or magazine, quickens his pulse and rouses him from the
lethargy that often overtakes his comfortable white neighbor. Looking
into the past of slavery, watching the coming generation, the most
careless of heart is forced into serious questioning. A comfortable
income and the intelligence to enjoy the culture of a great city do not
bring to the Negro any smug self-satisfaction; only a greater
responsibility toward the problem that moves through the world with his
dark face.
Before turning to our last topic, the Negro and the Municipality, we
ought to note two further characteristics of the Negro in New York.
There are certain statistics quoted by every writer upon the Negro,
statistics of mortality and crime. We have noted these for the child,
but not as yet for the Negroes as a whole. They have been left until
this point in our study that we may view them in relation to what we
have learned of the Negro's economic condition and his environment.
Looking for criminal statistics first, we find them difficult to obtain
in New York. The courts' reports do not classify by color, but we can
learn something from the census enumeration of 1904 of the prisoners in
the New York County Penitentiary and the New York County Workhouse.
These are short term offenders sent up from the city of New York. The
enumeration is as follows:
NEW YORK COUNTY PENITENTIARY (BLACKWELL'S ISLAND)
========================================================
| Total | Males | Females | Per cent | Per cent
| | | | Total | Females
--------+--------+-------+---------+----------+---------
White | 582 | 533 | 49 | 91.8 | 8.4
Colored | 52 | 33 | 19 | 8.2 | 36.5
========================================================
NEW YORK COUNTY WORKHOUSE
========================================================
White | 1126 | 870 | 256 | 96.5 | 22.7
Colored | 41 | 12 | 29 | 3.5 | 70.7
========================================================
In view of the proportion of Negroes to whites in Manhattan, two per
cent, we find the percentage of colored prisoners high, but no higher
than we expect when we remember that the Negro occupies the lowest plane
in the industrial community, "the plane which everywhere supplies the
jail, the penitentiary, the gallows."[1] But the very large percentage
of crime among colored women calls for grave consideration. In the
workhouse, imprisoned for fighting, for drunkenness, for prostitution,
the colored women more than double in number the colored men. Here is a
condition that we noted in the Children's Court records: an unduly large
percentage of disorderly and depraved colored female offenders.
We have already touched upon the subject of morality among colored
women. Various causes, some of which we have noted, go to the making up
of this high percentage of crime. The Negroes themselves believe the
basic cause to be their recent enslavement with its attendant unstable
marriage and parental status. They point to the centuries of healthful
home relationships among Americans and Europeans, and contrast them
with the thousands upon thousands of yearly sales of slaves that but two
generations ago disrupted the Negro's attempts at family life. With this
heritage they believe that it is inevitable that numbers of their women
should be slow to recognize the sanctity of home and the importance of
feminine virtue.
The mortality figures for the New York Negro are more striking than the
figures for crime. In 1908 the death rate for whites in the city was
16.6 in every thousand; for colored (including Chinese), 28.9, almost
double the white rate. The Negroes' greatest excess over the white was
in tuberculosis, congenital debility, and venereal diseases as the table
on the following page shows.
The Negro's inherent weakness, his inability to resist disease, is a
favorite topic today with writers on the color question. A high
mortality is indeed a matter for grave concern, but we may question
whether these figures show inherent weakness. If a new disease attacks
any group of people, it causes terrible decimation, and tuberculosis and
venereal diseases, the white man's plagues, have proved terribly
destructive to the black man. But recalling the conditions under which
the great majority of the colored race lives in New York, the long hours
of labor, the crowded rooms, the insufficient food, we find abundant
cause for a high death rate. For poverty and death go hand in hand, and
the proportion of Negroes in New York who, live in great poverty far
exceeds the proportion of whites.[2]
=====================================================
New York, 1908. | White. | Colored.
----------------------------------+--------+---------
Number of deaths from all causes | |
per 1000 population | 16.6 | 28.9
Number of deaths per 1000 deaths: | |
Tuberculosis | 136. | 232.8
Pneumonia | 126. | 136.3
Diarrhoea and enteritis | 91.8 | 79.
Bright's disease | 78.3 | 56.5
Heart disease | 76.7 | 83.4
Cancer | 45.5 | 24.8
Congenital debility | 24.5 | 34.1
Diphtheria and croup | 23.7 | 15.
Scarlet fever | 19. | 3.2
Typhoid | 7.3 | 6.9
Venereal diseases | 4. | 13.4
All others | 367.2 | 314.6
+--------+---------
| 1000.0 | 1000.0
=====================================================
The students at Hampton Institute sing an old plantation song that runs
like this:
"If religion was a thing that money could buy,
The rich would live and the poor would die.
But my good Lord has fixed it so
The rich and the poor together must go."
Some of our rich men seem to have fixed it with religion to escape from
the condition the poem describes, but it depicts a reality in the
Negro's life. Rich and poor, as we saw when we left our old New Yorkers,
competent and inefficient, pure and diseased, good and bad, all go
together. Much of the recent literature written by Negroes, and
especially that by Dr. Booker T. Washington, attempts to separate in the
minds of the community the thrifty and prosperous colored men from the
helpless and degraded; but the effort meets with a limited success. When
we can have a statistical study of some thousands of the well-to-do
Negroes compared with an equal number of well-to-do whites, we may find
striking similarity. From my own observations I find that the well-to-do
Negroes bear and rear children, refrain from committing crimes that put
them into jail, and live to an old age with the same success as their
white neighbors. But they get little credit for it. Willy-nilly, the
strong, intellectual Negro is linked to his unfortunate fellow. Whether
an increase in material prosperity will break this bond, or whether it
will continue until it ceases to be a bond as humanity comes into its
own, is a secret of the future. For today the song rings true, and the
rich and the poor go together.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Quincy Ewing, "The Heart of the Race Problem," _Atlantic Monthly_,
March, 1909.
[2] The statistician, Mr. I. B. Rubinow, in a discussion of high death
rates (American Statistical Association, December, 1905) quotes the rate
in five agricultural districts in a province of Russia, districts
inhabited by peasantry of a common stock. With almost mathematical
certainty, prosperity brings longer life. He divides his peasants into
six groups showing their death rate as follows:
Death Rate
Having no land 34.7
Less than 13.5 acres 32.7
13.5 to 40.5 acres 30.1
40.5 to 67.5 acres 25.4
67.5 acres to 135 acres 23.1
More than 135 acres 19.2
Mr. Rubinow suggests that the high Negro death rate may be explained by
noting the poorly paid occupations in which the Negro engages.