the women of the South are so bitterly opposed to giving suffrage to
Negro women? Do they fear us? Yea, they need to fear us, for we have
made up our minds that we are going to help our men of the South get
their rights, and Jean Gordon, being a woman, is fully aware that when
a woman wills a thing, it is as good as done. The Negro men are going
to come out on top, and their women are going to see to it. The Negro
men are going to learn to protect their women from the snares of white
men, and their women are going to help them do this, too.... No longer
does a Negro woman consider it an honor to have a white man for a
‘friend’—a lover; gradually have we made her understand that it is an
insult, and she now tells her father, brother, or husband, as the case
may be, and it is up to this man to defend the virtue of his female
relative, in the _same way_ the white man defends his. No more do we
hear nice-looking colored boys bragging that such and such a white
woman is quite crazy for him, for we have shown him that her affection
for him is likely to lead him into trouble, so, having quite a variety
of colors to choose from in the women of his own race (thanks to the
white man for that), the Negro boy runs along with the kind of girl who
pleases him, and keeps out of trouble. Very often, though, the White
does not let him stay out of trouble—there are so many ways devised by
these nice white people to hurt the Negro who is peaceably bent. The
Negro has been patient, true, but we all know there is an end to all
patience. I hope the time has come when the Whites of this section will
take up more time in improving themselves and less time in seeing the
error of our ways. We both of us have much to do, but we Negroes are
aware of it, and are anxious to improve ourselves, but we are unable
to take pattern after those who are more in need of lessons than we.
The Negro is bound to come out on top—even though he is in a hopeless
minority. Right will ever and always crush Might; for reference, see
William Hohenzollern!”
* * * * *
By this sulphurous little smoke one may know of subterranean fire.
When the earthquake comes the Jean Gordons will fall down and the new
Negro woman will stand forth. White society in places like New Orleans
may one day be overthrown unless it can live for ideals and reform its
institutions. Much depends on the law which is corrupted and much on
the churches now in decay. Literature in New Orleans is nigh dead, so I
will not mention that.
XII
THE NEW MIND OF THE NEGRO
Resentment is the main characteristic of the Negro forward movement.
In endeavoring to understand the Negro mind a maximum is gained by
answering the question: _What does it mean to have been a slave?_
Analysis of racial consciousness at once brings to light in the case of
the Negro a slave mentality. He has been pre-dispositioned by slavery.
To have been a slave, or to be the child of a slave, means to have an
old unpaid grudge in the blood; to have, in fact, _resentment_ either
smouldering or abeyant or militant. If it does not develop in the
slave it will develop in the child of the slave or the child of the
child. It may not take a violent form. Certain circumstances, such as
prosperity, have power to neutralize it. On the other hand, certain
other circumstances have power to bring it more rapidly to a head. The
virus feeds on grievances, will even feed on imaginary grievances, but
most certainly will grow apace on real grievances. In all seriousness,
there is nothing like burning people alive for bringing out active
spite and hate. Because of burning and lynching, the whole of American
Negrodom swells larger in resentment, day by day, and moon by moon.
The character of ex-slave, and the child of one who was a slave, is
aptly shown by the way the Negro treats animals, in the way also in
which he treats those Negroes who happen to come under him.
It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a
heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize
that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a
human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals,
though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of
themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves.
For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master.
A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children
of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he
is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children
will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is
learning how to torture.
The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his
horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro,
the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals
which is quite other. And toward human beings in their power or employ
they often have a point of view which is hateful. The peasant workman
in the power of the _Kulak_ peasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power
of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro
boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in
the power of a slave is so much worse!
In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a
great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it.
To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every
country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment
there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst,
it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has
suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave,
he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him
and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled
on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness
to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant
blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway.
They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but
from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.
What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism
in Russia. Bolshevism is eminently a slave movement. The children of
the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class
war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the
Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment
and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the
Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he
has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example
all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken
courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes
are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand
proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.
It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They
are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They
hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but
curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro
forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot
wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class
hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White
and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great
world struggle.
There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the
victims of the enraged Negroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers
themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been
told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who
do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also
the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and
the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on
whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises,
may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those
who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood
idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to
the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them
to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is
nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic.
Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from
France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled,
and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous
stuff of revolution.
A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come
to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories
of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied
equally to the Negro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a
white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white
men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to
the two vital questions:
1. Is it fitting, and can America condone the use of colored troops to
fight white enemies?
2. When many white citizens have such a violent animus against the
Negro, is it practicable to use the latter in the army?
The first of these questions was evaded by America as it had been from
the first by France. There are many who think that the use of “native”
troops against the Germans was more indefensible than the German use
of poison gas. For, by using colored troops against Whites in a white
man’s quarrel, the moral leadership of the Whites is obviously thrown
away, and there are bound to be serious after-effects in the weakening
of morale.
The second question was merely an important practical detail that had
been overlooked. Theoretically, all American citizens are equal. The
laws apply without distinction of race or color. In practice, equality
is denied. What more natural than to continue in the theoretical
assumption of equality, and hope that divergency in practice might be
overlooked. What more absurd, however, than to take a man who is being
illegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that
community?
The Northern white soldier did not, however, feel ill disposed toward
the black soldier, and I have met those who saw deeds of heroism done
by Negroes, and many who saw them wounded and suffering in the common
cause, and felt drawn toward them, to help them and their brothers.
But whatever may have been the common feeling about Negro soldiers in
the United States, it was definitely hostile to them in the camps in
France. There emerged two characteristic points of view: (1) That it
was good to kill off as many Negroes as possible, as that helped to
solve the Negro problem. (2) That the Negro was not worthy to fight for
his country.
Not much for patriotism to feed on there! There seems never to have
been any resolve to make first-class Negro regiments, and those units
who served in France were by no means adequately trained. By all
competent accounts they were very slack, and it goes without saying
that an almost superhuman effort of discipline was necessary to obtain
complete steadiness in this terrible war. It was common to endeavor
to terrorize the Negroes by alarming and exaggerated accounts of
the horrors of battle. Negroes were talked to by Whites in a very
unsoldierly way. Baiting them and scaring them was thought to be better
sport than dealing with them sternly and seriously. There is no doubt
also that some white soldiers rejoiced to see the Negro put back into
the slavery position and forced to obey on pain of death. There are
those who cannot forgive the Negro having got free from slavery, and
for them the spectacle of the Negro in the rank and file afforded much
pleasure. Threating Negroes with a court-martial and death sentence
became a characteristic jest.
The white man, however, soon found that the Negro fell into the humor
of the war more readily than into the tragedy of it. It agreed with his
own sense of humor. It was soon impossible to scare the raw recruits
with yarns. The idea of running away from a machine gun became natural
and hilarious. The dangers from night-bombing raiders over the lines
were facetiously exaggerated. Hiding best became a humorous point of
honor, and one Negro would vaunt against another how far he fled.
Private soldiers chaffed their officers on the subject of death. Asked
what “going over the top” meant, the raw recruit would answer: “I know;
it means Good mornin’, Jesus.” In short, in nearly every Negro unit
there set in a humoresque attitude to the war.
Officer: The Germans are going to start an offensive.
Negro Soldier: That so, cap? Then we’se spread the news over France.
As the popular joke has it.
The Negro officer then began to receive the white man’s attention.
Having trained many colored officers, Negroes often of education and
means and refinement, and having given them commission and uniform,
the Staff came to the conclusion that they had made a mistake. The
white Southern officer stirred up trouble, the white ranker would not
salute. There was the usual sordid squabble in officers’ messes. And
then the upshot—a great number of Negro officers subjected to the
humiliation of losing their commissions and being placed in the ranks.
This discouragement necessarily set the Negro officer thinking. It
cultivated his resentment. It sowed in his heart the seed of national
disaffection.
The next serious trouble was that of the French women and the Negro.
The indifference of white women whether the man they walked with
was black or brown or white was taken as an intolerable affront by
Southerners. They felt called upon to interfere and save the French
woman from herself. The rape legend was imported, and every effort
was made to infect the French male with race prejudice. Happily, the
propaganda failed. For one thing, Puritanism does not easily take root
in a French heart, and for another, the French have no instinctive
horror of Negroes. Possibly the rape legend even made the Negro a
little ornamental from the point of view of _amour_. “Black American
troops in France have given rise to as many complaints of attempted
rape as all the rest of the army ‘Les troupes noires Americaines
en France ont donné lieu, a elle seules, a autant de plaintes pour
tentatives de viol, que tout le reste de l’Armée,’” as an army order
puts it.
Negro honor, however, demands that the charge be rebutted, and the
matter has been thoroughly investigated. There does not seem to be much
in it. As every one knows who served in the ranks, women of easy virtue
were extremely plentiful and complaisant. The need might easily have
been to protect the Negro from the women rather than the women from the
Negro.
The fact is simply that the Negro walking with a white woman is to the
Southern American White as a red rag to a bull. And as by nature this
White is unrestrained and unreasonable, he seeks by all means, fair or
foul, to part them.
Finally, the culmination of the story of the American Negro in the war
is that the White denied him any valor or prowess or military virtue of
any kind, said the Negro was a coward and a runaway and utterly useless
in the fighting line. Fighting units were taken off their allotted duty
and changed to labor units. Regiments were ordered home; whole brigades
were given as a present to the grateful French. They may have been
rather inefficient. But, if so, that was due to bad training. Negroes
have fought magnificently in America’s wars of the past. They are a
great fighting race, and they are capable of discipline.
I listened when at New Orleans to a lecture given by Sergeant Needham
Roberts of the 369th U. S. Infantry, a handsome young Negro warrior,
twice wounded, the first American to be decorated by the French
Government. He was entirely patriotic, and made the apathetic Negro
audience stand to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He told how he ran
away from home to enlist, trained with a mass of black strangers, went
across the ocean—quite a terrifying experience for some of these young
soldiers, who but for the war had never crossed the sea. He gave his
first impressions of France and of the line, the exaggerated fright of
shell explosions and night attacks and bombs from the air. They were
just getting used to the first aspect of war when one day the news flew
round—“We are all ordered home again.” Official orders to that effect
quickly followed. They had all packed up and were marching to entrain
for Cherbourg when, according to the sergeant, Foch intervened.
“Why are you sending them back?” said he.
“They are not wanted.”
Foch seemed astonished.
“If you cannot use them, I can,” said the French marshal.
And then, hurray!—we were attached to the French.
It was no playground, the French front, but, as ever, a sterner piece
of reality than American or British. The Negroes were hotly engaged
and had many casualties. Roberts won his Croix de Guerre for a feat
which he performed with his chum, Pete Johnson. They had been left at
an advanced listening post and apparently overlooked—not relieved
for three days and three nights. The division had been relieved. On
the third night the Germans made a raid which the two Negro soldiers
repelled by themselves, first throwing out their bombs, then firing,
and finishing with a remarkable bit of butchery with the bayonet. The
Germans whom they did not put out of action they put to flight. How
many Germans lay dead it would be difficult to say. The number probably
grew like those of Falstaff’s men in buckram, but I did hear twenty
mentioned.
There was no doubt about the fact that Sergeant Roberts was a jolly
soldier—a “bonny faechter”—and he made himself on good terms with
his audience very quickly. He came from New York, and had swung along
Fifth Avenue with the heroes of New York’s Fighting Fifteenth. He was
full of the faith of the North, horribly depressed by the atmosphere of
the South, above all by the passivity and apathy of the Negroes of New
Orleans. He had better keep north of the Mason-Dixon line, for he is
evidently a born fighter.
If the war itself was a persistent educator of the Negro, his
subsequent treatment after the Armistice enforced very terribly what he
learned. It would be hardly worth while to enlarge on this in detail.
The fact which I wished to isolate is the growing resentment of the
colored people, the fact that some twelve millions are becoming highly
charged with resentment.
As illustration of this resentment one could quote much from the spoken
and the written word of the Negroes. But a poem, or part of a poem,
may suffice. It is Archibald Grimké’s “Thirteen Black Soldiers.” The
24th United States Infantry, a Negro regiment, was sent to Houston,
Texas, and was received with lack of sympathy and some hostility by the
population. A series of petty troubles culminated in a riot and mutiny.
Sixty-four Negroes were court-martialled, and thirteen were sentenced
to death, and hanged. It seems to show a lack of foresight to station
a Negro regiment among such a hostile people as the Texans. They are
more the enemies of the Negroes than were the Germans, and there was
certainty of trouble. Grimké’s poem expresses the boiling resentment to
which I have referred.
She hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers,
She hanged them for mutiny and murder,
She hanged them after she had put on them her uniform,
After she had put on them her uniform, the uniform of her soldiers,
She told them they were to be brave, to fight and, if needs be, to die
for her.
This was many years before she hanged them, her thirteen black
soldiers.
She told them to go there and they went,
To come here and they came, her brave black soldiers.
For her they went without food and water,
For her they suffered cold and heat,
For her they marched by day,
For her they watched by night,
For her in strange lands they stood fearless,
For her in strange lands they watched shelterless,
For her in strange lands they fought,
For her in strange lands they bled,
For her they faced fevers and fierce men,
For her they were always and everywhere ready to die.
And now she has hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.
For murder and mutiny she hanged them in anger and hate,
Hanged them in secret and dark and disgrace,
In secret and dark she disowned them,
In secret and dark buried them and left them in nameless disgrace.
Why did she hang them, her thirteen black soldiers?
What had they done to merit such fate?
She sent them to Houston, to Houston, in Texas,
She sent them in her uniform to this Southern city,
She sent them, her soldiers, her thirteen brave soldiers,
They went at her bidding to Houston,
They went where they were ordered.
They could not choose another place,
For they were soldiers and went where they were ordered.
They marched into Houston not knowing what awaited them.
Insult awaited them and violence.
Insult and violence hissed at them from house windows and struck at
them in the streets,
American colorphobia hissed and struck at them as they passed by on
the streets.
In the street cars they met discrimination and insult,
“They are not soldiers, they and their uniforms,
They are but common niggers,
They must be treated like common niggers,
They and their uniform.”
So hissed colorphobia, indigenous to Texas.
And then it squirted its venom on them,
Squirted its venom on them and on their uniform.
And what did she do, she who put that uniform on them,
And bade them to do and die if needs be for her?
Did she raise an arm to protect them?
Did she raise her voice to frighten away the reptilian thing?
Did she lift a finger or say a word of rebuke at it?
Did she do anything in defence of her black soldiers?
She did nothing. She sat complacent, indifferent in her seat of power.
She had eyes, but she refused to see what Houston was doing to her
black soldiers,
She had ears, but she stuffed them with cotton,
That she might not hear the murmured rage of her black soldiers,
They suffered alone, they were defenceless against insult and violence,
For she would not see them nor hear them nor protect them.
Then in desperation they smote the reptilian thing,
They smote it as they had smitten before her enemies,
For was it not her enemy, the reptilian thing, as well as their own?
They in an hour of madness smote it in battle furiously,
And it shrank back from their blows hysterical,
Terror and fear of death seized it, and it cried unto her to help.
And she, who would not hear her black soldiers in their dire need,
She, who put her uniform on them, heard their enemy.
She flew at its call and hanged her brave black soldiers.
She hanged them for doing for themselves what she ought to have done
for them,
She hanged them for resenting insult to her uniform,
She hanged them for defending from violence her brave black soldiers.
They marched with the dignity of brave men to the gallows,
With the souls of warriors they marched without a whimper to their doom.
And so they were hanged, her thirteen black soldiers,
And so they lie buried in nameless disgrace.
Is the watchword of Dr. Du Bois to be wondered?—
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
I met at Memphis, Tennessee, one of the few Southern white men who are
sympathetic to the Negro and understand the gravity of the situation.
This was Mr. Bolton Smith, a rich business man, a member of the Rotary
Club _quand meme_. As one who among other activities advances money on
the security of real estate in the Mississippi Delta, he necessarily
has been brought a great deal into contact with the Negro. Society in
Memphis looked at him somewhat askance because he did not share the
current conventional view, but he was not blackballed, only indulgently
laughed at as one who had a weak spot in his mental armor. In places
remote from Memphis, however, his views receive weighty consideration.