in Pierce Street and overheard this conversation: A colored woman was
asked, ‘Did you get the place?’ ‘Yes, I got it and started to work, when
the lady asked me where I lived, and when I told her she said she could
not have any one in her house who came from that street. She said there
was too much disease there.’ It remained for that woman to move. With
the West ordinance in force, where could she go? We have already a
crowded colored population. For her to move out meant for some one else
to move in. It affects not only the employed, but the employer, and the
only way out is for the man who hires a servant to go to the additional
expense of renting or buying a house for his servants in more healthy
quarters, which will aggravate the already troublesome help problem.”
The Philadelphia Ledger adds helplessly:
“How the Negro is going to be helped to rise under these circumstances
is one of the inscrutable problems of our time and generation. His own
unaided efforts are blocked everywhere by caste restrictions and
discriminations.”
The New York Globe says:
“The Negro has been told to smile and look pleasant as his political
rights have been taken from him. The argument has been that if he did
not make a fuss over voting the race prejudice of his white fellow
citizen would abate—that he would be given a freer chance to work, to
acquire property, to become of material weight in the community. But,
North as well as South, doors of industry are being shut against the
Negro. The economic tragedy of the educated Negro who aspires to good
things is pitiful. He finds either that personal effort and merit do not
count, or that they do not count much. In many places it is against the
Negro who is not willing to stay down in the mire that antipathy blazes
the most brightly. He is the ‘biggotty nigger’.”
Finally the Boston Herald pauses to remark:
“We purchased more than we knew with that first cargo of slaves sold by
the Dutch captain to the Virginia planters now almost three hundred
years ago.”
GOMPERS.
It seems pretty certain that Samuel Gompers, president of the American
Federation of Labor, was to some extent misquoted on the Negro problem.
The official version given by Mr. Charles Stetzle is as follows:
“The race problem came up in the convention, but not altogether by the
choice of the delegates. President Gompers had given an address on the
depressed races, remarking that it could not be expected that the Negro,
for instance, could have as high an ideal for himself as the Caucasian.
A morning newspaper came out next morning and in big headlines said that
Gompers had ‘read the Negro out of the trades union,’ when, as a matter
of fact, Gompers meant exactly the opposite. He took occasion to correct
the erroneous impression which had been made upon the public. At any
rate, he spoke of it at least three different times in public
addresses.”
The incident has caused much comment, most of it based on the
supposition that union labor is officially drawing the color line. The
Chicago Post says:
“The American Federation of Labor has always declared that ‘the working
people must unite and organize, irrespective of creed, color, sex,
nationality or politics.’ For many years the Federation denied
membership to all unions which drew the color line—a stand which kept
out, for example, the International Association of Machinists until it
eliminated the word ‘white’ from its constitution. Even when the A. F.
of L. relented sufficiently to admit several of the railroad
brotherhoods which were closed to Negroes, Mr. Gompers was always very
robust in his assertion that organized labor welcomed the Negro worker.
When the Industrial Commission of 1900 quizzed Mr. Gompers on the race
issue, it drew from him some very touching stories of Negro loyalty to
the trade union movement. He talked pretty much like an abolitionist up
to a few years ago.”
The Chicago Daily News says:
“Mr. Gompers was represented in the original report of his address to
have dealt with Negroes and Asiatics as if the problems presented by the
two were similar. Everybody should know that they are not.
“The Negroes are native-born American citizens. They know no other land.
It is their sincere desire, according to the measure of their abilities,
to share in the life of the American people. They are making progress in
education and industry. Under these conditions, to deny to Negroes the
right to join labor unions when they meet the standards required of
white applicants for membership would be clearly un-American.”
The comments of two other papers are characteristic. The Charleston (S.
C.) News and Courier is complacent:
“There is no use to palaver about and invent reasons. Everybody who
knows anything at all knows that racial antipathy is a real thing, even
though intangible. Why beat about the bush and deny it? Aside from the
ignorance of the Negro, his many weaknesses, his fatal physiological
structure, his extraction prevents his recognition as a social equal, be
he in South Africa, America or anywhere else. On that ground his
elimination from white unions is a necessity. Concomitant reasons need
not be given. They follow in natural sequence.”
The New York Evening Post says, however:
“But even should a reactionary policy of rigid exclusion prevail, it
cannot keep the Negro down industrially; it will doubtless handicap him
in many sections, but the only people who can keep the Negroes in an
inferior economic and social position are the Negroes themselves. A race
that has risen so rapidly against such wonderful odds is to be held back
by no organization of workingmen, however powerful.”
“COLORED.”
The case of the child with one-sixteenth Negro blood whom the District
of Columbia courts call a “Negro” has brought some comment. The Detroit
News says:
“Eventually the courts must draw the line. The dark races when
intimately associated with the white in overpowering numbers gradually
bleach out. At the fourth remove the descendants are often blond in
type. As the court seems to take no account of the actual color of the
individual in applying the classification ‘colored,’ it must be assumed
that definition must depend upon simple mathematics.”
The Taunton Gazette adds:
“By the same reasoning a man with one-sixteenth Chinese blood is a
Chinaman and one-sixteenth of the blood of any race relegates him to
that race. As a matter of fact, that question of one-sixteenth is not
likely to arise in any case save where it is desired to make out a
person a Negro, and that is where the nub of the whole matter rests.
“It is probable that there are thousands of persons in this country with
one-sixteenth Negro blood in them who do not know it themselves nor does
any one else, for family records are not always carefully kept along
these lines.”
VOTING.
The Boston Transcript has this letter from Dr. Horace Bumstead:
“Dr. Doremus Scudder of Hawaii told the American Missionary Association
in Tremont Temple that the American Negro of the future will thank his
Southern white brother for depriving him of the ballot until he should
have proved his fitness for it—and that he would thank him
notwithstanding the manner in which his ballot had been taken away. Let
us see just what this means.
“It means that the Negro will hereafter be grateful for a
disfranchisement practically based on color rather than unfitness—which
its promoters have boldly avowed was intended to disfranchise every
Negro if possible and not one white man if it could be avoided, and
which they accomplished through ‘grandfather’ and ‘understanding’
clauses artfully devised to deprive the Negro of his constitutional
guarantees for a square deal as regards suffrage qualifications.
“It means that the Negro will hereafter be grateful for a
disfranchisement which is seriously restricting his economic freedom and
opportunity, the protection of his life and property, his right to
travel in equal comfort for an equal fare, the education of his
children, and the guarding of the virtue of his wife and daughters.
“This conclusion Dr. Scudder naively states he has arrived at after
seven years’ residence, not in the South, but in Hawaii, and because the
liquor dealers there have bought up the votes of the natives. In other
words, when white men have so little control over their baser element
that they cannot keep them from offering bribes, the proper course, in
Dr. Scudder’s opinion, seems to be to take the ballot from all colored
men because some of them have accepted bribes, rather than to
disfranchise the few white men who have offered them.
“When American Negroes become grateful for a disfranchisement
accomplished in such ways, and on such grounds, and with such detriment
to their own welfare, they will have proved themselves unworthy of
American citizenship. And that time will never come. They are willing to
play the political game with their white brothers on equal terms, but
not with loaded dice and marked cards.”
NEGRO SOLDIERS.
The Boston Herald reports General Burt’s views on Negro soldiers as
follows:
“That in the five qualifications that go to make up a good soldier,
drilling, marksmanship, marching, discipline and fighting, the Negro
soldiers of the United States army are paramount, was the contention of
Brigadier-General Andrew S. Burt, retired, ex-commander of the
Brownsville Black Battalion, in his address last night on ‘The Negro
Soldier in Ancient and Modern Warfare,’ at a meeting of colored people
in St. Paul’s Baptist Church, under the auspices of the Boston Literary
Association.
“He cited two instances in the Spanish-American War when the colored
troops showed their true value as soldiers. The first instance being the
rescue of the Rough Riders by the Tenth Colored Cavalry, the second the
heroism of the Twenty-fourth Colored Infantry in volunteering as nurses
during the yellow fever epidemic.
“In speaking of army discipline he referred the audience to his sworn
testimony before the Senate committee on the Brownsville ‘shoot-up,’ and
challenged the comparison of any records of any class of good citizens
to equal that of the Twenty-fifth colored regiment.
“Speaking of the Negro soldier generally, he said: ‘I can find nowhere
in the histories of the Revolutionary, the Indian, the Spanish-American
or the war in the Philippines, a single instance where a Negro regiment
showed the white feather or refused to charge the enemy when called to
do so.’”
IN SOUTH AFRICA.
The A. P. O., of Cape Town, South Africa, a colored periodical, brings
word of the appointment of Mr. Hull, a colored man, to the South African
cabinet. It will be remembered that the South African Constitution
requires cabinet members to be “persons of European descent.” Apparently
men of mixed descent are not excluded. A. P. O. says:
“The decision of General Botha not to relinquish the premiership, and of
Mr. Hull to accept a seat, and so retain the post of Treasurer-General,
keep the Botha Ministry practically intact. We predicted that the Prime
Minister would get over his defeat and cling to his office with its
£4,000 a year.
“It is now safe to say that we are already on the road toward a Native
Parliament, which, according to Dr. Broon, is only one hundred years
off; for not only have many of the present M.L.A.’s an infusion of
native blood in their veins, as is evidenced by their features, but the
very Cabinet contains colored men. After all, we are moving pretty fast
toward the realization of a native Government.”
The prophecy of Professor Broon, to which A. P. O. refers, is thus
described in the Tsalo Ea Becoana:
“Prof. R. Broon, lecturing recently in Johannesburg on ‘South Africa 100
Years Hence,’ made some curious and interesting statements. He said he
had gone into the question and was thoroughly convinced that the black
man, if the present policy was continued, was going to rule South Africa
in 100 years. He did not include the colored people in his meaning, but
he referred to the Kafir or Bantu race. There were some 1,200,000 white
people in South Africa, while there were 7,200,000 Kafirs. One of the
principal factors that was welding the natives together was religion.
More and more black labor was being employed in the Cape Colony, and in
a short time the native would have a large number of trades in his
hands. Intermarriage between natives and whites was taking place in Cape
Colony. The segregation policy seemed to be the most practical way of
saving South Africa for the whites.”
[Illustration: Books]
A WINTER PILGRIMAGE
The race problem is not one problem. It differs not only in time, but in
place. Therefore I always go to different groups of colored people in
this land with much of interest and curiosity, knowing that each will
present its peculiar phase of relationship between the white and colored
group.
I have just come back from such a journey, and its scenes and lessons
are filling my thought.
There was Toledo, with its colored group a little pushed aside and half
forgotten in the onward rush of the growing city till the group gripped
itself and awoke and said: “We are a part of Toledo—you may not forget
us.” So now slowly comes the push forward and upward.
In Cleveland it is far different—it is not so much a matter of gaining
civic recognition as men and women—that battle was fought by worthy men
long years ago. It is the deeper problem of holding the ground gained;
of not letting theatres and restaurants and hotels inaugurate a new
discrimination which had once disappeared. This is a difficult battle of
the new economic rise of the Negro; when few Negroes applied or had
money to apply it was easy to say theoretically, “Live where you will,
go where you please.” But when a group of black folk growing in power
put a $75,000 church on your corner—that is a phase of the race problem
that hadn’t struck you before.
Between these cities of past and present lies the mystic city of the
future, with its great cloud walls.
In Oberlin there are nearly two thousand young folk at study and at
play. Working and playing beside them are a hundred colored boys and
girls, and they all walk on sacred ground, on ground long since
consecrated to racial equality and hatred of caste and slavery. Yet
among these venerable ideals obtrudes the Present and it, with all its
odd corners, must be builded into the future city.
The present holds not only the problem of the treatment of ten million
black folk elsewhere, but of the hundred colored boys and girls right
there in Oberlin. It presents a tremendous moral dilemma to frank young
souls. When these children came from anti-slavery homes they found it
easy and natural to treat black men as men. But coming now from a world
that thinks God made a big mistake in ever creating black folk—coming
from such social teaching, they hesitate. Once in a while a black
student (or rather a yellow one) may be elected a society, but usually
no desert in character or scholarship avails.
Yet this fact brings no mental peace or moral satisfaction. The spirit
of democracy is strong, the influence of the faculty is righteous, and I
came from five hours’ earnest conference with these young folk with a
sense of seeing a mighty battle for righteousness, and a belief that
somehow, sometime, justice would prevail.
But after all it was the men I met that meant most. Could I introduce
them? Let me see. There was the young lawyer who burned to awaken a
sleeping city to its duties and rights; there was the brown physician
who is one of the leading surgeons in the city, and his knife finds no
color line. Then the girl who ran a political campaign last month had a
father who was director in a white bank and one of the solid business
men of the town. In their parlor gathered a brown father, a yellow
mother, the white pastor and the white girl chum—but why should we
catalog the colors of their skins and not those of their clothes? In
Oberlin the chief book store is “colored,” and the chief paperhanger and
the chief building contractor. Elsewhere I sat with the man who had just
been elected a member of a leading white city club and heard how the
second highest mechanic in the Peerless motor factory wore “the shadowed
livery of the sun.”
Therefore, all is well? Therefore, all is not well. Here are a climbing
people. The hardiest and most talented and the pushing are literally
forcing a way. But against them and against the ordinary black man the
bonds of medievalism are drawn and ghettos and sumptuary laws are
encompassed in the color line.
W. E. B. D.
EDITORIAL
ENVY.
It is unfortunate that in the recent newspaper discussion of an Appeal
to Europe sent out not by this Association but by a number of colored
men of influence and standing, reference was constantly made to the
lowest personal motives and seldom to the arguments presented.
It is true that with all peoples, and especially with a race in the
throes of birth-pain, personal likes and jealousies play a wretchedly
large part. But it does not follow that they explain all the struggle
and difference of opinion. It is true that the rise of a man like Mr.
Booker T. Washington to a place of commanding influence has made him an
object of envy to many narrow souls. But it does not follow that the
thousands of intelligent people who differ with Mr. Washington are all
actuated by such motives, or are unable to distinguish great and vital
principles apart from personal feeling.
When, therefore, such differences of opinion arise, as it is natural and
healthy that they should arise, it is both wrong and unjust to assume
the motive to be necessarily low. Particularly is this true when
adequate causes of deep and compelling importance are openly and
honestly given as the cause of this difference.
Are such causes sufficient to sustain the complainers? That is a matter
of argument, not of innuendo or abuse. No man and no cause are above the
careful scrutiny and criticism of honest men, and certainly to-day there
is in the United States a very large field for argument as to the proper
attitude of colored leaders toward the race problem.
THE TRUTH.
To the honest seeker for light the puzzling thing about the Southern
situation is the absolutely contradictory statements that are often made
concerning conditions. For instance, the New York Evening Post is taken
to task by the Norfolk (Va.) Landmark for assuming that Southern colored
men are largely disfranchised. The Virginia paper says “No Negro in
Virginia can be kept from voting, provided he measures up to the same
requirements for the exercising of that right that the white man must.
The laws of the State will protect him in the right should election
officials deny it him. That Negroes in this State may freely qualify to
vote is fully attested by the fact that thousands of them do vote.”
Again, the New Orleans Picayune declares with regard to the complaint of
disfranchisement, “The arrant and absolute falsity of the specification
in regard to the ballot is seen in the fact that every legal bar to the
exercise of the ballot applies to whites and Negroes alike. Every
elector (voter) must either be able to read and write or, in case of
illiteracy, he must pay taxes on ordinary assessable property of the
minimum value of $300. These laws are strictly in accordance with the
requirements of the Constitution of the United States, and have been so
pronounced by the courts.”
Just so in earlier days before legal disfranchisement, paper after paper
and orator after orator declared that the Negro could and did vote
without let or hindrance.
Despite this, every intelligent person in the United States knows that
these statements are false. The Southern testimony to this is itself
open and convincing. Not only have we Mr. Tillman’s frank and
picturesque testimony on the past, but to-day the Richmond (Va.) Leader
says that all is well in Virginia “since we disfranchised the Negro”;
Congressman Underwood of Alabama says the Alabama Negro “does not count
for anything politically” in that State; a prominent judge on the
Mississippi bench says “The Negroes in Mississippi do not vote and
should not,” and it is a matter of plain official record in Louisiana
that of over 150,000 Negro males 21 years of age and over (of whom
nearly 70,000 could read and write) there were in 1908 only 1,743
registered as voters, and these were disfranchised by the “White
Primary” system. In the face of these facts, does it pay deliberately to
misrepresent the truth?
OPPORTUNITY.
A friend of our Association writes: “While I heartily approve of the
colored people being given an opportunity to improve their condition, I
feel that after doing what I can to help them to earn a living
honorably, they must depend on their own resources to advance
themselves.” This is the attitude of many excellent friends of humanity,
but it assumes that if a man is fairly equipped for earning a living
to-day he will have the opportunity to do so, and that the paths before
him will be open so as to make the rise of the deserving possible.
It is precisely because the opportunity to earn a living, even for those
equipped to do so, is not given to-day to thousands of colored people in
the United States, that the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People exists. It is wrong and wasteful to do for people what
they can and ought to do for themselves, but when the doors of
opportunity are so shut in their faces so as to discourage and keep back
the hard-working and deserving, then action is called for.
To-day Negroes may work freely as menials at low wages; they may work
freely as farm laborers under conditions of semi-slavery; higher than
that they meet unusual difficulties—the difficulty of saving capital
from low wages to farm or go into business; the difficulty of securing
admission to the trades even when competent; the difficulty of securing
protection under the law and of rearing a family in decency; the
difficulty of educating their children; the difficulty of protecting
their rights by the ballot. To be sure, if they are unusually gifted and
pushing they may push higher at the risk of insult and bitter
opposition. Thus the fact remains that the mass of the willing, eager
workers of the race are held back and forced down by a deep and growing
race prejudice, and these, pressing down on the lower strata, encourage
in them laziness and vagrancy and crime. The National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People is an organization for giving the
colored race a reasonable opportunity to help itself.
SCHOOLS.
The philanthropist of a city like New York is bewildered and often
exasperated by the demands and begging of colored schools in the South.
To some extent this is inevitable, and is due to the fact that the
United States is undertaking to give elementary education to a race of
ten million people very largely by private philanthropy instead of
making this a State and even a national charge, and leaving to voluntary
effort the college work and work of social uplift.
But beyond this the philanthropic world is to some extent itself to
blame because of the encouragement it gives to unknown and unvouched-for
enterprises and to unwise and unjustifiable attempts to duplicate
existing foundations.
The representative of a great fund once called on the writer and
expressed great sorrow that an alleged school in the South to which one
of the most prominent New York philanthropists had given $5,000 was
found on investigation to be no school at all. This was unfortunate, but
there are hundreds of good and deserving schools starving for help which
this philanthropist did not give to because their representatives did
not appear so glib or plausible. It is not the smoothest talker who
necessarily is doing the best work.
[Illustration:
_THE NATIONAL PASTIME._
_Seventy-five per cent. of the Negroes lynched have not even been
accused of rape._
]
Again, indiscriminate and ill-advised giving encourages such things as
are happening in Atlanta. Atlanta needs public elementary schools, but
it does not need more private schools. The existing schools are equipped
for excellent work in industries, agriculture, college training and some
professional work. With adequate help and endowment they could do
splendid work.