THE NEGRO AND THE NEWSPAPERSIt is not an easy task to plead in the courts of the oppressor against oppression and wrong. It is not easy to get the judgement of the white men of the world against the white man’s injustice to the black. But nevertheless the attempt must be made and made again until the seared conscience of the civilized world’s hall throbs with righteous indignation at such outrage. “To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men. The human race has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised against injustice, ignorance and lust, the Inquisition yet would serve the law and guillotines decide our least disputes. The few who dare must speak and speak again to right the wrongs of many.â€The urgent need of speaking out is shown by the following communication from Mr. J. Ellis Barker of London in an interview given to a correspondent ofThe New York Ageand published in that paper on December 29th 1910.“We people in Europe,†says Mr. Barker, “do not understand the race problem, and we do not know the colored people, for the simple reason that there are not any colored people in Europe. In London, where I live, there are only a few hundred colored students whom one does not meet. Before I came to the United States my prejudice against the colored people was as great as that of any Southern planter. My prejudice against your race, as I believe the prejudice of most white people, was due rather to ignorance than to ill-will. I had been told in the books and papers published in Europe that the colored people were a race of barbariansand savages. I had been told that the colored people were a worthless set of people, dressed in rags, working a day or two during the week, and loafing during the rest of the time. I was told that the colored people were idle, diseased and vicious. So I imagined that all of them lived in slums and alleys and that the aristocracy of the race consisted of the waiters and railway porters.I had been told that the colored people only played at science; that their doctors and lawyers werecharlatans. I had been told that the people of a mixed race were even worse than pure Negroes; that the mulattoes had lost the primitive virtues of the Negroes and had acquired all of the vices of the whites. A chance encounter with a cultured man of color induced me to look into the race problem and I was perfectly amazed when I discovered how greatly the colored people have been libelled and traduced. I have spent a considerable amount of time with colored people and have met many who are highly cultivated. I have found that among your race you have excellent lawyers, and some of the foremost physicians and surgeons. I have been over a large number of your elementary and higher grade schools and colleges and over Howard University, and I have admired the earnest and resolute determination with which your children try to improve their minds and to raise themselves. In your night schools I have found old men and women, former slaves, who are anxious to learn writing and reading. I have been to the homes of many colored people and I havefound them cosy, comfortable, elegant, and peopled by happy and harmonious families. I have come to the conclusion that the race is oppressed and persecuted and very largely because it is not known.â€But it is not in Europe alone that these baneful effects of calumny appear. Here in America, and even in the south where the bulk of the Negroes live in the midst of a people who resentfully declare that they should be left to deal with the Negro because they alone know him—even there the notion of the Negro, fostered by the press and other agencies of public opinion is as wide of the truth as it can be. To illustrate:In the March number of Van Norden’s Magazine in 1907 there appeared a symposium on The Negro Question. It was composed of expressions of opinion from twelve intelligent southerners, and was followed by an article by Mr. Booker T. Washington. The humor of the think lay in this, that these men were Southern college presidents and heads of banks, had lived all their lives among Negroes, and were, by their own words, proved to be either woefully or willfully ignorant of what the Negro had done and was doing. The mordant irony of fate decreed that Mr. Washington should be the one to present the facts that changed their seeming sapience to Falstaffian farce. The president of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Va. set forth that the Negro will not work regularly, that he needs but three dollars a week and, therefore, works but three days to get it and “quits work tospend it.†The president of Howard College, Alabama declared that, “My deliberate opinion is that the days of the Negro as a fair, honest laborer are numbered, and are few at that. He is becoming daily more shiftless, more unreliable, more restless, less inclined to work steadily.†The president of the University of South Carolina and the president of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts re-echoed the same doleful dictum while the president of the First National Bank of Birmingham, Ala. and the president of the Bank of Lexington, N.C. declared that it was a mistake to grant the rights of citizenship to the Negro and that education was a curse to him. The president of Guilford College repeated the “lazy, shiftless†argument while the president of Randolph-Macon College, Va. said, “Reduce their wages so that they shall have to work all the time to make a living and they will become better workmen or disappear in the struggle for existence,†repeating in substance, the argument of his brother-president of the Woman’s college.Mr. Washington’s article did not show any sign that it had been written as a reply of any sort. But it did show among other things, that the census of 1900 proved that the Negro peopleownedin the very states of these college presidents, “23,383 square miles of territory, an area nearly as large as that of Holland and Belgium combinedâ€; that this represented only a quarter of the farms worked by them; that, “after a searching investigation, I have not been able to find that a single graduate of Tuskegee, Hampton or any of the Negrocolleges can now be found in the prisons of the South;†that in a single county of Virginia-Gloucester Co.—Negroes were paying taxes on land valued at 88 million dollars and on buildings assessed at 80 millions, and all this on the soil where they had been slaves forty years before.Is not this eloquent of the value of American opinion on the American Negro as given in the American press? And the question suggested is, whether such statements are published in ignorance or ill-will? In either case it is equally damnatory.In December 1907 Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., an eminent Negro sociologist, published in McGirt’s Magazine an article on “The Newspapers and the Negroâ€, showing how the Negro is being “done†by headlines and other newspaper devices. The Horizon, at that time the most brilliant Negroperiodical, dealt with the subject in its issue for April 1908. Under the caption, “The Color Line in the Press Dispatchesâ€, it quoted approvingly these words of a Socialist paper—The Appeal to Reason—“The hand that fakes the Associated Press is the hand that rules the world.†European readers who are acquainted with the occasional diversions of Reuter’s Hong Kong and Shanghai correspondents will appreciate the point.The Horizon was constrained to refer to the matter again in its August issue. In both instances specific cases were cited and proof given. Since that time the need of some formal protest has been growing in the minds of all those thinking Negroes who are not compelled to “crook the pregnant hinges of the Kneeâ€; and it has grown largely because the practices complained of have grown to alarming proportions.The newspapers of this country have many crimes to answer for. They feature our criminals in bold head lines: our substantial men when noticed at all are relegated to the agate type division. Their methods, whether they obtain through set purpose or through carelessness, constantly appeal to the putrid passion of race hatred. They cause rapine to break loose by nurturing rancor. They help create untold sorrow. They are week-kneed and apologizing when the hour is bloody.But how can such a protest be effectively put? Though Truth come hot on the heels of Falsehood it could not quite undo its devil’s work. And the detractors of the weak and helpless are well aware of this.But Truth in the Negro’s case is not even unleashed. Truth, in fact, is chained up and well guarded, and it is this terrible task of setting Truth free that the Negro must essay in the very teeth of the American press. It is not an easy task to voice an adequate protest, for it needs the widest publicity. And since prejudice will oppose, it needs prestige also. Any such effort must feel itself feeble, and yet it must be made.
It is not an easy task to plead in the courts of the oppressor against oppression and wrong. It is not easy to get the judgement of the white men of the world against the white man’s injustice to the black. But nevertheless the attempt must be made and made again until the seared conscience of the civilized world’s hall throbs with righteous indignation at such outrage. “To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men. The human race has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised against injustice, ignorance and lust, the Inquisition yet would serve the law and guillotines decide our least disputes. The few who dare must speak and speak again to right the wrongs of many.â€
The urgent need of speaking out is shown by the following communication from Mr. J. Ellis Barker of London in an interview given to a correspondent ofThe New York Ageand published in that paper on December 29th 1910.
“We people in Europe,†says Mr. Barker, “do not understand the race problem, and we do not know the colored people, for the simple reason that there are not any colored people in Europe. In London, where I live, there are only a few hundred colored students whom one does not meet. Before I came to the United States my prejudice against the colored people was as great as that of any Southern planter. My prejudice against your race, as I believe the prejudice of most white people, was due rather to ignorance than to ill-will. I had been told in the books and papers published in Europe that the colored people were a race of barbariansand savages. I had been told that the colored people were a worthless set of people, dressed in rags, working a day or two during the week, and loafing during the rest of the time. I was told that the colored people were idle, diseased and vicious. So I imagined that all of them lived in slums and alleys and that the aristocracy of the race consisted of the waiters and railway porters.
I had been told that the colored people only played at science; that their doctors and lawyers werecharlatans. I had been told that the people of a mixed race were even worse than pure Negroes; that the mulattoes had lost the primitive virtues of the Negroes and had acquired all of the vices of the whites. A chance encounter with a cultured man of color induced me to look into the race problem and I was perfectly amazed when I discovered how greatly the colored people have been libelled and traduced. I have spent a considerable amount of time with colored people and have met many who are highly cultivated. I have found that among your race you have excellent lawyers, and some of the foremost physicians and surgeons. I have been over a large number of your elementary and higher grade schools and colleges and over Howard University, and I have admired the earnest and resolute determination with which your children try to improve their minds and to raise themselves. In your night schools I have found old men and women, former slaves, who are anxious to learn writing and reading. I have been to the homes of many colored people and I havefound them cosy, comfortable, elegant, and peopled by happy and harmonious families. I have come to the conclusion that the race is oppressed and persecuted and very largely because it is not known.â€
But it is not in Europe alone that these baneful effects of calumny appear. Here in America, and even in the south where the bulk of the Negroes live in the midst of a people who resentfully declare that they should be left to deal with the Negro because they alone know him—even there the notion of the Negro, fostered by the press and other agencies of public opinion is as wide of the truth as it can be. To illustrate:
In the March number of Van Norden’s Magazine in 1907 there appeared a symposium on The Negro Question. It was composed of expressions of opinion from twelve intelligent southerners, and was followed by an article by Mr. Booker T. Washington. The humor of the think lay in this, that these men were Southern college presidents and heads of banks, had lived all their lives among Negroes, and were, by their own words, proved to be either woefully or willfully ignorant of what the Negro had done and was doing. The mordant irony of fate decreed that Mr. Washington should be the one to present the facts that changed their seeming sapience to Falstaffian farce. The president of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Va. set forth that the Negro will not work regularly, that he needs but three dollars a week and, therefore, works but three days to get it and “quits work tospend it.†The president of Howard College, Alabama declared that, “My deliberate opinion is that the days of the Negro as a fair, honest laborer are numbered, and are few at that. He is becoming daily more shiftless, more unreliable, more restless, less inclined to work steadily.†The president of the University of South Carolina and the president of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts re-echoed the same doleful dictum while the president of the First National Bank of Birmingham, Ala. and the president of the Bank of Lexington, N.C. declared that it was a mistake to grant the rights of citizenship to the Negro and that education was a curse to him. The president of Guilford College repeated the “lazy, shiftless†argument while the president of Randolph-Macon College, Va. said, “Reduce their wages so that they shall have to work all the time to make a living and they will become better workmen or disappear in the struggle for existence,†repeating in substance, the argument of his brother-president of the Woman’s college.
Mr. Washington’s article did not show any sign that it had been written as a reply of any sort. But it did show among other things, that the census of 1900 proved that the Negro peopleownedin the very states of these college presidents, “23,383 square miles of territory, an area nearly as large as that of Holland and Belgium combinedâ€; that this represented only a quarter of the farms worked by them; that, “after a searching investigation, I have not been able to find that a single graduate of Tuskegee, Hampton or any of the Negrocolleges can now be found in the prisons of the South;†that in a single county of Virginia-Gloucester Co.—Negroes were paying taxes on land valued at 88 million dollars and on buildings assessed at 80 millions, and all this on the soil where they had been slaves forty years before.
Is not this eloquent of the value of American opinion on the American Negro as given in the American press? And the question suggested is, whether such statements are published in ignorance or ill-will? In either case it is equally damnatory.
In December 1907 Professor R. R. Wright, Jr., an eminent Negro sociologist, published in McGirt’s Magazine an article on “The Newspapers and the Negroâ€, showing how the Negro is being “done†by headlines and other newspaper devices. The Horizon, at that time the most brilliant Negroperiodical, dealt with the subject in its issue for April 1908. Under the caption, “The Color Line in the Press Dispatchesâ€, it quoted approvingly these words of a Socialist paper—The Appeal to Reason—“The hand that fakes the Associated Press is the hand that rules the world.†European readers who are acquainted with the occasional diversions of Reuter’s Hong Kong and Shanghai correspondents will appreciate the point.
The Horizon was constrained to refer to the matter again in its August issue. In both instances specific cases were cited and proof given. Since that time the need of some formal protest has been growing in the minds of all those thinking Negroes who are not compelled to “crook the pregnant hinges of the Kneeâ€; and it has grown largely because the practices complained of have grown to alarming proportions.
The newspapers of this country have many crimes to answer for. They feature our criminals in bold head lines: our substantial men when noticed at all are relegated to the agate type division. Their methods, whether they obtain through set purpose or through carelessness, constantly appeal to the putrid passion of race hatred. They cause rapine to break loose by nurturing rancor. They help create untold sorrow. They are week-kneed and apologizing when the hour is bloody.
But how can such a protest be effectively put? Though Truth come hot on the heels of Falsehood it could not quite undo its devil’s work. And the detractors of the weak and helpless are well aware of this.
But Truth in the Negro’s case is not even unleashed. Truth, in fact, is chained up and well guarded, and it is this terrible task of setting Truth free that the Negro must essay in the very teeth of the American press. It is not an easy task to voice an adequate protest, for it needs the widest publicity. And since prejudice will oppose, it needs prestige also. Any such effort must feel itself feeble, and yet it must be made.