CONCLUSION
A new little boy came two years ago into our story-book world. When Miss
North, taking Ezekiel by the hand, led him into her school-room,[1] we
met a child full of what we call temperament; dreaming quaint stories,
innocently friendly, anxious to please for affection's sake, in his
queer, unconscious way something of a genius. We saw his big musing eyes
looking out upon a world in which his teacher stood serene and
reasoning, but a little cold like her name; his friend, Miss Jane, kind
and very practical; his employer, Mr. Rankin, amused and contemptuous;
all watching him with the impersonal interest with which one might view
a new species in the animal world. For Ezekiel, unlike our other
story-book boys, had a double being, he was first Ezekiel Jordan, a
little black boy, and second, a Representative of the Negro Race.
Ezekiel was too young to understand his position, but the white world
about him never forgot it. When he arrived late to school, he was a
dilatory representative; when, obliging little soul, he promised three
people to weed their gardens all the same afternoon, he was a
prevaricating representative. He never happened to steal ice-cream from
the hoky-poky man or to play hookey, but if he had, he would have been a
thieving and lazy representative. Always he was something remote and
overwhelming, not a natural growing boy.
Ezekiel's position is that of each Negro child and man and woman in the
United States today. I think we have seen this as we have reviewed the
position of the race in New York; indeed, the very fact of our
attempting such a review is patent that we see and feel it. We white
Americans do not generalize concerning ourselves, we individualize,
leaving generalizations to the chance visitor, but we generalize
continually concerning colored Americans; we classify and measure and
pass judgment, a little more with each succeeding year.
Now if we are going to do this, let us be fair; let us try as much as
possible to dismiss prejudice, and to look at the Ezekiels entering our
school of life, with the same impartiality and the same understanding
sympathy with which we look upon our own race. And if we are to place
them side by side with the whites, let us be impartial, not cheating
them out of their hard-earned credits, or condemning them with undue
severity. Let us try, if we can, to be just.
When we begin to make this effort to judge fairly our colored world, we
need to remember especially two things: First, that we cannot yet
measure with any accuracy the capability of the colored man in the
United States, because he has not yet been given the opportunity to show
his capability. If we deny full expression to a race, if we restrict its
education, stifle its intellectual and aesthetic impulses, we make it
impossible fairly to gauge its ability. Under these circumstances to
measure its achievements with the more favored white race is
unreasonable and unjust, as unreasonable as to measure against a man's
a disfranchised woman's capabilities in directing the affairs of a
state.[2]
The second thing is difficult for us to remember, difficult for us at
first to believe; that we, dominant, ruling Americans, may not be the
persons best fitted to judge the Negro. We feel confident that we are,
since we have known him so long and are so familiar with his
peculiarities; but in moments of earnest reflection may it not occur to
us that we have not the desire or the imagination to enter into the life
emotions of others? "We are the intellect and virtue of the airth, the
cream of human natur', and the flower of moral force," Hannibal Chollup
still says, and glowers at the stranger who dares to suggest a different
standard from his own. Hannibal Chollup and his ilk are ill-fitted to
measure the refinements of feeling, the differences in ideals among
people.
This question of our fitness to sit in the judgment seat must come with
grave insistence when we read carefully the literature published in this
city of New York within the past two years. Our writers have assumed
such pomposity, have so revelled in what Mr. Chesterton calls "the
magnificent buttering of one's self all over with the same stale butter;
the big defiance of small enemies," as to make their conclusions
ridiculous. Ezekiel entering their school is at once pushed to the
bottom of the class, while the white boy at the head, Hannibal Chollup's
descendant, sings a jubilate of his own and butters himself so copiously
as to be as shiny as his English cousin, Wackford Squeers. Then the
writer, the judge, begins. Ezekiel is shown as the incorrigible boy of
the school. He is a lazy, good-for-nothing vagabond. Favored with the
chance to exercise his muscles twelve hours a day for a disinterested
employer, he fails to appreciate his opportunity. He is diseased,
degenerate. His sisters are without chastity, every one, polluting the
good, pure white men about them. He is a rapist, and it is his criminal
tendencies that are degrading America. The pale-faced ones of his family
steal into white society, marry, and insinuate grasping, avaricious
tendencies into the noble, generous men of white blood, causing them to
cheat in business and to practise political corruption. In short there
is nothing evil that Ezekiel is not at the bottom of. Sometimes, poor
little chap, he tries to sniffle out a word, to say that his family is
doing well, that he has an uncle who is buying a home, and a rich cousin
in the undertaking business, but such extenuating circumstances receive
scant attention, and we are not surprised to find, the class dismissed,
that Ezekiel and the millions whom he represents, are swiftly shuffled
off the earth, victims of "disease, vice, and profound discouragement."
Now this is not an exaggerated picture of much that has recently been
printed in newspaper and magazine, and does it not make us feel the
paradox that if we are to judge the Negro fairly, we must not judge him
at all, so little are we temperamentally capable of meeting the first
requirement?
"My brother Saxons," says Matthew Arnold, "have a terrible way with them
of wanting to improve everything but themselves off the face of the
earth." And he adds, "I have no such passion for finding nothing but
myself everywhere." Among our American writers a few, like Arnold, do
not care to find only themselves everywhere, and these have told us a
different story of the American Negro. They are poets and writers of
fiction, men and women who are happy in meeting and appreciating
different types of human beings.[3] If these writers were to instruct
us, they would say that we must individualize more when we think of the
black people about us, must differentiate. That, too, we must remember
that when we pass judgment, we need to know whether our own standard is
the best, whether we may not have something to learn from the standards
of others. Supposing Ezekiel is deliberate and slow to make changes or
to take risks; are we who are "acceleration mad," who acquire heart
disease hustling to catch trains, who mortgage our farms to buy
automobiles, who seek continually new sensations, really better than he?
Is it not a matter of difference, just as we may each place in different
order our desires, the one choosing struggle for power and the
accumulation of wealth, the other preferring serenity and pleasure in
the immediate present? And lastly, after having praised our own virtues
and our own ideals, must we not beware that we do not blame the Negro
when he adopts them, that we do not turn upon him and fiercely demand
only servile virtues, the virtues that make him useful not to himself
but to us?[4]
No one can talk for long of the Negro in America without propounding the
all-embracing question, What will become of him, what will be the
outcome of all this racial controversy? It is a daring person who
attempts to answer. We, who have studied the Negro in New York, may
perhaps venture to predict a little regarding his future in this city,
his possible status in the later years of the century; whether he will
lose in opportunity and social position, or whether he will advance in
his struggle to be a man.
Looking upon the great population of the city, its varied races and
nationalities, I confess that his outlook to me begins to be bright. New
York is still to a quite remarkable extent dominated socially by its old
American stock, its Dutch and Anglo-Saxon element. Few things strike the
foreign visitor so forcibly as that despite its enormous European
population, American society is homogeneous. But this is not likely to
continue for very long. When the present demand for exhausting
self-supporting work becomes less insistent, we shall feel in a deeper,
more vital way the influence of our vast foreign life. With a million
Jews and nearly a million Latin people, we cannot for long be held in
the provincialism of to-day. I suspect that to many Europeans New York
seems still a great overgrown village in "a nation of villagers,"
pronouncing with narrow, dogmatic assurance upon the deep unsolved
problems of life. But in the future it may take on a larger, more
cosmopolitan spirit. Its Italians may bring a finer feeling for beauty
and wholesome gayety, its Jews may continue to add great intellectual
achievements, and its people of African descent, perhaps always few in
number, may show with happy spontaneity their best and highest gifts. If
New York really becomes a cosmopolitan city, let us believe the Negro
will bring to it his highest genius and will walk through it simply,
quietly, unnoticed, a man among men.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lucy Pratt, "Ezekiel."
[2] "The world of modern intellectual life is in reality a white man's
world. Few women and perhaps no blacks have entered this world in the
fullest sense. To enter it in the fullest sense would be to be in it at
every moment from the time of birth to the time of death, and to absorb
it unconsciously and consciously, as the child absorbs language. When
something like this happens we shall be in a position to judge of the
mental efficiency of women and the lower races. At present we seem
justified in inferring that the differences in mental expression between
the higher and lower races and between men and women are no greater than
they should be in view of the existing differences in opportunity." W.
I. Thomas, "Sex and Society," p. 312.
[3] Note especially the stories of Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan
Cooke, and the poems of Rosalie M. Jonas.
[4] Careful readers of economic Negro studies by white writers will
notice this tendency to look upon the Negro as belonging to a servile
class. Emphasis is laid upon his responsibilities to the white man, not
upon the white man's responsibilities to him. Any one familiar with the
sympathetic attitude toward the workers in such a study as the
_Pittsburg Survey_ will notice at once the difference in attitude in
Negro surveys by whites, the slight emphasis laid upon the black
laborers' long hours and poor pay, and the failure to emphasize the
white man's responsibility. Negro laborers are still studied from the
viewpoint of the capitalist. There is one notable exception to this, the
study by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Sidney Olivier, on "White Capital
and Coloured Labor."
APPENDIX
The federal census in 1900 contained a volume on the Negro in the United
States, a source of information quoted by nearly every writer on the
American Negro. The tables in that volume, however, do not classify by
cities, and any one desiring information regarding the Negro in some
especial city must search through other volumes. As this is a lengthy
task, I am affixing a list of the tables in the census of 1900, treating
of the Negro in New York City, believing that it may also be a guide to
students of the new census of 1910, who wish to find New York Negro
statistics.
Population. Vol. I, Part I. Published 1901.
Page 868, Table 57. Aggregate, white, and colored population
distributed according to native or foreign parentage, for cities
having 25,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.
Page 934, Table 81. Total males twenty-one years of age and over,
classified by general nativity, color, and literacy, for cities
having 25,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.
Vol. II. Published 1902.
Page 163, Table 19. Persons of school age, five to twenty years,
inclusive, by general nativity and color, for cities having 25,000
inhabitants or more: 1900. Also, pages 165 and 167, Tables 20 and
21.
Page 332, Table 32. Conjugal condition of the aggregate population,
classified by sex, general nativity, color, and age periods, for
cities having 100,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.
Page 397, Table 54. Negro persons attending school during the
census year, classified by sex and age periods, for cities having
25,000 inhabitants or more: 1900.
Page 737, Table 111. Persons owning and hiring their homes,
classified by color, for cities having 100,000 inhabitants or more:
1900.
Vital Statistics. Vol. III. Published 1902.
Page 458, Table 19. Population, births, deaths, and death rates at
certain ages, and deaths from certain causes, by sex, color,
general nativity, and parent nativity: census year 1900.
Occupations. Published 1904.
Pages 634 to 642, Table 43. Total males and females, ten years of
age and over, engaged in selected groups of occupations, classified
by general nativity, color, conjugal condition, months unemployed,
age periods, and parentage, for cities having 50,000 inhabitants or
more: 1900.
Supplementary Analysis. Published 1906.
Page 262, Table 87. Per cent Negro in total population, 1900, 1890,
and 1880, per cent male and female in Negro population, per cent
illiterate in Negro population at least ten years of age, and among
negro males of voting age, and per 10,000 distribution of Negro
population by age periods.
Women at Work. Published 1907.
Page 146, Table 9. Number and percentage of breadwinners in female
population, sixteen years of age and over, classified by race and
nativity, for cities having at least 50,000 inhabitants: 1900.
Pages 147 to 151, Table 10. Number and percentage of breadwinners
in the female population, sixteen years and over, classified by
age, race, and nativity.
Pages 266 to 275, Table 28. Female breadwinners, sixteen years of
age and over, classified by family relationship, and by race,
nativity, marital condition, and occupation, for selected cities:
1900.
Pages 354 to 365, Table 29. Female breadwinners, sixteen years of
age and over, living at home, classified by the number of other
breadwinners in the family, and by race, nativity, marital
condition, and occupation, for selected cities: 1900.
Mortality Statistics. Published 1908.
Page 28. Number of deaths from all causes per 1,000 of population.
Page 376, Table 2. Deaths in each registration area, by age: 1908.
Pages 566 to 568, Table 8. Deaths in each city having 100,000
population or over in 1900, from certain causes and classes of
causes, by age: 1908.
INDEX
Aldridge, Ira, 137.
Amalgamation, 168.
Andrews, Charles, civil rights of Negroes, 214.
Andrews, Chas. C., on education, 14;
on industrial opportunity, 27.
Archer, William, 172.
Arnold, Matthew, 224.
Arthur, Chester A., 23.
Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 159.
Athens, Ga., 207.
Atlanta, Negroes in occupations in, 77, 91, 93;
proportion of Negro women to men in, 148;
suffrage in, 206.
Baker, Ray Stannard, on suffrage, 205.
Benefit societies, 175.
Birthplaces, 35.
Boese, Thomas, 15.
Brokers, real estate, 45, 108.
Brown, William, 14.
Bulkley, W. L., 161.
Burke _v._ Bosso, 215.
Burleigh, Harry, 126.
Businesses, 106-112.
Cahill, Marie, 133.
Charity Organization Society, 158.
Chesnutt, Charles W., 181.
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 222.
Churches:
Baptist, 20, 116, 123;
Catholic, 116;
Congregational, 20;
Episcopal, 20, 113, 116, 120;
Methodist, 20, 116.
City and Suburban Homes, 41.
Civil rights:
state bill, 213;
violations of, 209, 210.
Clarkson, Thomas, 32.
Cleveland, Grover, 17.
Clinton, De Witt, 14.
Cole and Johnson, 127, 133.
Constitutional conventions, state, 11-13.
Cook, Will Marion, 136.
Cooke, Grace MacGowan, 224.
Court:
children's, 66;
magistrate's, 202-204.
Craig, Walter A., 126.
Crime:
among children, 66-68;
among adults, 189.
Dahomeyans, 131.
District Nursing Association of Brooklyn, 159.
Dix, Morgan, 25.
Domestic Service, 80-83, 149-153.
Downing, Thomas, 27.
Du Bois, W. E. B., 183.
Dudley, S. H., 128.
Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 71, 83, 131.
East Side, 42-44.
Education:
colored teacher, 17, 18;
private colored schools, 14;
public colored schools, 15-19.
Emancipation, 8.
Ewing, Quincy, 190.
Fall River, mortality among infants, 59.
Finley, H. M., 32.
Frazier, S. E., 18.
Gaynor, William J., 201.
Government service, Negroes in, 88.
Greenwich Village, 33-35.
Hale, Edward Everett, 119.
Hamilton, Alexander, 14.
Hampton Institute, 110, 119, 193.
Hansell, George H., 20.
Haynes, George E., 112.
Health Department, 40, 53, 197.
Held, Anna, 133.
Hell's Kitchen, 37, 85.
Hogan, Ernest, 134.
Horsmanden, Daniel, 7.
Housing, 34, 36, 40, 45-51.
Hunt, John H., against Negro suffrage, 13.
Janvier, Thomas, 8, 33.
Jay, John, on emancipation, 8;
interest in education, 14.
Jay, Peter, on Negro suffrage, 11.
Jennings, Elizabeth, 21.
Jonas, Rosalie M., 224.
Jones, Edward, 14.
Kean, Edmund, 137.
Kent, Chancellor, favors Negro suffrage, 11.
Kidd, Dudley, 52.
King _v._ Gallagher, 16.
Kingsley, Mary, 70, 113.
Lanier, Sidney, 31.
Lincoln, Charles Z., 13.
Lincoln Hospital:
attitude towards Negro doctors, 114;
graduates of, 157.
Livingston, against Negro suffrage, 11.
London, Jack, 63.
MacGowan, Alice, 224.
Manhattan Trade School, 161, 162.
Manumission society, 14.
Middle West Side, 35-38.
Miller, Kelly, 86, 147.
Morris, Gouverneur, on emancipation, 8.
Mortality:
among infants, 53-60;
death rate by diseases, 192.
Municipal service, Negroes in, 197.
Music, 125-127.
New York Conspiracy, 7.
New York Milk Committee, 54.
Newman, G., infant mortality, 55, 58.
Nurses' Settlement, 159.
Olivier, Sidney, 226.
Palmer, A. Emerson, 18.
Patten, S. N., 38.
People _v._ King, 213.
Phillips, Ulrich B., 101.
Phipps, Henry, 41.
Phipps tenement, 42, 51, 125.
Pittsburg Survey, 225.
Police department, 198-201.
Poole, Ernest, 84.
Population, Negro, 9;
total, 31.
Pratt, Lucy, 218.
Prostitution, 155, 156.
Ray, Charles B., 24.
Reason, Patrick, 27.
Religion (see Churches).
Riots:
draft riots, 25;
riot of 1900, 199;
riot of 1905, 199-201.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 18.
Rubinow, I. B., relation of death rate to poverty, 193.
Russell, John L., 12.
Russell, Lillian, 133.
Russia, infant mortality in, 54;
mortality and poverty, 193.
Russworm, John B., 14.
Sanger, William W., 153.
San Juan Hill, 39-42.
Schools (see Education).
Scottron, Samuel R., on industrial opportunities, 26;
on occupations, 78.
Segregation:
churches, 19;
dwelling-places, 48-50;
schools, 15-19.
Shirtwaist makers' strike, 163.
Simmons, William J., 137.
Slave ships, 32.
Slaves, brutality towards, 5;
insurrections of, 6-8.
Smith, Gerritt, 24.
Smith, James McC., 27.
Smith, William G., 14.
Stage, 127-137.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 215.
Stone, Alfred Holt, on Negro in occupations in South, 75;
color line in South, 89, 92;
irresponsibility of Negroes, 102.
Straus, Nathan, 59.
Street cars, discrimination, 21-23.
Suffrage:
past, 11-13;
present, 196;
Negro's use of suffrage, 204-208;
in Athens, Ga., 207.
Tanner, Henry, 126.
Tenements (see Housing).
Thomas, W. I., 221.
Trade-unions, 95-99.
Trinity Church, 25.
Tucker, Helen, on Negro craftsmen, 96, 98.
Underground Railroad, 24.
Upper West Side, 45-48.
Varick, James, 20.
Walker, Aida, 157.
Washington, Booker T., 184, 194.
Waterbury, Daniel S., 12.
West Indies, arrivals from, 48.
Wheeler, B. F., 20.
White, Philip A., 27.
Williams, Peter, 20.
Williams and Walker, 129-133.
Wilson, H. J., 124.
Wilson, J. G., 8.
Winterbottom, 25.
Wright, Richard R., on the city Negro, 100, 104.
Wright, Theodore S., 14.
Zangwill, Israel, 137.
Transcriber's notes:
The date of the case of King _v._ Gallagher, given in the text
as 1862, and in Footnote 6 as 1882, is 1883.
The following is a list of changes made to the original.
The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
their positive as well as there relative number
their positive as well as their relative number
See H. J. Wilson. "The Negro and Music," _Outlook_,
See H. J. Wilson, "The Negro and Music," _Outlook_,
peoples, receive colored guests; and while
people, receive colored guests; and while
trains, who mortgate our farms to buy automobiles,
trains, who mortgage our farms to buy automobiles,
nearly a million Latin peoples, we cannot for
nearly a million Latin people, we cannot for
pupulation by age periods.
population by age periods.
Keane, Edmund, 137.
Kean, Edmund, 137.
End of Project Gutenberg's Half a Man, by Mary White Ovington and Franz Boas