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THE CRISIS
A RECORD OF THE DARKER RACES

Volume One | JANUARY, 1911 | Number Three

Edited by W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS, with the co-operation of Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, W. S. Braithwaite and M. D. Maclean.

CONTENTS | Man
Along the Color Line | 5
Opinion | 9
A Winter Pilgrimage | 15
Editorial | 16
Cartoon | 18
| By JOHN HENRY ADAMS |
Editorial | 20
Social Control | 22
| By JANE ADDAMS |
The Teacher: Poem | 23
| By LESLIE PINCKNEY HILL |
Employment of Colored Women in Chicago | 24
The Burden | 26
Talks About Women | 27
| By Mrs. J. E. MILHOLLAND |
What to Read | 28

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TERMS REASONABLE

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION for the ADVANCEMENT of COLORED PEOPLE

OBJECT.—The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is an organization composed of men and women of all races and classes who believe that the present widespread increase of prejudice against colored races and particularly the denial of rights and opportunities to ten million Americans of Negro descent is not only unjust and a menace to our free institutions, but also is a direct hindrance to World Peace and the realization of Human Brotherhood.

METHODS.—The encouragement of education and efforts for social uplift; the dissemination of literature; the holding of mass meetings; the maintenance of a lecture bureau; the encouragement of vigilance committees; the investigation of complaints; the maintenance of a Bureau of Information; the publication of The Crisis; the collection of facts and publication of the truth.

ORGANIZATION.—All interested persons are urged to join our organization—associate membership costs $1, and contributing and sustaining members pay from $2 to $25 a year.

FUNDS.—We need $10,000 a year for running expenses of this work and particularly urge the necessity of gifts to help on our objects.

OFFICERS.—The officers of the organization are:

National President—Mr. Moorfield Storey, Boston, Mass.

Chairman of the Executive Committee—Mr. Wm. English Walling, New York.

Treasurer—Mr. John E. Milholland, New York.

Disbursing Treasurer—Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, New York.

Director of Publicity and Research—Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, New York.

Executive Secretary—Miss Frances Blascoer, New York.

COMMITTEE.—Our work is carried on under the auspices of the following General Committee, in addition to the officers named:

[1]Miss Gertrude Barnum, New York.

[1]Rev. W. H. Brooks, New York.

Prof. John Dewey, New York.

Miss Maud R. Ingersoll, New York.

Mrs. Florence Kelley, New York.

[1]Mr. Paul Kennaday, New York.

[1]Mrs. F. R. Keyser, New York.

Dr. Chas. Leng, New York.

Mr. Jacob W. Mack, New York.

[1]Mrs. M. D. MacLean, New York.

Rev. Horace G. Miller, New York.

Mrs. Max Morgenthau, Jr., New York.

Mr. James F. Morton, Jr., New York.

Mr. Henry Moskowitz, New York.

Miss Leonora O’Reilly, New York.

[1]Rev. A. Clayton Powell, New York.

[1]Mr. Charles Edward Russell, New York.

Mr. Jacob H. Schiff, New York.

Prof. E. R. A. Seligman, New York.

[1]Rev. Joseph Silverman, New York.

Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, New York.

Mrs. Henry Villard, New York.

Miss Lillian D. Wald, New York.

[1]Bishop Alexander Walters, New York.

Dr. Stephen S. Wise, New York.

Rev. Jas. E. Haynes, D.D., Brooklyn, N. Y.

[1]Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Brooklyn, N. Y.

Miss M. R. Lyons, Brooklyn, N. Y.

[1]Miss M. W. Ovington, Brooklyn, N. Y.

[1]Dr. O. M. Waller, Brooklyn, N. Y.

Mrs. M. H. Talbert, Buffalo, N. Y.

Hon. Thos. M. Osborne, Auburn, N. Y.

[1]Mr. W. L. Bulkley, Ridgewood, N. J.

Mr. George W. Crawford, New Haven, Conn.

Miss Maria Baldwin, Boston, Mass.

Mr. Francis J. Garrison, Boston, Mass.

Mr. Archibald H. Grimke, Boston, Mass.

[1]Mr. Albert E. Pillsbury, Boston, Mass.

Mr. Wm. Munroe Trotter, Boston, Mass.

Dr. Horace Bumstead, Brookline, Mass.

Miss Elizabeth C. Carter, New Bedford, Mass.

Prest. Chas. T. Thwing, Cleveland, O.

Mr. Chas. W. Chesnutt, Cleveland, O.

Prest H. C. King, Oberlin, O.

Prest. W. S. Scarborough, Wilberforce, O.

[1]Miss Jane Addams, Chicago, Ill.

[1]Mrs. Ida B. Wells Barnett, Chicago, Ill.

[1]Dr. C. E. Bentley, Chicago, Ill.

Miss Sopbronisba Breckenridge, Chicago, Ill.

Mr. Clarence Darrow, Chicago, Ill.

[1]Mrs. Celia Parker Woolley, Chicago, Ill.

[1]Dr. N. F. Mossell, Philadelphia, Pa.

[1]Dr. Wm. A. Sinclair, Philadelphia, Pa.

Miss Susan Wharton, Philadelphia, Pa.

Mr. R. R. Wright, Jr., Philadelphia, Pa.

Mr. W. Justin Carter, Harrisburg, Pa.

Rev. Harvey Johnson, D.D., Baltimore, Md.

Hon. Wm. S. Bennett, Washington, D. C.

Mr. L. M. Hershaw, Washington, D. C.

Prof. Kelly Miller, Washington, D. C.

Prof. L. B. Moore, Washington, D. C.

Justice W. P. Stafford, Washington, D. C.

[1]Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, Washington, D. C.

[1]Rev. J. Milton Waldron, Washington, D. C.

Prest. John Hope, Atlanta, Ga.

Mr. Leslie P. Hill, Manassas, Va.

1. Executive Committee.

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Along the Color Line

POLITICAL.

Objections to the proposed appointment of William R. Lewis, a Negro attorney of Boston, as an assistant attorney-general are being presented to Attorney-General Wickersham. President Taft’s intention to appoint Lewis was learned semi-officially at the White House several weeks ago. Booker T. Washington has called upon Mr. Wickersham to urge his approval of the appointment, and Speaker Cannon has opposed it.

President Taft said in his message: “I renew my recommendation that the claims of the depositors in the Freedman’s Bank be recognized and paid by the passage of the pending bill on that subject. I also renew my recommendation that steps be taken looking to the holding of a Negro exposition in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the issuing by Mr. Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation.”

There is only one feature of the apportionment matter which is apt to precipitate trouble, and that is the proposal to reduce the representation of the Southern States which have deprived a part of their population of the right of suffrage. Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and other Commonwealths below the Mason and Dixon line have imposed restrictions upon the Negroes which make it impossible for them to vote at any election.—Denver Times.

THE COURTS.

In Richmond, Va., Judge Goff, in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, decided that no deed conveying real estate could legally preclude the subsequent conveyance of any part of that real estate to persons of African descent. He held that any provision or clause providing that real estate shall not be acquired by Negroes is invalid and void, and that no such provision can be put into a deed. The case was argued for the Negroes by George J. Hooper and William L. Royall. A. O. Boschen argued for the other side. The decision of Judge Goff will be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. It is attracting wide attention and much comment among members of the local bar. The case was that of the People’s Pleasure Park vs. Worsham.

Having been defeated in the Supreme Court of New York, and that defeat having been affirmed by the Appellate Division, the colored Order of Elks has filed an appeal to the Court of Appeals and has filed a bond of the National Surety Company to cover the payment of any costs that may be awarded against it. The colored order was enjoined from using the name or the emblem of the white Order of Elks.

The verdict of $1,000 awarded George W. Griffin, a Pullman car porter, against Daniel L. Brady, brother of “Diamond Jim” Brady, was affirmed by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. Griffin was arrested by Brady on a charge of theft, and after proving his innocence sued his accuser.

Joseph Atwater, an Oklahoma Negro, filed in the Supreme Court of the United States at Washington his appeal from the decision of the Oklahoma courts which had refused to enjoin election officials in Oklahoma City from denying him the right to vote on Nov. 8th. The petition for injunction was based on the claim that the “grandfather clause” placed in the Oklahoma constitution by amendment was invalid, because it would deny the right to vote to a large number of Negroes in the State entirely on account of color or previous condition of servitude.

SOCIAL UPLIFT.

In New Orleans during the past year several drug stores have been opened, a Business League organized, the Pythian Temple finished, five churches erected and 400 teachers have attended summer normal schools.

Dr. Cyrus Townsend Brady, by a startling paper read before the Ministers’ Alliance at a meeting at the Y. M. C. A., awakened the ministers into a realization of the Negro problem, and for the first time in the history of Kansas City a movement was organized by the ministers to investigate and endeavor to better the condition of the blacks.

The highest average that has been made on the punching machine in the Census Office was attained by Miss Eva B. Price, a colored girl, during the last two weeks in October. The work on these machines is done on the piece basis, and during this period Miss Price earned $88. The highest up to this time that had been paid any clerk on this work during any two weeks was $85. There are about 500 clerks working on the punching machines, and it is considered very high for a clerk to punch as many as 3,000 cards in one day. Miss Price’s highest mark for one day was 4,200 cards. She accomplished this unusual average during the regular seven-hour day, and has never worked on extra time.

In Philadelphia prominent churchmen of several denominations participated in a conference on the American Negro question, held in the Central Young Men’s Christian Association, 1421 Arch Street. Bishop Mackay-Smith presided, and the speakers included such leaders in denominational affairs as the Rev. Dr. Frank P. Parkin, district superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church; the Rev. Dr. A. J. Rowland, secretary of the American Baptist Publication Society; the Rev. Dr. Edwin Heyl Delk, of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church; the Rev. Edwin F. Randolph, of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church; B. F. Lee, Jr., of the Armstrong Association, and James S. Stemons.

With the exception of the Bishop, these ministers and laymen are associated in the Association for Equalizing Industrial Opportunities, the purpose of which is to secure fair play for the Negro wage earner in the industrial world.

In Cincinnati the last of the $2,000 needed to start an institution for colored women similar to the Y. W. C. A. has been received by Miss Elma C. Leach, of the Elizabeth Gamble Deaconess Association, and the work will be prosecuted at once. The home will be opened on West Sixth Street, near Mound. Temporary quarters will there be provided for colored girls coming into the city for work and for girls who are found to be living in undesirable environments. A nursery will be established and theoretical nursing taught. Lectures will also be given.

In a report the State Inspector of Asylums of Kentucky says that the buildings in which the Negro patients at the Eastern Kentucky Asylum are confined are a disgrace to the State. One is a cottage with basement and one story above. This building, he states, is in a very dangerous condition, likely to collapse at any time. It is simply held up with props put under it from time to time, and should a heavy wind strike it, it probably would collapse. In this building there are forty-two colored female patients. In the other colored ward building, which has a basement and two stories, the conditions are equally as bad. Both male and female patients are confined in this building, but are kept separate and distinct. The female capacity is thirty-two—there are forty-one patients; the male capacity is seventy—there are eighty-eight patients. So crowded is the building that a great number are compelled to sleep in the basement, which is very dark and damp and in rainy weather water collects therein. The inspector states that neither the Board of Control nor the officers of this institution are to blame, for they are doing everything in their power to avert a disaster.

COLORED COLLEGES.

Howard University at Washington, D. C., has this year 1,350 students. The college students number 347, of whom 167 are freshmen. Requirements have been raised both for admission to the college and medical school. The faculties include 110 professors, instructors and officers. The endowment amounts to $281,000. The medical school has received $55,000 in cash for tuition fees during the last two years. A new Carnegie library and hall of applied science have recently been added to the plant, and also a steam-heating plant.

Lincoln University, Chester County, Pa., has 136 students in the college and 50 in the theological seminary; all of these are taught by twelve professors and three instructors. The grounds and buildings are worth $250,000, and the endowment is a little over $600,000. Lately an electric plant has been added, and a new pipe organ.

Virginia Union University has 35 students in the college and 30 in the theological department, 120 in the academy and 40 in the grades. There are sixteen instructors. A special attempt is being made to get a new dormitory.

Wilberforce University has issued a statement which says:

“Though our existence was threatened in the past by poverty, war and fire, yet we have passed from a school with 52 acres of land, one building, a few small cottages, a primary department of instruction, two teachers and a handful of students, to three large united schools in operation to-day, aside from the military department. These are the college, the theological, and the normal and industrial schools, instructing in the following courses of study: Classical, scientific, academic, theological, music, English preparatory, military, art, business, sewing, carpentry, printing, cooking, shoemaking, blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, brickmaking and bricklaying, plumbing, tailoring, and applied mechanics and millinery. It has 350 acres of the best land in Ohio. It has now ten brick buildings, including four large halls, a $60,000 trades building, and a library costing $18,000, the gift of Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The value of the entire plant, with equipment, is quite $350,000. There are 32 teachers and an average of 400 students, and we could have over one thousand if we had accommodations for them.”

Mr. W. A. Joiner, formerly of Howard University, is superintendent of the State Department at Wilberforce.

Atlanta University has 400 students enrolled. Fifty of these are in the college course, with 30 teachers and officers. There are 653 normal and college graduates. The plant consists of seven brick buildings, including a library worth about $300,000; the endowment is $75,000, and a special effort is being made to raise $60,000 this year.

Shaw University, Raleigh, N. C., has over 500 students enrolled, and applicants have been turned away. There are preparatory, normal and college departments, and classes in theology, medicine and law. Attention is also given to music and industries. The Leonard medical building has been enlarged and a hospital is being built; shower baths have been put into the gymnasium and other buildings enlarged. President Meserve is just completing his seventeenth year of service.

The Georgia State Industrial College is near Savannah, Ga. It has 86 acres and 468 students. The school curriculum includes literary and industrial work. Each student has to take a trade along with his other studies. The school depends entirely upon income from the Landscript and Morrill funds. Among its outside activities are farmers’ conferences and an annual State fair.

EDUCATION.

In South Carolina Governor-elect Cole L. Bleaze is opposed to the division of the educational fund of the State of South Carolina between schools for the Negroes and the white children. It became known lately that the future Governor is convinced that it would be good for the State if the educational fund is divided so that taxes paid by whites for educational purposes go for the education of white children, and that those paid by blacks be used for the education of Negroes.

“I am firmly convinced, after the most careful thought and study,” said Colonel Bleaze to-day, “that the Almighty created the Negro to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water. I also believe that the greatest mistake the white race has ever made was in attempting to educate the free Negro.”

The first report of the Louisiana Department of Education for the year ending July 1, 1910, shows that the total amount spent for the maintenance of the public schools by the State was $4,936,300.64. Of this amount colored teachers received in salaries $202,251.13, while white teachers received $2,404,062.54. There are 5,001 white teachers employed and 1,285 colored teachers. White male teachers received an average monthly salary of $75.29, and white female teachers received an average monthly salary of $50.80. The average monthly salary of colored male teachers was only $34.25, and of colored female teachers $28.67. The average length of session of colored elementary schools is 4.6 months. The average lengths of session of white elementary and high schools is 8.23 months. There are 9,771 whites enrolled in the high schools. No figures are given for colored students enrolled in high schools. There are 54,637 colored children attending elementary schools, and 128,022 white children; 75.9 per cent. of white educable children are enrolled, and only 45.3 per cent. of the colored children. The average monthly cost of each child based on average attendance, white $2.90, colored $1.21.

The colored people of Plateau have the credit of being the leading Negro settlement in Mobile County, Alabama, in respect to raising money to help educate their children. The patrons of the school have raised over $180 for their school this year, $144 of this money being raised Thanksgiving Day. They are buying a beautiful site for a high school at a cost of $900. Over $600 of this money has been raised, and they are struggling to finish it this present school term.

That a systematic and organized crusade on idleness among members of the colored race is to be continued was indicated at the meeting of the Texas Negro Law and Order League at Houston, Texas. In a forceful address calling the attention of the members of the league to many vital questions affecting the welfare of the race President John M. Atkins stated that the time was ripe for sending literature over the country urging all Negro parents to look to the moral training of their boys.

For the purpose of urging every colored resident of New Orleans to contribute $1 per annum to be used in educating Negro children, a poll tax association among the colored people has been formed. A meeting was held Wednesday night and a citywide campaign with this object in view was planned. Circulars will be printed, stating the reasons for the movement, and the leaders of every Negro organization in the city will be asked to prevail upon his respective membership to see that they pay their poll tax.

Strong addresses were delivered before the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church by Professor D. C. Potts, president of the Mississippi Industrial College, and Dr. F. M. Williams of the North Mississippi Conference. Professor Potts gave a detailed report of the work done at the institution and declared that the enrollment at this time of the year far exceeds that of any previous year. He stated that the property was conservatively valued at $150,000 and congratulated the Negroes of Mississippi upon giving so much for the education of their own children.

THE CHURCH.

There are now five Negro priests in the Catholic Church in the United States; three are in the Order of St. Joseph, one is a member of the Holy Ghost order, and the fifth is attached to Archbishop Ireland’s diocese in St. Paul, Minn.

On Sunday afternoon, October 30, the societies of the Holy Name of the Roman Catholic Church made a big demonstration in Washington, D. C. One feature of it was the parade, with several thousand in line, including delegations from Baltimore and other nearby places. There were many colored men in line, but there was no semblance of “jim crowing.” Each marched with his own parish members of whatever color. There was a full share of colored mounted marshals and two of the six bands were colored, but the colored bands were not leading colored contingents.

This was in striking contrast to the action of the local committee of the World’s Sunday School Congress here last May, which barred the few colored delegates from the parade altogether, while in other places they were segregated as far as possible.

Two thousand Negro Baptists have been meeting in Little Rock, Ark.

The M. E. Conference at Nacogdoches, Texas, opened by singing “And are we yet alive!”

ECONOMIC.

During the last few days Negroes, generally known as “freedmen” from the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, have paid over $50,000 to the commissioner to the five tribes of Indians at Muskogee for land. The “freedmen” were allowed to select enough land to bring their allotments up to forty acres, paying for it the appraised value of the land. This appraisement was made by the government several years ago, and is about one-fourth of the actual cash value of the land now. The Negroes were given this preferential right to buy by a special act of Congress and their right expired December 1, which caused the rush.

A colored church in Atlanta has opened a labor exchange.

A number of Omaha colored men have incorporated the International Railroad Safety Pipe Coupling Company. It will manufacture the Harris coupling for cars. This aims at enabling coupling of steam air brake and emergency pipes without compelling a man to go under the cars and risk being crushed. The appliance is made to go under the Janney coupler. A. H. Harris of Denver is the inventor, and an Omaha foundry is making the castings for railways to try out.

Attorney-General Foy of the Province of Ontario, Canada, has included the name of Delos R. Davis in a new list of king’s counsels for that province. Mr. Davis is a colored barrister before the Amherstburg bar of long standing, and will do honor to his new title of “K. C.”

It required 55,000 enumerators to take the census; of these 1,605 were Negroes, and 1,295 of these Negroes were in the Southern States. Secretary Nagel said, a few days ago, that he had not heard a single complaint against them. Ten years ago there were no Negroes at all taking census in South Carolina, but this year 131 colored were employed.

ART.

The playing of Miss Helen Hagan at the concert of the Second Company, Governor’s Foot Guard Band, has been the subject of much enthusiastic comment during the past week. Many of the best musicians of New Haven were present, and their opinions constitute for Miss Hagan a “judgment of her peers.” Miss Hagan is a “prize student” of the Yale department of music and has been heard several times in concert work accompanied by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Her playing has always brought down the house. On the occasion of the Foot Guard concert she appeared twice upon the program in solos by Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Schumann and MacDowell, and responded to vehement demands for encores with compositions by Grieg and Mosznowski.

Although Miss Hagan is not yet twenty years of age and was graduated from the New Haven High School only last June, she has gone a long way up on the road toward being a successful concert artist.—New Haven Register.

William E. Scott has returned to Indianapolis from Paris, where he went nearly two years ago to continue his art work. He was born and reared in Indianapolis. He began his art studies under Otto Stark, while a student at the Manual Training High School. After graduating he became assistant teacher of art in the high school, which position he held a year and a half. He entered the Chicago Art Institute in 1904, won some cash scholarships and became proficient as a mural artist. During his last year’s attendance at the institute he did the mural decorations for five of the public school buildings of Chicago. For a short time after graduating from the institute he was engaged in special work in illustration, after which he went to Paris and studied under P. Marcel Beareneau and later under H. O. Tanner. He exhibited three paintings last August in a Paris salon, and traveled over England, Holland and Belgium before returning here.

Both of the persons mentioned above are colored.

OPINION

THE APPEAL TO EUROPE.

On October 26 a statement and appeal was sent to Europe signed by thirty-two Negro Americans. The appeal was not sent out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, nor did the association stand sponsor for it. It was sent solely on the authority of the men who signed it. These men include two editors, one dentist, seven lawyers, two ministers, two bishops, three physicians, one teacher, two presidents of educational institutions, one member of a Legislature and others.

This appeal, after stating that its signers do not agree with Mr. Washington’s picture of conditions here, states the following grievances:

“Our people were emancipated in a whirl of passion, and then left naked to the mercies of their enraged and impoverished ex-masters. As our sole means of defense we were given the ballot, and we used it so as to secure the real fruits of the war. Without it we would have returned to slavery; with it we struggled toward freedom. No sooner, however, had we rid ourselves of nearly two-thirds of our illiteracy and accumulated $600,000,000 worth of property in a generation, than this ballot, which had become increasingly necessary to the defense of our civil and property rights, was taken from us by force and fraud.

“To-day in eight States where the bulk of the Negroes live, black men of property and university training can be, and usually are, by law denied the ballot, while the most ignorant white man votes. This attempt to put the personal and property rights of the best of the blacks at the absolute political mercy of the worst of the whites is spreading each day.

“Along with this has gone a systematic attempt to curtail the education of the black race. Under a widely advertised system of ‘universal’ education, not one black boy in three to-day has in the United States a chance to learn to read and write. The proportion of school funds due to black children are often spent on whites, and the burden on private charity to support education, which is a public duty, has become almost intolerable.

“In every walk of life we meet discrimination, based solely on race and color, but continually and persistently misrepresented to the world as the natural difference due to condition.

“We are, for instance, usually forced to live in the worst quarters, and our consequent death rate is noted as a race trait, and reason for further discrimination. When we seek to buy property in better quarters we are sometimes in danger of mob violence or, as now in Baltimore, of actual legislation to prevent.

“We are forced to take lower wages for equal work, and our standard of living is then criticised. Fully half the labor unions refuse us admittance, and then claim that as ‘scabs’ we lower the price of labor.

“A persistent caste proscription seeks to force us and confine us to menial occupations where the conditions of work are worst.

“Our women in the South are without protection in law and custom, and are then derided as lewd. A widespread system of deliberate public insult is customary, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to secure decent accommodation in hotels, railway trains, restaurants and theatres, and even in the Christian church we are in most cases given to understand that we are unwelcome unless segregated.

“Worse than all this is the wilful miscarriage of justice in the courts. Not only have 2,500 black men been lynched publicly by mobs in the last twenty-five years, without semblance or pretense of trial, but regularly every day throughout the South the machinery of the courts is used, not to prevent crime and correct the wayward among the Negroes, but to wreak public dislike and vengeance and to raise public funds. This dealing in crime as a means of public revenue is a system well-nigh universal in the South, and while its glaring brutality through private lease has been checked, the underlying principle is still unchanged.

“Everywhere in the United States the old democratic doctrine of recognizing fitness wherever it occurs is losing ground before a reactionary policy of denying preferment in political or industrial life to competent men if they have a trace of Negro blood, and of using the weapons of public insult and humiliation to keep such men down. It is to-day a universal demand in the South that on all occasions social courtesies shall be denied any person of known Negro descent, even to the extent of refusing to apply the titles of ‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Miss.’

“Against this dominant tendency, strong and brave Americans, white and black, are fighting, but they need, and need sadly, the moral support of England and of Europe in this crusade for the recognition of manhood, despite adventitious differences of race, and it is like a blow in the face to have one who himself suffers daily insult and humiliation in America give the impression that all is well. It is one thing to be optimistic, self-forgetful and forgiving, but it is quite a different thing, consciously or unconsciously, to misrepresent the truth.”

This appeal has provoked widespread comment all over the world. The Vienna (Austria) Die Zeit, in publishing the document, says:

“During the sojourn in Vienna of Booker T. Washington, the distinguished apostle of the Negro, there appeared in Die Zeit a report from his pen in which he defended the white race of North America against the charge of systematic race prejudice and pictured the condition of the Negro race as on the whole very favorable. This report created great excitement in America and a deep disagreement among the intelligent leaders of the American Negroes. Booker T. Washington was warmly attacked in many American papers by both white and black speakers, and finally the American Negro leaders drew up an outspoken protest against Washington’s declarations.”

The Kölnische Volk Zeitung, Germany, speaks of an article which was “widely printed in Austria and Germany,” in which Mr. Washington “expressed himself in very optimistic words concerning his race in America and the undoubted solution of the problem,” and then reprints a part of the appeal.

In the United States the comment has taken wide range. From the South comes some bitterness when, for instance, the Raleigh News and Courier says:

“It is hard to tell which is the worst enemy of the Negro race—the brute who invites lynching by the basest of crimes, or the social-equality-hunting fellow like Du Bois, who slanders his country. Fortunately for the peaceable and industrious Negroes in the South, the world does not judge them either by Du Bois or the animal, and helps them and is in sympathy with their efforts to better their condition.”

The Richmond Leader adds:

“Efforts on the part of the Negro to give practical expression to the dream of equality may, indeed, cause temporary trouble and discomfort to the whites, but ultimately and necessarily they could not fail to provoke stern repression, and, if necessary, cruel punishment to the blacks. Fortunately, the great bulk of the Negro population in the South realizes this, and, having—at least for the time—accepted it as inevitable, they adjust themselves to the subordinate place to which their race consigns them, and in which the very existence of the superior race makes it absolutely necessary to keep them. There is little friction, therefore, between them and the white people among whom they live.”

The Chattanooga Times regards the document as “treasonable incendiarism,” and many papers denounce it as a demand for “social equality.” The New Orleans Times-Democrat says:

“To the average American the most striking feature is this ‘appeal,’ aside from its attack upon Booker Washington, is its confession, virtually in so many words, that the theory of racial social equality is losing ground ‘everywhere in the United States.’ Thoughtful students of the American race problem long ago noted the steady spread of race instinct, or prejudice, into sections other than the South; but it was hardly to be expected that the blatant Negro agitators would confess that their strident demands for race equality have not only completely failed, but have helped to turn the scale against them. Such progress as the Negro has made is recorded not by aid of these aspirants for social equality, but in spite of them.”

The Jersey City Journal says Negroes can vote in the North, they are educated in the North, they are only partially restricted in residence, they usually get equal pay for equal work, and the “objection to having colored people in residence sections is natural.”

The Chicago Tribune “can understand and sympathize” with the signers of the protest, but points out that the positions occupied by the signers themselves show the progress of the Negro.

The New York World says:

“Undeniably, the black population of the United States has just grievances. So also has the white population in the United States. Race prejudice is here as it is in Europe, and blacks are not the only sufferers. There is brutal tyranny in industry, but the blacks are not the only victims. There are social limitations that are cruel and inexcusable, but the blacks are not the only ones against whom the gates are shut.

“This is a world in which true men give and take. It is a world in which all must make allowances. It is a world in which, after all, men are judged not so much by race or nationality or possessions as by personal merit. Otherwise, how could a Booker Washington, born a Virginia slave, have ‘stood before kings’ and associated for the greater part of his life with the earth’s greatest and best?

“We do not condemn the American men of color who have made this protest. We simply remonstrate with them. They are asking more than a white man’s chance, and in the circumstances that is inadmissible.”

The Boston Globe, however, thinks that “these and other complaints are backed by educated Negroes, who demand that the old world shall know their wrongs. They deny that Dr. Washington is giving the right impression of the situation in this country. It would seem to the average person that admittedly there is much truth in the catalog of wrongs the association recites.”

The Brooklyn Times, too, acknowledges that “the lot of the colored American is a hard one at best, but there is nothing to be gained by complaining over conditions and prejudices that cannot be altered or eradicated in the lifetime of a single generation. There are obstacles in the path of the Afro-American, even the most intelligent and aspiring, of which the meanest white man can hardly form an adequate conception; the only thing the Negro can do is to make the best of hard conditions and do his utmost by his individual achievements to make the handicap of his color forgotten.

“It is not surprising, however, that to many ambitious colored citizens patience sometimes ceases to seem a virtue.”

It adds that the appeal “is a mild statement of existing conditions. The lot of the colored American is indeed a hard one. But it is improving. The area of sweet reasonableness is being gradually extended. Old prejudices, and especially racial prejudices, die hard, as the history of the dispersed Hebrew nation tells on every page of the annals of 2,000 years. But prejudice is not eternal, and every colored American who does the utmost of his duty in the place he fills does his part in bringing about the day when ungenerous and unjust discrimination will disappear, and when

Man to man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be, for a’ that.”

Finally, the Buffalo Express says emphatically:

“The memorial recites the long and familiar list of Negro wrongs—the political disfranchisement, the denial of education in some States, the discriminations in public places, the forcing into menial occupations, the hostility of trades unions, the attempts to confine Negroes to certain quarters of towns, the insults to Negro women, etc. It need not be gone over here. Readers of the Express are familiar with the shameful record. The fact that this is an appeal to the people of Europe against the people of the United States will arouse fresh antagonism to the Negro in some quarters, but, on the whole, it will do good. For shame’s sake, if not for that of justice, it may arouse us to do our duty. The opinion of the civilized world must have some effect on the most calloused American official conscience. And it is our governing class, our men and women of light and leading, that need to be aroused on this question.”

THE GHETTO.

The Baltimore attempt to segregate colored people has called forth widespread comment. A letter in the New York Sun thus portrays conditions:

“The Negro invasion in Baltimore is principally in a north and northwesterly direction, comprising the most beautiful, most exclusive and most valuable residential sections. About the year 1885 steadily but insidiously the Negro began to invade white residential sections. In Pennsylvania Avenue, beginning at Franklin Street in the downtown district and running north about twenty-six blocks to the intersection of North Avenue and Druid Hill Avenue, beginning at Paca Street in the downtown district and running north about twenty blocks to the intersection of North Avenue, as well as all blocks lying between Pennsylvania and Druid Hill Avenues and containing substantially built three-story houses, are now in the exclusive possession of the Negroes. They are now beginning to invade McCulloh Street, Madison Avenue, Eutaw Place and Linden Avenue, which run parallel with Pennsylvania and Druid Hill Avenues.”

Some papers see in this indubitable evidence of the rise of colored people.

As the Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel puts it:

“This is one of the most hopeful situations regarding the Negro which has been painted. It is enough to send shivers down the backs of the people who believe that ‘Cursed by Canaan’ is to hold good for all time. But it is an immense reassurance to those who are looking for the uplift of the black race. It seems, from this picture, that they must be getting rich rapidly. They are obtaining possession of fine residential property. They want to live in fine houses, the same as white folks with money. Doubtless, too, the same as white folks, they want to have the good things which money will buy.

“Judged by any test other than color, they seem to be very desirable citizens.”

Other papers, like the Bridgeport Telegram, scent danger:

“If they are deprived of the right to build homes where they please which is accorded to the most degraded white man who lands upon these shores provided people will sell land to him, and robbed of the right to become skilled workmen, their situation will be a much graver one than that from which the Civil War delivered them.”

Dr. Henry Moskowitz, in the New York Evening Post, points to the Russian analogy and the Boston Globe also insists on the failure of the Ghetto idea:

“Segregation has never been a very successful solution of the race problem, as may be seen in the experience of European cities with ghettos and in Russia’s attempt to keep Jews confined within certain pales. The Baltimore city council, however, by a piece of special pleading in its report, tries to justify the ordinance by saying that its ‘underlying purpose is the maintenance of peace and good order and the avoidance of friction and irritation between the two races.’ The ordinance ‘aims to prevent the whites from becoming a disturbing element to the blacks and likewise to prevent the Negroes from becoming a disturbing element to the whites.’ Ahem!”

The New York Journal calls the experiment dangerous:

“It is true that the establishment of homes of colored people in neighborhoods hitherto unfrequented by them causes antagonism and may produce trouble and disturb real estate values. But it is also true that it is dangerous, unjust and unworthy of this century to revive the obsolete ghetto system, denying to certain human beings the right to live where they please and where they can.

“We suppose that a white man who owns a house has a legal right to sell it to a Negro if he pleases. And we suppose that the highest court in the country will sustain the right of a colored man to live in his own home, subject to the tax laws and regulations of his neighborhood.

“Probably the plan to compel a hundred thousand colored people in Baltimore to live all together in one neighborhood could not legally be enforced.”

On the legal side of the matter Charles J. Bonaparte, formerly United States Attorney-General, says to a Baltimore Sun reporter:

“I have always understood, however, that it was a lawful use of private property to sell or rent one’s house for a proper purpose to an orderly person of whatever race or color, without regard to the wishes or the complexion of those who live next door, and, if this be true, then the well-known Radecke case, in Forty-ninth Maryland, to say nothing of other authorities, would seem to show clearly that if our always wise Mayor and City Council should undertake to interfere in such a matter, they could, and would, be politely advised to mind their own business.”

The Brooklyn Eagle, the Nyack (N. Y.) Star and the Dover (N. H.) Democrat call attention to the Lee Sing case (43 Federal Reports, 359), which voided an ordinance restricting the residence of a Chinaman.

The New York Sun says on the “property values” issue:

“The Baltimore ordinance cannot be supported on the ground that it is intended to protect one race against the indignities invariably experienced whenever it is compelled to force its presence upon another race in the pursuit of education, business and pleasure or in the exercise of political rights. Its frank purpose is to protect the property interests of the stronger race. In the opinion of the City Council of Baltimore real estate values in certain avenues have depreciated 30 to 50 per cent. owing to the presence of Negro residents, but if the sapient council were to study the recent census showing of Baltimore it would no doubt find that other causes have been at work in bringing about the depreciation. In any event, the proposed ordinance involves a principle which the courts are not likely to accept.”

The Manchester (N. H.) Union says:

“It would seem as if the Negroes themselves would tire of making purchases which immediately sink in value from a third to one-half, and it is somewhat peculiar that in Philadelphia and Washington there has been no tendency to anything of the kind, either as to encroachment upon the territory of the whites or a depreciation of the property occupied by the Negroes.”

The Macon (Ga.) Telegraph sees a chance for the Negro to make money through such segregation and to be proud of their Ghettos, but the Southwestern Christian Advocate, a colored paper, says:

“It is almost certain that wherever there is a Negro quarter there will be little or no city improvement. Notwithstanding Negroes pay the same rate of taxes, the streets on which they live are seldom paved, poorly lighted, and any public improvements that might be made are always last in coming to them. Thousands of Negroes make an effort not to buy within the white district but so near that district that they may be able to get some of the city improvements. There is also a measure of protection as well as a measure of convenience when Negroes live on the better streets.

“The Negro has a just protest against the sort of treatment he is forced to endure notwithstanding he is a taxpayer. It may be alleged that he is not a heavy taxpayer, and this we grant, but there are sections of cities sparsely settled which are improved at the behest of speculators while Negro residents are compelled to live in discomfiture and inconvenience because of the lack of improvement.”

Dr. Hughes of Baltimore, speaking for colored citizens, said:

“It means the stopping of self-respecting, law-abiding colored citizens in their efforts to secure homes and plant themselves in communities as taxpayers.

“Rental values will advance since there will be no outlet for an already congested population: they must stay where they are, and in order to do so pay any price which an unscrupulous money grabber may demand. With the high cost of foodstuffs and the low scale of wages for unskilled labor the passage of the West ordinance points to the creation of a pauper element in our city rather than a thrifty, law-abiding colored citizenship, and the pauper element of any city or community makes the more prosperous pay in one way or another for their support.

“In your ordinance you involve the bread of my people. Recently I stood 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.”

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.

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.

Because, however, one man deservedly lost his job at one of these great schools, he is attempting to found a new school in Atlanta and unnecessarily duplicate this work. Soon he will appear in New York asking funds, and without investigation or thought many will give. When they find their efforts wasted the deserving schools will suffer.

There is crying need of an impartial, thoroughly reliable directory of educational and philanthropic effort among Negroes, a central information bureau on broad lines, with maps and figures at command which could furnish unbiased facts. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is ready to undertake such a work immediately on a small scale, and to expand it whenever it can get the necessary support.

THE OLD STORY.

There is without doubt a large criminal and semi-criminal class among colored people. This is but another way of saying that the social uplift of a group of freedmen is a serious task. But it is also true, and painfully true, that the crime imputed carelessly and recklessly against colored people gives an impression of far greater criminality than the facts warrant.

Take, for instance, a typical case: A little innocent schoolgirl is brutally murdered in New Jersey. A Negro vagabond is arrested. Immediately the news is heralded from East to West, from North to South, in Europe and Asia, of the crime of this black murderer. Immediately a frenzied, hysterical mob gathers and attempts to lynch the poor wretch. He is spirited away and the public is almost sorry that he has escaped summary justice. Without counsel or friends, the man is shut up in prison and tortured to make him confess. “They did pretty near everything to me except kill me,” whispered the wretched man to the first friend he saw.

Finally, after the whole black race in America had suffered aspersion for several weeks, sense begins to dawn in Jersey. After all, what proof was there against this man? He was lazy, he had been in jail for alleged theft from gypsies, he was good natured, and he drank whiskey. That was all. Yet he stayed in jail under no charge and under universal censure. The coroner’s jury found no evidence to indict him. Still he lay in jail. Finally the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People stepped in and said, “What are you holding this man for?” The Public Prosecutor got red in the face and vociferated. Then he went downtown, and when the habeas corpus proceedings came and the judge asked again: “Why are you holding this man?” the prosecutor said chirpily, “For violating election laws,” and brought a mass of testimony. Then the judge discharged the prisoner from the murder charge and congratulated the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—but the man is still in jail.

Such justice is outrageous and such methods disgraceful. Black folk are willing to shoulder their own sins, but the difference between a vagabond and a murderer is too tremendous to be lightly ignored.

“SOCIAL EQUALITY.”

At last we have a definition of the very elusive phrase “Social Equality” as applied to the Negro problem. In stating their grievances colored people have recently specified these points:

1. Disfranchisement, even of educated Negroes.

2. Curtailment of common school training.

3. Confinement to “Ghettos.”

4. Discrimination in wages.

5. Confinement to menial employment.

6. Systematic insult of their women.

7. Lynching and miscarriage of justice.

8. Refusal to recognize fitness “in political or industrial life.”

9. Personal discourtesy.

Southern papers in Charlotte, Richmond, New Orleans and Nashville have with singular unanimity hastened to call this complaint an unequivocal demand for “social equality,” and as such absolutely inadmissible. We are glad to have a frank definition, because we have always suspected this smooth phrase. We recommend on this showing that hereafter colored men who hasten to disavow any desire for “social equality” should carefully read the above list of disabilities which social inequality would seem to prescribe.

ASHAMED.

Any colored man who complains of the treatment he receives in America is apt to be faced sooner or later by the statement that he is ashamed of his race.

The statement usually strikes him as a most astounding piece of illogical reasoning, to which a hot reply is appropriate.

And yet notice the curious logic of the persons who say such things. They argue:

White men alone are men. This Negro wants to be a man. Ergo he wants to be a white man.

Their attention is drawn to the efforts of colored people to be treated decently. This minor premise therefore attracts them. But the major premise—the question as to treating black men like white men—never enters their heads, nor can they conceive it entering the black man’s head. If he wants to be a man he must want to be white, and therefore it is with peculiar complacency that a Tennessee paper says of a dark champion of Negro equality: “He bitterly resents his Negro blood.”

Not so, O Blind Man. He bitterly resents your treatment of Negro blood. The prouder he is, or has a right to be, of the blood of his black fathers, the more doggedly he resists the attempt to load men of that blood with ignominy and chains. It is race pride that fights for freedom; it is the man ashamed of his blood who weakly submits and smiles.

JESUS CHRIST IN BALTIMORE.

It seems that it is not only Property that is screaming with fright at the Black Spectre in Baltimore, but Religion also. Two churches founded in the name of Him who “put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree” are compelled to move. Their palatial edifices filled with marble memorials and Tiffany windows are quite useless for the purposes of their religion since black folk settled next door. Incontinently they have dropped their Bibles and gathered up their priestly robes and fled, after selling their property to colored people for $125,000 in good, cold cash.

Where are they going? Uptown. Up to the wealthy and exclusive and socially select. There they will establish their little gods again, and learned prelates with sonorous voices will ask the echoing pews: “How can the Church reach the working man?”

Why not ask the working man? Why not ask black people, and yellow people, and poor people, and all the people from whom such congregations flee in holy terror? The church that does not run from the lowly finds the lowly at its doors, and there are some such churches in the land, but we fear that their number in Baltimore is not as great as should be.

“EXCEPT SERVANTS.”

The noticeable reservation in all attempts, North and South, to separate black folk and white is the saving phrase, “Except servants.”

Are not servants colored? Is the objection, then, to colored people or to colored people who are not servants? In other words, is this race prejudice inborn antipathy or a social and economic caste?

SOCIAL CONTROL

By JANE ADDAMS, of Hull House

I always find it very difficult to write upon the great race problem which we have in America. I think, on the whole, that the most satisfactory books on the subject are written by people outside of America. This is certainly true of two books, “White Capital and Black Labor,” by the Governor of Jamaica, and William Archer’s book entitled “Afro-America.” Although the latter is inconclusive, it at least gives one the impression that the man who has written it has seen clearly into the situation, and that, I suppose, is what it is very difficult for any American to do.

One thing, however, is clear to all of us, that not only in the South, but everywhere in America, a strong race antagonism is asserting itself, which has various modes of lawless and insolent expression. The contemptuous attitude of the so-called superior race toward the inferior results in a social segregation of each race, and puts the one race group thus segregated quite outside the influences of social control represented by the other. Those inherited resources of the race embodied in custom and kindly intercourse which make much more for social restraint than does legal enactment itself are thus made operative only upon the group which has inherited them, and the newer group which needs them most is practically left without. Thus in every large city we have a colony of colored people who have not been brought under social control, and a majority of the white people in the same community are tacitly endeavoring to keep from them those restraints which can be communicated only through social intercourse. One could easily illustrate this lack of inherited control by comparing the experiences of a group of colored girls with those of a group representing the daughters of Italian immigrants, or of any other South European peoples. The Italian girls very much enjoy the novelty of factory work, the opportunity to earn money and to dress as Americans do, but this new freedom of theirs is carefully guarded. Their mothers seldom give them permission to go to a party in the evening, and never without chaperonage. Their fathers consider it a point of honor that their daughters shall not be alone on the streets after dark. The daughter of the humblest Italian receives this care because her parents are but carrying out social traditions. A group of colored girls, on the other hand, are quite without this protection. If they yield more easily to the temptations of a city than any other girls, who shall say how far the lack of social restraint is responsible for their downfall? The Italian parents represent the social traditions which have been worked out during centuries of civilization, and which often become a deterrent to progress through the very bigotry with which they cling to them; nevertheless, it is largely through these customs and manners that new groups are assimilated into civilization.

Added to this is the fact that a decent colored family, if it is also poor, often finds it difficult to rent a house save one that is undesirable, because situated near a red-light district, and the family in the community least equipped with social tradition is forced to expose its daughters to the most flagrantly immoral conditions the community permits. This is but one of the many examples of the harmful effects of race segregation which might be instanced.

Another result of race antagonism is the readiness to irritation which in time characterizes the intercourse of the two races. We stupidly force one race to demand as a right from the other those things which should be accorded as a courtesy, and every meeting between representatives of the two races is easily characterized by insolence and arrogance. To the friction of city life, and the complications of modern intercourse, is added this primitive race animosity which should long since have been outgrown. When the white people in a city are tacitly leagued against the colored people within its borders, the result is sure to be disastrous, but there are still graver dangers in permitting the primitive instinct to survive and to become self-assertive. When race antagonism manifests itself through lynching, it defiantly insists that it is superior to all those laws which have been gradually evolved during thousands of years, and which form at once the record and the instrument of civilization. The fact that this race antagonism enables the men acting under its impulsion to justify themselves in their lawlessness constitutes the great danger of the situation. The men claim that they are executing a primitive retribution which precedes all law, and in this belief they put themselves in a position where they cannot be reasoned with, although this dangerous manifestation must constantly be reckoned with as a deterrent to progress and a menace to orderly living. Moreover, this race antagonism is very close to the one thing in human relations which is uglier than itself, namely, sex antagonism, and in every defense made in its behalf an appeal to the latter antagonism is closely interwoven. Many men in every community justify violence when it is committed under the impulsion of these two antagonisms, and others carelessly assert that great laws of human intercourse, first and foremost founded upon justice and right relations between man and man, should thus be disregarded and destroyed.

If the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will soberly take up every flagrant case of lawbreaking, and if it allow no withdrawal of constitutional rights to pass unchallenged, it will perform a most useful service to America and for the advancement of all its citizens. Many other opportunities may be open in time to such an association, but is not this its first and most obvious obligation?

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THE TEACHER.

By Leslie Pinckney Hill.

Lord, who am I to teach the way

To little children day by day,

So prone myself to go astray?

I teach them Knowledge, but I know

How faint they flicker, and how low

The candles of my knowledge glow.

I teach them Power to will and do,

But only now to learn anew

My own great weakness through and through.

I teach them Love for all mankind

And all God’s creatures; but I find

My love comes lagging still behind.

Lord, if their guide I still must be,

O let the little children see

The teacher leaning hard on thee!

Employment of Colored Women in Chicago

From a Study Made by the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy

In considering the field of employment for colored women, the professional women must be discussed separately. They admit fewer difficulties and put a brave face on the matter, but in any case their present position was gained only after a long struggle. The education is the less difficult part. The great effort is to get the work after having prepared themselves for it. The Negro woman, like her white sister, is constantly forced to choose between a lower wage or no work. The pity is that her own people do not know the colored girl needs their help nor realize how much they could do for her.

Two of the musicians found the struggle too hard and were compelled to leave Chicago. One girl of twenty-three, a graduate of the Chicago Conservatory of Music, is playing in a low concert hall in one of the worst sections of the city, from 8 in the evening till 4 in the morning. Her wages are $18 a week, and with this she supports a father and mother and younger sister.

There are from fifteen to twenty colored teachers in the public schools of Chicago. This information was obtained from the office of the superintendent, where it was said no record was kept of the number of colored teachers. When they are given such a place they are always warned that they are likely to have difficulty. As a rule they are in schools where the majority of the children are Negroes. They are all in the grades, but they say that their opportunities for promotion are equal to those of white women. Indeed, they say that there are two places where they are not discriminated against because of their color. One is in the public schools, the other is under the Civil Service Commission.

However, the professional women do not have the greatest difficulty. The real barriers are met by the women who have had only an average education—girls who have finished high school, or perhaps only the eighth grade. These girls, if they were white, would find employment at clerical and office work in Chicago’s department stores, mail order houses and wholesale stores. But these positions are absolutely closed to the Negro girl. She has no choice but housework.

When the object of the inquiry was explained to one woman she said: “Why, no one wants a Negro to work for him. I’ll show you—look in the newspaper.” And she produced a paper with its columns of advertisements for help wanted. “See, not one person in this whole city has asked for a Negro to work for him.”

A great many of the colored women find what they call “day work” most satisfactory. This means from eight to nine hours a day at some kind of housework, cleaning, washing, ironing or dusting. This the Negro women prefer to regular positions as maids, because it allows them to go at night to their families. The majority of the women who do this work receive $1.50, with 10 cents extra for carfare. There was a higher grade of day work for which the pay was $2 a day besides the carfare. This included the packing of trunks, washing of fine linen and lace curtains, and even some mending.

The records of the South Side Free Employment Agency showed that the wages of colored women were uniformly lower than those of white women. Of course, there is no way of judging of ability by records, but where the white cooks received $8 per week the Negro cooks were paid $7, and where the white maids received $6, sometimes, but not as frequently as in the case of the cooks, the Negro maid received less. One dollar and a half was paid for “day work.” At the colored employment agency which is run in connection with the Frederic Douglas Centre they have many more requests for maids than they have girls to fill the places. Good places with high wages are sometimes offered, but the girls are more and more demanding “day work” and refusing to work by the week. At the South Side Free Employment Agency during the months of January, February and March of this year forty-two positions for colored women were found.[2] These forty-two positions were filled by thirty-six women, some of them coming back to the office two or three times during the three months. The superintendent said it was difficult to find places for the colored women who applied, and they probably succeeded in placing only about 25 per cent. of them. In the opinion of those finding the work for the girls in this office, the reason for the difficulties they encounter are the fact that they do not remain long in one place and have a general reputation for dishonesty. The fundamental cause of the discrimination by employers against them is racial prejudice either in the employer himself or in his customers.

2. 454 white women in the same time.

One girl who has only a trace of colored blood was able to secure a position as salesgirl in a store. After she had been there a long time she asked for an increase in wages, such as had been allowed the white girls, but the request was refused and she was told that she ought to be thankful that they kept her at all.

In many cases, especially when the women were living alone, the earnings, plus the income from the lodgers, barely covered the rent. When they work by the day they rarely work more than four days a week. Sometimes the amount they gave as their weekly wage fell short of even paying the rent, but more often the rent was covered and a very small margin left to live on.

Such treatment has discouraged the Negro woman. She has accepted the conditions and seldom makes any real effort to get into other sorts of work. The twelfth question on the schedule, “What attempts have you made to secure other kinds of work in Chicago or elsewhere?” was usually answered by a question: “What’s the use of trying to get work when you know you can’t get it?”

The colored women are like white women in the same grade of life. They do not realize the need of careful training, and they do not appreciate the advantages of specialization in their work. But the Negro woman is especially handicapped, for she not only lacks training but must overcome the prejudice against her color. Of the 270 women interviewed, 43 per cent. were doing some form of housework for wages, yet all evidence of conscious training was entirely lacking. This need must be brought home to them before they can expect any real advancement.

A peculiar problem presents itself in connection with the housework. Practically this is the only occupation open to Negro women, and it is also the only occupation where one is not expected to go home at night. This the Negroes insist on doing. They are accused of having no family feeling, yet the fact remains that they will accept a lower wage and live under far less advantageous conditions for the sake of being free at night. That is why the “day work” is so popular. Rather than live in some other person’s home and get good wages for continued service, the colored woman prefers to live in this way. She will have a tiny room, go out as many days a week as she can get places, and pay for her room and part of her board out of her earnings, which sometimes amount to only $3 or $4.50 per week.

Occasionally laundry, sewing or hair work is done in their homes, but the day work is almost universally preferred.

Many of the Negroes are so nearly white that they can be mistaken for white girls, in which case they are able to secure very good positions and keep them as long as their color is not known.

One girl worked for a fellowship at the Art Institute. Her work was good and the place was promised her. In making out the papers she said Negro, when asked her nationality, to the great astonishment of the man in charge. He said he would have to look into the matter, but the girl did not get the fellowship.

A young man, son of a colored minister in the city, had a position in a business man’s office, kept the books, collected rents, etc. He had a peculiar name, and one of the tenants remembered it in connection with the boy’s father, who had all the physical characteristics of the Negro. The tenant made inquiries and reported the matter to the landlord, threatening to leave the building if he had to pay rent to a Negro. The boy was discharged.

A colored girl, who was very light colored, said that more than once she secured a place and the colored people themselves had told the employer he had a “Negro” working for him. The woman with whom she was living said: “It’s true every time. The Negroes are their own worst enemies.”

To summarize, the isolation which is forced upon the Negro, both in his social and his business life, constitutes one of the principal difficulties which he encounters. As far as the colored woman is concerned, as we have shown, the principal occupations which are open to her are domestic service and school teaching. This leaves a large number of women whose education has given them ambitions beyond housework, who are not fitted to compete with northern teachers and yet cannot obtain clerical work because they are Negroes. Certain fields in which there is apparently an opportunity for the colored women are little tried. For example, sewing is profitable and there is little feeling against the employment of Negro seamstresses, and yet few follow the dressmaking profession.

Without doubt one fundamental reason for the difficulties the colored woman meets in seeking employment is her lack of industrial training. The white woman suffers from this also, but the colored woman doubly so. The most hopeful sign is the growing conviction on the part of the leading Negro women of the city that there is need of co-operation between them and the uneducated and unskilled, and that they are trying to find some practical means to give to these women the much-needed training for industrial life.

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THE BURDEN

If blood be the price of liberty,

If blood be the price of liberty,

If blood be the price of liberty,

Lord God, we have paid in full.

COLORED MEN LYNCHED WITHOUT TRIAL.

1885 | 78
1886 | 71
1887 | 80
1888 | 95
1889 | 95
1890 | 90
1891 | 121
1892 | 155
1893 | 154
1894 | 134
1895 | 112
1896 | 80
1897 | 122
1898 | 102
1899 | 84
1900 | 107
1901 | 107
1902 | 86
1903 | 86
1904 | 83
1905[3] | 60
1906[3] | 60
1907[3] | 60
1908[3] | 80
1909 | 73
1910[4] | 50
Total | 2,425

3. Estimated.

4. Estimated to date.

The policy usually carried out consistently in the South of refusing the colored woman the courtesies accorded the white woman leads to some unfortunate results. One of the courtesies refused is the title of “Mrs.” or “Miss.” Thus a Kentucky newspaper, in its recent educational news, notes “the resignation of Mrs. Mattie Spring Barr as a substitute teacher and the unanimous election of Miss Ella Williams,” while a few paragraphs below it says that “Principal Russell of the Russell Negro School asked that Lizzie Brooks be promoted to the position of regular teacher and that Annie B. Jones be made a substitute.” Here we have two groups of women doing similar important work for the community, yet the group with Negro blood is denied the formality of address that every other section of the country gives to the teacher in a public school.

How much the South loses by this policy is shown by a Northerner’s experience in the office of one of the philanthropic societies. Two probation officers, volunteers, were going out to their work. The secretary of the society addressed the first, a white woman, as Mrs. Brown: the second, a little middle-aged black woman, he called Mary. When they had left the Northerner questioned the difference in address. “I couldn’t call a nigger Mrs. or Miss.,” the secretary expostulated. “It would be impossible.” “But here in your own city,” the Northerner answered, “I happen to know a number of educated colored girls, some of them college graduates, who have a desire for social service. Under you they might learn the best methods of charitable work, but they would not care to be called ‘Annie’ or ‘Jane’ by a young white man. Can you afford to lose such helpers as these?”

He had but one answer. “It would never do for me to say Mrs. or Miss to a nigger. It would be impossible.”

Throughout the country there are a number of colored postal clerks. These men, with others in the service, belong to the Mutual Benefit Association. At a recent meeting in Chicago the delegates to this Mutual Benefit Association voted in the future to admit only clerks of the Caucasian race. According to one of the colored clerks, the meeting that passed this vote was “packed,” colored members receiving no notice to elect delegates to it.

The black servant is more acceptable to some people than the educated colored man. As an instance of this is Mr. U. of Washington, a highly cultivated Negro of some means. As owner of a cottage and a few acres of land in a small Virginia town, he good-naturedly allowed an old black woman to live rent-free upon his place. On her death he went down to claim the property, but found the woman’s daughter had put in a counter claim. The case went to court, and in his plea before the jury the woman’s lawyer said: “Are you going to take property away from this black mammy’s daughter to give it to a smart nigger from Washington?” And despite Mr. U.’s former yearly payment of taxes, despite the deed which he himself held, he lost his suit.

In Wilcox County Ala., there are 10,758 Negro children and 2,000 white children of school age, making a total population of 12,758. The per capita allowance for each child in the State this year is $2.56. According to the recent apportionment of the school fund on this basis, Wilcox County receives $32,660.48. Of this amount the 10,758 Negro children have been allowed one-fifth, or $6,532.09, about 60 cents each, while the 2,000 white children receive the remaining four-fifths, or $26,128.39, about $13 each. Further investigation shows that only 1,000 of the 10,758 Negro children are in school, leaving 6,758 with absolutely no provision for obtaining even a common school education.

TALKS ABOUT WOMEN

NUMBER TWO By Mrs. JOHN E. MILHOLLAND

A most interesting and instructive morning was given at the Berkeley Lyceum on Wednesday, December 7, under the auspices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The weather was bitterly cold, and although the great fall of snow during the night had made getting about a not only troublesome but dangerous experience, the little theatre was well filled with many well-known women in sympathy with the cause and interested in all sorts of activities for progress. The chairman, Mr. John Haynes Holmes, introduced Madame Hackley, who gave the musical part of the program, and did it well with her customary finish and appreciation.

Madam Hackley was trained in Paris, and gave several French selections with great skill.

Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, the speaker, was most enthusiastically received, and made, as usual, a most effective and touching speech, to which her audience listened with not only interest but surprise, as many present had never dreamed of the struggles of these women in their efforts for educational advancement.

Without doubt Mrs. Terrell is one of the best orators we have to-day. She has much dignity, with a very easy and fluent mode of speaking. She is direct, and when, as on this occasion, she is talking for the women of her race, her enthusiasm and sincerity carry conviction to her listeners. When she had finished Mrs. Terrell was warmly congratulated, and the enthusiastic daughter of the great orator, Robert Ingersoll, Mrs. Walston R. Brown, declared that “Mrs. Terrell must tell her story again to a larger and fuller audience.” In her remarks Mrs. Terrell told of the obstacles which confront colored women and girls in their efforts to better their conditions. Often having to battle against this great evil of race prejudice which yet lingers in our land and which so often stands in the way of progress for these women, not only, said Mrs. Terrell, must she struggle with the handicap of color, but only too often she gets no sympathy from the white woman, who should be at least willing to give a helping hand to these colored friends who, like herself, are more or less looking forward to perfect freedom and all which that means for womanhood. The speaker thought that right here was a big field for the American woman’s activities, and hoped for the co-operation of her white friends.

Mrs. Stanton Blatch, who was in the audience, made a short but forceful speech for the cause of women, and thought “the vote” would help along quicker than anything else all reforms of this or any other nature. The secretary of the Trades Woman’s League also spoke, and declared that she would do her part toward opening the doors of her association to all women, whether white or colored.

After a most delightful rendering of several Negro melodies, Mrs. Hackley told how she so much hoped to establish a school of music for her people. No one hearing her direct, simple and earnest story doubted for a moment her ultimate success in this worthy effort, and she most certainly will have the co-operation of every musical member of her audience.

The chairman made a few remarks with his usual dignity and precision, and the first musical morning was voted a real success. Those having boxes were Mrs. Villard, Mrs. E. W. Harkness, Mrs. Paul M. Warburg, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, Mrs. Robert Ingersoll, whose daughter, Miss Maud, acted as one of the ushers; Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, Mrs. Frederick Nathan, Mrs. Frances R. Keyser, Mrs. Charles W. Anderson, together with many other well-known women, white and colored.

The arrangements were in charge of Miss Frances Blascoer, executive secretary of the Association.

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The annual report of British East Africa for the year 1908–09, which was issued a few months ago, states that the period was not marked by any salient events, but the Protectorate had made steady progress in spite of weather conditions somewhat unfavorable to agriculture. There had been little or no friction with native tribes. Labor difficulties still exist, but show a tendency to diminish. European overseers of the native railway laborers have proved far more satisfactory than the Indians formerly employed.

The report says of slavery:

“The ordinance for the abolition of the legal status of slavery has worked well and without friction during the year. Altogether 3,593 cases have been settled by the District Courts, and compensation to the amount of £7,053 has been awarded.”

WHAT TO READ

PERIODICALS.

Plea for the Conservation of Another Great National Resource. F. P. Chisholm. Education, November.

Dip of the Tar Brush. M. A. H. New England Magazine, October.

Special Plea of a Southerner. E. Harlan. New England Magazine, October.

Prince Henry of Portugal and the African Crusade of the Fifteenth Century. C. R. Beasley. American Historical Review, October.

Excavation of Cyrene. F. W. Kelsey. Nation, October 27.

Diary of Gideon Welles. Atlanta, December.

Cuban Experiences. Frederick Funston. Scribner’s, December.

A Hero’s Conscience. G. Bradford, Jr. Atlanta, December.

BOOKS.

Wilson, Lady S. D. A.—South African Memories. Longmans.

Shotwell, W. G.—Life of Charles Sumner. Crowell. 733 pp.

Steffens. Alexander H., Recollections of. Doubleday, Page & Co. 572 pp.

Newton, J. H.—Lincoln and Herndon. Torch Press. 367 pp.

Sylvester, H. M.—Indian Wars of New England. Clark. 3 vols.

Haring, C. H.—The Buccaneers of the West Indies in the 17th Century. Dutton. 298 pp.

Hagood, Johnson.—Memoirs of the War of Secession. State Co. 498 pp.

Deutsch, G.—History of the Jews. Bloch. 122 pp.

Shoemaker. M. M.—Islam Lands. Putnams. 251 pp.

Withers, P.—Egypt of Yesterday and To-day. Stokes. 293 pp.

Addams, Jane.—Twenty Years at Hull House. Macmillan, 462 pp.

Documentary History of American Industrial Society. Vol, IX: Labor Movement. Clark. 378 pp.

THE LADY OF THE SLAVE STATES.

Mrs. George Haven Putnam, in a very charming essay in the Contemporary Review for December, discusses “The Lady of the Slave States.” She deals gently enough with her subject; she says that the slave-owner’s wife like everybody else with slavery was blighted by its curse, but she demolished very effectually the myth of the gracious fascinating woman of culture who ruled family and estate by the charm of her personality.

The ante-bellum Southern lady never had much to say for herself and was in short not “the Gothic saint in her niche” that tradition pictures, but a kindly little creature surrounded by “Orientalism” and little better off, so far as opportunities for development went, than any lady of the harem.

Mrs. Putnam quotes Miss Martineau, who traveled extensively through the slave States, to show how the system limited the white women and made them “the greatest slaves on the plantation.” Patience was the supreme virtue of the ante-bellum lady—they made the best of a bad state of affairs. Logic she had little or none, and her up-bringing tended to make her a delightful girl but a middle-aged woman of only moderate attractions. And while she was often very kind to her slaves her sensibilities seemed in some measure blunted by perpetual sight of suffering and injustice.

When the war ended the ex-mistresses of slaves showed how good was the material that had been buried under the “Orientalism” of the plantation.

RACE PREJUDICE IN THE ORIENT.

Race Prejudice: An address by Melville E. Stone to the Quill Club, New York City.

The best review of this remarkable little pamphlet will be a few extracts from its pages:

What is to be the outcome? What does all this mean for the future of the world? Let us view the problem from the political, the commercial and the moral aspects. How long will the 6,000 soldiers we have in the Philippines be able to keep our flag afloat among 8,000,000 of natives? How long will the 75,000 English soldiers in India be able to maintain British sovereignty over 300,000,000 of Asians? Believe me, these are not idle questions. They are up to us for an answer, whether we will or no, and upon our ability to make answer will depend the future of what we are pleased to call our Western civilization. I would not be an alarmist, and yet I would have you feel that Macauley’s suggestion of the New Zealander on a broken arch of London Bridge, sketching the ruins of St. Paul, has come to be more than an extravagant figure of speech. And I am convinced that there is real danger awaiting us unless we mend our ways. It is not the Asian who needs educating; it is the European. I am not worrying half so much about the heathen in his blindness as I am about the Christian in his blindness. Asia is awake and preparing for the coming struggle. And we are doing very much to force the issue and to prepare her for the contest. For a century we have been sending at enormous cost our missionaries to all parts of the hemisphere to civilize. There may be doubt as to the amount of proselyting we have been able to accomplish; there can be no possible doubt of the work we have done to strengthen the Asian people politically and commercially.

We shall never meet the problems growing out of our relation with the Far East unless we absolutely and once for all put away race prejudice. I believe the European snob in Asia is distinctly the enemy of the civilized West. And his coadjutor in this country is a fitting criminal yoke-fellow. Let me give you some illustrations of what I mean—cases which came under my personal observation. From Bombay to Yokohama there is not a social club at any port or treaty point where a native, whatever his culture or refinement, will be admitted. At the Bengal Club at Calcutta last year a member in perfectly good standing innocently invited an Eurasian gentleman—that is, one who is half native and half European—to dine with him. It became known that the invitation had been extended, and a storm of opposition broke among the members. The matter was finally adjusted by setting aside the ladies’ department of the club, and there the offending member and his unfortunate guest dined alone. The next day the member was called before the board of governors and notified that another like breach of the rules would result in his expulsion. The beating of native servants and workmen in India is a daily and hourly occurrence. It formerly was so at Hong Kong and Shanghai, but Mr. Sprague, the representative of the Standard Oil Company at Shanghai, told me that since the Russo-Japanese war the natives would not stand it, and that all beating of them by Europeans in that city had ceased.

The son of a maharaja goes to England, is educated at Oxford or Cambridge, is lionized in the West End of London—mayhap he is honored with an invitation to Windsor. When he goes back home he may enter no white man’s club; if he be fortunate enough to be invited to a white man’s function, no white woman will dance or associate with him; and if by any luck he should marry a European, he, his wife and his children become outcasts. Although native troops, like the Sikhs, have shown undying loyalty to the British flag and on frequent occasions have exhibited courage in the highest degree, no one of them ever has or ever can achieve the Victoria Cross.

Socially they are all saying to us: “Stop cheating us, stop swindling us, stop your treating us as your inferiors who are to be beaten and robbed.” Japan is crying out, “Treat us fairly and we will go more than half-way. Leave to us the question whether Japanese laborers shall go to America to annoy you, and we will stop them. But do not say that you will admit the lazaroni of Hungary and Italy and Russia, simply because they are white, and shut us out because we are yellow.”

The Sinhalese, natives of Ceylon, while I was in Colombo, addressed a remarkable communication to the Governor-General. They said a hundred years ago there was established in the United States a new theory of government—that there should be no taxation without representation. “Now,” they said, “we ask a share in the government of the island. We pay taxes. You may fix a property qualification and say that no one having less than a thousand pounds sterling shall share in the government. We shall not object. You may also fix an educational qualification. You may say that no one but a college graduate shall take part in the government. We will not object. In short, you may fix any qualification except a racial qualification. That would not be fair.” “And what answer have you to make?” I asked Mr. Crosby Rolles, editor of The Times of Ceylon. “To meet their request,” he replied, “would mean to turn over the government of Ceylon to them at once, because there are 6,000 of them and only 5,000 English men, women and children. We must stop educating them.”

What do you think of that for a remedy? Personally. I do not think it will work, any more than I think any rule of arbitrary repression can endure. I cannot bring myself to sympathize altogether with the views expressed by Mr. Roosevelt in his recent Guildhall speech. I take refuge in what seems to me the larger experience and riper judgment of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, who in July, 1904, was also given the freedom of the City of London in Guildhall, and on that occasion used these words: “Depend upon it, you will never rule the East except through the heart, and the moment imagination has gone out of your Asiatic policy your empire will dwindle and decay.

“In smug complacency you may close your doors which look toward Asia, while you open wide those which look toward Europe; you may refuse the Oriental admission to your schools, while you accord the privilege to any child of a European; you may pile import duties mountain high, and raise our standards of living to any pitch of extravagance; you may build warships without limit, and you may continue to treat the Asian as legitimate prey. But I am confident that it will not avail.

“As a soldier, whether at Omdurman, in the Sudan, or on 203–Metre Hill, at Port Arthur, the man of color has shown himself a right good fighting man; in commerce he has, by his industry, perseverance, ingenuity and frugality, given us pause; and before the eternal throne his temporal and his spiritual welfare are worth as much as yours and mine.”

BOOKS

When our readers wish to know where to buy the best books on race and other human problems they should consult this list:

A BOOK ALL INTERESTED IN HUMAN PROBLEMS OUGHT TO READ

JOHN BROWN

A Biography Fifty Years After

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THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

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Fully Illustrated with Portraits, and Other Illustrations

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Atlanta University Studies

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The Souls of Black Folk

By W. E. Burghardt DuBois

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Books for “Crisis” Readers

JOHN BROWN

By W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS, A.M., Ph. D., Professor of Sociology in Atlanta University

12mo. Cloth, stamped in gold, gilt top. With frontispiece portrait of Brown

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THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH

His economic progress in relation to his Moral and Religious Development. By BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, of Tuskegee Institute, and W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS, of Atlanta University

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Chapter 1—The Economic Development of the Negro Race in Slavery

Chapter 2—The Economic Development of the Negro Race Since Its Emancipation

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a manufacturing corporation, is the sole owner of six letters patent, consisting of brake gearing and novel improvements in forks. These forks possess many practical advantages, as they combine the functions of an ordinary fork, a pike, a larding needle, a needle for sewing together a roll of beef, venison, veal or the legs of a turkey, duck or other game, stuffed or otherwise, and obviates the necessity of providing separate utensils to serve the several purposes for which such utensils are designed. The NEW POWER, on which the Company is now securing patents, will REVOLUTIONIZE the entire mechanism of power and its application. It will surpass the Marconi Wireless and the telegraph and telephone in importance. Think of it! A POWER which will displace steam, water, electricity and all known power in use to-day. At an early date the Company will demonstrate this NEW POWER. Do not delay. Invest now. Capital Stock $100,000. Shares $5.

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Educational Directory

Howard University

WILBUR P. THIRKIELD, President

Washington, D. C.

The College of Arts and Sciences—Kelly Miller, A.M., Dean.

The Teachers’ College—Lewis B. Moore, A.M., Ph.D., Dean.

The Academy—George J. Cummings, A.M., Dean.

The Commercial College—George W. Cook, A.M., Dean.

School of Manual Arts and Applied Sciences—

PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS

The School of Theology—Isaac Clark, D.D., Dean.

The School of Medicine: Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Colleges—Edward O. Balloch, M.D., Dean.

The School of Law—Benjamin F. Leighton, LL.D., Dean.

For catalogue and special information address Dean of Department.

Atlanta University

Is beautifully located in the City of Atlanta, Ga. The courses of study include High School, Normal School and College, with manual training and domestic science. Among the teachers are graduates of Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Smith and Wellesley. Forty one years of successful work have been completed. Students come from all parts of the South. Graduates are almost universally successful.

For further information address

President EDWARD T. WARE

ATLANTA, GA.

Wilberforce University

WILBERFORCE, OHIO

Opens first Tuesday in September

Located in Greene County, 3¼ miles from Xenia, Ohio. Healthful surroundings. Refined community. Faculty of 32 members. Expenses low. Classical and Scientific, Theological, Preparatory, Music, Military, Normal and Business Departments. Ten industries taught. Great opportunities for High School graduates entering College or Professional Courses. Two new buildings for girls to be erected this year—one now in process of erection, and the other to be begun in the spring.

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W. S. SCARBOROUGH, President.

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Address THE PRESIDENT

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Write for Catalogue to

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Real Estate and Probate Matters a Specialty

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General Practice Notary Public

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Attorney and Counselor-at-Law

1020 Metropolitan Life Building

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ADVERTISING RATES

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The Curse of Race Prejudice

James F. Morton, Jr., A.M., Author and Publisher

Forceful, rational, comprehensive. An arsenal of facts and unanswerable arguments. Invaluable for propaganda. Read the chapter on “The Bugbear of Social Equality,” which is a veritable eye-opener. Thousands already sold. Agents wanted everywhere.

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Mme. BECK’S School of Dressmaking

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CAPITAL STOCK, $15,000

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Write for information. The best paying investment ever offered our people.

NYANZA PHARMACY

is the only colored Drug Store in New York City, and the purpose of the Corporation is to establish chains of stores, carrying Drugs and everything incidental to the Drug business. It is really the indisputable duty of every self-respecting member of the race to give it his support.

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Cigars and Tobacco for Sale

Daily and Weekly Papers and Magazines

Brooklyn Agents for THE CRISIS

How to Elevate the Moral and Civic Tone of the Negro Community

Negroes—good, bad and indifferent—as long as they have lived in tenements, have had to live shamefully intermingled. Formerly they were forced to live in ramshackle tenements that had been abandoned by the whites, at exorbitant rents for wretched accommodations. But now, thanks to the thrift and enterprise of certain progressive Negro real estate agents, they may live in houses having the same conveniences and accommodations as the whites. While, happily, the physical surroundings of the Negro tenant have been radically altered, unhappily his moral surroundings remain unchanged. How, then, can we improve his moral surroundings? Co-operation is a sine qua non in the solution of this problem. Tenants MUST co-operate with their agents and agents MUST co-operate with one another in ameliorating the moral and civic condition of Negro communities. We can’t lean on the landlord. He is an indifferent third party. He cares not, so to speak, whether his house is tenanted with respectable or disrespectable tenants, so long as it is full and he gets his rents. If he’s at all concerned about the disrespectable or respectable tenants in his house, it’s only to the extent that he’s afraid the former may be the cause of some or all of the latter moving, thus leaving him with some vacancies.

The present moral conditions of Negro tenantry are indeed bad. The individual efforts of certain Negro agents toward bettering the conditions have been praiseworthy, to say the least, but as far as making any progress toward the desired goal is concerned, such efforts must needs be and practically have been of little or no avail. What is the desirable goal is too obvious to command explanation. But how to reach that goal is the matter under consideration. In the first place, we repeat that the united efforts of tenants and agents are the desideratum.

Let the agent compel a prospective tenant to furnish references satisfying fair and reasonable requirements as imposed by, agreed upon and accepted in toto by all agents. The respectable tenant will be glad to do it. Any tenant not furnishing such references should be “jim-crowed,” as it were, from decent neighborhoods.

This matter of bettering the moral and civic condition of Negro communities is a case of a wheel within a wheel. As has been emphasized before, the agent can do absolutely nothing without co-operation. Ministers wielding great influence over large congregations can lend a powerfully helping hand, if they will. We must all pull together. We cannot work resultfully in factions. It is unquestionably within our power to do it, if all others do their respective parts and the colored real estate agent does his.

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HENRY PHIPPS’ MODEL TENEMENTS FOR COLORED FAMILIES

Do You Want a Position?

Best Places

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The New York and New Jersey Industrial Exchange, through its Employment Agency Department, furnishes more Colored Help to the leading families in the city and in the suburban towns than any other medium in New York.

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Telephones 5016–4546 Columbus

Cosmopolitan Automobile School

Automobile School

The aim of the School will be to give its students a sufficient knowledge of the theory and practice of Automobile and Automobiling to enable them to meet the emergencies that constantly arise to make those who complete the course competent to run machines, take them apart and assemble them properly, and to make such repairs as may be necessary and possible on the road.

TUITION—Six weeks’ course, including Shop and Road Work, $25: installments if you wish, payable $5 on enrollment and $20 by the completion of the fourth week.

SHOP WORK—Consists of naming all the parts of the automobile, taking the engine and the rest of the automobile apart and putting them together again properly, and making such repairs as may be necessary and possible.

ROAD WORK—When the shop work is complete the student takes up the operating and handling of cars on the road until he is competent.

If there is any special information which you desire respecting the course or opportunities in the automobile business we shall be glad to bear from you.

COSMOPOLITAN AUTO CO. of New York

Telephone 803 Columbus School: Hotel Maceo, 213 West 53d St. LEE A. POLLARD, Mgr.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.

Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.

Re-indexed footnotes using numbers.

A reprint edition provided by Arno Press, A Publishing and Library Service of the New York Times, New York, 1969.