VII

VIIAFTER THE WAR: THE VOTEThemarch to the sea, like John Brown’s soul marching to eternity, was a moving symbol of the faith of the war. Men saw in it the march of the cause of humanity as a whole. Sherman offered Savannah as a Christmas gift to Abraham Lincoln, and the star of Bethlehem shone anew over a ravaged land and ravaged hearts. The news when it came was a signal for great popular rejoicing and a prophetic belief in the end of the war. Four months afterward there was a general capitulation of the South. It is true America’s most innocent and Christian man was destroyed by hate—another Golgotha day in history, when on Good Friday in a theatre in Washington Lincoln was assassinated—but the fight had been fought and the victory won. It became possible to ratify the abolition of slavery by the re-establishment of the Union and the common consent of all the States.“In Sixty Three the slaves were free; In Sixty Four the war was o’er,” says a rhyme, but in truth the Negroes were not free in the South till the South had been conquered by theUnited States, and the war was not o’er till April, 1865. It was on the 24th of May, 1865, that the army marched past the White House in its final grand review, bearing aloft its battle-riven flags festooned with flowers. There was glory in the North; the twilight of confusion in the South; and the Negroes were free. Peace came once more, though not peace in men’s hearts. War hate still bred hate, and the lust of cruelty called into being its monster progeny of revenge.The fanatic who murdered Lincoln in doing so struck the whole of his own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. The Negroes and the Negro cause suffered also. The ex-slaves were given votes and put on an electoral equality with white men. This was a palpable injustice and indignity. The Negroes in 1863 were not prepared in mind or in soul or in knowledge for the exercise of the franchise. Neither were they gifted with the power of will and physical strength necessary to hold the suffrage when it was given them. There was the sameexaltation nationally when the victory was won as there had been locally when Sherman marched through, and the same disillusion and the same destruction of bridges was to take place also. Where the white man went the black man could not follow. For a brief space of time the ex-slave dominated the white South. The black vote was exploited by political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the war should still have left the educated white man in authority and not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. As is usual after a war, the victors wanted a revolution in the land where they had won. The white North revenged itself on the white South. But a black revolution was a thing that could not be. Racial instinct came to the help of the Whites, and through general tacit understandings and organized conspiracies the new black masters were ousted from their places. Then fear of what might be, and once more, revenge born of the brief black dominion, went as far the other way in injustice. Nigger baiting arose,mob violence took the place of the justice of the courts. The central authority was flouted, first covertly and then openly. The Negro was hustled back to peonage and servility, and one might be tempted to think that the cause for which all the blood of the Civil War had been shed was lost. It would have been lost had not slavery become a complete anachronism in world society. The yoke could not be reimposed upon the Negro’s neck. His freedom has persisted, it has grown.The maximum of persecution of the Negro in recent years does not equal the misery of slavery. Even if all the lynchings and burnings and humiliations and disabilities be put together they do not add up to one year of servitude. Most Negroes understand that. They know that no matter what may be the vicissitudes they pass through they are still progressing to an ever fuller freedom.In viewing the whole situation one is apt to underestimate the unhappiness of slavery and to magnify the unhappiness of the present era of freedom. It is blessed to be free. Even to be the worst possible peon is far removed from slavery. The great significance of the Emancipation is that the Negro slaves were set free—free for anything and everything in the wide world. In the prison house of a national institution of slavery there was no hope, no sense of the ultimate possibilities latent in a man.But with freedom every baby became a potential Alexander.In 1863 a new life began to germinate, began to have promise. Some thought that it must show forth at once. But that was fallacious. It was bound to spend a long time underground before the first modest shoots of the new should appear. Many have argued that the Negro would come to nothing in his freedom, and even those who have believed in his destiny have been impatient. Premature greetings have been given time and oft to new Negro culture and responsibility. The only criticism made here is that they were premature. The greatest of these was the suffrage.I have said that the denial of the Negro his legitimate vote is a part of peonage, and I have also said that it was wrong to give the freed-men votes at once. I should like to explain how Negro suffrage stands to-day.In the first place, it was wrong to enfranchise the ex-slaves, not because they were not entitled to votes, but because they were not ready to be intrusted with votes. In 1863 in England as well as in America the world could be saved by the ballot box alone. It was a rebellion against this belief that caused Carlyle to fulminate against “Nigger Democracy.” In talking with Dean Brawley of Morehouse College at Atlanta, I noticed a prejudice against Carlyle which is very widespread among educated colored people.In the first place I should like to assure them that the use by Carlyle of the expression “nigger” has nothing in common with the brutal and contemptuous sense in which that word is used in America. Thus we say “working like a nigger,” an expression derived from the life of the slaves; “nigger diploma,” a contemptuous English expression for a high degree such as Doctor of Literature or Doctor of Divinity, thought to have been purchased in America at a Negro university; theten little nigger boys, the black boys who come so swiftly to bad ends in the familiar rhyme of our childhood. “Nigger” is in England a playful word for a Negro, and is used always in the nursery. It is the children’s word for a black man, preferably for one who has been thoroughly blacked. Carlyle was one of the most reverent of men, and not accustomed to speak contemptuously of God’s creatures. But he was contemptuous of the suffrage. To him and to Ruskin and to many another it seemed absurd that the voice of the educated man and the illiterate should have the same value; that the many who are dull and ignorant should be allowed to outvote the few who know. The enfranchisement of the freed Negroes furnished Carlyle with an example of carrying an absurdity to its logical conclusion.The alternative to government by ballot has, however, proved to be government by the dominationof a military caste, and mankind generally in our time has shown that it prefers the former. The ballot box with all its absurdity seems nevertheless our only means of carrying on in freedom. It would be wrong to grant the suffrage to the millions of savages under British rule in Africa, because they could not use it. And it was wrong to enfranchise Negrodom in America with a stroke of the pen after the Civil War. It has done the Negroes more harm than good.To have such a grievance as to be legally enfranchised and yet physically denied the use of the vote is, of course, great harm. It affects the social mind. It makes bitterness and brews agitation. To be conscripted and called upon to fight for the country when this grievance is in mind has aggravated the harm already done. “We are not too low to fight the foe, but we’re too low to share in the spoil,” as the story goes. I heard a Negro comedian indulging in funniosities at a colored music hall win great applause by a chansonette:Cullud folk will be ready to fightWhen cullud folk has equal right.I a’nt so foolish as I seem to be.And it is a reasonable sentiment.The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote. Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but theother half has more than average capacity for citizenship. Yet in spite of the Constitution and the Federal authority these many millions remain practically without voice in all the Southern States. Physical force is exerted to keep them from the ballot box.The Southerner affects to believe that the educated Negro is even less fitted to have a vote than the illiterate sort. But that is because he hates to see the Negro rise. He will tell you that in certain States the Negroes outnumber the Whites by ten to one. But that is a characteristic misstatement. It is hard to find a city where the black vote exceeds the white. In the last census the blackest cities were Birmingham and Memphis, where the Negroes proved to be forty per cent. of the population, while inRichmond it was37%Atlanta34%Nashville34%Washington29%New Orleans27%And there are only two States where the Negro population exceeds that of the White; namely, Mississippi and South Carolina, where the Negroes were 57 per cent. and 55 per cent. of the total population.If, as seems only fair, an illiteracy test were made legal by amendment of the Constitution,white voters would outnumber black by a large margin.As for having anything to fear from the educated Negro vote, there is of course one matter of anxiety. The Negro would be bound to fight for social justice, and violence would be done to racial prejudice.The South is, however, determined that the Negro shall never vote again. Year by year the colored people as a whole grow in intelligence, in capacity, and in the number of its intelligentsia, but the South is not moved. It sees no explosion in the future, and makes no provision for one—will not, till the explosion comes.Racial fear, no doubt, plays a large part in this determination, but there is a further consideration. The Solid South votes Democratic to a man. The Negro, if he had a chance, would vote as solidly Republican. I remember being present at a violent quarrel at a Negro meeting in New Orleans—one Negro, though he had not a vote, had actually called himself a Democrat. A remedying of the defective suffrage would be an enormous access of strength to the Republican party. For this reason Democrats exaggerate their racial fear. And also for that reason every Republican politician who gains power is bound to make a bid to break the solid South. Senator Lodge himself was the author of a “Force Bill” which came near enactment some years ago, and it would have placed Federalsoldiers at every ballot box in the South, to protect black voters.The South defies anything which the Federal Government may devise. As Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, said to his colleagues in the Senate:“But there is one issue upon which the South is solid, and upon which she will remain solid—the protection of her civilization from subjection to an ignorant and servile race. And neither Federal honors nor Federal bayonets can shake that solidity.”President Wilson’s administration has been one which was dominated by Southern Democrats, and as the Southern vote has been behind him and them, there could hardly be any help given to the Negroes. The Democratic failure has nevertheless been a real disappointment. Wilson’s radical idealism; his plunge to the root of trouble wherever trouble was, led many to believe that he would do something to remedy the pitiable state of the Negroes. Some legal palliative would come with a better grace from Democrats than a forceful measure enacted over their heads by Republicans. Perhaps with the downfall of the Democratic party and the coming triumph of the Republicans something practical will be done during the next few years to help the Negro. The main hope of color must lie in a Republican President and a Republican Senate being in powertogether. November, 1920, and its elections will be as fateful for the Negro as for the world.Roosevelt gave his party a generous lead when he received Booker T. Washington at the White House, and I heard young Colonel Roosevelt one evening, with his father’s nerve and pluck, promise a vast Negro audience a “square deal” if they would have patience. That square deal is the Negro’s right, especially in the matter of the vote. It is strange that the movement for the “rights of man” inaugurated practically in the French Revolution should have stopped short about 1870, and the contrary ideal of the “privilege of individuals” begun to progress. As Sutton Griggs very forcefully put it in his address to the National Baptist Convention at Newark, New Jersey:“In 1792 a motion was carried in the English House of Commons providing for the gradual abolition of the slave traffic. In 1794 the French Convention decreed that the rights of French citizens should be granted to all slaves in French colonies. In 1834 the British abolished slavery entirely within their dominions. In 1848 French slaves were emancipated. In 1863 the Dutch set their slaves free. The South, unmoved by world thought, clung to its slaves, but they were violently torn from her grasp in the Civil War. Under the impulse of the doctrine of the native equality of all men theFifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding the denial of the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was adopted in the year 1869. In the year 1870, bills were passed by Congress providing fines and imprisonment for anyone who even tried to prevent the Negro from voting or to keep his vote from being counted.“But all of the forces that could be marshaled have not, up to the present time, been able to move our nation or the world one inch forward in a straight line from this point. The action just mentioned stands as the last recorded national act designed to incorporate the Negro race in the governmental structure without reservations. Further efforts were made by powerful forces, but all have proved to be abortive. In 1875 a very comprehensive bill intended to make the Negroes of the South secure in their rights passed the lower house of Congress but was defeated in the Senate. Some years later, the Lodge Election Bill, having the same purpose, passed the House but was defeated in the Senate. The Republican party’s platform, upon which President Taft was elected, contained an unequivocal declaration in favor of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in letter and in spirit, but no legislation in that direction was attempted during his term of office.”To-day, however, a world war and the greatest affirmation of the rights of nations if not of man, has been made. There is an opportunity to resume the interrupted advance.VIIIIN ALABAMA: COLOR AND COLOR PREJUDICEI madean expedition into Alabama from Atlanta, and again saw something of that State when I got down to the Gulf of Mexico. In the matter of Negro life it is first of all important because of Tuskegee Institute, which, like the college at Hampton, is sometimes called the Mecca of the American Negro. It was founded by Booker T. Washington, and is the visible expression of the self-help idea. There, as at Hampton, the ex-slave is taught to do something as the end of his schooling. The establishment is now under the guidance of the beloved Dr. Moton, a wise and genial African giant of pure Negro extraction: his father is said to have been a prince who in selling his captives was himself lured on to a slaver, and suddenly found himself in the position of his own captive enemies. This was during Civil War time, and he came to America a slave but to be made free. As a boy barely able to sign his name young Moton first appeared at Hampton, and the authorities were at first doubtful about accepting him as a student. But what they would have missed! Dr. Moton is the very best type of Negro teacher, the worthysuccessor of Booker Washington. Tuskegee, besides its educational work, does much to combat race hatred, and keeps public opinion in America well informed on the lynchings that take place. The presence of the institute in the backward State of Alabama is very important for the future of the South.At Birmingham, Alabama, I was presented to a very charming young widow who had been left rather rich, a well-educated lady of leisure, who lived well and dressed well, and was possessed of a recognizable Americanchic. I met her in town, and then in response to an invitation called on her at her house. She was certainly a Negro beauty, and I have no doubt was highly desired in marriage. There was a clear five thousand a year besides her charms, and it was impossible not to feel some of the glamour of that fact—The belle of the season is wastingan hour upon you.Mmmmmmshe cooed to everything I said. She was shy as a pedestal without its statue; her eyes burned, and I could not help feeling all the atmosphere of “romance.” If she had been a shade lighter in complexion any white man might have fallen in love with her.Her children—or was it the children of one of her black servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery,but colored dolls,after Nature. This was very charming, and I should have liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black Madonna.To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll.It was also at Southern Brum that, calling on Reverend Williams, I happened upon this singular conversation:“Now, isn’t it absurd for us to have white angels?”“You surely would not like them black?”“We give Sunday-school cards to our children with white angels on them. It’swrong.”“Black angels would be ugly.”“No more ugly than white.”I thought the whiteness of the angels was as the whiteness of white light which contained all color. That, however, was lost on the reverend, who happened to be a realist.“Christ himself was not white. He would have had to travel in a Jim Crow car,” said he. “But put it to yourself: isn’t it absurd for us to be taught that the good are all white, and that sin itself is black?”“It does seem to leave you in the shade,” said I.“Expressions such as ‘black as sin’ ought to be deleted from the language. One might as well say ‘white as sin.’”I ransacked my brain rapidly.“We say ‘pale as envy,’” said I.“‘Black spite,’” he retorted. “Why should it be black?”I could not say.“Then Adam and Eve in the Garden,” he went on, “are always shown as beautifully white creatures, whereas, considering the climate, they may well have been as dark-skinned as any Negro couple in Alabama. Babylon was built by Negroes.”“Would you have Adam and Eve painted black?”“Why, yes, I would.”This struck me as rather diverting, but it was quite serious. Later, in New York one night at Liberty Hall, before I was driven out as a white interloper, I heard an orator say to an admiring host of Negroes: “Why, I ask you, is God always shown as white? It is because He is the white man’s God. It is the God of our masters. (Yes, brothers, that’s it.) It’s the God of those who persecute and despise the colored people. Brothers, we’ve got to knock that white God down and put up a black God. We’ve got to rewrite the Old Testament and the New from a black man’s point of view. Our theologians must get busy on a black God.”This was what we Whites call clap trap, and irreverent as well. But it seemed to take well with the Harlem brothers. Once more a lesson may be derived for older children—— If you make God in your own image, it does not follow that other children will agree that it is like——It reminded me of the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they got home from the war and took a good look at their own womenkind; they thought them so much more good looking than French or German girls. Girls and dolls, angels and Gods, we like them to correspond to our own complexion.Birmingham at night glows to the sky with furnaces. A hundred thousand black proletarians earn their living on coal and steel, stirringup soot to heaven. Though I met there the charming Mrs. J——, whom I have mentioned, and also other educated Negroes, it is not to be supposed that it is a place of culture, white or black. It is a straggling city with an ugly, misshapen, ill-balanced interior or center part like a table spread with small teacups and large jam pots. It will not stand comparison with Atlanta or New Orleans or Richmond. Strictly speaking, it is not a city, but an agglomeration of industrialism. Nevertheless, the factories which surround it are owned by companies of vast resources, and it is claimed that in the steel industry there are some of the most extensive industrial plants in the world. Business is little disturbed by strikes. On the gates of the vast factory estates is written:We do not want you unless you are able to look after yourself. Careless men are always liable to accident.Some notices declare “Non-Union Shops,” others “Open Shops,” but it does not seem to matter much. The unions have little power. Wages are high, though not as high as in the North, but the cost of living is very much less, and there is a lower standard of respectability. In some cases the industrials are housed on the factory grounds, and you see Negro dwellings which amount to industrial barracks. Every gate has its porter or civilian sentry, and in order to reach your workingman you may have to show what your business is with him. On the way tohis door you are met by the notice that trespassers will be prosecuted.There is no encouragement to loiterers, but you may see the Negro gangs at work, organized squads of workers hard at it, with Negro foremen or white foremen. A myriad-fold Negro industrialism straggles near mines and furnaces, blacker than in Nature. The coaly black Negro collier, the sooted face of steel worker and tar operative are curious comments on whether it is good to be Black or to be White. Coke products flame and smoke at innumerable pipes, while locomotives are panting and steaming forward and back, and a platoon of chimney stacks belches forth dense blackness, which, enfolded in the breeze, wanders over the heavens and one’s eyes.I strayed in at the doors of some very dirty Negro houses. Here was little of theamour propreof Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anti-kink was not being generally applied, and as far as the little ones were concerned, mother’s little Alabama coon seemed to be getting a little bit too much for mother. It is not difficult to understand the disgust of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy, large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. The sight of them was responsible for much of the feeling which inspired the Northern riots. “We knowour Northern Negroes,” they said in the North, “but these from the South were like no Negroes we had ever seen.” There was awakened much prejudice against these uncouth Africans, who seemed so near to the savage and the beast. It was natural, perhaps. But high wages and new hopes and ideals quickly improve the black immigrant. He is being absorbed into the generality of black Negrodom, in its established worthiness and respectability, above the Mason-Dixon line. It would be difficult after a few years to pick out a Southern Negro in a crowd in New York.The little black children in the suburbs of Birmingham were alternately very confiding and then suddenly scared and then confiding again as I tried to talk to them. There was much fear in their bodies. They seemed if anything to be blacker than their parents, and I volunteered the opinion that a good deal of their color would come off in a course of hot baths. But washing facilities were of a rudimentary kind, and the passion for being fit and fresh could not readily be developed.The white South could improve its Negroes infinitely if it cared to do so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its Negroes to rise and seems most happy when they can readily be identified with the beasts that perish. But if it thought more highly of the Negro, the Negro would rise.I visited Professor K—— in his three-storied house. He had been one of the Negro Four-Minute Men who had made popular addresses to his people during the war fervor, inducing them to be “patriotic” and subscribe their dollars to various funds. He said he was deeply discouraged. He did not belong to Alabama and would much rather live in a more civilized part of the world, but he gave his life for the uplift of the children. He was doing what he could, but the Whites gave no co-operation. In these factory areas the colored children outnumbered the Whites five to one. Teaching was, of course, segregated; he had no objection to that, but very, very little was done by comparison for the black children. They had most need of blessing—but they shared only in parsimony and curses. He showed me his school—a ramshackle building of old, faded wood. “Oh, but our teachers have enthusiasm,” said he. “They’re doing a work of God, and they love it. Yes, sir.”I obtained an impression which I think is sound, that there was more keenness to teach on the part of the colored people of Alabama than on the part of the Whites. White schools find some difficulty in obtaining good teachers; colored schools find no such difficulty. If colored students only go on in the way they have begun, there is quite a good prospect of their obtaining posts to teach white children in whiteschools—not perhaps soon in Alabama, for it is strongly prejudiced, but elsewhere first, and then in this State. To start off with, they would be excellent with young children. There is a broad road of conquest standing open there. As Booker T. Washington very sagaciously pointed out to his people, there is no stronger argument in their favor than personal attainment.However, looking around the houses of the industrialized masses here, one can only be appalled at the inadequacy of civilization. There is nothing that is better than in the forlorn mining villages of the Russian Ural. It makes a sort of Negro little better than a nigger, and it is surprising that he does not run amuck more often than he does.If the outlying settlements reminded of the Ural, the center of the city reminded of nothing better than Omsk. Here on the main street, at Eighteenth Street, is a very “jazzy” corner, resplendent with five times too much light at night, vocal with noisy music, and swarming with Negroes of all castes and colors. By day it is like a web of gregarious larvæ; by night it is the entrance to wonderland. Here is massed together the Negro enterprise of the city. Most of the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen’s clever Negro stories are thought to be derived from this corner—Mr. Florian Slappey, Lawyer Evans Chew, and the rest. Do not their ways and doings divert a vast number of readers totheSaturday Evening Post? I may have met some of them. I cannot say. But I met their like.The chief establishment is the savings bank building, a squat, six-story erection in red brick. It is flanked by places of amusement, but in itself it is an ark of professionalism and learning. It is a hive of many cells or cabinets, and every cabinet has its special occupant, a doctor here, a dentist there, a lawyer in the other, another doctor, a professor, an agent, and so on. You may meet nearly all who count in Birmingham Negrodom here. By the way, the local way of pronouncing the name of the city is Bumming Ham; if you say politely, Birmingham, pronouncing with lips and teeth in the front part of the mouth, no one will understand what you mean. A Negro pastor whirled me round to the hub of Bumming Ham in his brand-new car. He had lately had a very successful revival, of which the motor was an outward and visible sign. And I called on many of the notables. I met a short, scrubby Negro of fifty, whose complexion seemed to have been drenched in yellowness. He explained this by the statement that the blood of Senator H—— flowed in his veins. The senator had taken a liberty with his mother, who for her part was thoroughly black. He thanked the senator, since probably he had given him some brains; his mother’s side of the family was unusually hard-headed.He had become a professor. His daughter was a remarkable public speaker, and as Senator H—— was an orator, he used to tell his Sarah thattherewas Senator H—— coming out in her. “The Negro has been mixed with the best blood in the South,” said he; “the blood of the masters, the English aristocrats who came first to the country.”I did not think there was much in that.“Are mulattoes increasing or decreasing in numbers?” I asked.He thought they were increasing. But he did not deny the fact that Negro children tend to revert to type. When two mulattoes marry, the children are generally darker than the parents, and often real Negro types. The white man’s strain is thrown out rapidly.“How, then, is it that mulattoes and near Whites are on the increase?” The professor thought for one reason there was still much illegitimacy, and for another the Negro race under civilized conditions was getting a little fairer on the whole. Some of the mulatto women were extremely beautiful, and consequently more attractive to white men. The white women of the South hated the mulatto women because they took their husbands away from them. He thought a good deal of race hatred was fostered by the white woman, who instinctively hated the other race.“Did you ever hear of a union between aNegro woman and a white man that was on other than an animal plane?” I asked him.Professor M—— knew of several instances where an infatuation for a Negro woman had inspired a white man to make good in life. It was generally a tragedy, for they could not marry, and they were subject to coarse suspicion and raillery and intrigue. It stood in the way of the white man finding a white bride, and of the Negro woman finding a Negro husband. Where a white man had become interested in a Negro woman it was not good for the health of a Negro man to pretend to her affections. The mob feeling against Negroes was so readily aroused that it was the easiest thing in Alabama for a white man who had a grudge against a Negro to “frame up” a crime or a scandal and make him leave the neighborhood or remain constantly in danger of being roughly handled.Alabama has a bad record for lynching. It is about fifth in the list of bad States. I understood that lynching was on the increase. The old folk, the people who had been slave owners, the settled inhabitants of places like Anniston and Montgomery, and of the country, knew all the family history of their “niggers” from A to Z, and what they might do, or could do, and they were friendly, compared with the “new sort.”The poor Whites loved to be in mobs and feel in mobs. Over their meals and at work and inthe trolley cars they loved to talk in the way of the mob. Individually they don’t understand the Negro—they are afraid of him, like dogs that will only attack when in numbers. They mostly came to America after the Civil War and the Emancipation found the Negroes in possession of land or of work or of houses. They had their grievances, and instead of visiting them upon God or the Devil or Society in general, found the Negro a convenient fetish and visited their discontent on him. It soon became a habit, then it became a sort of lust and brutal sport.The older and more solid people have been much annoyed by the growth of this brutality, and something definite is being done to combat it in Alabama. Committees have been formed, or were being formed in the fall of 1919, in every county in the State, half white, half colored, to inquire into racial strife and see what could be done for life and freedom.An old Negro said to me: “We had two clocks on the cabin wall, and one was very slow and deliberate and always seemed to say:“’Take yo’ time. Take yo’ time!’“But the other gabbled to us:“’Get together, get together, get together!’ That’s what we got to do to-day, brothers—get together.”The Negroes are fond of emphasizing the triviality of color differences. They reprove thewhite man playfully. “Why get so excited about difference in color? We believe in equality of rights for all men,” I heard a leader say, “for all men of whatever color—white, black, brown, or yellow, or blue.” And his audience laughed. “Two boys go into a shop; one buys a red toy, the other a blue toy—but it is not very important which color—the toy’s the same.”But of course color prejudice or preference is not such a haphazard matter, and prejudice against the Negro is prejudice against more than color. The toy, so to speak, is different. It may be as good, but it is different. The body, and especially the skull, of a Negro is different from that of the white man. The nervous system, the brain, the mind and soul, are different. I heard the theory put forward in the name of Christian Science that in God’s perfect plan there were no Negroes. Their dark skins were other men’s evil thought about them. All men were really white, and the outward appearance of their skin could be made to correspond to the white idea by concentrated true thought about them. That is a charitable and beautiful faith to live by. But what of the new line of Negroes who are proud of being black, who abhor pallor as nausea? There are many Negroes now who have a religion of being black. The new generation of children is being brought up to glorify Negro color. It is told of the princes and warriors from which it is descended, learns withthe geography of the United States the geography of Africa, and delights in the cognomen—Afro-American. The color issue will never be settled by all Negroes becoming Whites. It seems clear also that it cannot be solved by all men becoming mulattoes. There seems to remain just one obvious solution, and that is in distinct and parallel development, equality before the law, and mutual understanding and tolerance.IXTHE SOUTHERN POINT OF VIEWShoemaker:No, my lord, they don’t hurt you there.Foppington:I tell thee, they pinch me execrably.Shoemaker:Well, then, my lord, if those shoes pinch you, I’ll be d——d.Foppington:Why, wilt thou undertake to persuade me I cannot feel?Shoemaker:Your lordship may please to feel what you think fit; but that shoe does not hurt you.—(“A Trip to Scarborough.”)TheSouthern point of view can be gathered together in a very short chapter. Its expression has so crystallized that it can be set down in a series of paragraphs and phrases. Whosoever doth not believe, without doubt he shall be damned everlastingly. Wherever you meet a Southerner, be it in the remotest corner of the earth, it is the same as in native Alabama. I was talking to the Mother Superior of a convent one day in a genial English countryside. Although I did not know it, she derived from Mississippi. I mentioned the subject of the Negro, and from her quiet face, meager with fasting and pale with meditation, there flashed nevertheless the Southern flame—like lightning across the room.You have only to mention the Negro sympathetically in a public meeting and some one ofSouthern extraction will be found opposing to you a statement of the Southern creed. Thus, after speaking one morning at Carnegie Hall, some one came up to me and said very emphatically: If you had lived among the Negroes you would not speak of them as you do—the inevitable Southerner.This is his creed:1. We understand the niggers and they like us. When they go North they’re crazy till they get back to us. The North does not understand the nigger, pets him and spoils him, and at last dislikes him more than any Southerner.2. We have occasionally race riots in the South, but they are generally caused by Yankees who have come South. In any case the worst riots in recent years have taken place in the North—at Washington, right under the President’s nose, and at Chicago.3. Few Northerners or Englishmen understand or can understand the Negro problem. Those who understand, agree with us. Those who do not agree, do not understand.4. The nigger is all right as long as he is kept in his place. You must make him keep his distance. If once you are familiar with him, you are lost. He will give himself such airs that it will be impossible to get on with him.5. The nigger is an animal. The male of the species we generally call a “buck nigger.” Like the animals, he is full of lust. Like the animals,also, he does not feel pain. When he is burned it is not the same as a white man burning. Like the animals, he has no soul either to lose or to save, and Christianity and education are alike wasted on him. The polished Negro is merely disgusting, like an ape in evening dress. You clothe him and dress him and put him at table, but he’s an animal all the same and is bound to behave like one. You can’t trust him.6. Under the influence of alcohol the Negro becomes a wild beast. He goes out of control. No fear of consequence can stop him. That is why some of the Southern States have been so ardently prohibitionist.7. If you had to live with them you’d understand how terrible it is.8. The nigger is a liar. He will say anything to your face to please you, or anything he thinks you want him to say. He’ll tell you stories of lynchings that would make you think we lynched a nigger every week, instead of it’s being the rarest occurrence.9. When we lynch ‘em it’s for a very good reason—to protect our white women. Ask any of your English or Northern friends, who pity the Negro, whether they’d be willing to let their daughters marry a Negro. It’s a horrible thought. But that is what the Negro is always after—the white woman. His fancy runs to her, and if it were not for the terror of being lynched we should never be able to leave our wives anddaughters in security. The R in the middle of the Negro’s name stands for his favorite proclivity. We burn ‘em alive, yes, and do it slow, because killing’s too good for them, and we get just so mad that everyone wants to be there, and have his part in putting them to death. In the North they do not lynch the Negro, but if one commits a crime they blame the whole Negro race. In the South we find the guilty man and punish him.10. When the white man goes to the Negro girl, it’s different. He ought to be ashamed of himself, but there, it’s human nature, and you can’t be too stern with him.11. The white man is master, and must remain master. But you do not realize how precarious his position is, outnumbered as he is, ten to one, in many districts. If the niggers joined hands against us we might be all killed in a night.12. They have votes. By the greatest injustice ever committed in this country, the Constitution of the United States was amended to give these people votes and give them power over us. It is true we prevent them using their votes, and override the Constitution at every election. But political agitation goes on all the time. Every Negro would vote Republican if he had a chance, just because we vote Democrat. The Republican party knows that, and is always conspiring to restore to the Negro his lost power ofvoting. It will never succeed, but you can see the anxiety it causes us.13. As for education, it’s bad for the nigger almost every way, and every new educated nigger makes it more difficult to keep ‘em down. But kept down they must be.14. Justice? Well, you ask any nigger which he’d prefer, a Southern court of justice and a Southern judge, or a Northern one. He would always prefer the Southern one, because in the South we understand him. And we’re very fond of them and they of us. We get on very well together.Southern belief rarely strays out of this codified expression of thought. Get into converse with a Southerner on the subject of the Negroes, and you will almost always be able to refer his talk to 1 or 6 or 10 or some other paragraph of the foregoing. It is sufficiently pat and parrot-like to be amusing at last. The Negro himself is amused and pained by it. It amounts to this: The Southerner has made the Negro a pair of boots and he says they fit very well. The Negro says they don’t fit. But the Southerner says he’ll risk his salvation on it—he made the boots, and he knows his trade. The Negro, however, has to wear them.Perhaps if it were merely opinion, the idleness of the spoken word, the Southern point of view would merit less attention. Talk might bediscounted, as mere talk is discounted by responsible minds. But it has unfortunately a remarkable counterpart in action. It is the concomitant of mob murder and torture. It is expressed not only in narrow and bitter phrase, but in actual flesh twisting; not only in the flames of fanaticism, but in real flames.Lynching is a popular sport in the South. It is perhaps popular in idea all over the world. Even in Great Britain, where the policeman is on a sort of moral pedestal, and is paid immense respect, how often among the masses does one hear the sentiment that such and such a person should be put against a wall and shot. Even in a nation that has such a phrase as “the majesty of the law” the idea of taking the law into one’s own hands is generally popular. In Russia,samosudi, as they are called, are frequent, and there is a short and terrible way with pickpockets when the crowd finds them out. France’s passion forla lanternedoes not need to be enlarged upon.It is said that in countries where the laws are badly administered and the police held in little respect, lynchings are the more frequent. This is so. And while lynching can have a moral sanction at first, it may, if unchecked, grow to be a popular sport, a means of “national” holiday, like the shows of Rome, theauto-da-fé’sof Spain, bullfights, and boxing competitions. When sufficient cause for a lynching is lacking,cause may have to be invented, just to let the folk have some “fun.” In the United States to-day there are not sufficient crimes committed by the Negroes to satisfy the hunger of the crowd for lynchings. So inevitably many innocent black men are sacrificed just for sport’s sake.Last year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched in America; fourteen of them were burned alive. Burning appears to be on the increase, and is an obvious indication of growing mob lust. This form of brutality has long ago ceased in the Europe from which perhaps it was derived. Spaniards burned the Indians. Indians burned the settlers. Settlers burned their runaway slaves. And still to-day in comparatively large numbers the white Southern mob burns its Negro victims. It has its historical background. The thought of burning supposed delinquents alive is common in Southern minds. “Make ‘em die slow” is even a watchword.The Southern half of the United States is fond of saying that the North is now quite as bad in its treatment of the Negro. Happily, that is untrue. Seventy-two out of the seventy-seven lynchings occurred south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the rest occurred in the Western States. The North was immune. Unfortunately, this good record was marred by some bad race riots in Northern cities.Of all the States, Georgia had the worst recordfor lynching. During last year she lynched twenty-two persons, almost twice as many as the next worst, Mississippi. Two of these were for alleged attacks on white women. The rest were for a variety of crimes and misdemeanors. Thus, in April, a soldier was beaten to death at Blakely for wearing his uniform too long. In May, at Warrenton, Benny Richards was burned to death for murder. In the first week in August a soldier was shot for refusing to yield the road, and another was hanged for discussing the Chicago race riots. At Pope City another soldier was lynched for shooting. In the belief that the Negroes were planning a rising, Eli Cooper was taken at Ocmulgee and publicly burned at the stake. On September 10th, in the Georgian city of Athens, another Negro, Obe Cox, was burned for murder. In Americus, in October, Ernest Glenwood was drowned as a propagandist. On October 5th, Moses Martin was shot for incautious remarks. Next day, at Lincolnton, one Negro was shot for misleading the mob, and two others were burned alive for committing murder. Next day another was shot at Macon for attempted murder. Two were hanged at Buena Vista for intimacy with a white woman, and before the end of the month three more met their end from the mob for shooting and manslaughter.As far as Georgia is concerned, this record disposes of the theory that lynching only takesplace when white women have been attacked. As a matter of fact, the commonest motive for lynching of Negroes throughout the United States has been shown to be mob condemnation, of violence—not of lust. By far the greatest number of lynchings are for supposed murder. The mob lynches the Negro as a man shoots his dog when the latter has turned on him. Formerly, attacks on women provided the greater number of cases. If the Negro were fool enough ever to make eyes at a white woman, he risked his life. Many innocent admirations and misunderstandings have resulted in lynchings. As for rape, the Negro who commits it is bound to come to a violent end. Very few escape lynching, and the South claims that whatever immunity it enjoys from Negro sexual crimes is due to the deterrent of lynch law. It claims that if the criminals were merely dealt with according to the law, sexual crimes would speedily multiply.White people with the white-race instinct are generally ready to condone lynching when it is proved that it thus acts as a deterrent. Perhaps they are right, and they ought not to put it to themselves from the black man’s point of view. But there is the other point of view, and there is the collective opinion of the colored people on the subject, and that opinion is being organized and will make itself felt. It is worth attention and sympathy.Granted that the black man is the under man as far as the Whites are concerned, is he not entitled to some protection for hisownwomen? One of these Georgia lynchings which occurred last year was a characteristic affair. It occurred at the town of Milan. Two young white fellows tried to break into a house and seize two colored girls living there with their mother. They ran screaming to a neighbor’s home. The Whites tore down a door, ripped up flooring, fired a gun, and made a great disturbance. One old Negro woman was so frightened she jumped into a well, and a worthy Negro grandfather of seventy-two years came out with a shotgun and fired in defence of the women. One of the white men fired on him. The Negro fired back and killed him. The other white man fled. Now, for that deed, instead of being honored as a brave man, the Negro was seized by the white mob and hanged on a high post, and his old body was shot to pieces. This man was a good and quiet citizen who went to chapel every Sunday, and had performed his duty at peace with God and man for a lifetime. The man who led the lynchers was a “Christian” preacher. Sworn evidence on the matter was taken, but the officers of the law in the county refused to act.This lynching was by no means exceptional in its character. To cite an exceptional affair, one might well take the happenings in Brooksand Lowndes Counties, Georgia, in May, 1918. Here a white bully with a pronounced spite against Negroes had been in court and paid the fine of thirty dollars for gambling which had been pronounced against a certain colored man called Sidney Johnson, and the latter had been sent to his estate to work off the debt. This is an example of the abuse of the law for keeping Negroes still in a state of slavery—a characteristic example of peonage.Johnson did the work to pay off the fine, but the farmer held him to do a great deal more. Eventually the Negro feigned sickness as an excuse for not doing any more. The farmer then came to his house and flogged him. It must be supposed this roused the devil in Johnson; he threatened the farmer, and he paid a return visit to the white man’s house, fired on him through the window, killing the man himself and dangerously wounding his wife. At once the usual lynching committee was formed, and for a whole week they hunted for Johnson, who had gone into hiding. During that time they lynched eleven Negroes, of whom one was a woman.The white farmer had given cause for much hatred. He had constantly ill-treated his colored laborers. On one occasion he had flogged a Negro woman. Her husband had stood up for her, and he had him arrested and sentenced to a term of penal servitude in chains. The whitemob concluded that he must have shot the farmer for revenge, and they accordingly lynched him. He was shot to death. His wife would not be quieted, but kept insisting that her poor husband had been innocent. The mob therefore seized her. It tied her upside down by her ankles to a tree, poured petrol on her clothing, and burned her to death. White American women will perhaps take note that this colored sister of theirs was in her eighth month with child. The mob around her was not angry or insensate, but hysterical with brutal pleasure. The clothes burned off her body. Her child, prematurely born, was kicked to and fro by the mob and then—— Well, that is perhaps sufficient. There are many details of this crime which cannot be set down in print. But all these facts were authenticated and submitted to the governor of the State. The point that struck me was the pleasure which was taken by the mob in the sufferings which it was causing. It was drunk with cruelty. Here was little idea of a deterrent. Here was no question of racial prudence. From the point of view of the natural history of mankind, it put those white denizens of Georgia on a lower level than cannibals.It was America’s glorious May, when she was pouring troops into Europe and winning the war; hundreds of thousands of Negroes were clad in the uniform of the army and were fightingfor “freedom and justice” in Europe. The moral eloquence of the President was in all men’s minds. America had the chance to take the moral leadership of the world.But away back in Georgia the mob pursued its horrible way. At length it found the original Johnson who had committed the murder, and he defended himself to the last in a house with gun and revolver, and died fighting. His dead body was dragged at the back of a motor car through the district, and then burned.The facts were brought to the attention of the governor, and he made a statement denouncing mob violence. But no one was ever brought to justice, though the names of the ringleaders were ascertained. No committee of inquiry was sent from Washington. In fact, the people of Georgia were allowed thus to smirch the glorious flag of the republic and to lower the opinion of America in every capital of the world; for the facts of this story have been printed in circular form and distributed widely. It is undoubtedly a remarkable example of lynching.It seems rather strange that lynching crowds allow themselves to be photographed. Men and women and children in hundreds are to be seen in horrible pictures. One sees the summer mob all in straw hats, the men without coats or waistcoats, the women in white blouses, all eager,some mirthful, some facetious. You can upon occasion buy these photographs as picture postcards. The people are neither ashamed nor afraid.Northern Negroes go down to investigate lynchings, buy these photographs, bring them back to safe New York, and then print them off in circulars with details of the whole affair. Southern newspapers, though reticent, cannot forego giving descriptions of lynchings, everyone is so much interested in them. Newspaper reports are also reprinted. There is no need to resort to hearsay in telling of the mob murders of the South. They are heavily documented and absolutely authenticated. The United States Government cannot, for instance, prosecute such a Negro association as the N. A. A. C. P. for the pamphlets it issues on lynchings, because it does no more than publish facts which have been publicly authenticated. If prosecuted, worse details would see light. Therefore, these pamphlets go forth.The first thing they do is tell the colored people as a whole what has been happening. The Negroes of Alabama and Tennessee hear what has been happening in Georgia; the Negroes of Florida and Louisiana hear what has taken place in Arkansas and Texas. Above all, the educated Northern Negroes know of it. Advanced papers such as theCrisis, the ChicagoDefender, and theNegro Messengerare givingthe Negro people as a whole a new consciousness. First of all in Christianity in the days of slavery and in their melancholy plantation music they obtained a collective race consciousness. And now, through persecution on the one hand and newspapers on the other they are strengthening and fulfilling that consciousness. Destiny is being shaped in this race, and white men are the instruments who are shaping it. May it not emerge eventually as a sword, the sword of the wrath of the Lord.I met many Whites who boasted of having taken part in a lynching, and I have met those who possessed gruesome mementoes in the shape of charred bones and gray, dry, Negro skin. I said they were fools. Actually to have the signs upon them! Truly they were in the state of mind in which most men seem to be when fate is going to overtake them. They were proud of their “quick way with niggers,” they justified it, they felt the wisdom of lynching could never be disproved. The matter to them was not worth arguing. They assumed that anyone who wished to argue the point must have sympathy with the “niggers,” and that was enough for them. It never occurred to them that one who doubted the wisdom of lynching might be actuated by sympathy or at least apprehensive for them.I felt sorry for the white women of the South; there will some day be a terrible reckoningagainst them. Their honor and safety are being made the pretext for terrible brutality and cruelty. Revenge, when it gains its opportunity, will therefore wreak itself upon the white woman most. Because in the name of the white woman they justify burning Negroes at the stake to-day, white women may be burned by black mobs by and by. There is no doubt that almost any insurrection of Negroes could ultimately be put down by force, and that it would be very bad for the Negroes and for their cause, but before it could be put down what might happen? And should it synchronize with revolutionary disturbances among the Whites themselves, or with a foreign war?I do not believe that there are real conspiracies of Negroes. But there is growing disaffection. The colored people are a friendly, easy-going, fond-to-foolish folk by nature. But their affection and devotion have been roughly refused. It has almost disappeared. Now we have the phenomenon of Negro mothers telling their little children of the terrible things done by the white folk, and every Negro child is learning that the white man is his enemy. Every lynching, everyauto-da-féis secreting hate and the need for revenge in the Negro masses. Because the Negroes are weak and helpless and unorganized to-day, illiterate often, stupid and unbalanced often, clownish and funny and unreliable, white folk think that it will always beso. But they are wrong. While the industrialized masses of the Whites are certainly degenerating, the masses of the Negroes are certainly rising. Trouble is bound to arise and retribution terrible. What the lowbrows of the South are teaching the Negro he will be found to have learned, and as Shylock said about revenge—it will go hard but he betters the instruction.It may be thought that this is written with too much emphasis, and that this statement on the lynchings is too unmerciful to the white South. But I believe it is absolutely necessary. There are those who would be ready to do again the injustice which was done to the Whites in the South after the Civil War. When discussing these matters in the North I have been horror-struck by the opinions I have heard expressed. This is written in no partisan spirit, and I believe those who would rejoice in the destruction or punishment of the Southern white population are utterly wrong in heart. Punishment and revenge will only perpetuate the strife. But anéclaircissement, a flood of daylight on these matters, a thorough shaking of these stupid people down below the line—a warning in such terrible terms as I have made, might save Black and White for the religion of love and a joy in God’s creatures.It may come from a stranger, a complete outsider, with more force than from an American. I have, however, found a Southerner who condemnedGeorgia, the Roman Catholic Bishop, Benjamin J. Keiley, who gave out a very serious warning in Savannah on the 2nd of November of last year. He said:“It is hardly necessary to state that I am a Southerner.... I warmly love the South; and her story, her traditions, and her ideals are very dear to me.... But I fully recognize the absolute justice of one charge which is made against her, and I look with grave apprehension to the future, for no people that disregards justice can ever have the blessing of God, and we are guilty of great injustice to the Negro. The Negro was brought here against his will; he is here and he will remain here, and he is not treated with justice by us; nay, I will say that he is often not treated with ordinary humanity.“Look at the statistics in our own State. Georgia stands first in the list of States in the matter of lynching. Has there ever been a man punished in this State for lynching a Negro?“Lynching is murder, nothing else.“Besides, is it not the fact that fair and impartial justice is not meted out to white and colored men alike? The courts of this State either set the example, or follow the example set them, and they make a great distinction between the white and the black criminal brought before them. The latter as a rule gets the full limit of the law. Do you ever hear of a street difficulty in which a Negro and a white man were involved which was brought before ajudge, in which, no matter what were the real facts of the case, the Negro did not get the worst of it?“Georgians boast of being a Christian people, and this year they are putting their hands into their pockets to raise millions to bring the light of Christianity, as understood by them, to some less favored peoples in Europe.“I would like to know if it is entirely compatible with Christian morality to treat the Negro as he is treated here? My belief is that the Negro and the white man were redeemed by the blood of Christ shed on the cross of Calvary, and that the Christian religion absolutely condemns injustice to anyone and forbids the taking of life.“To me the murder of a Negro is as much murder as the killing of a white man, and in each case Christian civilization demands that the punishment of the crime should rest in the hands of the lawfully constituted authorities.“I have lived to see in Georgia an appeal made to the highest authority in the State for protection of the lives of colored men, women, and children, answered by the statement that the Negro should not commit crimes! The people of Georgia vest in certain officials the execution of justice. Yet no lyncher has ever been punished here, and I regret to state that public sentiment seems to justify the conduct of the officials.“Only a short time ago I was reading thestrange news of the race riots in the Northern and Western cities. Thank God, we have had none of these riots in the South. Do you know the reason? The only reason is the forbearance of the Negro. He has been treated with gross injustice; he has not retaliated. In all these cases gross disregard for law and order are either the cause or the direct consequence of those disturbances.“Are there not numbers of honest, law-abiding citizens of Georgia who know that I am telling God’s truth, and who will protest against this injustice to the Negro? Is there not a just and fearless man on the bench in this State who will have the courage to announce that there shall be no difference in his court between the white man and the colored man?“Injustice and disregard of law and the lawful conduct of affairs are the sure forerunners of anarchy and the loss of our liberty, and we are drifting in that direction.“The Negro will not stand asking for justice from Georgia laws or Georgia courts. He has been patient, and I hope he will remain so, but he well knows where the remedy lies, and he will very soon be found knocking at the door of the Federal Congress, asking protection. And Congress will hear him.“If appeals to right, justice, to Christian morality, do not avail to put a stop to this injustice to the Negro and protect him againstthe murderous lynchers, then Georgia will see Federal bayonets giving him protection.”Such a voice is very rare. The warning is the more worth heeding.

VIIAFTER THE WAR: THE VOTEThemarch to the sea, like John Brown’s soul marching to eternity, was a moving symbol of the faith of the war. Men saw in it the march of the cause of humanity as a whole. Sherman offered Savannah as a Christmas gift to Abraham Lincoln, and the star of Bethlehem shone anew over a ravaged land and ravaged hearts. The news when it came was a signal for great popular rejoicing and a prophetic belief in the end of the war. Four months afterward there was a general capitulation of the South. It is true America’s most innocent and Christian man was destroyed by hate—another Golgotha day in history, when on Good Friday in a theatre in Washington Lincoln was assassinated—but the fight had been fought and the victory won. It became possible to ratify the abolition of slavery by the re-establishment of the Union and the common consent of all the States.“In Sixty Three the slaves were free; In Sixty Four the war was o’er,” says a rhyme, but in truth the Negroes were not free in the South till the South had been conquered by theUnited States, and the war was not o’er till April, 1865. It was on the 24th of May, 1865, that the army marched past the White House in its final grand review, bearing aloft its battle-riven flags festooned with flowers. There was glory in the North; the twilight of confusion in the South; and the Negroes were free. Peace came once more, though not peace in men’s hearts. War hate still bred hate, and the lust of cruelty called into being its monster progeny of revenge.The fanatic who murdered Lincoln in doing so struck the whole of his own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. The Negroes and the Negro cause suffered also. The ex-slaves were given votes and put on an electoral equality with white men. This was a palpable injustice and indignity. The Negroes in 1863 were not prepared in mind or in soul or in knowledge for the exercise of the franchise. Neither were they gifted with the power of will and physical strength necessary to hold the suffrage when it was given them. There was the sameexaltation nationally when the victory was won as there had been locally when Sherman marched through, and the same disillusion and the same destruction of bridges was to take place also. Where the white man went the black man could not follow. For a brief space of time the ex-slave dominated the white South. The black vote was exploited by political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the war should still have left the educated white man in authority and not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. As is usual after a war, the victors wanted a revolution in the land where they had won. The white North revenged itself on the white South. But a black revolution was a thing that could not be. Racial instinct came to the help of the Whites, and through general tacit understandings and organized conspiracies the new black masters were ousted from their places. Then fear of what might be, and once more, revenge born of the brief black dominion, went as far the other way in injustice. Nigger baiting arose,mob violence took the place of the justice of the courts. The central authority was flouted, first covertly and then openly. The Negro was hustled back to peonage and servility, and one might be tempted to think that the cause for which all the blood of the Civil War had been shed was lost. It would have been lost had not slavery become a complete anachronism in world society. The yoke could not be reimposed upon the Negro’s neck. His freedom has persisted, it has grown.The maximum of persecution of the Negro in recent years does not equal the misery of slavery. Even if all the lynchings and burnings and humiliations and disabilities be put together they do not add up to one year of servitude. Most Negroes understand that. They know that no matter what may be the vicissitudes they pass through they are still progressing to an ever fuller freedom.In viewing the whole situation one is apt to underestimate the unhappiness of slavery and to magnify the unhappiness of the present era of freedom. It is blessed to be free. Even to be the worst possible peon is far removed from slavery. The great significance of the Emancipation is that the Negro slaves were set free—free for anything and everything in the wide world. In the prison house of a national institution of slavery there was no hope, no sense of the ultimate possibilities latent in a man.But with freedom every baby became a potential Alexander.In 1863 a new life began to germinate, began to have promise. Some thought that it must show forth at once. But that was fallacious. It was bound to spend a long time underground before the first modest shoots of the new should appear. Many have argued that the Negro would come to nothing in his freedom, and even those who have believed in his destiny have been impatient. Premature greetings have been given time and oft to new Negro culture and responsibility. The only criticism made here is that they were premature. The greatest of these was the suffrage.I have said that the denial of the Negro his legitimate vote is a part of peonage, and I have also said that it was wrong to give the freed-men votes at once. I should like to explain how Negro suffrage stands to-day.In the first place, it was wrong to enfranchise the ex-slaves, not because they were not entitled to votes, but because they were not ready to be intrusted with votes. In 1863 in England as well as in America the world could be saved by the ballot box alone. It was a rebellion against this belief that caused Carlyle to fulminate against “Nigger Democracy.” In talking with Dean Brawley of Morehouse College at Atlanta, I noticed a prejudice against Carlyle which is very widespread among educated colored people.In the first place I should like to assure them that the use by Carlyle of the expression “nigger” has nothing in common with the brutal and contemptuous sense in which that word is used in America. Thus we say “working like a nigger,” an expression derived from the life of the slaves; “nigger diploma,” a contemptuous English expression for a high degree such as Doctor of Literature or Doctor of Divinity, thought to have been purchased in America at a Negro university; theten little nigger boys, the black boys who come so swiftly to bad ends in the familiar rhyme of our childhood. “Nigger” is in England a playful word for a Negro, and is used always in the nursery. It is the children’s word for a black man, preferably for one who has been thoroughly blacked. Carlyle was one of the most reverent of men, and not accustomed to speak contemptuously of God’s creatures. But he was contemptuous of the suffrage. To him and to Ruskin and to many another it seemed absurd that the voice of the educated man and the illiterate should have the same value; that the many who are dull and ignorant should be allowed to outvote the few who know. The enfranchisement of the freed Negroes furnished Carlyle with an example of carrying an absurdity to its logical conclusion.The alternative to government by ballot has, however, proved to be government by the dominationof a military caste, and mankind generally in our time has shown that it prefers the former. The ballot box with all its absurdity seems nevertheless our only means of carrying on in freedom. It would be wrong to grant the suffrage to the millions of savages under British rule in Africa, because they could not use it. And it was wrong to enfranchise Negrodom in America with a stroke of the pen after the Civil War. It has done the Negroes more harm than good.To have such a grievance as to be legally enfranchised and yet physically denied the use of the vote is, of course, great harm. It affects the social mind. It makes bitterness and brews agitation. To be conscripted and called upon to fight for the country when this grievance is in mind has aggravated the harm already done. “We are not too low to fight the foe, but we’re too low to share in the spoil,” as the story goes. I heard a Negro comedian indulging in funniosities at a colored music hall win great applause by a chansonette:Cullud folk will be ready to fightWhen cullud folk has equal right.I a’nt so foolish as I seem to be.And it is a reasonable sentiment.The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote. Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but theother half has more than average capacity for citizenship. Yet in spite of the Constitution and the Federal authority these many millions remain practically without voice in all the Southern States. Physical force is exerted to keep them from the ballot box.The Southerner affects to believe that the educated Negro is even less fitted to have a vote than the illiterate sort. But that is because he hates to see the Negro rise. He will tell you that in certain States the Negroes outnumber the Whites by ten to one. But that is a characteristic misstatement. It is hard to find a city where the black vote exceeds the white. In the last census the blackest cities were Birmingham and Memphis, where the Negroes proved to be forty per cent. of the population, while inRichmond it was37%Atlanta34%Nashville34%Washington29%New Orleans27%And there are only two States where the Negro population exceeds that of the White; namely, Mississippi and South Carolina, where the Negroes were 57 per cent. and 55 per cent. of the total population.If, as seems only fair, an illiteracy test were made legal by amendment of the Constitution,white voters would outnumber black by a large margin.As for having anything to fear from the educated Negro vote, there is of course one matter of anxiety. The Negro would be bound to fight for social justice, and violence would be done to racial prejudice.The South is, however, determined that the Negro shall never vote again. Year by year the colored people as a whole grow in intelligence, in capacity, and in the number of its intelligentsia, but the South is not moved. It sees no explosion in the future, and makes no provision for one—will not, till the explosion comes.Racial fear, no doubt, plays a large part in this determination, but there is a further consideration. The Solid South votes Democratic to a man. The Negro, if he had a chance, would vote as solidly Republican. I remember being present at a violent quarrel at a Negro meeting in New Orleans—one Negro, though he had not a vote, had actually called himself a Democrat. A remedying of the defective suffrage would be an enormous access of strength to the Republican party. For this reason Democrats exaggerate their racial fear. And also for that reason every Republican politician who gains power is bound to make a bid to break the solid South. Senator Lodge himself was the author of a “Force Bill” which came near enactment some years ago, and it would have placed Federalsoldiers at every ballot box in the South, to protect black voters.The South defies anything which the Federal Government may devise. As Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, said to his colleagues in the Senate:“But there is one issue upon which the South is solid, and upon which she will remain solid—the protection of her civilization from subjection to an ignorant and servile race. And neither Federal honors nor Federal bayonets can shake that solidity.”President Wilson’s administration has been one which was dominated by Southern Democrats, and as the Southern vote has been behind him and them, there could hardly be any help given to the Negroes. The Democratic failure has nevertheless been a real disappointment. Wilson’s radical idealism; his plunge to the root of trouble wherever trouble was, led many to believe that he would do something to remedy the pitiable state of the Negroes. Some legal palliative would come with a better grace from Democrats than a forceful measure enacted over their heads by Republicans. Perhaps with the downfall of the Democratic party and the coming triumph of the Republicans something practical will be done during the next few years to help the Negro. The main hope of color must lie in a Republican President and a Republican Senate being in powertogether. November, 1920, and its elections will be as fateful for the Negro as for the world.Roosevelt gave his party a generous lead when he received Booker T. Washington at the White House, and I heard young Colonel Roosevelt one evening, with his father’s nerve and pluck, promise a vast Negro audience a “square deal” if they would have patience. That square deal is the Negro’s right, especially in the matter of the vote. It is strange that the movement for the “rights of man” inaugurated practically in the French Revolution should have stopped short about 1870, and the contrary ideal of the “privilege of individuals” begun to progress. As Sutton Griggs very forcefully put it in his address to the National Baptist Convention at Newark, New Jersey:“In 1792 a motion was carried in the English House of Commons providing for the gradual abolition of the slave traffic. In 1794 the French Convention decreed that the rights of French citizens should be granted to all slaves in French colonies. In 1834 the British abolished slavery entirely within their dominions. In 1848 French slaves were emancipated. In 1863 the Dutch set their slaves free. The South, unmoved by world thought, clung to its slaves, but they were violently torn from her grasp in the Civil War. Under the impulse of the doctrine of the native equality of all men theFifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding the denial of the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was adopted in the year 1869. In the year 1870, bills were passed by Congress providing fines and imprisonment for anyone who even tried to prevent the Negro from voting or to keep his vote from being counted.“But all of the forces that could be marshaled have not, up to the present time, been able to move our nation or the world one inch forward in a straight line from this point. The action just mentioned stands as the last recorded national act designed to incorporate the Negro race in the governmental structure without reservations. Further efforts were made by powerful forces, but all have proved to be abortive. In 1875 a very comprehensive bill intended to make the Negroes of the South secure in their rights passed the lower house of Congress but was defeated in the Senate. Some years later, the Lodge Election Bill, having the same purpose, passed the House but was defeated in the Senate. The Republican party’s platform, upon which President Taft was elected, contained an unequivocal declaration in favor of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in letter and in spirit, but no legislation in that direction was attempted during his term of office.”To-day, however, a world war and the greatest affirmation of the rights of nations if not of man, has been made. There is an opportunity to resume the interrupted advance.

AFTER THE WAR: THE VOTE

Themarch to the sea, like John Brown’s soul marching to eternity, was a moving symbol of the faith of the war. Men saw in it the march of the cause of humanity as a whole. Sherman offered Savannah as a Christmas gift to Abraham Lincoln, and the star of Bethlehem shone anew over a ravaged land and ravaged hearts. The news when it came was a signal for great popular rejoicing and a prophetic belief in the end of the war. Four months afterward there was a general capitulation of the South. It is true America’s most innocent and Christian man was destroyed by hate—another Golgotha day in history, when on Good Friday in a theatre in Washington Lincoln was assassinated—but the fight had been fought and the victory won. It became possible to ratify the abolition of slavery by the re-establishment of the Union and the common consent of all the States.

“In Sixty Three the slaves were free; In Sixty Four the war was o’er,” says a rhyme, but in truth the Negroes were not free in the South till the South had been conquered by theUnited States, and the war was not o’er till April, 1865. It was on the 24th of May, 1865, that the army marched past the White House in its final grand review, bearing aloft its battle-riven flags festooned with flowers. There was glory in the North; the twilight of confusion in the South; and the Negroes were free. Peace came once more, though not peace in men’s hearts. War hate still bred hate, and the lust of cruelty called into being its monster progeny of revenge.

The fanatic who murdered Lincoln in doing so struck the whole of his own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. The Negroes and the Negro cause suffered also. The ex-slaves were given votes and put on an electoral equality with white men. This was a palpable injustice and indignity. The Negroes in 1863 were not prepared in mind or in soul or in knowledge for the exercise of the franchise. Neither were they gifted with the power of will and physical strength necessary to hold the suffrage when it was given them. There was the sameexaltation nationally when the victory was won as there had been locally when Sherman marched through, and the same disillusion and the same destruction of bridges was to take place also. Where the white man went the black man could not follow. For a brief space of time the ex-slave dominated the white South. The black vote was exploited by political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the war should still have left the educated white man in authority and not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. As is usual after a war, the victors wanted a revolution in the land where they had won. The white North revenged itself on the white South. But a black revolution was a thing that could not be. Racial instinct came to the help of the Whites, and through general tacit understandings and organized conspiracies the new black masters were ousted from their places. Then fear of what might be, and once more, revenge born of the brief black dominion, went as far the other way in injustice. Nigger baiting arose,mob violence took the place of the justice of the courts. The central authority was flouted, first covertly and then openly. The Negro was hustled back to peonage and servility, and one might be tempted to think that the cause for which all the blood of the Civil War had been shed was lost. It would have been lost had not slavery become a complete anachronism in world society. The yoke could not be reimposed upon the Negro’s neck. His freedom has persisted, it has grown.

The maximum of persecution of the Negro in recent years does not equal the misery of slavery. Even if all the lynchings and burnings and humiliations and disabilities be put together they do not add up to one year of servitude. Most Negroes understand that. They know that no matter what may be the vicissitudes they pass through they are still progressing to an ever fuller freedom.

In viewing the whole situation one is apt to underestimate the unhappiness of slavery and to magnify the unhappiness of the present era of freedom. It is blessed to be free. Even to be the worst possible peon is far removed from slavery. The great significance of the Emancipation is that the Negro slaves were set free—free for anything and everything in the wide world. In the prison house of a national institution of slavery there was no hope, no sense of the ultimate possibilities latent in a man.But with freedom every baby became a potential Alexander.

In 1863 a new life began to germinate, began to have promise. Some thought that it must show forth at once. But that was fallacious. It was bound to spend a long time underground before the first modest shoots of the new should appear. Many have argued that the Negro would come to nothing in his freedom, and even those who have believed in his destiny have been impatient. Premature greetings have been given time and oft to new Negro culture and responsibility. The only criticism made here is that they were premature. The greatest of these was the suffrage.

I have said that the denial of the Negro his legitimate vote is a part of peonage, and I have also said that it was wrong to give the freed-men votes at once. I should like to explain how Negro suffrage stands to-day.

In the first place, it was wrong to enfranchise the ex-slaves, not because they were not entitled to votes, but because they were not ready to be intrusted with votes. In 1863 in England as well as in America the world could be saved by the ballot box alone. It was a rebellion against this belief that caused Carlyle to fulminate against “Nigger Democracy.” In talking with Dean Brawley of Morehouse College at Atlanta, I noticed a prejudice against Carlyle which is very widespread among educated colored people.In the first place I should like to assure them that the use by Carlyle of the expression “nigger” has nothing in common with the brutal and contemptuous sense in which that word is used in America. Thus we say “working like a nigger,” an expression derived from the life of the slaves; “nigger diploma,” a contemptuous English expression for a high degree such as Doctor of Literature or Doctor of Divinity, thought to have been purchased in America at a Negro university; theten little nigger boys, the black boys who come so swiftly to bad ends in the familiar rhyme of our childhood. “Nigger” is in England a playful word for a Negro, and is used always in the nursery. It is the children’s word for a black man, preferably for one who has been thoroughly blacked. Carlyle was one of the most reverent of men, and not accustomed to speak contemptuously of God’s creatures. But he was contemptuous of the suffrage. To him and to Ruskin and to many another it seemed absurd that the voice of the educated man and the illiterate should have the same value; that the many who are dull and ignorant should be allowed to outvote the few who know. The enfranchisement of the freed Negroes furnished Carlyle with an example of carrying an absurdity to its logical conclusion.

The alternative to government by ballot has, however, proved to be government by the dominationof a military caste, and mankind generally in our time has shown that it prefers the former. The ballot box with all its absurdity seems nevertheless our only means of carrying on in freedom. It would be wrong to grant the suffrage to the millions of savages under British rule in Africa, because they could not use it. And it was wrong to enfranchise Negrodom in America with a stroke of the pen after the Civil War. It has done the Negroes more harm than good.

To have such a grievance as to be legally enfranchised and yet physically denied the use of the vote is, of course, great harm. It affects the social mind. It makes bitterness and brews agitation. To be conscripted and called upon to fight for the country when this grievance is in mind has aggravated the harm already done. “We are not too low to fight the foe, but we’re too low to share in the spoil,” as the story goes. I heard a Negro comedian indulging in funniosities at a colored music hall win great applause by a chansonette:

Cullud folk will be ready to fightWhen cullud folk has equal right.I a’nt so foolish as I seem to be.

And it is a reasonable sentiment.

The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote. Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but theother half has more than average capacity for citizenship. Yet in spite of the Constitution and the Federal authority these many millions remain practically without voice in all the Southern States. Physical force is exerted to keep them from the ballot box.

The Southerner affects to believe that the educated Negro is even less fitted to have a vote than the illiterate sort. But that is because he hates to see the Negro rise. He will tell you that in certain States the Negroes outnumber the Whites by ten to one. But that is a characteristic misstatement. It is hard to find a city where the black vote exceeds the white. In the last census the blackest cities were Birmingham and Memphis, where the Negroes proved to be forty per cent. of the population, while in

And there are only two States where the Negro population exceeds that of the White; namely, Mississippi and South Carolina, where the Negroes were 57 per cent. and 55 per cent. of the total population.

If, as seems only fair, an illiteracy test were made legal by amendment of the Constitution,white voters would outnumber black by a large margin.

As for having anything to fear from the educated Negro vote, there is of course one matter of anxiety. The Negro would be bound to fight for social justice, and violence would be done to racial prejudice.

The South is, however, determined that the Negro shall never vote again. Year by year the colored people as a whole grow in intelligence, in capacity, and in the number of its intelligentsia, but the South is not moved. It sees no explosion in the future, and makes no provision for one—will not, till the explosion comes.

Racial fear, no doubt, plays a large part in this determination, but there is a further consideration. The Solid South votes Democratic to a man. The Negro, if he had a chance, would vote as solidly Republican. I remember being present at a violent quarrel at a Negro meeting in New Orleans—one Negro, though he had not a vote, had actually called himself a Democrat. A remedying of the defective suffrage would be an enormous access of strength to the Republican party. For this reason Democrats exaggerate their racial fear. And also for that reason every Republican politician who gains power is bound to make a bid to break the solid South. Senator Lodge himself was the author of a “Force Bill” which came near enactment some years ago, and it would have placed Federalsoldiers at every ballot box in the South, to protect black voters.

The South defies anything which the Federal Government may devise. As Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, said to his colleagues in the Senate:

“But there is one issue upon which the South is solid, and upon which she will remain solid—the protection of her civilization from subjection to an ignorant and servile race. And neither Federal honors nor Federal bayonets can shake that solidity.”

President Wilson’s administration has been one which was dominated by Southern Democrats, and as the Southern vote has been behind him and them, there could hardly be any help given to the Negroes. The Democratic failure has nevertheless been a real disappointment. Wilson’s radical idealism; his plunge to the root of trouble wherever trouble was, led many to believe that he would do something to remedy the pitiable state of the Negroes. Some legal palliative would come with a better grace from Democrats than a forceful measure enacted over their heads by Republicans. Perhaps with the downfall of the Democratic party and the coming triumph of the Republicans something practical will be done during the next few years to help the Negro. The main hope of color must lie in a Republican President and a Republican Senate being in powertogether. November, 1920, and its elections will be as fateful for the Negro as for the world.

Roosevelt gave his party a generous lead when he received Booker T. Washington at the White House, and I heard young Colonel Roosevelt one evening, with his father’s nerve and pluck, promise a vast Negro audience a “square deal” if they would have patience. That square deal is the Negro’s right, especially in the matter of the vote. It is strange that the movement for the “rights of man” inaugurated practically in the French Revolution should have stopped short about 1870, and the contrary ideal of the “privilege of individuals” begun to progress. As Sutton Griggs very forcefully put it in his address to the National Baptist Convention at Newark, New Jersey:

“In 1792 a motion was carried in the English House of Commons providing for the gradual abolition of the slave traffic. In 1794 the French Convention decreed that the rights of French citizens should be granted to all slaves in French colonies. In 1834 the British abolished slavery entirely within their dominions. In 1848 French slaves were emancipated. In 1863 the Dutch set their slaves free. The South, unmoved by world thought, clung to its slaves, but they were violently torn from her grasp in the Civil War. Under the impulse of the doctrine of the native equality of all men theFifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding the denial of the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was adopted in the year 1869. In the year 1870, bills were passed by Congress providing fines and imprisonment for anyone who even tried to prevent the Negro from voting or to keep his vote from being counted.

“But all of the forces that could be marshaled have not, up to the present time, been able to move our nation or the world one inch forward in a straight line from this point. The action just mentioned stands as the last recorded national act designed to incorporate the Negro race in the governmental structure without reservations. Further efforts were made by powerful forces, but all have proved to be abortive. In 1875 a very comprehensive bill intended to make the Negroes of the South secure in their rights passed the lower house of Congress but was defeated in the Senate. Some years later, the Lodge Election Bill, having the same purpose, passed the House but was defeated in the Senate. The Republican party’s platform, upon which President Taft was elected, contained an unequivocal declaration in favor of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in letter and in spirit, but no legislation in that direction was attempted during his term of office.”

To-day, however, a world war and the greatest affirmation of the rights of nations if not of man, has been made. There is an opportunity to resume the interrupted advance.

VIIIIN ALABAMA: COLOR AND COLOR PREJUDICEI madean expedition into Alabama from Atlanta, and again saw something of that State when I got down to the Gulf of Mexico. In the matter of Negro life it is first of all important because of Tuskegee Institute, which, like the college at Hampton, is sometimes called the Mecca of the American Negro. It was founded by Booker T. Washington, and is the visible expression of the self-help idea. There, as at Hampton, the ex-slave is taught to do something as the end of his schooling. The establishment is now under the guidance of the beloved Dr. Moton, a wise and genial African giant of pure Negro extraction: his father is said to have been a prince who in selling his captives was himself lured on to a slaver, and suddenly found himself in the position of his own captive enemies. This was during Civil War time, and he came to America a slave but to be made free. As a boy barely able to sign his name young Moton first appeared at Hampton, and the authorities were at first doubtful about accepting him as a student. But what they would have missed! Dr. Moton is the very best type of Negro teacher, the worthysuccessor of Booker Washington. Tuskegee, besides its educational work, does much to combat race hatred, and keeps public opinion in America well informed on the lynchings that take place. The presence of the institute in the backward State of Alabama is very important for the future of the South.At Birmingham, Alabama, I was presented to a very charming young widow who had been left rather rich, a well-educated lady of leisure, who lived well and dressed well, and was possessed of a recognizable Americanchic. I met her in town, and then in response to an invitation called on her at her house. She was certainly a Negro beauty, and I have no doubt was highly desired in marriage. There was a clear five thousand a year besides her charms, and it was impossible not to feel some of the glamour of that fact—The belle of the season is wastingan hour upon you.Mmmmmmshe cooed to everything I said. She was shy as a pedestal without its statue; her eyes burned, and I could not help feeling all the atmosphere of “romance.” If she had been a shade lighter in complexion any white man might have fallen in love with her.Her children—or was it the children of one of her black servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery,but colored dolls,after Nature. This was very charming, and I should have liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black Madonna.To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll.It was also at Southern Brum that, calling on Reverend Williams, I happened upon this singular conversation:“Now, isn’t it absurd for us to have white angels?”“You surely would not like them black?”“We give Sunday-school cards to our children with white angels on them. It’swrong.”“Black angels would be ugly.”“No more ugly than white.”I thought the whiteness of the angels was as the whiteness of white light which contained all color. That, however, was lost on the reverend, who happened to be a realist.“Christ himself was not white. He would have had to travel in a Jim Crow car,” said he. “But put it to yourself: isn’t it absurd for us to be taught that the good are all white, and that sin itself is black?”“It does seem to leave you in the shade,” said I.“Expressions such as ‘black as sin’ ought to be deleted from the language. One might as well say ‘white as sin.’”I ransacked my brain rapidly.“We say ‘pale as envy,’” said I.“‘Black spite,’” he retorted. “Why should it be black?”I could not say.“Then Adam and Eve in the Garden,” he went on, “are always shown as beautifully white creatures, whereas, considering the climate, they may well have been as dark-skinned as any Negro couple in Alabama. Babylon was built by Negroes.”“Would you have Adam and Eve painted black?”“Why, yes, I would.”This struck me as rather diverting, but it was quite serious. Later, in New York one night at Liberty Hall, before I was driven out as a white interloper, I heard an orator say to an admiring host of Negroes: “Why, I ask you, is God always shown as white? It is because He is the white man’s God. It is the God of our masters. (Yes, brothers, that’s it.) It’s the God of those who persecute and despise the colored people. Brothers, we’ve got to knock that white God down and put up a black God. We’ve got to rewrite the Old Testament and the New from a black man’s point of view. Our theologians must get busy on a black God.”This was what we Whites call clap trap, and irreverent as well. But it seemed to take well with the Harlem brothers. Once more a lesson may be derived for older children—— If you make God in your own image, it does not follow that other children will agree that it is like——It reminded me of the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they got home from the war and took a good look at their own womenkind; they thought them so much more good looking than French or German girls. Girls and dolls, angels and Gods, we like them to correspond to our own complexion.Birmingham at night glows to the sky with furnaces. A hundred thousand black proletarians earn their living on coal and steel, stirringup soot to heaven. Though I met there the charming Mrs. J——, whom I have mentioned, and also other educated Negroes, it is not to be supposed that it is a place of culture, white or black. It is a straggling city with an ugly, misshapen, ill-balanced interior or center part like a table spread with small teacups and large jam pots. It will not stand comparison with Atlanta or New Orleans or Richmond. Strictly speaking, it is not a city, but an agglomeration of industrialism. Nevertheless, the factories which surround it are owned by companies of vast resources, and it is claimed that in the steel industry there are some of the most extensive industrial plants in the world. Business is little disturbed by strikes. On the gates of the vast factory estates is written:We do not want you unless you are able to look after yourself. Careless men are always liable to accident.Some notices declare “Non-Union Shops,” others “Open Shops,” but it does not seem to matter much. The unions have little power. Wages are high, though not as high as in the North, but the cost of living is very much less, and there is a lower standard of respectability. In some cases the industrials are housed on the factory grounds, and you see Negro dwellings which amount to industrial barracks. Every gate has its porter or civilian sentry, and in order to reach your workingman you may have to show what your business is with him. On the way tohis door you are met by the notice that trespassers will be prosecuted.There is no encouragement to loiterers, but you may see the Negro gangs at work, organized squads of workers hard at it, with Negro foremen or white foremen. A myriad-fold Negro industrialism straggles near mines and furnaces, blacker than in Nature. The coaly black Negro collier, the sooted face of steel worker and tar operative are curious comments on whether it is good to be Black or to be White. Coke products flame and smoke at innumerable pipes, while locomotives are panting and steaming forward and back, and a platoon of chimney stacks belches forth dense blackness, which, enfolded in the breeze, wanders over the heavens and one’s eyes.I strayed in at the doors of some very dirty Negro houses. Here was little of theamour propreof Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anti-kink was not being generally applied, and as far as the little ones were concerned, mother’s little Alabama coon seemed to be getting a little bit too much for mother. It is not difficult to understand the disgust of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy, large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. The sight of them was responsible for much of the feeling which inspired the Northern riots. “We knowour Northern Negroes,” they said in the North, “but these from the South were like no Negroes we had ever seen.” There was awakened much prejudice against these uncouth Africans, who seemed so near to the savage and the beast. It was natural, perhaps. But high wages and new hopes and ideals quickly improve the black immigrant. He is being absorbed into the generality of black Negrodom, in its established worthiness and respectability, above the Mason-Dixon line. It would be difficult after a few years to pick out a Southern Negro in a crowd in New York.The little black children in the suburbs of Birmingham were alternately very confiding and then suddenly scared and then confiding again as I tried to talk to them. There was much fear in their bodies. They seemed if anything to be blacker than their parents, and I volunteered the opinion that a good deal of their color would come off in a course of hot baths. But washing facilities were of a rudimentary kind, and the passion for being fit and fresh could not readily be developed.The white South could improve its Negroes infinitely if it cared to do so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its Negroes to rise and seems most happy when they can readily be identified with the beasts that perish. But if it thought more highly of the Negro, the Negro would rise.I visited Professor K—— in his three-storied house. He had been one of the Negro Four-Minute Men who had made popular addresses to his people during the war fervor, inducing them to be “patriotic” and subscribe their dollars to various funds. He said he was deeply discouraged. He did not belong to Alabama and would much rather live in a more civilized part of the world, but he gave his life for the uplift of the children. He was doing what he could, but the Whites gave no co-operation. In these factory areas the colored children outnumbered the Whites five to one. Teaching was, of course, segregated; he had no objection to that, but very, very little was done by comparison for the black children. They had most need of blessing—but they shared only in parsimony and curses. He showed me his school—a ramshackle building of old, faded wood. “Oh, but our teachers have enthusiasm,” said he. “They’re doing a work of God, and they love it. Yes, sir.”I obtained an impression which I think is sound, that there was more keenness to teach on the part of the colored people of Alabama than on the part of the Whites. White schools find some difficulty in obtaining good teachers; colored schools find no such difficulty. If colored students only go on in the way they have begun, there is quite a good prospect of their obtaining posts to teach white children in whiteschools—not perhaps soon in Alabama, for it is strongly prejudiced, but elsewhere first, and then in this State. To start off with, they would be excellent with young children. There is a broad road of conquest standing open there. As Booker T. Washington very sagaciously pointed out to his people, there is no stronger argument in their favor than personal attainment.However, looking around the houses of the industrialized masses here, one can only be appalled at the inadequacy of civilization. There is nothing that is better than in the forlorn mining villages of the Russian Ural. It makes a sort of Negro little better than a nigger, and it is surprising that he does not run amuck more often than he does.If the outlying settlements reminded of the Ural, the center of the city reminded of nothing better than Omsk. Here on the main street, at Eighteenth Street, is a very “jazzy” corner, resplendent with five times too much light at night, vocal with noisy music, and swarming with Negroes of all castes and colors. By day it is like a web of gregarious larvæ; by night it is the entrance to wonderland. Here is massed together the Negro enterprise of the city. Most of the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen’s clever Negro stories are thought to be derived from this corner—Mr. Florian Slappey, Lawyer Evans Chew, and the rest. Do not their ways and doings divert a vast number of readers totheSaturday Evening Post? I may have met some of them. I cannot say. But I met their like.The chief establishment is the savings bank building, a squat, six-story erection in red brick. It is flanked by places of amusement, but in itself it is an ark of professionalism and learning. It is a hive of many cells or cabinets, and every cabinet has its special occupant, a doctor here, a dentist there, a lawyer in the other, another doctor, a professor, an agent, and so on. You may meet nearly all who count in Birmingham Negrodom here. By the way, the local way of pronouncing the name of the city is Bumming Ham; if you say politely, Birmingham, pronouncing with lips and teeth in the front part of the mouth, no one will understand what you mean. A Negro pastor whirled me round to the hub of Bumming Ham in his brand-new car. He had lately had a very successful revival, of which the motor was an outward and visible sign. And I called on many of the notables. I met a short, scrubby Negro of fifty, whose complexion seemed to have been drenched in yellowness. He explained this by the statement that the blood of Senator H—— flowed in his veins. The senator had taken a liberty with his mother, who for her part was thoroughly black. He thanked the senator, since probably he had given him some brains; his mother’s side of the family was unusually hard-headed.He had become a professor. His daughter was a remarkable public speaker, and as Senator H—— was an orator, he used to tell his Sarah thattherewas Senator H—— coming out in her. “The Negro has been mixed with the best blood in the South,” said he; “the blood of the masters, the English aristocrats who came first to the country.”I did not think there was much in that.“Are mulattoes increasing or decreasing in numbers?” I asked.He thought they were increasing. But he did not deny the fact that Negro children tend to revert to type. When two mulattoes marry, the children are generally darker than the parents, and often real Negro types. The white man’s strain is thrown out rapidly.“How, then, is it that mulattoes and near Whites are on the increase?” The professor thought for one reason there was still much illegitimacy, and for another the Negro race under civilized conditions was getting a little fairer on the whole. Some of the mulatto women were extremely beautiful, and consequently more attractive to white men. The white women of the South hated the mulatto women because they took their husbands away from them. He thought a good deal of race hatred was fostered by the white woman, who instinctively hated the other race.“Did you ever hear of a union between aNegro woman and a white man that was on other than an animal plane?” I asked him.Professor M—— knew of several instances where an infatuation for a Negro woman had inspired a white man to make good in life. It was generally a tragedy, for they could not marry, and they were subject to coarse suspicion and raillery and intrigue. It stood in the way of the white man finding a white bride, and of the Negro woman finding a Negro husband. Where a white man had become interested in a Negro woman it was not good for the health of a Negro man to pretend to her affections. The mob feeling against Negroes was so readily aroused that it was the easiest thing in Alabama for a white man who had a grudge against a Negro to “frame up” a crime or a scandal and make him leave the neighborhood or remain constantly in danger of being roughly handled.Alabama has a bad record for lynching. It is about fifth in the list of bad States. I understood that lynching was on the increase. The old folk, the people who had been slave owners, the settled inhabitants of places like Anniston and Montgomery, and of the country, knew all the family history of their “niggers” from A to Z, and what they might do, or could do, and they were friendly, compared with the “new sort.”The poor Whites loved to be in mobs and feel in mobs. Over their meals and at work and inthe trolley cars they loved to talk in the way of the mob. Individually they don’t understand the Negro—they are afraid of him, like dogs that will only attack when in numbers. They mostly came to America after the Civil War and the Emancipation found the Negroes in possession of land or of work or of houses. They had their grievances, and instead of visiting them upon God or the Devil or Society in general, found the Negro a convenient fetish and visited their discontent on him. It soon became a habit, then it became a sort of lust and brutal sport.The older and more solid people have been much annoyed by the growth of this brutality, and something definite is being done to combat it in Alabama. Committees have been formed, or were being formed in the fall of 1919, in every county in the State, half white, half colored, to inquire into racial strife and see what could be done for life and freedom.An old Negro said to me: “We had two clocks on the cabin wall, and one was very slow and deliberate and always seemed to say:“’Take yo’ time. Take yo’ time!’“But the other gabbled to us:“’Get together, get together, get together!’ That’s what we got to do to-day, brothers—get together.”The Negroes are fond of emphasizing the triviality of color differences. They reprove thewhite man playfully. “Why get so excited about difference in color? We believe in equality of rights for all men,” I heard a leader say, “for all men of whatever color—white, black, brown, or yellow, or blue.” And his audience laughed. “Two boys go into a shop; one buys a red toy, the other a blue toy—but it is not very important which color—the toy’s the same.”But of course color prejudice or preference is not such a haphazard matter, and prejudice against the Negro is prejudice against more than color. The toy, so to speak, is different. It may be as good, but it is different. The body, and especially the skull, of a Negro is different from that of the white man. The nervous system, the brain, the mind and soul, are different. I heard the theory put forward in the name of Christian Science that in God’s perfect plan there were no Negroes. Their dark skins were other men’s evil thought about them. All men were really white, and the outward appearance of their skin could be made to correspond to the white idea by concentrated true thought about them. That is a charitable and beautiful faith to live by. But what of the new line of Negroes who are proud of being black, who abhor pallor as nausea? There are many Negroes now who have a religion of being black. The new generation of children is being brought up to glorify Negro color. It is told of the princes and warriors from which it is descended, learns withthe geography of the United States the geography of Africa, and delights in the cognomen—Afro-American. The color issue will never be settled by all Negroes becoming Whites. It seems clear also that it cannot be solved by all men becoming mulattoes. There seems to remain just one obvious solution, and that is in distinct and parallel development, equality before the law, and mutual understanding and tolerance.

IN ALABAMA: COLOR AND COLOR PREJUDICE

I madean expedition into Alabama from Atlanta, and again saw something of that State when I got down to the Gulf of Mexico. In the matter of Negro life it is first of all important because of Tuskegee Institute, which, like the college at Hampton, is sometimes called the Mecca of the American Negro. It was founded by Booker T. Washington, and is the visible expression of the self-help idea. There, as at Hampton, the ex-slave is taught to do something as the end of his schooling. The establishment is now under the guidance of the beloved Dr. Moton, a wise and genial African giant of pure Negro extraction: his father is said to have been a prince who in selling his captives was himself lured on to a slaver, and suddenly found himself in the position of his own captive enemies. This was during Civil War time, and he came to America a slave but to be made free. As a boy barely able to sign his name young Moton first appeared at Hampton, and the authorities were at first doubtful about accepting him as a student. But what they would have missed! Dr. Moton is the very best type of Negro teacher, the worthysuccessor of Booker Washington. Tuskegee, besides its educational work, does much to combat race hatred, and keeps public opinion in America well informed on the lynchings that take place. The presence of the institute in the backward State of Alabama is very important for the future of the South.

At Birmingham, Alabama, I was presented to a very charming young widow who had been left rather rich, a well-educated lady of leisure, who lived well and dressed well, and was possessed of a recognizable Americanchic. I met her in town, and then in response to an invitation called on her at her house. She was certainly a Negro beauty, and I have no doubt was highly desired in marriage. There was a clear five thousand a year besides her charms, and it was impossible not to feel some of the glamour of that fact—

The belle of the season is wasting

an hour upon you.

Mmmmmmshe cooed to everything I said. She was shy as a pedestal without its statue; her eyes burned, and I could not help feeling all the atmosphere of “romance.” If she had been a shade lighter in complexion any white man might have fallen in love with her.

Her children—or was it the children of one of her black servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery,but colored dolls,after Nature. This was very charming, and I should have liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black Madonna.

To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll.

It was also at Southern Brum that, calling on Reverend Williams, I happened upon this singular conversation:

“Now, isn’t it absurd for us to have white angels?”

“You surely would not like them black?”

“We give Sunday-school cards to our children with white angels on them. It’swrong.”

“Black angels would be ugly.”

“No more ugly than white.”

I thought the whiteness of the angels was as the whiteness of white light which contained all color. That, however, was lost on the reverend, who happened to be a realist.

“Christ himself was not white. He would have had to travel in a Jim Crow car,” said he. “But put it to yourself: isn’t it absurd for us to be taught that the good are all white, and that sin itself is black?”

“It does seem to leave you in the shade,” said I.

“Expressions such as ‘black as sin’ ought to be deleted from the language. One might as well say ‘white as sin.’”

I ransacked my brain rapidly.

“We say ‘pale as envy,’” said I.

“‘Black spite,’” he retorted. “Why should it be black?”

I could not say.

“Then Adam and Eve in the Garden,” he went on, “are always shown as beautifully white creatures, whereas, considering the climate, they may well have been as dark-skinned as any Negro couple in Alabama. Babylon was built by Negroes.”

“Would you have Adam and Eve painted black?”

“Why, yes, I would.”

This struck me as rather diverting, but it was quite serious. Later, in New York one night at Liberty Hall, before I was driven out as a white interloper, I heard an orator say to an admiring host of Negroes: “Why, I ask you, is God always shown as white? It is because He is the white man’s God. It is the God of our masters. (Yes, brothers, that’s it.) It’s the God of those who persecute and despise the colored people. Brothers, we’ve got to knock that white God down and put up a black God. We’ve got to rewrite the Old Testament and the New from a black man’s point of view. Our theologians must get busy on a black God.”

This was what we Whites call clap trap, and irreverent as well. But it seemed to take well with the Harlem brothers. Once more a lesson may be derived for older children—— If you make God in your own image, it does not follow that other children will agree that it is like——

It reminded me of the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they got home from the war and took a good look at their own womenkind; they thought them so much more good looking than French or German girls. Girls and dolls, angels and Gods, we like them to correspond to our own complexion.

Birmingham at night glows to the sky with furnaces. A hundred thousand black proletarians earn their living on coal and steel, stirringup soot to heaven. Though I met there the charming Mrs. J——, whom I have mentioned, and also other educated Negroes, it is not to be supposed that it is a place of culture, white or black. It is a straggling city with an ugly, misshapen, ill-balanced interior or center part like a table spread with small teacups and large jam pots. It will not stand comparison with Atlanta or New Orleans or Richmond. Strictly speaking, it is not a city, but an agglomeration of industrialism. Nevertheless, the factories which surround it are owned by companies of vast resources, and it is claimed that in the steel industry there are some of the most extensive industrial plants in the world. Business is little disturbed by strikes. On the gates of the vast factory estates is written:We do not want you unless you are able to look after yourself. Careless men are always liable to accident.Some notices declare “Non-Union Shops,” others “Open Shops,” but it does not seem to matter much. The unions have little power. Wages are high, though not as high as in the North, but the cost of living is very much less, and there is a lower standard of respectability. In some cases the industrials are housed on the factory grounds, and you see Negro dwellings which amount to industrial barracks. Every gate has its porter or civilian sentry, and in order to reach your workingman you may have to show what your business is with him. On the way tohis door you are met by the notice that trespassers will be prosecuted.

There is no encouragement to loiterers, but you may see the Negro gangs at work, organized squads of workers hard at it, with Negro foremen or white foremen. A myriad-fold Negro industrialism straggles near mines and furnaces, blacker than in Nature. The coaly black Negro collier, the sooted face of steel worker and tar operative are curious comments on whether it is good to be Black or to be White. Coke products flame and smoke at innumerable pipes, while locomotives are panting and steaming forward and back, and a platoon of chimney stacks belches forth dense blackness, which, enfolded in the breeze, wanders over the heavens and one’s eyes.

I strayed in at the doors of some very dirty Negro houses. Here was little of theamour propreof Baltimore and Philadelphia. Anti-kink was not being generally applied, and as far as the little ones were concerned, mother’s little Alabama coon seemed to be getting a little bit too much for mother. It is not difficult to understand the disgust of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy, large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. The sight of them was responsible for much of the feeling which inspired the Northern riots. “We knowour Northern Negroes,” they said in the North, “but these from the South were like no Negroes we had ever seen.” There was awakened much prejudice against these uncouth Africans, who seemed so near to the savage and the beast. It was natural, perhaps. But high wages and new hopes and ideals quickly improve the black immigrant. He is being absorbed into the generality of black Negrodom, in its established worthiness and respectability, above the Mason-Dixon line. It would be difficult after a few years to pick out a Southern Negro in a crowd in New York.

The little black children in the suburbs of Birmingham were alternately very confiding and then suddenly scared and then confiding again as I tried to talk to them. There was much fear in their bodies. They seemed if anything to be blacker than their parents, and I volunteered the opinion that a good deal of their color would come off in a course of hot baths. But washing facilities were of a rudimentary kind, and the passion for being fit and fresh could not readily be developed.

The white South could improve its Negroes infinitely if it cared to do so. On the whole, however, it does not wish its Negroes to rise and seems most happy when they can readily be identified with the beasts that perish. But if it thought more highly of the Negro, the Negro would rise.

I visited Professor K—— in his three-storied house. He had been one of the Negro Four-Minute Men who had made popular addresses to his people during the war fervor, inducing them to be “patriotic” and subscribe their dollars to various funds. He said he was deeply discouraged. He did not belong to Alabama and would much rather live in a more civilized part of the world, but he gave his life for the uplift of the children. He was doing what he could, but the Whites gave no co-operation. In these factory areas the colored children outnumbered the Whites five to one. Teaching was, of course, segregated; he had no objection to that, but very, very little was done by comparison for the black children. They had most need of blessing—but they shared only in parsimony and curses. He showed me his school—a ramshackle building of old, faded wood. “Oh, but our teachers have enthusiasm,” said he. “They’re doing a work of God, and they love it. Yes, sir.”

I obtained an impression which I think is sound, that there was more keenness to teach on the part of the colored people of Alabama than on the part of the Whites. White schools find some difficulty in obtaining good teachers; colored schools find no such difficulty. If colored students only go on in the way they have begun, there is quite a good prospect of their obtaining posts to teach white children in whiteschools—not perhaps soon in Alabama, for it is strongly prejudiced, but elsewhere first, and then in this State. To start off with, they would be excellent with young children. There is a broad road of conquest standing open there. As Booker T. Washington very sagaciously pointed out to his people, there is no stronger argument in their favor than personal attainment.

However, looking around the houses of the industrialized masses here, one can only be appalled at the inadequacy of civilization. There is nothing that is better than in the forlorn mining villages of the Russian Ural. It makes a sort of Negro little better than a nigger, and it is surprising that he does not run amuck more often than he does.

If the outlying settlements reminded of the Ural, the center of the city reminded of nothing better than Omsk. Here on the main street, at Eighteenth Street, is a very “jazzy” corner, resplendent with five times too much light at night, vocal with noisy music, and swarming with Negroes of all castes and colors. By day it is like a web of gregarious larvæ; by night it is the entrance to wonderland. Here is massed together the Negro enterprise of the city. Most of the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen’s clever Negro stories are thought to be derived from this corner—Mr. Florian Slappey, Lawyer Evans Chew, and the rest. Do not their ways and doings divert a vast number of readers totheSaturday Evening Post? I may have met some of them. I cannot say. But I met their like.

The chief establishment is the savings bank building, a squat, six-story erection in red brick. It is flanked by places of amusement, but in itself it is an ark of professionalism and learning. It is a hive of many cells or cabinets, and every cabinet has its special occupant, a doctor here, a dentist there, a lawyer in the other, another doctor, a professor, an agent, and so on. You may meet nearly all who count in Birmingham Negrodom here. By the way, the local way of pronouncing the name of the city is Bumming Ham; if you say politely, Birmingham, pronouncing with lips and teeth in the front part of the mouth, no one will understand what you mean. A Negro pastor whirled me round to the hub of Bumming Ham in his brand-new car. He had lately had a very successful revival, of which the motor was an outward and visible sign. And I called on many of the notables. I met a short, scrubby Negro of fifty, whose complexion seemed to have been drenched in yellowness. He explained this by the statement that the blood of Senator H—— flowed in his veins. The senator had taken a liberty with his mother, who for her part was thoroughly black. He thanked the senator, since probably he had given him some brains; his mother’s side of the family was unusually hard-headed.He had become a professor. His daughter was a remarkable public speaker, and as Senator H—— was an orator, he used to tell his Sarah thattherewas Senator H—— coming out in her. “The Negro has been mixed with the best blood in the South,” said he; “the blood of the masters, the English aristocrats who came first to the country.”

I did not think there was much in that.

“Are mulattoes increasing or decreasing in numbers?” I asked.

He thought they were increasing. But he did not deny the fact that Negro children tend to revert to type. When two mulattoes marry, the children are generally darker than the parents, and often real Negro types. The white man’s strain is thrown out rapidly.

“How, then, is it that mulattoes and near Whites are on the increase?” The professor thought for one reason there was still much illegitimacy, and for another the Negro race under civilized conditions was getting a little fairer on the whole. Some of the mulatto women were extremely beautiful, and consequently more attractive to white men. The white women of the South hated the mulatto women because they took their husbands away from them. He thought a good deal of race hatred was fostered by the white woman, who instinctively hated the other race.

“Did you ever hear of a union between aNegro woman and a white man that was on other than an animal plane?” I asked him.

Professor M—— knew of several instances where an infatuation for a Negro woman had inspired a white man to make good in life. It was generally a tragedy, for they could not marry, and they were subject to coarse suspicion and raillery and intrigue. It stood in the way of the white man finding a white bride, and of the Negro woman finding a Negro husband. Where a white man had become interested in a Negro woman it was not good for the health of a Negro man to pretend to her affections. The mob feeling against Negroes was so readily aroused that it was the easiest thing in Alabama for a white man who had a grudge against a Negro to “frame up” a crime or a scandal and make him leave the neighborhood or remain constantly in danger of being roughly handled.

Alabama has a bad record for lynching. It is about fifth in the list of bad States. I understood that lynching was on the increase. The old folk, the people who had been slave owners, the settled inhabitants of places like Anniston and Montgomery, and of the country, knew all the family history of their “niggers” from A to Z, and what they might do, or could do, and they were friendly, compared with the “new sort.”

The poor Whites loved to be in mobs and feel in mobs. Over their meals and at work and inthe trolley cars they loved to talk in the way of the mob. Individually they don’t understand the Negro—they are afraid of him, like dogs that will only attack when in numbers. They mostly came to America after the Civil War and the Emancipation found the Negroes in possession of land or of work or of houses. They had their grievances, and instead of visiting them upon God or the Devil or Society in general, found the Negro a convenient fetish and visited their discontent on him. It soon became a habit, then it became a sort of lust and brutal sport.

The older and more solid people have been much annoyed by the growth of this brutality, and something definite is being done to combat it in Alabama. Committees have been formed, or were being formed in the fall of 1919, in every county in the State, half white, half colored, to inquire into racial strife and see what could be done for life and freedom.

An old Negro said to me: “We had two clocks on the cabin wall, and one was very slow and deliberate and always seemed to say:

“’Take yo’ time. Take yo’ time!’

“But the other gabbled to us:

“’Get together, get together, get together!’ That’s what we got to do to-day, brothers—get together.”

The Negroes are fond of emphasizing the triviality of color differences. They reprove thewhite man playfully. “Why get so excited about difference in color? We believe in equality of rights for all men,” I heard a leader say, “for all men of whatever color—white, black, brown, or yellow, or blue.” And his audience laughed. “Two boys go into a shop; one buys a red toy, the other a blue toy—but it is not very important which color—the toy’s the same.”

But of course color prejudice or preference is not such a haphazard matter, and prejudice against the Negro is prejudice against more than color. The toy, so to speak, is different. It may be as good, but it is different. The body, and especially the skull, of a Negro is different from that of the white man. The nervous system, the brain, the mind and soul, are different. I heard the theory put forward in the name of Christian Science that in God’s perfect plan there were no Negroes. Their dark skins were other men’s evil thought about them. All men were really white, and the outward appearance of their skin could be made to correspond to the white idea by concentrated true thought about them. That is a charitable and beautiful faith to live by. But what of the new line of Negroes who are proud of being black, who abhor pallor as nausea? There are many Negroes now who have a religion of being black. The new generation of children is being brought up to glorify Negro color. It is told of the princes and warriors from which it is descended, learns withthe geography of the United States the geography of Africa, and delights in the cognomen—Afro-American. The color issue will never be settled by all Negroes becoming Whites. It seems clear also that it cannot be solved by all men becoming mulattoes. There seems to remain just one obvious solution, and that is in distinct and parallel development, equality before the law, and mutual understanding and tolerance.

IXTHE SOUTHERN POINT OF VIEWShoemaker:No, my lord, they don’t hurt you there.Foppington:I tell thee, they pinch me execrably.Shoemaker:Well, then, my lord, if those shoes pinch you, I’ll be d——d.Foppington:Why, wilt thou undertake to persuade me I cannot feel?Shoemaker:Your lordship may please to feel what you think fit; but that shoe does not hurt you.—(“A Trip to Scarborough.”)TheSouthern point of view can be gathered together in a very short chapter. Its expression has so crystallized that it can be set down in a series of paragraphs and phrases. Whosoever doth not believe, without doubt he shall be damned everlastingly. Wherever you meet a Southerner, be it in the remotest corner of the earth, it is the same as in native Alabama. I was talking to the Mother Superior of a convent one day in a genial English countryside. Although I did not know it, she derived from Mississippi. I mentioned the subject of the Negro, and from her quiet face, meager with fasting and pale with meditation, there flashed nevertheless the Southern flame—like lightning across the room.You have only to mention the Negro sympathetically in a public meeting and some one ofSouthern extraction will be found opposing to you a statement of the Southern creed. Thus, after speaking one morning at Carnegie Hall, some one came up to me and said very emphatically: If you had lived among the Negroes you would not speak of them as you do—the inevitable Southerner.This is his creed:1. We understand the niggers and they like us. When they go North they’re crazy till they get back to us. The North does not understand the nigger, pets him and spoils him, and at last dislikes him more than any Southerner.2. We have occasionally race riots in the South, but they are generally caused by Yankees who have come South. In any case the worst riots in recent years have taken place in the North—at Washington, right under the President’s nose, and at Chicago.3. Few Northerners or Englishmen understand or can understand the Negro problem. Those who understand, agree with us. Those who do not agree, do not understand.4. The nigger is all right as long as he is kept in his place. You must make him keep his distance. If once you are familiar with him, you are lost. He will give himself such airs that it will be impossible to get on with him.5. The nigger is an animal. The male of the species we generally call a “buck nigger.” Like the animals, he is full of lust. Like the animals,also, he does not feel pain. When he is burned it is not the same as a white man burning. Like the animals, he has no soul either to lose or to save, and Christianity and education are alike wasted on him. The polished Negro is merely disgusting, like an ape in evening dress. You clothe him and dress him and put him at table, but he’s an animal all the same and is bound to behave like one. You can’t trust him.6. Under the influence of alcohol the Negro becomes a wild beast. He goes out of control. No fear of consequence can stop him. That is why some of the Southern States have been so ardently prohibitionist.7. If you had to live with them you’d understand how terrible it is.8. The nigger is a liar. He will say anything to your face to please you, or anything he thinks you want him to say. He’ll tell you stories of lynchings that would make you think we lynched a nigger every week, instead of it’s being the rarest occurrence.9. When we lynch ‘em it’s for a very good reason—to protect our white women. Ask any of your English or Northern friends, who pity the Negro, whether they’d be willing to let their daughters marry a Negro. It’s a horrible thought. But that is what the Negro is always after—the white woman. His fancy runs to her, and if it were not for the terror of being lynched we should never be able to leave our wives anddaughters in security. The R in the middle of the Negro’s name stands for his favorite proclivity. We burn ‘em alive, yes, and do it slow, because killing’s too good for them, and we get just so mad that everyone wants to be there, and have his part in putting them to death. In the North they do not lynch the Negro, but if one commits a crime they blame the whole Negro race. In the South we find the guilty man and punish him.10. When the white man goes to the Negro girl, it’s different. He ought to be ashamed of himself, but there, it’s human nature, and you can’t be too stern with him.11. The white man is master, and must remain master. But you do not realize how precarious his position is, outnumbered as he is, ten to one, in many districts. If the niggers joined hands against us we might be all killed in a night.12. They have votes. By the greatest injustice ever committed in this country, the Constitution of the United States was amended to give these people votes and give them power over us. It is true we prevent them using their votes, and override the Constitution at every election. But political agitation goes on all the time. Every Negro would vote Republican if he had a chance, just because we vote Democrat. The Republican party knows that, and is always conspiring to restore to the Negro his lost power ofvoting. It will never succeed, but you can see the anxiety it causes us.13. As for education, it’s bad for the nigger almost every way, and every new educated nigger makes it more difficult to keep ‘em down. But kept down they must be.14. Justice? Well, you ask any nigger which he’d prefer, a Southern court of justice and a Southern judge, or a Northern one. He would always prefer the Southern one, because in the South we understand him. And we’re very fond of them and they of us. We get on very well together.Southern belief rarely strays out of this codified expression of thought. Get into converse with a Southerner on the subject of the Negroes, and you will almost always be able to refer his talk to 1 or 6 or 10 or some other paragraph of the foregoing. It is sufficiently pat and parrot-like to be amusing at last. The Negro himself is amused and pained by it. It amounts to this: The Southerner has made the Negro a pair of boots and he says they fit very well. The Negro says they don’t fit. But the Southerner says he’ll risk his salvation on it—he made the boots, and he knows his trade. The Negro, however, has to wear them.Perhaps if it were merely opinion, the idleness of the spoken word, the Southern point of view would merit less attention. Talk might bediscounted, as mere talk is discounted by responsible minds. But it has unfortunately a remarkable counterpart in action. It is the concomitant of mob murder and torture. It is expressed not only in narrow and bitter phrase, but in actual flesh twisting; not only in the flames of fanaticism, but in real flames.Lynching is a popular sport in the South. It is perhaps popular in idea all over the world. Even in Great Britain, where the policeman is on a sort of moral pedestal, and is paid immense respect, how often among the masses does one hear the sentiment that such and such a person should be put against a wall and shot. Even in a nation that has such a phrase as “the majesty of the law” the idea of taking the law into one’s own hands is generally popular. In Russia,samosudi, as they are called, are frequent, and there is a short and terrible way with pickpockets when the crowd finds them out. France’s passion forla lanternedoes not need to be enlarged upon.It is said that in countries where the laws are badly administered and the police held in little respect, lynchings are the more frequent. This is so. And while lynching can have a moral sanction at first, it may, if unchecked, grow to be a popular sport, a means of “national” holiday, like the shows of Rome, theauto-da-fé’sof Spain, bullfights, and boxing competitions. When sufficient cause for a lynching is lacking,cause may have to be invented, just to let the folk have some “fun.” In the United States to-day there are not sufficient crimes committed by the Negroes to satisfy the hunger of the crowd for lynchings. So inevitably many innocent black men are sacrificed just for sport’s sake.Last year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched in America; fourteen of them were burned alive. Burning appears to be on the increase, and is an obvious indication of growing mob lust. This form of brutality has long ago ceased in the Europe from which perhaps it was derived. Spaniards burned the Indians. Indians burned the settlers. Settlers burned their runaway slaves. And still to-day in comparatively large numbers the white Southern mob burns its Negro victims. It has its historical background. The thought of burning supposed delinquents alive is common in Southern minds. “Make ‘em die slow” is even a watchword.The Southern half of the United States is fond of saying that the North is now quite as bad in its treatment of the Negro. Happily, that is untrue. Seventy-two out of the seventy-seven lynchings occurred south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the rest occurred in the Western States. The North was immune. Unfortunately, this good record was marred by some bad race riots in Northern cities.Of all the States, Georgia had the worst recordfor lynching. During last year she lynched twenty-two persons, almost twice as many as the next worst, Mississippi. Two of these were for alleged attacks on white women. The rest were for a variety of crimes and misdemeanors. Thus, in April, a soldier was beaten to death at Blakely for wearing his uniform too long. In May, at Warrenton, Benny Richards was burned to death for murder. In the first week in August a soldier was shot for refusing to yield the road, and another was hanged for discussing the Chicago race riots. At Pope City another soldier was lynched for shooting. In the belief that the Negroes were planning a rising, Eli Cooper was taken at Ocmulgee and publicly burned at the stake. On September 10th, in the Georgian city of Athens, another Negro, Obe Cox, was burned for murder. In Americus, in October, Ernest Glenwood was drowned as a propagandist. On October 5th, Moses Martin was shot for incautious remarks. Next day, at Lincolnton, one Negro was shot for misleading the mob, and two others were burned alive for committing murder. Next day another was shot at Macon for attempted murder. Two were hanged at Buena Vista for intimacy with a white woman, and before the end of the month three more met their end from the mob for shooting and manslaughter.As far as Georgia is concerned, this record disposes of the theory that lynching only takesplace when white women have been attacked. As a matter of fact, the commonest motive for lynching of Negroes throughout the United States has been shown to be mob condemnation, of violence—not of lust. By far the greatest number of lynchings are for supposed murder. The mob lynches the Negro as a man shoots his dog when the latter has turned on him. Formerly, attacks on women provided the greater number of cases. If the Negro were fool enough ever to make eyes at a white woman, he risked his life. Many innocent admirations and misunderstandings have resulted in lynchings. As for rape, the Negro who commits it is bound to come to a violent end. Very few escape lynching, and the South claims that whatever immunity it enjoys from Negro sexual crimes is due to the deterrent of lynch law. It claims that if the criminals were merely dealt with according to the law, sexual crimes would speedily multiply.White people with the white-race instinct are generally ready to condone lynching when it is proved that it thus acts as a deterrent. Perhaps they are right, and they ought not to put it to themselves from the black man’s point of view. But there is the other point of view, and there is the collective opinion of the colored people on the subject, and that opinion is being organized and will make itself felt. It is worth attention and sympathy.Granted that the black man is the under man as far as the Whites are concerned, is he not entitled to some protection for hisownwomen? One of these Georgia lynchings which occurred last year was a characteristic affair. It occurred at the town of Milan. Two young white fellows tried to break into a house and seize two colored girls living there with their mother. They ran screaming to a neighbor’s home. The Whites tore down a door, ripped up flooring, fired a gun, and made a great disturbance. One old Negro woman was so frightened she jumped into a well, and a worthy Negro grandfather of seventy-two years came out with a shotgun and fired in defence of the women. One of the white men fired on him. The Negro fired back and killed him. The other white man fled. Now, for that deed, instead of being honored as a brave man, the Negro was seized by the white mob and hanged on a high post, and his old body was shot to pieces. This man was a good and quiet citizen who went to chapel every Sunday, and had performed his duty at peace with God and man for a lifetime. The man who led the lynchers was a “Christian” preacher. Sworn evidence on the matter was taken, but the officers of the law in the county refused to act.This lynching was by no means exceptional in its character. To cite an exceptional affair, one might well take the happenings in Brooksand Lowndes Counties, Georgia, in May, 1918. Here a white bully with a pronounced spite against Negroes had been in court and paid the fine of thirty dollars for gambling which had been pronounced against a certain colored man called Sidney Johnson, and the latter had been sent to his estate to work off the debt. This is an example of the abuse of the law for keeping Negroes still in a state of slavery—a characteristic example of peonage.Johnson did the work to pay off the fine, but the farmer held him to do a great deal more. Eventually the Negro feigned sickness as an excuse for not doing any more. The farmer then came to his house and flogged him. It must be supposed this roused the devil in Johnson; he threatened the farmer, and he paid a return visit to the white man’s house, fired on him through the window, killing the man himself and dangerously wounding his wife. At once the usual lynching committee was formed, and for a whole week they hunted for Johnson, who had gone into hiding. During that time they lynched eleven Negroes, of whom one was a woman.The white farmer had given cause for much hatred. He had constantly ill-treated his colored laborers. On one occasion he had flogged a Negro woman. Her husband had stood up for her, and he had him arrested and sentenced to a term of penal servitude in chains. The whitemob concluded that he must have shot the farmer for revenge, and they accordingly lynched him. He was shot to death. His wife would not be quieted, but kept insisting that her poor husband had been innocent. The mob therefore seized her. It tied her upside down by her ankles to a tree, poured petrol on her clothing, and burned her to death. White American women will perhaps take note that this colored sister of theirs was in her eighth month with child. The mob around her was not angry or insensate, but hysterical with brutal pleasure. The clothes burned off her body. Her child, prematurely born, was kicked to and fro by the mob and then—— Well, that is perhaps sufficient. There are many details of this crime which cannot be set down in print. But all these facts were authenticated and submitted to the governor of the State. The point that struck me was the pleasure which was taken by the mob in the sufferings which it was causing. It was drunk with cruelty. Here was little idea of a deterrent. Here was no question of racial prudence. From the point of view of the natural history of mankind, it put those white denizens of Georgia on a lower level than cannibals.It was America’s glorious May, when she was pouring troops into Europe and winning the war; hundreds of thousands of Negroes were clad in the uniform of the army and were fightingfor “freedom and justice” in Europe. The moral eloquence of the President was in all men’s minds. America had the chance to take the moral leadership of the world.But away back in Georgia the mob pursued its horrible way. At length it found the original Johnson who had committed the murder, and he defended himself to the last in a house with gun and revolver, and died fighting. His dead body was dragged at the back of a motor car through the district, and then burned.The facts were brought to the attention of the governor, and he made a statement denouncing mob violence. But no one was ever brought to justice, though the names of the ringleaders were ascertained. No committee of inquiry was sent from Washington. In fact, the people of Georgia were allowed thus to smirch the glorious flag of the republic and to lower the opinion of America in every capital of the world; for the facts of this story have been printed in circular form and distributed widely. It is undoubtedly a remarkable example of lynching.It seems rather strange that lynching crowds allow themselves to be photographed. Men and women and children in hundreds are to be seen in horrible pictures. One sees the summer mob all in straw hats, the men without coats or waistcoats, the women in white blouses, all eager,some mirthful, some facetious. You can upon occasion buy these photographs as picture postcards. The people are neither ashamed nor afraid.Northern Negroes go down to investigate lynchings, buy these photographs, bring them back to safe New York, and then print them off in circulars with details of the whole affair. Southern newspapers, though reticent, cannot forego giving descriptions of lynchings, everyone is so much interested in them. Newspaper reports are also reprinted. There is no need to resort to hearsay in telling of the mob murders of the South. They are heavily documented and absolutely authenticated. The United States Government cannot, for instance, prosecute such a Negro association as the N. A. A. C. P. for the pamphlets it issues on lynchings, because it does no more than publish facts which have been publicly authenticated. If prosecuted, worse details would see light. Therefore, these pamphlets go forth.The first thing they do is tell the colored people as a whole what has been happening. The Negroes of Alabama and Tennessee hear what has been happening in Georgia; the Negroes of Florida and Louisiana hear what has taken place in Arkansas and Texas. Above all, the educated Northern Negroes know of it. Advanced papers such as theCrisis, the ChicagoDefender, and theNegro Messengerare givingthe Negro people as a whole a new consciousness. First of all in Christianity in the days of slavery and in their melancholy plantation music they obtained a collective race consciousness. And now, through persecution on the one hand and newspapers on the other they are strengthening and fulfilling that consciousness. Destiny is being shaped in this race, and white men are the instruments who are shaping it. May it not emerge eventually as a sword, the sword of the wrath of the Lord.I met many Whites who boasted of having taken part in a lynching, and I have met those who possessed gruesome mementoes in the shape of charred bones and gray, dry, Negro skin. I said they were fools. Actually to have the signs upon them! Truly they were in the state of mind in which most men seem to be when fate is going to overtake them. They were proud of their “quick way with niggers,” they justified it, they felt the wisdom of lynching could never be disproved. The matter to them was not worth arguing. They assumed that anyone who wished to argue the point must have sympathy with the “niggers,” and that was enough for them. It never occurred to them that one who doubted the wisdom of lynching might be actuated by sympathy or at least apprehensive for them.I felt sorry for the white women of the South; there will some day be a terrible reckoningagainst them. Their honor and safety are being made the pretext for terrible brutality and cruelty. Revenge, when it gains its opportunity, will therefore wreak itself upon the white woman most. Because in the name of the white woman they justify burning Negroes at the stake to-day, white women may be burned by black mobs by and by. There is no doubt that almost any insurrection of Negroes could ultimately be put down by force, and that it would be very bad for the Negroes and for their cause, but before it could be put down what might happen? And should it synchronize with revolutionary disturbances among the Whites themselves, or with a foreign war?I do not believe that there are real conspiracies of Negroes. But there is growing disaffection. The colored people are a friendly, easy-going, fond-to-foolish folk by nature. But their affection and devotion have been roughly refused. It has almost disappeared. Now we have the phenomenon of Negro mothers telling their little children of the terrible things done by the white folk, and every Negro child is learning that the white man is his enemy. Every lynching, everyauto-da-féis secreting hate and the need for revenge in the Negro masses. Because the Negroes are weak and helpless and unorganized to-day, illiterate often, stupid and unbalanced often, clownish and funny and unreliable, white folk think that it will always beso. But they are wrong. While the industrialized masses of the Whites are certainly degenerating, the masses of the Negroes are certainly rising. Trouble is bound to arise and retribution terrible. What the lowbrows of the South are teaching the Negro he will be found to have learned, and as Shylock said about revenge—it will go hard but he betters the instruction.It may be thought that this is written with too much emphasis, and that this statement on the lynchings is too unmerciful to the white South. But I believe it is absolutely necessary. There are those who would be ready to do again the injustice which was done to the Whites in the South after the Civil War. When discussing these matters in the North I have been horror-struck by the opinions I have heard expressed. This is written in no partisan spirit, and I believe those who would rejoice in the destruction or punishment of the Southern white population are utterly wrong in heart. Punishment and revenge will only perpetuate the strife. But anéclaircissement, a flood of daylight on these matters, a thorough shaking of these stupid people down below the line—a warning in such terrible terms as I have made, might save Black and White for the religion of love and a joy in God’s creatures.It may come from a stranger, a complete outsider, with more force than from an American. I have, however, found a Southerner who condemnedGeorgia, the Roman Catholic Bishop, Benjamin J. Keiley, who gave out a very serious warning in Savannah on the 2nd of November of last year. He said:“It is hardly necessary to state that I am a Southerner.... I warmly love the South; and her story, her traditions, and her ideals are very dear to me.... But I fully recognize the absolute justice of one charge which is made against her, and I look with grave apprehension to the future, for no people that disregards justice can ever have the blessing of God, and we are guilty of great injustice to the Negro. The Negro was brought here against his will; he is here and he will remain here, and he is not treated with justice by us; nay, I will say that he is often not treated with ordinary humanity.“Look at the statistics in our own State. Georgia stands first in the list of States in the matter of lynching. Has there ever been a man punished in this State for lynching a Negro?“Lynching is murder, nothing else.“Besides, is it not the fact that fair and impartial justice is not meted out to white and colored men alike? The courts of this State either set the example, or follow the example set them, and they make a great distinction between the white and the black criminal brought before them. The latter as a rule gets the full limit of the law. Do you ever hear of a street difficulty in which a Negro and a white man were involved which was brought before ajudge, in which, no matter what were the real facts of the case, the Negro did not get the worst of it?“Georgians boast of being a Christian people, and this year they are putting their hands into their pockets to raise millions to bring the light of Christianity, as understood by them, to some less favored peoples in Europe.“I would like to know if it is entirely compatible with Christian morality to treat the Negro as he is treated here? My belief is that the Negro and the white man were redeemed by the blood of Christ shed on the cross of Calvary, and that the Christian religion absolutely condemns injustice to anyone and forbids the taking of life.“To me the murder of a Negro is as much murder as the killing of a white man, and in each case Christian civilization demands that the punishment of the crime should rest in the hands of the lawfully constituted authorities.“I have lived to see in Georgia an appeal made to the highest authority in the State for protection of the lives of colored men, women, and children, answered by the statement that the Negro should not commit crimes! The people of Georgia vest in certain officials the execution of justice. Yet no lyncher has ever been punished here, and I regret to state that public sentiment seems to justify the conduct of the officials.“Only a short time ago I was reading thestrange news of the race riots in the Northern and Western cities. Thank God, we have had none of these riots in the South. Do you know the reason? The only reason is the forbearance of the Negro. He has been treated with gross injustice; he has not retaliated. In all these cases gross disregard for law and order are either the cause or the direct consequence of those disturbances.“Are there not numbers of honest, law-abiding citizens of Georgia who know that I am telling God’s truth, and who will protest against this injustice to the Negro? Is there not a just and fearless man on the bench in this State who will have the courage to announce that there shall be no difference in his court between the white man and the colored man?“Injustice and disregard of law and the lawful conduct of affairs are the sure forerunners of anarchy and the loss of our liberty, and we are drifting in that direction.“The Negro will not stand asking for justice from Georgia laws or Georgia courts. He has been patient, and I hope he will remain so, but he well knows where the remedy lies, and he will very soon be found knocking at the door of the Federal Congress, asking protection. And Congress will hear him.“If appeals to right, justice, to Christian morality, do not avail to put a stop to this injustice to the Negro and protect him againstthe murderous lynchers, then Georgia will see Federal bayonets giving him protection.”Such a voice is very rare. The warning is the more worth heeding.

THE SOUTHERN POINT OF VIEW

TheSouthern point of view can be gathered together in a very short chapter. Its expression has so crystallized that it can be set down in a series of paragraphs and phrases. Whosoever doth not believe, without doubt he shall be damned everlastingly. Wherever you meet a Southerner, be it in the remotest corner of the earth, it is the same as in native Alabama. I was talking to the Mother Superior of a convent one day in a genial English countryside. Although I did not know it, she derived from Mississippi. I mentioned the subject of the Negro, and from her quiet face, meager with fasting and pale with meditation, there flashed nevertheless the Southern flame—like lightning across the room.

You have only to mention the Negro sympathetically in a public meeting and some one ofSouthern extraction will be found opposing to you a statement of the Southern creed. Thus, after speaking one morning at Carnegie Hall, some one came up to me and said very emphatically: If you had lived among the Negroes you would not speak of them as you do—the inevitable Southerner.

This is his creed:

1. We understand the niggers and they like us. When they go North they’re crazy till they get back to us. The North does not understand the nigger, pets him and spoils him, and at last dislikes him more than any Southerner.

2. We have occasionally race riots in the South, but they are generally caused by Yankees who have come South. In any case the worst riots in recent years have taken place in the North—at Washington, right under the President’s nose, and at Chicago.

3. Few Northerners or Englishmen understand or can understand the Negro problem. Those who understand, agree with us. Those who do not agree, do not understand.

4. The nigger is all right as long as he is kept in his place. You must make him keep his distance. If once you are familiar with him, you are lost. He will give himself such airs that it will be impossible to get on with him.

5. The nigger is an animal. The male of the species we generally call a “buck nigger.” Like the animals, he is full of lust. Like the animals,also, he does not feel pain. When he is burned it is not the same as a white man burning. Like the animals, he has no soul either to lose or to save, and Christianity and education are alike wasted on him. The polished Negro is merely disgusting, like an ape in evening dress. You clothe him and dress him and put him at table, but he’s an animal all the same and is bound to behave like one. You can’t trust him.

6. Under the influence of alcohol the Negro becomes a wild beast. He goes out of control. No fear of consequence can stop him. That is why some of the Southern States have been so ardently prohibitionist.

7. If you had to live with them you’d understand how terrible it is.

8. The nigger is a liar. He will say anything to your face to please you, or anything he thinks you want him to say. He’ll tell you stories of lynchings that would make you think we lynched a nigger every week, instead of it’s being the rarest occurrence.

9. When we lynch ‘em it’s for a very good reason—to protect our white women. Ask any of your English or Northern friends, who pity the Negro, whether they’d be willing to let their daughters marry a Negro. It’s a horrible thought. But that is what the Negro is always after—the white woman. His fancy runs to her, and if it were not for the terror of being lynched we should never be able to leave our wives anddaughters in security. The R in the middle of the Negro’s name stands for his favorite proclivity. We burn ‘em alive, yes, and do it slow, because killing’s too good for them, and we get just so mad that everyone wants to be there, and have his part in putting them to death. In the North they do not lynch the Negro, but if one commits a crime they blame the whole Negro race. In the South we find the guilty man and punish him.

10. When the white man goes to the Negro girl, it’s different. He ought to be ashamed of himself, but there, it’s human nature, and you can’t be too stern with him.

11. The white man is master, and must remain master. But you do not realize how precarious his position is, outnumbered as he is, ten to one, in many districts. If the niggers joined hands against us we might be all killed in a night.

12. They have votes. By the greatest injustice ever committed in this country, the Constitution of the United States was amended to give these people votes and give them power over us. It is true we prevent them using their votes, and override the Constitution at every election. But political agitation goes on all the time. Every Negro would vote Republican if he had a chance, just because we vote Democrat. The Republican party knows that, and is always conspiring to restore to the Negro his lost power ofvoting. It will never succeed, but you can see the anxiety it causes us.

13. As for education, it’s bad for the nigger almost every way, and every new educated nigger makes it more difficult to keep ‘em down. But kept down they must be.

14. Justice? Well, you ask any nigger which he’d prefer, a Southern court of justice and a Southern judge, or a Northern one. He would always prefer the Southern one, because in the South we understand him. And we’re very fond of them and they of us. We get on very well together.

Southern belief rarely strays out of this codified expression of thought. Get into converse with a Southerner on the subject of the Negroes, and you will almost always be able to refer his talk to 1 or 6 or 10 or some other paragraph of the foregoing. It is sufficiently pat and parrot-like to be amusing at last. The Negro himself is amused and pained by it. It amounts to this: The Southerner has made the Negro a pair of boots and he says they fit very well. The Negro says they don’t fit. But the Southerner says he’ll risk his salvation on it—he made the boots, and he knows his trade. The Negro, however, has to wear them.

Perhaps if it were merely opinion, the idleness of the spoken word, the Southern point of view would merit less attention. Talk might bediscounted, as mere talk is discounted by responsible minds. But it has unfortunately a remarkable counterpart in action. It is the concomitant of mob murder and torture. It is expressed not only in narrow and bitter phrase, but in actual flesh twisting; not only in the flames of fanaticism, but in real flames.

Lynching is a popular sport in the South. It is perhaps popular in idea all over the world. Even in Great Britain, where the policeman is on a sort of moral pedestal, and is paid immense respect, how often among the masses does one hear the sentiment that such and such a person should be put against a wall and shot. Even in a nation that has such a phrase as “the majesty of the law” the idea of taking the law into one’s own hands is generally popular. In Russia,samosudi, as they are called, are frequent, and there is a short and terrible way with pickpockets when the crowd finds them out. France’s passion forla lanternedoes not need to be enlarged upon.

It is said that in countries where the laws are badly administered and the police held in little respect, lynchings are the more frequent. This is so. And while lynching can have a moral sanction at first, it may, if unchecked, grow to be a popular sport, a means of “national” holiday, like the shows of Rome, theauto-da-fé’sof Spain, bullfights, and boxing competitions. When sufficient cause for a lynching is lacking,cause may have to be invented, just to let the folk have some “fun.” In the United States to-day there are not sufficient crimes committed by the Negroes to satisfy the hunger of the crowd for lynchings. So inevitably many innocent black men are sacrificed just for sport’s sake.

Last year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched in America; fourteen of them were burned alive. Burning appears to be on the increase, and is an obvious indication of growing mob lust. This form of brutality has long ago ceased in the Europe from which perhaps it was derived. Spaniards burned the Indians. Indians burned the settlers. Settlers burned their runaway slaves. And still to-day in comparatively large numbers the white Southern mob burns its Negro victims. It has its historical background. The thought of burning supposed delinquents alive is common in Southern minds. “Make ‘em die slow” is even a watchword.

The Southern half of the United States is fond of saying that the North is now quite as bad in its treatment of the Negro. Happily, that is untrue. Seventy-two out of the seventy-seven lynchings occurred south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the rest occurred in the Western States. The North was immune. Unfortunately, this good record was marred by some bad race riots in Northern cities.

Of all the States, Georgia had the worst recordfor lynching. During last year she lynched twenty-two persons, almost twice as many as the next worst, Mississippi. Two of these were for alleged attacks on white women. The rest were for a variety of crimes and misdemeanors. Thus, in April, a soldier was beaten to death at Blakely for wearing his uniform too long. In May, at Warrenton, Benny Richards was burned to death for murder. In the first week in August a soldier was shot for refusing to yield the road, and another was hanged for discussing the Chicago race riots. At Pope City another soldier was lynched for shooting. In the belief that the Negroes were planning a rising, Eli Cooper was taken at Ocmulgee and publicly burned at the stake. On September 10th, in the Georgian city of Athens, another Negro, Obe Cox, was burned for murder. In Americus, in October, Ernest Glenwood was drowned as a propagandist. On October 5th, Moses Martin was shot for incautious remarks. Next day, at Lincolnton, one Negro was shot for misleading the mob, and two others were burned alive for committing murder. Next day another was shot at Macon for attempted murder. Two were hanged at Buena Vista for intimacy with a white woman, and before the end of the month three more met their end from the mob for shooting and manslaughter.

As far as Georgia is concerned, this record disposes of the theory that lynching only takesplace when white women have been attacked. As a matter of fact, the commonest motive for lynching of Negroes throughout the United States has been shown to be mob condemnation, of violence—not of lust. By far the greatest number of lynchings are for supposed murder. The mob lynches the Negro as a man shoots his dog when the latter has turned on him. Formerly, attacks on women provided the greater number of cases. If the Negro were fool enough ever to make eyes at a white woman, he risked his life. Many innocent admirations and misunderstandings have resulted in lynchings. As for rape, the Negro who commits it is bound to come to a violent end. Very few escape lynching, and the South claims that whatever immunity it enjoys from Negro sexual crimes is due to the deterrent of lynch law. It claims that if the criminals were merely dealt with according to the law, sexual crimes would speedily multiply.

White people with the white-race instinct are generally ready to condone lynching when it is proved that it thus acts as a deterrent. Perhaps they are right, and they ought not to put it to themselves from the black man’s point of view. But there is the other point of view, and there is the collective opinion of the colored people on the subject, and that opinion is being organized and will make itself felt. It is worth attention and sympathy.

Granted that the black man is the under man as far as the Whites are concerned, is he not entitled to some protection for hisownwomen? One of these Georgia lynchings which occurred last year was a characteristic affair. It occurred at the town of Milan. Two young white fellows tried to break into a house and seize two colored girls living there with their mother. They ran screaming to a neighbor’s home. The Whites tore down a door, ripped up flooring, fired a gun, and made a great disturbance. One old Negro woman was so frightened she jumped into a well, and a worthy Negro grandfather of seventy-two years came out with a shotgun and fired in defence of the women. One of the white men fired on him. The Negro fired back and killed him. The other white man fled. Now, for that deed, instead of being honored as a brave man, the Negro was seized by the white mob and hanged on a high post, and his old body was shot to pieces. This man was a good and quiet citizen who went to chapel every Sunday, and had performed his duty at peace with God and man for a lifetime. The man who led the lynchers was a “Christian” preacher. Sworn evidence on the matter was taken, but the officers of the law in the county refused to act.

This lynching was by no means exceptional in its character. To cite an exceptional affair, one might well take the happenings in Brooksand Lowndes Counties, Georgia, in May, 1918. Here a white bully with a pronounced spite against Negroes had been in court and paid the fine of thirty dollars for gambling which had been pronounced against a certain colored man called Sidney Johnson, and the latter had been sent to his estate to work off the debt. This is an example of the abuse of the law for keeping Negroes still in a state of slavery—a characteristic example of peonage.

Johnson did the work to pay off the fine, but the farmer held him to do a great deal more. Eventually the Negro feigned sickness as an excuse for not doing any more. The farmer then came to his house and flogged him. It must be supposed this roused the devil in Johnson; he threatened the farmer, and he paid a return visit to the white man’s house, fired on him through the window, killing the man himself and dangerously wounding his wife. At once the usual lynching committee was formed, and for a whole week they hunted for Johnson, who had gone into hiding. During that time they lynched eleven Negroes, of whom one was a woman.

The white farmer had given cause for much hatred. He had constantly ill-treated his colored laborers. On one occasion he had flogged a Negro woman. Her husband had stood up for her, and he had him arrested and sentenced to a term of penal servitude in chains. The whitemob concluded that he must have shot the farmer for revenge, and they accordingly lynched him. He was shot to death. His wife would not be quieted, but kept insisting that her poor husband had been innocent. The mob therefore seized her. It tied her upside down by her ankles to a tree, poured petrol on her clothing, and burned her to death. White American women will perhaps take note that this colored sister of theirs was in her eighth month with child. The mob around her was not angry or insensate, but hysterical with brutal pleasure. The clothes burned off her body. Her child, prematurely born, was kicked to and fro by the mob and then—— Well, that is perhaps sufficient. There are many details of this crime which cannot be set down in print. But all these facts were authenticated and submitted to the governor of the State. The point that struck me was the pleasure which was taken by the mob in the sufferings which it was causing. It was drunk with cruelty. Here was little idea of a deterrent. Here was no question of racial prudence. From the point of view of the natural history of mankind, it put those white denizens of Georgia on a lower level than cannibals.

It was America’s glorious May, when she was pouring troops into Europe and winning the war; hundreds of thousands of Negroes were clad in the uniform of the army and were fightingfor “freedom and justice” in Europe. The moral eloquence of the President was in all men’s minds. America had the chance to take the moral leadership of the world.

But away back in Georgia the mob pursued its horrible way. At length it found the original Johnson who had committed the murder, and he defended himself to the last in a house with gun and revolver, and died fighting. His dead body was dragged at the back of a motor car through the district, and then burned.

The facts were brought to the attention of the governor, and he made a statement denouncing mob violence. But no one was ever brought to justice, though the names of the ringleaders were ascertained. No committee of inquiry was sent from Washington. In fact, the people of Georgia were allowed thus to smirch the glorious flag of the republic and to lower the opinion of America in every capital of the world; for the facts of this story have been printed in circular form and distributed widely. It is undoubtedly a remarkable example of lynching.

It seems rather strange that lynching crowds allow themselves to be photographed. Men and women and children in hundreds are to be seen in horrible pictures. One sees the summer mob all in straw hats, the men without coats or waistcoats, the women in white blouses, all eager,some mirthful, some facetious. You can upon occasion buy these photographs as picture postcards. The people are neither ashamed nor afraid.

Northern Negroes go down to investigate lynchings, buy these photographs, bring them back to safe New York, and then print them off in circulars with details of the whole affair. Southern newspapers, though reticent, cannot forego giving descriptions of lynchings, everyone is so much interested in them. Newspaper reports are also reprinted. There is no need to resort to hearsay in telling of the mob murders of the South. They are heavily documented and absolutely authenticated. The United States Government cannot, for instance, prosecute such a Negro association as the N. A. A. C. P. for the pamphlets it issues on lynchings, because it does no more than publish facts which have been publicly authenticated. If prosecuted, worse details would see light. Therefore, these pamphlets go forth.

The first thing they do is tell the colored people as a whole what has been happening. The Negroes of Alabama and Tennessee hear what has been happening in Georgia; the Negroes of Florida and Louisiana hear what has taken place in Arkansas and Texas. Above all, the educated Northern Negroes know of it. Advanced papers such as theCrisis, the ChicagoDefender, and theNegro Messengerare givingthe Negro people as a whole a new consciousness. First of all in Christianity in the days of slavery and in their melancholy plantation music they obtained a collective race consciousness. And now, through persecution on the one hand and newspapers on the other they are strengthening and fulfilling that consciousness. Destiny is being shaped in this race, and white men are the instruments who are shaping it. May it not emerge eventually as a sword, the sword of the wrath of the Lord.

I met many Whites who boasted of having taken part in a lynching, and I have met those who possessed gruesome mementoes in the shape of charred bones and gray, dry, Negro skin. I said they were fools. Actually to have the signs upon them! Truly they were in the state of mind in which most men seem to be when fate is going to overtake them. They were proud of their “quick way with niggers,” they justified it, they felt the wisdom of lynching could never be disproved. The matter to them was not worth arguing. They assumed that anyone who wished to argue the point must have sympathy with the “niggers,” and that was enough for them. It never occurred to them that one who doubted the wisdom of lynching might be actuated by sympathy or at least apprehensive for them.

I felt sorry for the white women of the South; there will some day be a terrible reckoningagainst them. Their honor and safety are being made the pretext for terrible brutality and cruelty. Revenge, when it gains its opportunity, will therefore wreak itself upon the white woman most. Because in the name of the white woman they justify burning Negroes at the stake to-day, white women may be burned by black mobs by and by. There is no doubt that almost any insurrection of Negroes could ultimately be put down by force, and that it would be very bad for the Negroes and for their cause, but before it could be put down what might happen? And should it synchronize with revolutionary disturbances among the Whites themselves, or with a foreign war?

I do not believe that there are real conspiracies of Negroes. But there is growing disaffection. The colored people are a friendly, easy-going, fond-to-foolish folk by nature. But their affection and devotion have been roughly refused. It has almost disappeared. Now we have the phenomenon of Negro mothers telling their little children of the terrible things done by the white folk, and every Negro child is learning that the white man is his enemy. Every lynching, everyauto-da-féis secreting hate and the need for revenge in the Negro masses. Because the Negroes are weak and helpless and unorganized to-day, illiterate often, stupid and unbalanced often, clownish and funny and unreliable, white folk think that it will always beso. But they are wrong. While the industrialized masses of the Whites are certainly degenerating, the masses of the Negroes are certainly rising. Trouble is bound to arise and retribution terrible. What the lowbrows of the South are teaching the Negro he will be found to have learned, and as Shylock said about revenge—it will go hard but he betters the instruction.

It may be thought that this is written with too much emphasis, and that this statement on the lynchings is too unmerciful to the white South. But I believe it is absolutely necessary. There are those who would be ready to do again the injustice which was done to the Whites in the South after the Civil War. When discussing these matters in the North I have been horror-struck by the opinions I have heard expressed. This is written in no partisan spirit, and I believe those who would rejoice in the destruction or punishment of the Southern white population are utterly wrong in heart. Punishment and revenge will only perpetuate the strife. But anéclaircissement, a flood of daylight on these matters, a thorough shaking of these stupid people down below the line—a warning in such terrible terms as I have made, might save Black and White for the religion of love and a joy in God’s creatures.

It may come from a stranger, a complete outsider, with more force than from an American. I have, however, found a Southerner who condemnedGeorgia, the Roman Catholic Bishop, Benjamin J. Keiley, who gave out a very serious warning in Savannah on the 2nd of November of last year. He said:

“It is hardly necessary to state that I am a Southerner.... I warmly love the South; and her story, her traditions, and her ideals are very dear to me.... But I fully recognize the absolute justice of one charge which is made against her, and I look with grave apprehension to the future, for no people that disregards justice can ever have the blessing of God, and we are guilty of great injustice to the Negro. The Negro was brought here against his will; he is here and he will remain here, and he is not treated with justice by us; nay, I will say that he is often not treated with ordinary humanity.

“Look at the statistics in our own State. Georgia stands first in the list of States in the matter of lynching. Has there ever been a man punished in this State for lynching a Negro?

“Lynching is murder, nothing else.

“Besides, is it not the fact that fair and impartial justice is not meted out to white and colored men alike? The courts of this State either set the example, or follow the example set them, and they make a great distinction between the white and the black criminal brought before them. The latter as a rule gets the full limit of the law. Do you ever hear of a street difficulty in which a Negro and a white man were involved which was brought before ajudge, in which, no matter what were the real facts of the case, the Negro did not get the worst of it?

“Georgians boast of being a Christian people, and this year they are putting their hands into their pockets to raise millions to bring the light of Christianity, as understood by them, to some less favored peoples in Europe.

“I would like to know if it is entirely compatible with Christian morality to treat the Negro as he is treated here? My belief is that the Negro and the white man were redeemed by the blood of Christ shed on the cross of Calvary, and that the Christian religion absolutely condemns injustice to anyone and forbids the taking of life.

“To me the murder of a Negro is as much murder as the killing of a white man, and in each case Christian civilization demands that the punishment of the crime should rest in the hands of the lawfully constituted authorities.

“I have lived to see in Georgia an appeal made to the highest authority in the State for protection of the lives of colored men, women, and children, answered by the statement that the Negro should not commit crimes! The people of Georgia vest in certain officials the execution of justice. Yet no lyncher has ever been punished here, and I regret to state that public sentiment seems to justify the conduct of the officials.

“Only a short time ago I was reading thestrange news of the race riots in the Northern and Western cities. Thank God, we have had none of these riots in the South. Do you know the reason? The only reason is the forbearance of the Negro. He has been treated with gross injustice; he has not retaliated. In all these cases gross disregard for law and order are either the cause or the direct consequence of those disturbances.

“Are there not numbers of honest, law-abiding citizens of Georgia who know that I am telling God’s truth, and who will protest against this injustice to the Negro? Is there not a just and fearless man on the bench in this State who will have the courage to announce that there shall be no difference in his court between the white man and the colored man?

“Injustice and disregard of law and the lawful conduct of affairs are the sure forerunners of anarchy and the loss of our liberty, and we are drifting in that direction.

“The Negro will not stand asking for justice from Georgia laws or Georgia courts. He has been patient, and I hope he will remain so, but he well knows where the remedy lies, and he will very soon be found knocking at the door of the Federal Congress, asking protection. And Congress will hear him.

“If appeals to right, justice, to Christian morality, do not avail to put a stop to this injustice to the Negro and protect him againstthe murderous lynchers, then Georgia will see Federal bayonets giving him protection.”

Such a voice is very rare. The warning is the more worth heeding.

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