ferment when I was there. Not because of white-woman trouble, but in
anticipation of a riot breaking out on one plea or another. A bad
lynching had occurred in the preceding September. A drunken White
quarreled with a Negro taxi driver, threatened him and exasperated him,
whereupon a conflict ensued in which the White was killed. The white
mob then rounded up every Negro chauffeur in the city and terrified a
great number of homes, because the lyncher does not care whether he
lynches the right Negro or not, as long as one of them suffers. And in
this case two paid the penalty. Undoubtedly the horror and terror of
being taken by the mob is the worst of an execution of this kind.
The Negroes were very suspicious of white men, and I did not make
much progress inquiring into their ways of life. I found, however, a
considerably inflated prosperity of churches, due to the philanthropy
of Northern visitors, and a well-to-do black proletariat working in
the shipbuilding yard and the docks. Nearly all the work done by them
was, however, unskilled, and they were only taken as substitutes on
skilled work. Substitutes earned as much as seven dollars a day. There
is a “Colored” Bank and, as at Birmingham, a so-called “skyscraper” of
six stories accommodating all and sundry of trades and professions.
Once more, successful drug stores and burial parlors, and a Mme. Nettie
Price with beauty establishment. I called at the War Camp Community
Club for colored soldiers and sailors—not so enterprising as the one I
visited at Norfolk—but the right sort of institution, well used in a
proper and discreet way.
I crossed the neck of land to Pensacola, passing through Tallahassee,
a district where fine leaves of tobacco for cigar wrapping are grown
under trellis. Orange groves hung in plenteous fruit just ripe to pick,
changing from green to gold. Pensacola is a port with a great history
of its own involving Spanish, British, French, American history. Its
background is of orange groves and pecan orchards. The pecan nut, a
refinement from the walnut, is so prized in the rest of the United
States that one can make a good living and save money on a planting
of a hundred or so trees. The main street of Pensacola, leading down
to the long pier, is very picturesque, with its mariners’ grocers and
marine stores. A passenger vessel plies weekly to Mobile, the great
fruit port of southern Alabama, and it is possible to get a passage
on cargo boats going to New Orleans. Before the war there was much
maritime traffic, but few of the vessels which sailed away to do
transport and other war duties have returned.
Pensacola claims to be the oldest white city in the United States,
disputing the matter with St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and is taking
the question very seriously in view of any celebration. It is not an
important place, but is building toward its own supposed greatness,
has a fine new railway station and huge, white stone post office and
mammoth hotel. These buildings are puzzling in a town where life seems
so placid.
Here was a bad lynching for rape a year ago, and a Negro was burned
to death. Representations were made to the governor of Florida on the
matter. The governor, Sidney I. Catts, replied that he made every
effort to keep down lynching in the State, but he could not bring the
lynchers to trial, as the citizenship of the State would not stand for
it. Apparently he condoned the burning of the Negro, because it was a
clear case of sexual wantonness and violence on the part of one of the
Negro race. It is somewhat surprising that the chief officer of the law
should thus fail to uphold the law. Who is to uphold it if he do not? A
contrast this, to the heroic behavior of Mayor Smith of Omaha!
* * * * *
Nature did not intend the Gulf of Mexico as a frame for lynching,
nor that those happy, blue skies should look down on human candles.
If ever there was a serene and happy place in the world it is here,
and there is scope for all races to live and to let live. Health is
on the shoulder of the winds that blow; fish and fruit and grain and
sugar are abundant. Are not the harbors bobbing with grapefruit; upon
occasion does not every boy suck the natural sugar from the cane? The
luscious canteloupe fills with the sun; peaches and nectarines swell
to double sizes of lusciousness and sweetness. Visitors, moreover,
bring a plenitude of dollars and scatter them as they go. Jacksonville,
Tallahassee, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans—they are more blest by
Nature than other cities of the South.
Personally, I preferred New Orleans. It is the finest and most
interesting city in which to live. It is by far the largest city of the
South, Atlanta coming second, and Birmingham, Alabama, third. It is the
great port of the vast Mississippi River, and is the head of what was
a mighty river traffic. It faces south, and is more related to France
and Spain and the Indies than to Britain and Scandinavia and the North
Atlantic. Like New York, it has also a strange mixture of races, but
they are southern races.
Of course it has been notorious as a city of pleasure and fast living.
Everyone says to the tourist, “When you get to New Orleans, you’ll
see ‘life,’” by which is meant the life-wasting of the immoral. Its
reputation in that respect resembled that of Cairo, and the curious,
even if they did not wish to taste, could pay to be shown round and
thus satisfy their eyes by looking upon evil. The money which flows
southward from the pockets of the rich throughout the winter has no
doubt helped to keep the red light burning. Now all has changed,
however. The various vice crusades and the enactment of prohibition
have combined to bring New Orleans to the moral level of other cities
of America. There is a violent opposition to the Puritan movement in
many sections of the population, and the law is flouted very often,
but New Orleans nevertheless has ceased to present any particular
interest to the low pleasure seeker or those of morbid imagination.
The city will be the better for it. It is a wonderful place. The
inhabitants, after all, were not mainly engaged in the business of
pleasure, but in honest trade, and they increase ever. New Orleans is
the metropolis of the South, and has a vast and growing commerce which
is rendered picturesque by the glamour of that abundance of Nature in
the midst of which she is founded.
One pictures New Orleans as a city of men in white, with white
hats as well as white clothes, men smoking heavy, black cigars, or
sauntering idly in the company of exotic-looking ladies; a city of
wide open streets and white houses, of many open-air cafés and garden
theatres and luxuriant parks, a place certainly of fashion and gayety
and elegant living. But what I found on my first impression was an
unpainted city, a mass of houses mostly wooden, but mouldering,
pallid, and peeling, of every hue of decay. Some walls seemed ready
to fall out, some ready to fall in. Man of the period 1920, European,
industrialized, diminutive, clad in sober garb, pursued the common way
of life. The cheap lunch shop, hall-mark of American civilization,
identified the city as American. There were the usual lofty, ramshackle
caravanserai with Negro bell boys and the clatter of ice water, the
usual public gardens strewn with the newspapers of the day. But though
it was winter, the weather was hot. The atmosphere was dense and warm,
and the closeness was not dissipated even by the wind when it came.
A gale blew in from the Gulf. It scattered warm rain in the city, it
rushed through multitudes of palm trees in the suburbs outside.
The American part of the city is vast and residential and conventional.
The business section expresses business; the home section is uptown
and removed from the life of the center. If there were only this “new”
part, nothing would distinguish New Orleans from other cities. But it
has its _vieux carrée_ in which its history is written, the old, or
French, part of the town. The American side is continually rebuilding
itself, but the French remains as it was. It has not torn itself down
and got rebuilt in modern style. Its great public place is Jackson
Square, flanked by the market, and that is beautifully prim and French,
but it is foiled by ugly railings and municipal sheds. Nevertheless,
it holds one more than does the architectural grandeur of Lafayette
Square, in the American half, with its stupendously grand Post Office
and Town Hall; and the subdued simplicity of Dauphine Street and
Chartres and Bienville and many others is better than any quantity of
the new and takes one back in mind to Old Paris and Old London. With
all its Creole restaurants and cheap markets and French churches, it
reminded me forcibly of Soho, in London, but of course it is larger and
grander.
Once a tongue of the Mississippi divided the old from the new, a long
and narrow strip of somewhat torpid water. Now it has been filled up,
though where the water was it is in some places green with grass. Six
lines of electric cars and four streams of other traffic go up and
down Canal Street, as it is now called. It is a great highway, finer
in some respects than the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, certainly
broader. On one side of it and down to the water edge it is definitely
and undoubtedly old; on the other it is definitely and undoubtedly new.
On one side is reality and matter of fact, on the other glamour and
color; on one you make or lose money, on the other you have or miss
adventures; one is prose, the other poetry; and it is well understood
in New Orleans. You work in one, you live a conventional home life in
one, but in the other you seek pleasure and adventures away from home.
Not that you cannot dine on the new side, where there are costly and
luxurious hotels, but an interesting and characteristic story might be
written of a man who stayed too long over his wine in the new part,
and then, late at night, strayed across this broad, dark Lethe which
divides old from new, to lose himself on the farther side—an adventure
and a dream.
The foreign streets are of red brick and painted wood, with
vine-wreathed verandas and balconies. The houses are crowded within.
Red painted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and show a bed occupying
half a tiny room, and perhaps a Creole lady in the bed. There is not
much squeamishness in the Creoles. French is spoken everywhere, and
often English is not understood. Most of the people are Catholic, and
are related spiritually to “Mother Church.” Old St. Louis Cathedral,
with its spiky tower, is full of people of a Sunday morning, and the
service is so perfunctory that it is clear it is no mission church,
but one long established and sure. There are monastical institutions,
even for the Negroes. While Irish Catholics do not like Negroes, the
French and Spanish do. Specially interesting is the Convent of the
Sacred Heart, with its black Mother Superior and its happy, placid
Negro Catholicism. The best of the Negroes call themselves Negro
Creoles. The Creoles are the cross-breed of French and Spaniard and
their descendants. Strictly speaking, no Negroes are Creoles, but the
descendants of the slaves of the Creoles and in general the French
and Spanish-speaking Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles, and are
generally indulged in the appellation. Creoles indeed have not much
prejudice against color, being much mixed themselves, and in any case
of French extraction, and the French have never had much sense of
racial distinction. To speak French is a sign of belonging to society
in New Orleans. The opening of the opera season at the French Opera
House (lately burned down) is the event of the winter, and everyone
of importance _must_ be present. The next sign of good taste is to
know cuisine, and to be able to differentiate the _delicaces_ and the
subtleties of the famous Creole chefs.
I visited the mayor, Catholic, but of German name. He could not easily
have kept his mayoralty with such a name in England. But here he was
very popular. He was a human pyramid in long, voluminous morning
coat, smoking a cigar as he worked, but walking with a ponderous and
poised walk, and exhibiting a front of truly mayoral proportions. He
said, concerning the Negroes, “We have no trouble with them here;
we get on very well together. They are outside politics; that makes
it much easier. If they had the power to vote, of course it would
be different.” New Orleans is one of those places where a Negro’s
grandfather must have voted if he is to vote, and he must prove that
his grandfather voted. I demurred to the mayor. “The Negroes seem very
suspicious of the Whites, and hostile,” said I. He thought not. It was
evidently his set policy to have that point of view. Politically he
could not afford to be strongly interested in the Negro ferment. For
although the disenfranchised Negro population thought him friendly to
them, the Whites also thought him “sound on the nigger question.” No
white man who expressed sympathy for the Negro could possibly succeed
in Louisiana politics. There was proceeding while I was there a violent
election campaign for the governorship of the State, and it was
curious that, though the Negro could take little personal part in the
choosing of the governor, he nevertheless took almost first place in
the political discussions. Soundness on the Negro question seemed to be
the chief test of candidacy. A man who might betray lynchers to justice
or anything of that kind was evidently feared by the white population.
Nevertheless, as I have said, the Creoles were on friendly terms with
the Negroes. It is the Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American section of the
population, the undifferentiated Southern Whites, who determine the way
of politics here, as elsewhere in the South. It is likely that if the
Creoles were left to themselves with the Negro population, they would
grant them full rights, not only in the courts and in suffrage, but
socially. The Negroes know this, and are therefore on very good terms
with the French-speaking population.
Nevertheless, it must be said that but for a handful of leaders the
Negro population is more dull, more impassive, and ignorant than
elsewhere. A black proletariat of a hundred thousand ought to be able
to raise on its broad base a fine column of intelligence and business.
There ought to be large and flourishing groups of doctors and lawyers
and shopkeepers, but here, as at Birmingham, there is the usual
Insurance Society’s building, which is all-in-all. And Negro insurance
is little more than the organization of burying clubs, with the
Negro undertakers as prime beneficiaries. The biggest Negro business
throughout the South is connected with burying Negroes. It is sad, but
it is characteristic of this era of their development. New Orleans
has its “Pythian Building,” its temple of the Knights of Pythias, of
which the debonair Mr. Green is Grand Master, not only for the State of
Louisiana, but for the world. This is the civic center of the Negro’s
life in New Orleans, and, like the Penny Bank Building of Birmingham,
and its sister building at Jacksonville, houses many activities. The
Pythian Temple of New Orleans is said to be the finest Negro building
in the United States. It is a fine edifice, and in America business
is judged much more by the building it inhabits than in Europe. An
integral part of the temple is a very useful theatre, not a cinema
hall, but a genuine stage for the “legitimate” drama. Here, no doubt,
the Knights of Pythias appear in full regalia and parade to do the
pseudo ritual of the society. But the theatre is used for all manner of
purposes.
I was present one Sunday afternoon at a local meeting of the National
Association. The Southern White is opposed to the Association, and
would do much to thwart it if he knew much about it. But the Southern
Whites do not mix with Negro intellectuals, and are content to live in
that paradise indicated by the mayor—_We get on all right with them
down here_.
When, however, a bad lynching takes place the local white population
soon hears of the National Association. It sends its representatives
down from New York to investigate the facts. In such cases facts
are the last things the white community wish brought to light, and
then the National Association is discovered and roundly abused. Its
representatives are sometimes white, which makes them more dangerous
from a Southern point of view. Attempts are made to “railroad”
them—run them out of town.
The case of Mr. Shillady, in Texas, must be mentioned here. He is
the white secretary of this militant association, and has done very
valuable work for his country by investigating and authenticating the
details of mob murders. Texas has a bad record for lynching, rioting,
and lawlessness. The Texan people, however, would not have him, and he
was actually thrashed publicly by a judge and a constable. It was done
in front of the Driscoll Hotel, Austin, where Shillady was staying.
Having been assaulted in this way, he was put on a Northern train and
told to leave it at his peril. The judge remains still judge, the
constable remains still a constable—if he be not now a sergeant or
inspector. When we sing “Down Texas Way” that is what it means.
The local meeting this Sunday afternoon was of a quarrelsome character.
A well-known and devoted Negro leader had been accused in a New Orleans
Negro paper of “selling out the colored folk” at St. Louis. There had
been great enthusiasm in the forming of what is called the “American
Legion,” a national club of all who had served or worn an American
uniform in the Great War. Negro membership of the Legion was apparently
being barred in the South, and some wrong-headed Negro journalist
had accused an old Creole Negro of attending the St. Louis inaugural
gathering of the Legion and agreeing that Negro soldiers and sailors
should be excluded.
A violent personal quarrel banged from man to man. As I was asked to
speak, I told them I thought they could ill afford to quarrel among
themselves. Nevertheless, I had noticed a marked disposition to quarrel
among the educated Negroes. Loyalty to one another was not one of their
characteristics. No people could do much who did not prize unity more
than discord. While so many were against them all, how absurd to spend
an afternoon quarreling with one another!
This was warmly applauded, though no doubt one might as well sit in
Canute’s chair and “bid the main flood bate its usual height,” as
bid them cease to quarrel. They brought the fighting instinct out of
Africa, and still longed to wield the battle-axe.
Besides the Pythian Temple Block, New Orleans has also a sort of South
Street, a cheap line of shops with “swell toggery” for Negroes. Negro
suit-pressing establishments, barbers, and the like, pawnshops, and
what not. This is South Rampart, and on it is the People’s Drug Store,
a hive of Negro life. Up above the store Mrs. Camille Cohen-Bell
operates an insurance company, and her father, W. L. Cohen, runs for
what it is worth in opinion (it cannot count much in votes), the Negro
Republican party.
During a fortnight in New Orleans I visited frequently this pleasant
company of Negro Creoles, the well-educated Mrs. Bell, who loved
to speak French, and her ebullient father. The place was haunted
by undertakers. It appeared that when a Negro was insured in the
company he was allotted to an undertaker in case of death. Undertakers
therefore became very anxious when clients moved out of their parish.
If any one fell sick away from home, and there was the likelihood of
his dying and being buried by a stranger, the fret of the local buriers
was comical.
I met here a very advanced Negro lady who gave out very positive views
on morality. The presence of a white man was perhaps a challenge
to her mind. Some white woman called Jean Gordon had been making a
missionary address to the Negroes on moral purity and proper behavior
at a large Baptist church. I did not hear Jean Gordon, but her black
protagonist was so forceful I asked her to write a statement of what
she thought. This was her answer to Jean Gordon:
“ ... Jean Gordon states that every young colored girl knows no white
man may marry her under the law, and if she brings into the world an
illegitimate child she is not fit to be a mother. All very true. Now,
I daresay that every young colored girl is aware of this fact, but,
judging from the way the white men run after these colored girls,
either they (the white men) are in ignorance of the law, or it is their
object flagrantly to disobey it. There is one thing I wish all white
men and women to bear in mind, when they refer to illicit relations
of white men and black women, and vice versa—it is this: the laws of
this Southland are made by white men, and no sooner have they made
these laws than they get busy finding ways to break them and evading
punishment for so doing. It is a well-known fact that no Negro woman
seeks the attentions of a white man—rather is the shoe on the other
foot, and Negro women have a very hard time making Whites keep in
their places. However, the attraction is not confined to the men of
the white race, for good-looking colored men have as hard a time as
the good-looking colored women. So, it seems to me that if Jean Gordon
should address an audience of white men and women, and plead with them
to teach their boys, husbands, brothers, and fathers the necessity of
respecting the laws, and the women of all races, then colored young
women would have no trouble keeping their virtue and their morals. All
honor is due to the Negro women, for no one knows better than Jean
Gordon herself the terrible pressure brought against them by white men
who seek to force their attentions on them. The wonder of it is that
so many of them are able to hold out against such odds, but God is in
His heaven and does not sleep. So, I say, let the white women get busy
and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that
will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is
not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant
asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white
man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why
it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? I am able to
give a partial reason—THE FORCE OF HABIT! The white man has grown so
accustomed to seducing Negro women and getting by with it, that the
virtue of his own women has come to mean nothing to him.
“We now come to Jean Gordon’s statement relative to ‘wild stories
are being circulated that the Negro won the great world war....’ No
intelligent Negro can claim that the Negro won the world war, but
every intelligent man, woman, and child, in this country and on the
other side, is aware that the Negro did his share in winning it over
there, and did his full share over here. The Negro has participated
in every war in which this country has engaged, and at no time did he
retreat nor show the yellow streak. No one can cite an instance where
a Negro protested against going to the front. Against propaganda that
was overwhelming, the Negro remained loyal. The first Negroes to set
foot on French soil were from Louisiana—longshoremen; they were not
soldiers, true, but they did what they were sent to do, and did it
well. Very few white regiments from Louisiana saw the firing line,
yet they are all soldiers. No doubt, had they been sent to the front,
they would have fought, but so would every black citizen of the United
States. However, if it is true that ‘comparatively few of them fought
when the total of the millions of white men who died in that struggle
is considered,’ the reason for that is that the South did its level
best to keep the Negro out of the war as a soldier. And it must be
known that every white man who fought and died was not an American!
Every black man who fought did his part creditably, as has ever been
the case. Whole Negro regiments were decorated by the French, and bear
in mind that among those who were the first to be decorated by the
French were American Negroes! As for the fighting qualities of the
Negro, all I need do is to refer any ‘doubting Thomas’ to Xon Hill.
Nothing more need be said. And I repeat for all concerned that while
the Negro did not win the world war, _he did his share in helping to
win it_ over there, and he and his women who remained over here helped
to win it by laboring and giving funds.... The Negro dug trenches, he
fought, he died on the battlefield, he gave of his money and his labor
over here, and his women gave of their money and labor. _Did_ the Negro
help win the great world war? _I’ll say he did!!!_ Will anyone say he
did not? If anyone has done more, let him come forward.