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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?