IA man stood stained; France was one Alp of hate,Pressing upon him with the whole world's weight;In all the circle of the ancient sunThere was no voice to speak for him—not one;In all the world of men there was no soundBut of a sword flung broken to the ground.Hell laughed its little hour; and then beholdHow one by one the guarded gates unfold!Swiftly a sword by Unseen Forces hurled,And now a man rising against the world!IIOh, import deep as life is, deep as time!There is a Something sacred and sublimeMoving behind the worlds, beyond our ken,Weighing the stars, weighing the deeds of men.Take heart, O soul of sorrow, and be strong!There is one greater than the whole world's wrong.Be hushed before the high Benignant PowerThat moves wool-shod through sepulcher and tower!No truth so low but He will give it crown;No wrong so high but He will hurl it down.O men that forge the fetter, it is vain;There is a Still Hand stronger than your chain.'Tis no avail to bargain, sneer, and nod,And shrug the shoulder for reply to God.
IA man stood stained; France was one Alp of hate,Pressing upon him with the whole world's weight;In all the circle of the ancient sunThere was no voice to speak for him—not one;In all the world of men there was no soundBut of a sword flung broken to the ground.Hell laughed its little hour; and then beholdHow one by one the guarded gates unfold!Swiftly a sword by Unseen Forces hurled,And now a man rising against the world!
A man stood stained; France was one Alp of hate,Pressing upon him with the whole world's weight;In all the circle of the ancient sunThere was no voice to speak for him—not one;In all the world of men there was no soundBut of a sword flung broken to the ground.
Hell laughed its little hour; and then beholdHow one by one the guarded gates unfold!Swiftly a sword by Unseen Forces hurled,And now a man rising against the world!
IIOh, import deep as life is, deep as time!There is a Something sacred and sublimeMoving behind the worlds, beyond our ken,Weighing the stars, weighing the deeds of men.Take heart, O soul of sorrow, and be strong!There is one greater than the whole world's wrong.Be hushed before the high Benignant PowerThat moves wool-shod through sepulcher and tower!No truth so low but He will give it crown;No wrong so high but He will hurl it down.O men that forge the fetter, it is vain;There is a Still Hand stronger than your chain.'Tis no avail to bargain, sneer, and nod,And shrug the shoulder for reply to God.
Oh, import deep as life is, deep as time!There is a Something sacred and sublimeMoving behind the worlds, beyond our ken,Weighing the stars, weighing the deeds of men.
Take heart, O soul of sorrow, and be strong!There is one greater than the whole world's wrong.Be hushed before the high Benignant PowerThat moves wool-shod through sepulcher and tower!No truth so low but He will give it crown;No wrong so high but He will hurl it down.O men that forge the fetter, it is vain;There is a Still Hand stronger than your chain.'Tis no avail to bargain, sneer, and nod,And shrug the shoulder for reply to God.
The bitter period that we have been considering was not wholly without its bright features, and with the new century new voices began to be articulate. In May, 1900, there was in Montgomery a conference in which Southern men undertook as never before to make a study of their problems. That some who came had yet no real conception of the task and its difficulties may be seen from the suggestion of one man that the Negroes be deported to the West or to the islands of the sea. Several men advocated the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. The position outstanding for its statesmanship was that of ex-Governor William A. McCorkle of West Virginia, who asserted that the right of franchise was the vital and underlying principle of the life of the people of the United States and must not be violated, that the remedy for present conditions was an "honest and inflexible educational and property basis, administered fairly for black and white," and finally that the Negro Problem was not a local problem but one to be settled by the hearty coöperation of all of the people of the United States.
Meanwhile the Southern Educational Congress continued its sittings from year to year, and about 1901 there developed new and great interest in education, the Southern Education Board acting in close coöperation with the General Education Board, the medium of the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller, and frequently also with the Peabody and Slater funds.224In 1907 came the announcement of the Jeanes Fund, established by Anna T. Jeanes, a Quaker of Philadelphia, for the education of the Negro in the rural districts of the South; and in 1911 that of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, established by Caroline Phelps-Stokes with emphasis on the education of the Negro in Africa and America. More and more these agencies were to work in harmony and coöperation with the officials in the different states concerned. In 1900 J.L.M. Curry, a Southern man of great breadth of culture, was still in charge of the Peabody and Slater funds, but he was soon to pass from the scene and in the work now to be done were prominent Robert C. Ogden, Hollis B. Frissell, Wallace Buttrick, George Foster Peabody, and James H. Dillard.
Along with the mob violence, moreover, that disgraced the opening years of the century was an increasing number of officers who were disposed to do their duty even under trying circumstances. Less than two months after his notorious inaugural Governor Vardaman of Mississippi interested the reading public by ordering out a company of militia when a lynching was practically announced to take place, and by boarding a special train to the scene to save the Negro. In this same state in 1909, when the legislature passed a law levying a tax for the establishment of agricultural schools for white students, and levied this on the property of white people and Negroes alike, though only the white people were to have schools, a Jasper County Negro contested the matter before the Chancery Court, which declared the law unconstitutional, and he was further supported by the Supreme Court of the state. Such a decision was inspiring, but it was not the rule, and already the problems of another decade were being foreshadowed. Already also under the stress of conditions in the South many Negroes were seeking a haven in the North. By 1900 there were as many Negroes in Pennsylvania as in Missouri, whereas twenty years before there had been twice as many in the latter state. There were in Massachusetts more than in Delaware, whereas twenty years before Delaware had had 50 per cent more than Massachusetts. Within twenty years Virginia gained 312,000 white people and only 29,000 Negroes, the latter having begun a steady movement to New York. North Carolina gained 400,000 white people and only 93,000 Negroes. South Carolina and Mississippi, however, were not yet affected in large measure by the movement.
The race indeed was beginning to be possessed by a new consciousness. After 1895 Booker T. Washington was a very genuine leader. From the first, however, there was a distinct group of Negro men who honestly questioned the ultimate wisdom of the so-called Atlanta Compromise, and who felt that in seeming to be willing temporarily to accept proscription and to waive political rights Dr. Washington had given up too much. Sometimes also there was something in his illustrations of the effects of current methods of education that provoked reply. Those who were of the opposition, however, were not at first united and constructive, and in their utterances they sometimes offended by harshness of tone. Dr. Washington himself said of the extremists in this group that they frequently understood theories but not things; that in college they gave little thought to preparing for any definite task in the world, but started out with the idea of preparing themselves to solve the race problem; and that many of them made a business of keeping the troubles, wrongs, and hardships of the Negro race before the public.225There was ample ground for this criticism. More and more, however, the opposition gained force; theGuardian, a weekly paper edited in Boston by Monroe Trotter, was particularly outspoken, and in Boston the real climax came in 1903 in an endeavor to break up a meeting at which Dr. Washington was to speak. Then, beginning in January, 1904, theVoice of the Negro, a magazine published in Atlanta for three years, definitely helped toward the cultivation of racial ideals. Publication of the periodical became irregular after the Atlanta Massacre, and it finally expired in 1907. Some of the articles dealt with older and more philosophical themes, but there were also bright and illuminating studies in education and other social topics, as well as a strong stand on political issues. TheColored American, published in Boston just a few years before theVoicebegan to appear, also did inspiring work. Various local or state organizations, moreover, from time to time showed the virtue of coöperation; thus the Georgia Equal Rights Convention, assembled in Macon in February, 1906, at the call of William J. White, the veteran editor of theGeorgia Baptist, brought together representative men from all over the state and considered such topics as the unequal division of school taxes, the deprivation of the jury rights of Negroes, the peonage system, and the penal system. In 1905 twenty-nine men of the race launched what was known as the Niagara Movement. The aims of this organization were freedom of speech and criticism, an unlettered and unsubsidized press, manhood suffrage, the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color, the recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present creed, the recognition of the highest and best training as the monopoly of no class or race, a belief in the dignity of labor, and united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership. The time was not yet quite propitious, and the Niagara Movement as such died after three or four years. Its principles lived on, however, and it greatly helped toward the formation of a stronger and more permanent organization.
In 1909 a number of people who were interested in the general effect of the Negro Problem on democracy in America organized in New York the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.226It was felt that the situation had become so bad that the time had come for a simple declaration of human rights. In 1910 Moorfield Storey, a distinguished lawyer of Boston, became national president, and W.E. Burghardt DuBois director of publicity and research, and editor of theCrisis, which periodical began publication in November of this year. The organization was successful from the first, and local branches were formed all over the country, some years elapsing, however, before the South was penetrated. Said the Director: "Of two things we Negroes have dreamed for many years: An organization so effective and so powerful that when discrimination and injustice touched one Negro, it would touch 12,000,000. We have not got this yet, but we have taken a great step toward it. We have dreamed, too, of an organization that would work ceaselessly to make Americans know that the so-called 'Negro problem' is simply one phase of the vaster problem of democracy in America, and that those who wish freedom and justice for their country must wish it for every black citizen. This is the great and insistent message of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."
This organization is outstanding as an effort in coöperation between the races for the improvement of the condition of the Negro. Of special interest along the line of economic betterment has been the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, now known as the National Urban League, which also has numerous branches with headquarters in New York and through whose offices thousands of Negroes have been placed in honorable employment. The National Urban League was also formally organized in 1910; it represented a merging of the different agencies working in New York City in behalf of the social betterment of the Negro population, especially of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women and of the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions among Negroes in New York, both of which agencies had been organized in 1906. As we shall see, the work of the League was to be greatly expanded within the next decade by the conditions brought about by the war; and under the direction of the executive secretary, Eugene Kinckle Jones, with the assistance of alert and patriotic officers, its work was to prove one of genuinely national service.
Interesting also was a new concern on the part of the young Southern college man about the problems at his door. Within just a few years after the close of the period now considered, Phelps-Stokes fellowships for the study of problems relating to the Negro were founded at the Universities of Virginia and Georgia; it was expected that similar fellowships would be founded in other institutions; and there was interest in the annual meetings of the Southern Sociological Congress and the University Commission on Southern Race Questions.
Thus from one direction and another at length broke upon a "vale of tears" a new day of effort and of hope. For the real contest the forces were gathering. The next decade was to be one of unending bitterness and violence, but also one in which the Negro was to rise as never before to the dignity of self-reliant and courageous manhood.
Footnote 205:(return)In 1896 this paper entered into an elaborate study,Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, a publication of the American Economic Association. In this Hoffman contended at length that the race was not only not holding its own in population, but that it was also astonishingly criminal and was steadily losing economically. His work was critically studied and its fallacies exposed in theNation, April 1, 1897.
Footnote 206:(return)June, 1892, p. 526.
Footnote 207:(return)See article by Albert Shaw, "Negro Progress on the Tuskegee Plan," inReview of Reviews, April, 1894.
Footnote 208,209:(return 208)(return 209)Speech before N.E.A., in St. Louis, June 30, 1904.
Footnote 210:(return)Speech at Fisk University, 1805.
Footnote 211,212,213:(return 211)(return 212)(return 213)Speech at Atlanta Exposition, September 18, 1895.
Footnote 214:(return)Speech at Harvard University, June 24, 1896.
Footnote 215:(return)October, 1898, p. 387.
Footnote 216:(return)From this time forth the wildest rumors were afloat and the number of men that Charles had killed was greatly exaggerated. Some reports said scores or even hundreds, and it is quite possible that any figures given herewith are an understatement.
Footnote 217:(return)R.S. Baker:Following the Colour Line, 3.
Footnote 218:(return)Outlook, November 3, 1906, p. 561.
Footnote 219:(return)The Negro in the South, 115.
Footnote 220:(return)Its fundamental assumptions were ably refuted by Edward Atkinson in theNorth American Review, August, 1905.
Footnote 221:(return)It was reviewed in theDial, April 16, 1901, by W.E.B. DuBois, who said in part: "Mr. Thomas's book is a sinister symptom—a growth and development under American conditions of life which illustrates peculiarly the anomalous position of black men, and the terrific stress under which they struggle. And the struggle and the fight of human beings against hard conditions of life always tends to develop the criminal or the hypocrite, the cynic or the radical. Wherever among a hard-pressed people these types begin to appear, it is a visible sign of a burden that is threatening to overtax their strength, and the foreshadowing of the age of revolt."
Footnote 222:(return)For a general treatment of the matter of the Negro as dealt with in American Literature, especially fiction, note "The Negro in American Fiction," in theDial, May 11, 1916, a paper included inThe Negro in Literature and Art. The thesis there is that imaginative treatment of the Negro is still governed by outworn antebellum types, or that in the search for burlesque some types of young and uncultured Negroes of the present day are deliberately overdrawn, but that there is not an honest or a serious facing of the characters and the situations in the life of the Negro people in the United States to-day. Since the paper first appeared it has received much further point; witness the stories by E.K. Means and Octavius Roy Cohen.
Footnote 223:(return)It is here quoted with the permission of the author and in the form in which it originally appeared inMcClure's Magazine, September, 1899.
Footnote 224:(return)In 1867 George Peabody, an American merchant and patriot, established the Peabody Educational Fund for the purpose of promoting "intellectual, moral, and industrial education in the most destitute portion of the Southern states." The John F. Slater Fund was established in 1882 especially for the encouragement of the industrial education of Negroes.
Footnote 225:(return)See chapter "The Intellectuals," inMy Larger Education.
Footnote 226:(return)For detailed statement of origin see pamphlet, "How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began," by Mary White Ovington, published by the Association.
The decade 1910-1920, momentous in the history of the world, in the history of the Negro race in America must finally be regarded as the period of a great spiritual uprising against the proscription, the defamation, and the violence of the preceding twenty years. As never before the Negro began to realize that the ultimate burden of his salvation rested upon himself, and he learned to respect and to depend upon himself accordingly.
The decade naturally divides into two parts, that before and that after the beginning of the Great War in Europe. Even in the earlier years, however, the tendencies that later were dominant were beginning to be manifest. The greater part of the ten years was consumed by the two administrations of President Woodrow Wilson; and not only did the National Government in the course of these administrations discriminate openly against persons of Negro descent in the Federal service and fail to protect those who happened to live in the capital, but its policy also gave encouragement to outrage in places technically said to be beyond its jurisdiction. A great war was to give new occasion and new opportunity for discrimination, defamatory propaganda was to be circulated on a scale undreamed of before, and the close of the war was to witness attempts for a new reign of terror in the South. Even beyond the bounds of continental America the race was now to suffer by reason of the national policy, and the little republic of Hayti to lift its bleeding hands to the calm judgment of the world.
Both a cause and a result of the struggle through which the race was now to pass was its astonishing progress. The fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation—January 1, 1913—called to mind as did nothing else the proscription and the mistakes, but also the successes and the hopes of the Negro people in America. Throughout the South disfranchisement seemed almost complete; and yet, after many attempts, the movement finally failed in Maryland in 1911 and in Arkansas in 1912. In 1915, moreover, the disfranchising act of Oklahoma was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, and henceforth the Negro could feel that the highest legal authority was no longer on the side of those who sought to deprive him of all political voice. Eleven years before, the Court had taken refuge in technicalities. The year 1911 was also marked by the appointment of the first Negro policeman in New York, by the election of the first Negro legislator in Pennsylvania, and by the appointment of a man of the race, William H. Lewis, as Assistant Attorney General of the United States; and several civil rights suits were won in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. Banks, insurance companies, and commercial and industrial enterprises were constantly being capitalized; churches erected more and more stately edifices; and fraternal organizations constantly increased in membership and wealth. By 1913 the Odd Fellows numbered very nearly half a million members and owned property worth two and a half million dollars; in 1920 the Dunbar Amusement Corporation of Philadelphia erected a theater costing $400,000; and the foremost business woman of the race in the decade, Mme. C.J. Walker, on the simple business of toilet articles and hair preparations built up an enterprise of national scope and conducted in accordance with the principles regularly governing great American commercial organizations. Fifty years after emancipation, moreover, very nearly one-fourth of all the Negroes in the Southern states were living in homes that they themselves owned; thus 430,449 of 1,917,391 houses occupied in these states were reported in 1910 as owned, and 314,340 were free of all encumbrance. The percentage of illiteracy decreased from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910, and movements were under way for the still more rapid spread of elementary knowledge. Excellent high schools, such as those in St. Louis, Washington, Kansas City (both cities of this name), Louisville, Baltimore, and other cities and towns in the border states and sometimes as far away as Texas, were setting a standard such as was in accord with the best in the country; and in one year, 1917, 455 young people of the race received the degree of bachelor of arts, while throughout the decade different ones received honors and took the highest graduate degrees at the foremost institutions of learning in the country. Early in the decade the General Education Board began actively to assist in the work of the higher educational institutions, and an outstanding gift was that of half a million dollars to Fisk University in 1920. Meanwhile, through the National Urban League and hundreds of local clubs and welfare organizations, social betterment went forward, much impetus being given to the work by the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs organized in 1896.
Along with its progress, throughout the decade the race had to meet increasing bitterness and opposition, and this was intensified by the motion picture, "The Birth of a Nation," built on lines similar to those ofThe Clansman. Negro men standing high on civil service lists were sometimes set aside; in 1913 the white railway mail clerks of the South began an open campaign against Negroes in the service in direct violation of the rules; and a little later in the same year segregation in the different departments became notorious. In 1911 the American Bar Association raised the question of the color-line; and efforts for the restriction of Negroes to certain neighborhoods in different prominent cities sometimes resulted in violence, as in the dynamiting of the homes of Negroes in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1911. When the Progressive party was organized in 1912 the Negro was given to understand that his support was not sought, and in 1911 a strike of firemen on the Queen and Crescent Railroad was in its main outlines similar to the trouble on the Georgia Railroad two years before. Meanwhile in the South the race received only 18 per cent of the total expenditures for education, although it constituted more than 30 per cent of the population.
Worse than anything else, however, was the matter of lynching. In each year the total number of victims of illegal execution continued to number three- or fourscore; but no one could ever be sure that every instance had been recorded. Between the opening of the decade and the time of the entrance of the United States into the war, five cases were attended by such unusual circumstances that the public could not soon forget them. At Coatesville, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia, on August 12, 1911, a Negro laborer, Zach Walker, while drunk, fatally shot a night watchman. He was pursued and attempted suicide. Wounded, he was brought to town and placed in the hospital. From this place he was taken chained to his cot, dragged for some miles, and then tortured and burned to death in the presence of a great crowd of people, including many women, and his bones and the links of the chain which bound him distributed as souvenirs. At Monticello, Georgia, in January, 1915, when a Negro family resisted an officer who was making an arrest, the father, Dan Barbour, his young son, and his two daughters were all hanged to a tree and their bodies riddled with bullets. Before the close of the year there was serious trouble in the southwestern portion of the state, and behind this lay all the evils of the system of peonage in the black belt. Driven to desperation by the mistreatment accorded them in the raising of cotton, the Negroes at last killed an overseer who had whipped a Negro boy. A reign of terror was then instituted; churches, society halls, and homes were burnt, and several individuals shot. On December 30 there was a wholesale lynching of six Negroes in Early County. Less than three weeks afterwards a sheriff who attempted to arrest some more Negroes and who was accompanied by a mob was killed. Then (January 20, 1916) five Negroes who had been taken from the jail in Worth County were rushed in automobiles into Lee County adjoining, and hanged and shot. On May 15, 1916, at Waco, Texas, Jesse Washington, a sullen and overgrown boy of seventeen, who worked for a white farmer named Fryar at the town of Robinson, six miles away, and who one week before had criminally assaulted and killed Mrs. Fryar, after unspeakable mutilation was burned in the heart of the town. A part of the torture consisted in stabbing with knives and the cutting off of the boy's fingers as he grabbed the chain by which he was bound. Finally, on October 21, 1916, Anthony Crawford, a Negro farmer of Abbeville, South Carolina, who owned four hundred and twenty-seven acres of the best cotton land in his county and who was reported to be worth $20,000, was lynched. He had come to town to the store of W.D. Barksdale to sell a load of cotton-seed, and the two men had quarreled about the price, although no blow was struck on either side. A little later, however, Crawford was arrested by a local policeman and a crowd of idlers from the public square rushed to give him a whipping for his "impudence." He promptly knocked down the ringleader with a hammer. The mob then set upon him, nearly killed him, and at length threw him into the jail. A few hours later, fearing that the sheriff would secretly remove the prisoner, it returned, dragged the wounded man forth, and then hanged and shot him, after which proceedings warning was sent to his family to leave the county by the middle of the next month.
It will be observed that in these five noteworthy occurrences, in only one case was there any question of criminal assault. On the other hand, in one case two young women were included among the victims; another was really a series of lynchings emphasizing the lot of some Negroes under a vicious economic system; and the last simply grew out of the jealousy and hatred aroused by a Negro of independent means who knew how to stand up for his rights.
Such was the progress, such also the violence that the Negro witnessed during the decade. Along with his problems at home he now began to have a new interest in those of his kin across the sea, and this feeling was intensified by the world war. It raises questions of such far-reaching importance, however, that it must receive separate and distinct treatment.
Very soon after the beginning of the Great War in Europe there began what will ultimately be known as the most remarkable migratory movement in the history of the Negro in America. Migration had indeed at no time ceased since the great movement of 1879, but for the most part it had been merely personal and not in response to any great emergency. The sudden ceasing of the stream of immigration from Europe, however, created an unprecedented demand for labor in the great industrial centers of the North, and business men were not long in realizing the possibilities of a source that had as yet been used in only the slightest degree. Special agents undoubtedly worked in some measure; but the outstanding feature of the new migration was that it was primarily a mass movement and not one organized or encouraged by any special group of leaders. Labor was needed in railroad construction, in the steel mills, in the tobacco farms of Connecticut, and in the packing-houses, foundries, and automobile plants. In 1915 the New England tobacco growers hastily got together in New York two hundred girls; but these proved to be unsatisfactory, and it was realized that the labor supply would have to be more carefully supervised. In January, 1916, the management of the Continental Tobacco Corporation definitely decided on the policy of importing workers from the South, and within the next year not less than three thousand Negroes came to Hartford, several hundred being students from the schools and colleges who went North to work for the summer. In the same summer came also train-loads of Negroes from Jacksonville and other points to work for the Erie and Pennsylvania Railroads.
Those who left their homes in the South to find new ones in the North thus worked first of all in response to a new economic demand. Prominent in their thought to urge them on, however, were the generally unsatisfactory conditions in the South from which they had so long suffered and from which all too often there had seemed to be no escape. As it was, they were sometimes greatly embarrassed in leaving. In Jacksonville the city council passed an ordinance requiring that agents who wished to recruit labor to be sent out of the state should pay $1,000 for a license or suffer a fine of $600 and spend sixty days in jail. Macon, Ga., raised the license fee to $25,000. In Savannah the excitement was intense. When two trains did not move as it was expected that they would, three hundred Negroes paid their own fares and went North. Later, when the leaders of the movement could not be found, the police arrested one hundred of the Negroes and sent them to the police barracks, charging them with loitering. Similar scenes were enacted elsewhere, the South being then as ever unwilling to be deprived of its labor supply. Meanwhile wages for some men in such an industrial center as Birmingham leaped to $9 and $10 a day. All told, hardly less than three-fourths of a million Negroes went North within the four years 1915-1918.
Naturally such a great shifting of population did not take place without some inconvenience and hardship. Among the thousands who changed their place of residence were many ignorant and improvident persons; but sometimes it was the most skilled artisans and the most substantial owners of homes in different communities who sold their property and moved away. In the North they at once met congestion in housing facilities. In Philadelphia and Pittsburgh this condition became so bad as to demand immediate attention. In more than one place there were outbreaks in which lives were lost. In East St. Louis, Ill., all of the social problems raised by the movement were seen in their baldest guise. The original population of this city had come for the most part from Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee. It had long been an important industrial center. It was also a very rough place, the scene of prize-fights and cock-fights and a haven for escaped prisoners; and there was very close connection between the saloons and politics. For years the managers of the industrial plants had recruited their labor supply from Ellis Island. When this failed they turned to the Negroes of the South; and difficulties were aggravated by a series of strikes on the part of the white workers. By the spring of 1917 not less than ten thousand Negroes had recently arrived in the city, and the housing situation was so acute that these people were more and more being forced into the white localities. Sometimes Negroes who had recently arrived wandered aimlessly about the streets, where they met the rougher elements of the city; there were frequent fights and also much trouble on the street cars. The Negroes interested themselves in politics and even succeeded in placing in office several men of their choice. In February, 1917, there was a strike of the white workers at the Aluminum Ore Works. This was adjusted at the time, but the settlement was not permanent, and meanwhile there were almost daily arrivals from the South, and the East St. LouisJournalwas demanding: "Make East St. Louis a Lily White Town." There were preliminary riots on May 27-30. On the night of July I men in automobiles rode through the Negro section and began firing promiscuously. The next day the massacre broke forth in all its fury, and before it was over hundreds of thousands of dollars in property had been destroyed, six thousand Negroes had been driven from their homes, and about one hundred and fifty shot, burned, hanged, or maimed for life. Officers of the law failed to do their duty, and the testimony of victims as to the torture inflicted upon them was such as to send a thrill of horror through the heart of the American people. Later there was a congressional investigation, but from this nothing very material resulted. In the last week of this same month, July, 1917, there were also serious outbreaks in both Chester and Philadelphia, Penn., the fundamental issues being the same as in East St. Louis.
Meanwhile welfare organizations earnestly labored to adjust the Negro in his new environment. In Chicago the different state clubs helped nobly. Greater than any other one agency, however, was the National Urban League, whose work now witnessed an unprecedented expansion. Representative was the work of the Detroit branch, which was not content merely with finding vacant positions, but approached manufacturers of all kinds through distribution of literature and by personal visits, and within twelve months was successful in placing not less than one thousand Negroes in employment other than unskilled labor. It also established a bureau of investigation and information regarding housing conditions, and generally aimed at the proper moral and social care of those who needed its service. The whole problem of the Negro was of such commanding importance after the United States entered the war as to lead to the creation of a special Division of Negro Economics in the office of the Secretary of Labor, to the directorship of which Dr. George E. Haynes was called.
In January, 1918, a Conference of Migration was called in New York under the auspices of the National Urban League, and this placed before the American Federation of Labor resolutions asking that Negro labor be considered on the same basis as white. The Federation had long been debating the whole question of the Negro, and it had not seemed to be able to arrive at a clearcut policy though its general attitude was unfavorable. In 1919, however, it voted to take steps to recognize and admit Negro unions. At last it seemed to realize the necessity of making allies of Negro workers, and of course any such change of front on the part of white workmen would menace some of the foundations of racial strife in the South and indeed in the country at large. Just how effective the new decision was to be in actual practice remained to be seen, especially as the whole labor movement was thrown on the defensive by the end of 1920. However, special interest attached to the events in Bogalusa, La., in November, 1919. Here were the headquarters of the Great Southern Lumber Company, whose sawmill in the place was said to be the largest in the world. For some time it had made use of unorganized Negro labor as against the white labor unions. The forces of labor, however, began to organize the Negroes in the employ of the Company, which held political as well as capitalistic control in the community. The Company then began to have Negroes arrested on charges of vagrancy, taking them before the city court and having them fined and turned over to the Company to work out the fines under the guard of gunmen. In the troubles that came to a head on November 22, three white men were shot and killed, one of them being the district president of the American Federation of Labor, who was helping to give protection to a colored organizer. The full significance of this incident remained also to be seen; but it is quite possible that in the final history of the Negro problem the skirmish at Bogalusa will mark the beginning of the end of the exploiting of Negro labor and the first recognition of the identity of interest between white and black workmen in the South.
Just on the eve of America's entrance into the war in Europe occurred an incident that from the standpoint of the Negro at least must finally appear simply as the prelude to the great contest to come. Once more, at an unexpected moment, ten years after Brownsville, the loyalty and heroism of the Negro soldier impressed the American people. The expedition of the American forces into Mexico in 1916, with the political events attending this, is a long story. The outstanding incident, however, was that in which two troops of the Tenth Cavalry engaged. About eighty men had been sent a long distance from the main line of the American army, their errand being supposedly the pursuit of a deserter. At or near the town of Carrizal the Americans seem to have chosen to go through the town rather than around it, and the result was a clash in which Captain Boyd, who commanded the detachment, and some twenty of his men were killed, twenty-two others being captured by the Mexicans. Under the circumstances the whole venture was rather imprudent in the first place. As to the engagement itself, the Mexicans said that the American troops made the attack, while the latter said that the Mexicans themselves first opened fire. However this may have been, all other phases of the Mexican problem seemed for the moment to be forgotten at Washington in the demand for the release of the twenty-two men who had been taken. There was no reason for holding them, and they were brought up to El Paso within a few days and sent across the line. Thus, though "some one had blundered," these Negro soldiers did their duty; "theirs not to make reply; theirs but to do and die." So in the face of odds they fought like heroes and twenty died beneath the Mexican stars.
When the United States entered the war in Europe in April, 1917, the question of overwhelming importance to the Negro people was naturally that of their relation to the great conflict in which their country had become engaged. Their response to the draft call set a noteworthy example of loyalty to all other elements in the country. At the very outset the race faced a terrible dilemma: If there were to be special training camps for officers, and if the National Government would make no provision otherwise, did it wish to have a special camp for Negroes, such as would give formal approval to a policy of segregation, or did it wish to have no camp at all on such terms and thus lose the opportunity to have any men of the race specially trained as officers? The camp was secured—Camp Dodge, near Des Moines, Iowa; and throughout the summer of 1917 the work of training went forward, the heart of a harassed and burdened people responding more and more with pride to the work of their men. On October 15, 625 became commissioned officers, and all told 1200 received commissions. To the fighting forces of the United States the race furnished altogether very nearly 400,000 men, of whom just a little more than half actually saw service in Europe.
Negro men served in all branches of the military establishment and also as surveyors and draftsmen. For the handling of many of the questions relating to them Emmett J. Scott was on October 1, 1917, appointed Special Assistant to the Secretary of War. Mr. Scott had for a number of years assisted Dr. Booker T. Washington as secretary at Tuskegee Institute, and in 1909 he was one of the three members of the special commission appointed by President Taft for the investigation of Liberian affairs. Negro nurses were authorized by the War Department for service in base hospitals at six army camps, and women served also as canteen workers in France and in charge of hostess houses in the United States. Sixty Negro men served as chaplains; 350 as Y.M.C.A. secretaries; and others in special capacities. Service of exceptional value was rendered by Negro women in industry, and very largely also they maintained and promoted the food supply through agriculture at the same time that they released men for service at the front. Meanwhile the race invested millions of dollars in Liberty Bonds and War Savings stamps and contributed generously to the Red Cross, Y.M.C.A., and other relief agencies. In the summer of 1918 interest naturally centered upon the actual performance of Negro soldiers in France and upon the establishment of units of the Students' Army Training Corps in twenty leading educational institutions. When these units were demobilized in December, 1918, provision was made in a number of the schools for the formation of units of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.
The remarkable record made by the Negro in the previous wars of the country was fully equaled by that in the Great War. Negro soldiers fought with special distinction in the Argonne Forest, at Château-Thierry, in Belleau Wood, in the St. Mihiel district, in the Champagne sector, at Vosges and Metz, winning often very high praise from their commanders. Entire regiments of Negro troops were cited for exceptional valor and decorated with the Croix de Guerre—the 369th, the 371st, and the 372nd; while groups of officers and men of the 365th, the 366th, the 368th, the 370th, and the first battalion of the 367th were also decorated. At the close of the war the highest Negro officers in the army were Lieutenant Colonel Otis B. Duncan, commander of the third battalion of the 370th, formerly the Eighth Illinois, and the highest ranking Negro officer in the American Expeditionary Forces; Colonel Charles Young (retired), on special duty at Camp Grant, Ill.; Colonel Franklin A. Dennison, of the 370th Infantry, and Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, of the Ninth Cavalry. The 370th was the first American regiment stationed in the St. Mihiel sector; it was one of the three that occupied a sector at Verdun when a penetration there would have been disastrous to the Allied cause; and it went direct from the training camp to the firing-line. Noteworthy also was the record of the 369th infantry, formerly the Fifteenth Regiment, New York National Guard. This organization was under shellfire for 191 days, and it held one trench for 91 days without relief. It was the first unit of Allied fighters to reach the Rhine, going down as an advance guard of the French army of occupation. A prominent hero in this regiment was Sergeant Henry Johnson, who returned with the Croix de Guerre with one star and one palm. He is credited with routing a party of Germans at Bois-Hanzey in the Argonne on May 5, 1918, with singularly heavy losses to the enemy. Many other men acted with similar bravery. Hardly less heroic was the service of the stevedore regiments, or the thousands of men in the army who did not go to France but who did their duty as they were commanded at home. General Vincenden said of the men of the 370th: "Fired by a noble ardor, they go at times even beyond the objectives given them by the higher command; they have always wished to be in the front line"; and General Coybet said of the 371st and 372nd: "The most powerful defenses, the most strongly organized machine gun nests, the heaviest artillery barrages—nothing could stop them. These crack regiments overcame every obstacle with a most complete contempt for danger.... They have shown us the way to victory."
In spite of his noble record—perhaps in some measure because of it—and in the face of his loyal response to the call to duty, the Negro unhappily became in the course of the war the victim of proscription and propaganda probably without parallel in the history of the country. No effort seems to have been spared to discredit him both as a man and as a soldier. In both France and America the apparent object of the forces working against him was the intention to prevent any feeling that the war would make any change in the condition of the race at home. In the South Negroes were sometimes forced into peonage and restrained in their efforts to go North; and generally they had no representation on local boards, the draft was frequently operated so as to be unfair to them, and every man who registered found special provision for the indication of his race in the corner of his card. Accordingly in many localities Negroes contributed more than their quota, this being the result of favoritism shown to white draftees. The first report of the Provost-Marshal General showed that of every 100 Negroes called 36 were certified for service, while of every 100 white men called only 25 were certified. Of those summoned in Class I Negroes contributed 51.65 per cent of their registrants as against 32.53 per cent of the white. In France the work of defamation was manifest and flagrant. Slanders about the Negro soldiers were deliberately circulated among the French people, sometimes on very high authority, much of this propaganda growing out of a jealous fear of any acquaintance whatsoever of the Negro men with the French women. Especially insolent and sometimes brutal were the men of the military police, who at times shot and killed on the slightest provocation. Proprietors who sold to Negro soldiers were sometimes boycotted, and offenses were magnified which in the case of white men never saw publication. Negro officers were discriminated against in hotel and traveling accommodations, while upon the ordinary men in the service fell unduly any specially unpleasant duty such as that of re-burying the dead. White women engaged in "Y" work, especially Southern women, showed a disposition not to serve Negroes, though the Red Cross and Salvation Army organizations were much better in this respect; and finally the Negro soldier was not given any place in the great victory parade in Paris. About the close of the war moreover a great picture, or series of pictures, the "Pantheon de la Guerre," that was on a mammoth scale and that attracted extraordinary attention, was noteworthy as giving representation to all of the forces and divisions of the Allied armies except the Negroes in the forces from the United States.227Not unnaturally the Germans endeavored—though without success—to capitalize the situation by circulating among the Negroes insidious literature that sometimes made very strong points. All of these things are to be considered by those people in the United States who think that the Negro suffers unduly from a grievance.
While the Negro soldier abroad was thus facing unusual pressure in addition to the ordinary hardships of war, at home occurred an incident that was doubly depressing coming as it did just a few weeks after the massacre at East St. Louis. In August, 1917, a battalion of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, stationed at Houston, Texas, to assist in the work of concentrating soldiers for the war in Europe, encountered the ill-will of the town, and between the city police and the Negro military police there was constant friction. At last when one of the Negroes had been beaten, word was circulated among his comrades that he had been shot, and a number of them set out for revenge. In the riot that followed (August 23) two of the Negroes and seventeen white people of the town were killed, the latter number including five policemen. As a result of this encounter sixty-three members of the battalion were court-martialed at Fort Sam Houston. Thirteen were hanged on December 11, 1917, five more were executed on September 13, 1918, fifty-one were sentenced to life imprisonment and five to briefer terms; and the Negro people of the country felt very keenly the fact that the condemned men were hanged like common criminals rather than given the death of soldiers. Thus for one reason or another the whole matter of the war and the incidents connected therewith simply made the Negro question more bitterly than ever the real disposition toward him of the government under which he lived and which he had striven so long to serve.
Such incidents abroad and such feeling at home as we have recorded not only agitated the Negro people, but gave thousands of other citizens concern, and when the armistice suddenly came on November 11, 1918, not only in the South but in localities elsewhere in the country racial feeling had been raised to the highest point. About the same time there began to be spread abroad sinister rumors that the old KuKlux were riding again; and within a few months parades at night in representative cities in Alabama and Georgia left no doubt that the rumors were well founded. The Negro people fully realized the significance of the new movement, and they felt full well the pressure being brought to bear upon them in view of the shortage of domestic servants in the South. Still more did they sense the situation that would face their sons and brothers when they returned from France. But they were not afraid; and in all of the riots of the period the noteworthy fact stands out that in some of the cities in which the situation was most tense—notably Atlanta and Birmingham—no great race trouble was permitted to start.
In general, however, the violence that had characterized the year 1917 continued through 1918 and 1919. In the one state of Tennessee, within less than a year and on separate occasions, three Negroes were burned at the stake. On May 22, 1917, near Memphis, Ell T. Person, nearly fifty years of age, was burned for the alleged assault and murder of a young woman; and in this case the word "alleged" is used advisedly, for the whole matter of the fixing of the blame for the crime and the fact that the man was denied a legal trial left grave doubt as to the extent of his guilt. On Sunday, December 2, 1917, at Dyersburg, immediately after the adjournment of services in the churches of the town, Lation Scott, guilty of criminal assault, was burned; his eyes were put out with red-hot irons, a hot poker was rammed down his throat, and he was mutilated in unmentionable ways. Two months later, on February 12, 1918, at Estill Springs, Jim McIlheron, who had shot and killed two young white men, was also burned at the stake. In Estill Springs it had for some time been the sport of young white men in the community to throw rocks at single Negroes and make them run. Late one afternoon McIlheron went into a store to buy some candy. As he passed out, a remark was made by one of three young men about his eating his candy. The rest of the story is obvious.
As horrible as these burnings were, it is certain that they did not grind the iron into the Negro's soul any more surely than the three stories that follow. Hampton Smith was known as one of the harshest employers of Negro labor in Brooks County, Ga. As it was difficult for him to get help otherwise, he would go into the courts and whenever a Negro was convicted and was unable to pay his fine or was sentenced to a term on the chain-gang, he would pay the fine and secure the man for work on his plantation. He thus secured the services of Sidney Johnson, fined thirty dollars for gambling. After Johnson had more than worked out the thirty dollars he asked pay for the additional time he served. Smith refused to give this and a quarrel resulted. A few mornings later, when Johnson, sick, did not come to work, Smith found him in his cabin and beat him. A few evenings later, while Smith was sitting in his home, he was shot through a window and killed instantly, and his wife was wounded. As a result of this occurrence the Negroes of both Brooks and Lowndes counties were terrorized for the week May 17-24, 1918, and not less than eleven of them lynched. Into the bodies of two men lynched together not less than seven hundred bullets are said to have been fired. Johnson himself had been shot dead when he was found; but his body was mutilated, dragged through the streets of Valdosta, and burned. Mary Turner, the wife of one of the victims, said that her husband had been unjustly treated and that if she knew who had killed him she would have warrants sworn out against them. For saying this she too was lynched, although she was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her ankles were tied together and she was hung to a tree, head downward. Gasoline and oil from the automobiles near were thrown on her clothing and a match applied. While she was yet alive her abdomen was cut open with a large knife and her unborn babe fell to the ground. It gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel. Hundreds of bullets were then fired into the woman's body. As a result of these events not less than five hundred Negroes left the immediate vicinity of Valdosta immediately, and hundreds of others prepared to leave as soon as they could dispose of their land, and this they proceeded to do in the face of the threat that any Negro who attempted to leave would be regarded as implicated in the murder of Smith and dealt with accordingly. At the end of this same year—on December 20, 1918—four young Negroes—Major Clark, aged twenty; Andrew Clark, aged fifteen; Maggie Howze, aged twenty, and Alma Howze, aged sixteen—were taken from the little jail at Shubuta, Mississippi, and lynched on a bridge near the town. They were accused of the murder of E.L. Johnston, a white dentist, though all protested their innocence. The situation that preceded the lynching was significant. Major Clark was in love with Maggie Howze and planned to marry her. This thought enraged Johnston, who was soon to become the father of a child by the young woman, and who told Clark to leave her alone. As the two sisters were about to be killed, Maggie screamed and fought, crying, "I ain't guilty of killing the doctor and you oughtn't to kill me"; and to silence her cries one member of the mob struck her in the mouth with a monkey wrench, knocking her teeth out. On May 24, 1919, at Milan, Telfair County, Georgia, two young white men, Jim Dowdy and Lewis Evans, went drunk late at night to the Negro section of the town and to the home of a widow who had two daughters. They were refused admittance and then fired into the house. The girls, frightened, ran to another home. They were pursued, and Berry Washington, a respectable Negro seventy-two years of age, seized a shotgun, intending to give them protection; and in the course of the shooting that followed Dowdy was killed. The next night, Saturday the 25th, Washington was taken to the place where Dowdy was killed and his body shot to pieces.
It remained for the capital of the nation, however, largely to show the real situation of the race in the aftermath of a great war conducted by a Democratic administration. Heretofore the Federal Government had declared itself powerless to act in the case of lawlessness in an individual state; but it was now to have an opportunity to deal with violence in Washington itself. On July 19, 1919, a series of lurid and exaggerated stories in the daily papers of attempted assaults of Negroes on white women resulted in an outbreak that was intended to terrorize the popular Northwest section, in which lived a large proportion of the Negroes in the District of Columbia. For three days the violence continued intermittently, and as the constituted police authority did practically nothing for the defense of the Negro citizens, the loss of life might have been infinitely greater than it was if the colored men of the city had not assumed their own defense. As it was they saved the capital and earned the gratitude of the race and the nation. It appeared that Negroes—educated, law-abiding Negroes—would not now run when their lives and their homes were at stake, and before such determination the mob retreated ingloriously.
Just a week afterwards—before the country had really caught its breath after the events in Washington—there burst into flame in Chicago a race war of the greatest bitterness and fierceness. For a number of years the Western metropolis had been known as that city offering to the Negro the best industrial and political opportunity in the country. When the migration caused by the war was at its height, tens of thousands of Negroes from the South passed through the city going elsewhere, but thousands also remained to work in the stockyards or other places. With all of the coming and going, the Negroes in the city must at any time in 1918 or 1919 have numbered not less than 150,000; and banks, coöperative societies, and race newspapers flourished. There were also abundant social problems awakened by the saloons and gambling dens, and by the seamy side of politics. Those who had been longest in the city, however, rallied to the needs of the newcomers, and in their homes, their churches, and their places of work endeavored to get them adjusted in their environment. The housing situation, in spite of all such effort, became more and more acute, and when some Negroes were forced beyond the bounds of the old "black belt" there were attempts to dynamite their new residences. Meanwhile hundreds of young men who had gone to France or to cantonments—1850 from the district of one draft board at State and 35th Streets—returned to find again a place in the life of Chicago; and daily from Washington or from the South came the great waves of social unrest. Said Arnold Hill, secretary of the Chicago branch of the National Urban League: "Every time a lynching takes place in a community down South you can depend on it that colored people from that community will arrive in Chicago inside of two weeks; we have seen it happen so often that whenever we read newspaper dispatches of a public hanging or burning in a Texas or a Mississippi town, we get ready to extend greetings to the people from the immediate vicinity of the lynching." Before the armistice was signed the League was each month finding work for 1700 or 1800 men and women; in the following April the number fell to 500, but with the coming of summer it rapidly rose again. Unskilled work was plentiful, and jobs in foundries and steel mills, in building and construction work, and in light factories and packing-houses kept up a steady demand for laborers. Meanwhile trouble was brewing, and on the streets there were occasional encounters.
Such was the situation when on a Sunday at the end of July a Negro boy at a bathing beach near Twenty-sixth Street swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him, knocked him off a raft, and he was drowned. Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked him to arrest the boys who threw the stones. He refused to do so, and as the dead body of the Negro boy was being handled, more rocks were thrown on both sides. The trouble thus engendered spread through the Negro district on the South Side, and for a week it was impossible or dangerous for people to go to work. Some employed at the stockyards could not get to their work for some days further. At the end of three days twenty Negroes were reported as dead, fourteen white men were dead, scores of people were injured, and a number of houses of Negroes burned.
In the face of this disaster the great soul of Chicago rose above its materialism. There were many conferences between representative people; out of all the effort grew the determination to work for a nobler city; and the sincerity was such as to give one hope not only for Chicago but also for a new and better America.
The riots in Washington and Chicago were followed within a few weeks by outbreaks in Knoxville and Omaha. In the latter place the fundamental cause of the trouble was social and political corruption, and because he strongly opposed the lynching of William Brown, the Negro, the mayor of the city, Edward P. Smith, very nearly lost his life. As it was, the county court house was burned, one man more was killed, and perhaps as many as forty injured. More important even than this, however—and indeed one of the two or three most far-reaching instances of racial trouble in the history of the Negro in America—was the reign of terror in and near Elaine, Phillips County, Arkansas, in the first week of October, 1919. The causes of this were fundamental and reached the very heart of the race problem and of the daily life of tens of thousands of Negroes.
Many Negro tenants in eastern Arkansas, as in other states, were still living under a share system by which the owner furnished the land and the Negro the labor, and by which at the end of the year the two supposedly got equal parts of the crop. Meanwhile throughout the year the tenant would get his food, clothing, and other supplies at exorbitant prices from a "commissary" operated by the planter or his agent; and in actual practice the landowner and the tenant did not go together to a city to dispose of the crop when it was gathered, as was sometimes done elsewhere, but the landowner alone sold the crop and settled with the tenant whenever and however he pleased; nor at the time of settlement was any itemized statement of supplies given, only the total amount owed being stated. Obviously the planter could regularly pad his accounts, keep the Negro in debt, and be assured of his labor supply from year to year.
In 1918 the price of cotton was constantly rising and at length reached forty cents a pound. Even with the cheating to which the Negroes were subjected, it became difficult to keep them in debt, and they became more and more insistent in their demands for itemized statements. Nevertheless some of those whose cotton was sold in October, 1918, did not get any statement of any sort before July of the next year.
Seeing no other way out of their difficulty, sixty-eight of the Negroes got together and decided to hire a lawyer who would help them to get statements of their accounts and settlement at the right figures. Feeling that the life of any Negro lawyer who took such a case would be endangered, they employed the firm of Bratton and Bratton, of Little Rock. They made contracts with this firm to handle the sixty-eight cases at fifty dollars each in cash and a percentage of the moneys collected from the white planters. Some of the Negroes also planned to go before the Federal Grand Jury and charge certain planters with peonage. They had secret meetings from time to time in order to collect the money to be paid in advance and to collect the evidence which would enable them successfully to prosecute their cases. Some Negro cotton-pickers about the same time organized a union; and at Elaine many Negroes who worked in the sawmills and who desired to protect their wives and daughters from insult, refused to allow them to pick cotton or to work for a white man at any price.
Such was the sentiment out of which developed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, which was an effort by legal means to secure protection from unscrupulous landlords, but which did use the form of a fraternal order with passwords and grips and insignia so as the more forcefully to appeal to some of its members. About the first of October the report was spread abroad in Phillips County that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection and that they were rapidly preparing to massacre the white people on a great scale. When the situation had become tense, one Sunday John Clem, a white man from Helena, drunk, came to Elaine and proceeded to terrorize the Negro population by gun play. The colored people kept off the streets in order to avoid trouble and telephoned the sheriff at Helena. This man failed to act. The next day Clem was abroad again, but the Negroes still avoided trouble, thinking that his acts were simply designed to start a race riot. On Tuesday evening, October 1, however, W.D. Adkins, a special agent of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, in company with Charles Pratt, a deputy sheriff, was riding past a Negro church near Hoop Spur, a small community just a few miles from Elaine. According to Pratt, persons in the church fired without cause on the party, killing Adkins and wounding himself. According to the Negroes, Adkins and Pratt fired into the church, evidently to frighten the people there assembled. At any rate word spread through the county that the massacre had started, and for days there was murder and rioting, in the course of which not less than five white men and twenty-five Negroes were killed, though some estimates placed the number of fatalities a great deal higher. Negroes were arrested and disarmed; some were shot on the highways; homes were fired into; and at one time hundreds of men and women were in a stockade under heavy guard and under the most unwholesome conditions, while hundreds of white men, armed to the teeth, rushed to the vicinity from neighboring cities and towns. Governor Charles H. Brough telegraphed to Camp Pike for Federal troops, and five hundred were mobilized at once "to repel the attack of the black army." Worse than any other feature was the wanton slaying of the four Johnston brothers, whose father had been a prominent Presbyterian minister and whose mother was formerly a school-teacher. Dr. D.A.E. Johnston was a successful dentist and owned a three-story building in Helena. Dr. Louis Johnston was a physician who lived in Oklahoma and who had come home on a visit. A third brother had served in France and been wounded and gassed at Château-Thierry.
Altogether one thousand Negroes were arrested and one hundred and twenty-two indicted. A special committee of seven gathered evidence and is charged with having used electric connections on the witness chair in order to frighten the Negroes. Twelve men were sentenced to death (though up to the end of 1920 execution had been stayed), and fifty-four to penitentiary terms. The trials lasted from five to ten minutes each. No witnesses for the defense were called; no Negroes were on the juries; no change of venue was given. Meanwhile lawyers at Helena were preparing to reap further harvest from Negroes who would be indicted and against whom there was no evidence, but who had saved money and Liberty Bonds.
Governor Brough in a statement to the press blamed theCrisisand the ChicagoDefenderfor the trouble. He had served for a number of years as a professor of economics before becoming governor and had even identified himself with the forward-looking University Commission on Southern Race Questions; and it is true that he postponed the executions in order to allow appeals to be filed in behalf of the condemned men. That he should thus attempt to shift the burden of blame and overlook the facts when in a position of grave responsibility was a keen disappointment to the lovers of progress.
Reference to the monthly periodical and the weekly paper just mentioned, however, brings us to still another matter—the feeling on the part of the Negro that, in addition to the outrages visited on the race, the Government was now, under the cloak of wartime legislation, formally to attempt to curtail its freedom of speech. For some days the issue of theCrisisfor May, 1919, was held up in the mail; a South Carolina representative in Congress quoted by way of denunciation from the editorial "Returning Soldiers" in the same number of the periodical; and a little later in the year the Department of Justice devoted twenty-seven pages of the report of the investigation against "Persons Advising Anarchy, Sedition, and the Forcible Overthrow of the Government" to a report on "Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications." Among other periodicals and papers mentioned were theMessengerand theNegro Worldof New York; and by theMessengerindeed, frankly radical in its attitude not only on the race question but also on fundamental economic principles, even theCrisiswas regarded as conservative in tone. There could be no doubt that a great spiritual change had come over the Negro people of the United States. At the very time that their sons and brothers were making the supreme sacrifice in France they were witnessing such events as those at East St. Louis or Houston, or reading of three burnings within a year in Tennessee. A new determination closely akin to consecration possessed them. Fully to understand the new spirit one would read not only such publications as those that have been mentioned, but also those issued in the heart of the South. "Good-by, Black Mammy," said theSouthwestern Christian Advocate, taking as its theme the story of four Southern white men who acted as honorary pallbearers at an old Negro woman's funeral, but who under no circumstances would thus have served for a thrifty, intelligent, well-educated man of the race. Said the HoustonInformer, voicing the feeling of thousands, "The black man fought to make the world safe for democracy; he now demands that America be made and maintained safe for black Americans." With hypocrisy in the practice of the Christian religion there ceased to be any patience whatsoever, as was shown by the treatment accorded a Y.M.C.A. "Call on behalf of the young men and boys of the two great sister Anglo-Saxon nations." "Read! Read! Read!" said theChallenge Magazine, "then when the mob comes, whether with torch or with gun, let us stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord." "Protect your home," said the gentleChristian Recorder, "protect your wife and children, with your life if necessary. If a man crosses your threshold after you and your family, the law allows you to protect your home even if you have to kill the intruder." Perhaps nothing, however, better summed up the new spirit than the following sonnet by Claude McKay: