X

XEXODUSTheNegro’s refrain, “Let My People Go,” continues to have a strong emotional appeal. Though devoted to the Southland in an intense, sentimental way, for the Negro has an infinitely pathetic love of home, he has come sorrowfully to the conclusion—he must go away from here. It is strange, because homesickness is almost a mania with the Negro. He relates himself to the white master’s house where he works, to the rude cabin where his family live, to his church, to the “home niggers,” in an extravagant pathological way which has nothing to do with gratitude. Perhaps it is because as a people the slaves were uprooted out of a home in Africa, and they have a haunting melancholy in the hidden depths of their souls. I believe their childish idealization of heaven in their hymns is fundamentally a sort of homesickness. The Negro is not a natural nomad or vagrant like the Russian, the Jew, the Tartar. He must have been as geographically fixed in his native haunts in Africa. Judge, then, how great a disturbancemust take place before the Negro en masse would be ready to emigrate. Yet so it is to-day. With consternation in their aspect, whole families, whole communities, are waiting—to go North. And hundreds of thousands of them are on the move. Of course it is not a complete change of scene. The North has its Negro masses too. One rather loses sight of them among the Whites, but they are there. And they do not cease to invite their unhappy brothers and sisters down South to throw up everything and come North.While it is commonly said that the Negro cannot stand the colder climate of the North, there is, however, not much evidence to that effect. As their orators are proud to declaim—the only civilized man to accompany Peary to the actual North Pole was his trusted servant, Matt Henson, a Negro. To some delicate Negroes, no doubt, a severe climate would be fatal, but that is true for Whites as well as Negroes. On the whole, the Northern air seems to be good for the Negro if he can stand it. The Negroes of New York and Chicago and Boston, and the Canadian Negroes, are firmer in flesh and in will than those who live in the South. And they are certainly more energetic. They yield more hope for the race as a whole than do the others. Perhaps one ought to discount this fact in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes. There is nothingthat will undermine the constitution more than terror and nervous depression. Security is the real Negro ozone.There has been during the last three years a steady migration of Negroes northward. This has been primarily due to the stoppage of foreign immigration and the consequent labor shortage in the districts which depended on the immigrant. The reasons why the Negro was ready to leave his Southern habitat have been summarized in the U. S. Department of Labor Report:[5]“General dissatisfaction with conditions, ravages of boll weevil, floods, change of crop system, low wages, poor houses on plantations, poor school facilities, unsatisfactory crop settlements, rough treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching, desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends in the North, and, finally, advice of white friends in the South where crops had failed.”It is impossible to calculate the numbers with any likelihood of accuracy. Even the census of 1920 will hardly indicate what has taken place—for no one can say what allowance ought to be made for natural increase in the last ten years. But the insurance companies reckon that between May, 1916, and September, 1917,between thirty-five and forty thousand Negroes left Georgia. Perhaps the net loss to the South has been a quarter of a million, the majority young, single men and women. Some certainly put the figure higher. The movement has slowed down, owing to the after-the-war stagnancy in trade, the very bad housing conditions in the North, the race riot in Chicago, and other retarding influences. With a revival of trade it may go on more rapidly. Certainly whenever a countryside in the South is visited by some special act of violence there is a tendency for the colored population to flee. Unfortunately, the lot of migrants of the type of Negroes is always a hard one. It is difficult to settle down in a new community. Irregular habits bring disease. Provincial dullness makes it difficult to find a job or to evade sharpers. Unfortunately, also, Negroes are not by nature altruistic, not clannish like the Jews. They do not help one another in distress as much as poor Whites do. So many who flee northward inevitably come to grief.It is urged in the South that the North is not entirely appreciative of the influx of so many Negroes. But, on the other hand, it is alleged that the large Northern companies sent their agents into every State in the South seeking labor. It was certainly useful to the companies. And although the loose and nondescript unemployed immigrants were guilty of a number ofcrimes, it is generally held that those who found employment proved very steady and reliable. The Negro proved a safe man in the munition factory, and it was found he could do a white man’s job in a mine and in the steel works. The employers of labor were well pleased. But there was a section of the community that was not pleased, and that was the working class—the poor Whites once more, who saw in Negro migration an influx of non-union labor, depressing wages, and lowering the standard of living. The workingmen speedily quarreled with the Negro—seeing in him the oft encountered strike breaker. Those who have gone through the Negro district of Chicago, with its filthy, ramshackle frame buildings occupied by Negro families, a family to a room, know how appalling is the aspect of the Negro there. In the old days the white population took it as a matter of course, as they did so many other things in this evil industrial conglomeration so aptly called theJungle. But too much competition and too many unfamiliar, gloomy Negro faces on the streets caused the nervous shock which accounted for the Chicago riots, begun strangely enough not by a Negro attack, but by a white youth knocking a Negro boy off a raft on the lake and drowning him. The three days’ free fight which ensued was one of the most disillusioning episodes in the history of Northern friendship for the Negro.Nevertheless, Negro leaders still cry “Come North!”There have always been those who thought that the Negro problem could be solved by encouraging migration. The exodus to the North was hailed as a partial liquidation of the Southern trouble. Doubtless an even distribution of Negroes over the whole of the country would put them in the desired minority as regards Whites. Outnumbered by ten to one, they would never seem to threaten to grasp electoral control or be in a position to use physical force with a chance of success. But these are highly theoretical suppositions. Even at the present great rate of exodus it would take hundreds of years to even them out, and there is no reason to think that the emigrants would distribute themselves easily. They would probably crowd more and more into the large cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh, and be as much involved in evil conditions there as they were in the South.Another popular misconception is that it is possible to find a home for the Negro in Africa, and get rid of him that way. Men say airily, “Pack them all off to Liberia,” as they used to say, “Send the Jews back to Palestine.” It is not a practical proposal. Abraham Lincoln held this view, and he opened negotiations with foreign governments in order to find suitableterritory for Negro colonization, but he gave up the idea when General Butler, who investigated the matter for him, convinced him that the Negro birth rate was greater than any possible rate of transport.What was true in 1865 ought to be more obvious to-day. It is a physical impossibility to transport those twelve millions and their progeny to Africa. If a large instalment were taken, would they not perish from starvation and disease? The eyes of the world would be on the United States doing such a thing, and they would be involved in a terrible scandal.But, indeed, the first to cry out “Give us back our niggers” would be the South; for her whole prosperity has a foundation of Negro labor. Take away the black population, and the white farmers, and traders, and financiers would be so impoverished that they also would want to emigrate to Africa.In a material way would not the whole continent of America suffer greatly? You cannot withdraw twelve million from the laboring class and go on as before. It is a ridiculous solution. The only reason for giving it place in serious criticism is that so many people nurse the delusion that the problem can be solved by deportation. It stands in the way when people would otherwise face the facts honestly—our forefathers introduced the Negro into our midst, he is here to stay, and we have to findout what is best for him and best for the White, taking the facts as they are.One good purpose has, however, been served by the encouragement of Negro emigration back to Africa. It has kept the Negro in touch with his original home. It has broadened the Negro’s outlook and started a Negro Zionism—a sentiment for Africa. The Negro loves large conceptions—the universal tempts his mind as it tempts that of the Slav. In short, Liberianism has possessed the Negro of a world movement.XIIN NORTH FLORIDA AND NEW ORLEANSLynchingis more associated with the cotton-growing districts than with others. It is not a fact that the further south you go the more violent the temper of the people. Southeastern Georgia, where the main business is lumbering and rice growing, has a better record than the cotton-growing interior. The cotton planters are aware of this, and it is not uncommon to curse the cotton and wish they could turn to something else. Cotton is not a popular industry. In the old days it bound slavery upon planter and Negro—for cotton necessitates cheap labor—and now it keeps the Negro down and perpetuates an ungenerous type of life.I worked down the Atlantic coast to Brunswick and Jacksonville, preparing in mind for some sort of joyful surprise when I should enter Florida. Brunswick is one of the oldest ports in Georgia. As far as records go, it has never been disgraced by a lynching. Its background of industry is chiefly timber, and the eye looks in vain for a cotton bale or a cotton blossom. It is a peaceful little city, all sand and low palm and scrub, with innumerable grasshoppers and butterflies even in December. An open-streetedport with placid, happy Negroes and no race movement of any kind.At Jacksonville one experiences a complete change of air. It is the climate of Florida, and the difference between cotton and fruit. The difference also between much sombre business and some gilded pleasure. When the rich from the North step out of their cars in Florida and take their ease at Palm Beach, they naturally would not care to be mixed up in the South’s pet sport. Lynchings are bad business in Florida, for if the things occurred there that take place in the neighboring State of Georgia it would certainly frighten away many polite and wealthy visitors. As regards the white woman also, the Floridians do not so assiduously libel the Negro as do the Georgians. Ladies need not be afraid to visit the watering places; the colored man is said to have his passions well under control. Most of the trouble that does occur is in more obscure places, and more in northern than in southern Florida.Jacksonville is a large port with a population bordering on a hundred thousand. Naturally, there are masses of poor as well as numbers of rich. There is employment for a great quantity of Negro labor, and on the streets one may observe the characteristics of a large maritime city. What strikes an Englishman visiting these Atlantic ports—Baltimore, Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, when compared with Hull, Cardiff,Liverpool, London Docks, etc.—is the absence of that somewhat agitating phenomenon of black dock laborers walking out with poor white girls. You may see them any evening in England. As a natural and instinctive thing, most Whites resent it, and street fights in England are the not uncommon result. In America, walking out with Negroes either innocently or otherwise is impossible. Riots and lynchings do not arise from that reason, but from alleged individual assaults upon white women. It should be remarked that womanhood in America ispracticallyidealized. The public as a whole is disinclined to tolerate a woman smoking or drinking, or bathing in inadequate attire, or even “spooning.” It would not occur to a poor white factory girl as even possible to walk out with a Negro. Her moral self-esteem is higher than that of her English sister. The girls who are seen walking out with Negroes in London belong more often to a class which is economically or morally submerged.The Jacksonville Negroes were in a state of considerable anxiety and ferment when I was there. Not because of white-woman trouble, but in anticipation of a riot breaking out on one plea or another. A bad lynching had occurred in the preceding September. A drunken White quarreled with a Negro taxi driver, threatened him and exasperated him, whereupon a conflict ensued in which the White was killed. The whitemob then rounded up every Negro chauffeur in the city and terrified a great number of homes, because the lyncher does not care whether he lynches the right Negro or not, as long as one of them suffers. And in this case two paid the penalty. Undoubtedly the horror and terror of being taken by the mob is the worst of an execution of this kind.The Negroes were very suspicious of white men, and I did not make much progress inquiring into their ways of life. I found, however, a considerably inflated prosperity of churches, due to the philanthropy of Northern visitors, and a well-to-do black proletariat working in the shipbuilding yard and the docks. Nearly all the work done by them was, however, unskilled, and they were only taken as substitutes on skilled work. Substitutes earned as much as seven dollars a day. There is a “Colored” Bank and, as at Birmingham, a so-called “skyscraper” of six stories accommodating all and sundry of trades and professions. Once more, successful drug stores and burial parlors, and a Mme. Nettie Price with beauty establishment. I called at the War Camp Community Club for colored soldiers and sailors—not so enterprising as the one I visited at Norfolk—but the right sort of institution, well used in a proper and discreet way.I crossed the neck of land to Pensacola, passing through Tallahassee, a district where fineleaves of tobacco for cigar wrapping are grown under trellis. Orange groves hung in plenteous fruit just ripe to pick, changing from green to gold. Pensacola is a port with a great history of its own involving Spanish, British, French, American history. Its background is of orange groves and pecan orchards. The pecan nut, a refinement from the walnut, is so prized in the rest of the United States that one can make a good living and save money on a planting of a hundred or so trees. The main street of Pensacola, leading down to the long pier, is very picturesque, with its mariners’ grocers and marine stores. A passenger vessel plies weekly to Mobile, the great fruit port of southern Alabama, and it is possible to get a passage on cargo boats going to New Orleans. Before the war there was much maritime traffic, but few of the vessels which sailed away to do transport and other war duties have returned.Pensacola claims to be the oldest white city in the United States, disputing the matter with St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and is taking the question very seriously in view of any celebration. It is not an important place, but is building toward its own supposed greatness, has a fine new railway station and huge, white stone post office and mammoth hotel. These buildings are puzzling in a town where life seems so placid.Here was a bad lynching for rape a year ago,and a Negro was burned to death. Representations were made to the governor of Florida on the matter. The governor, Sidney I. Catts, replied that he made every effort to keep down lynching in the State, but he could not bring the lynchers to trial, as the citizenship of the State would not stand for it. Apparently he condoned the burning of the Negro, because it was a clear case of sexual wantonness and violence on the part of one of the Negro race. It is somewhat surprising that the chief officer of the law should thus fail to uphold the law. Who is to uphold it if he do not? A contrast this, to the heroic behavior of Mayor Smith of Omaha!Nature did not intend the Gulf of Mexico as a frame for lynching, nor that those happy, blue skies should look down on human candles. If ever there was a serene and happy place in the world it is here, and there is scope for all races to live and to let live. Health is on the shoulder of the winds that blow; fish and fruit and grain and sugar are abundant. Are not the harbors bobbing with grapefruit; upon occasion does not every boy suck the natural sugar from the cane? The luscious canteloupe fills with the sun; peaches and nectarines swell to double sizes of lusciousness and sweetness. Visitors, moreover, bring a plenitude of dollars and scatter them as they go. Jacksonville, Tallahassee,Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans—they are more blest by Nature than other cities of the South.Personally, I preferred New Orleans. It is the finest and most interesting city in which to live. It is by far the largest city of the South, Atlanta coming second, and Birmingham, Alabama, third. It is the great port of the vast Mississippi River, and is the head of what was a mighty river traffic. It faces south, and is more related to France and Spain and the Indies than to Britain and Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Like New York, it has also a strange mixture of races, but they are southern races.Of course it has been notorious as a city of pleasure and fast living. Everyone says to the tourist, “When you get to New Orleans, you’ll see ‘life,’” by which is meant the life-wasting of the immoral. Its reputation in that respect resembled that of Cairo, and the curious, even if they did not wish to taste, could pay to be shown round and thus satisfy their eyes by looking upon evil. The money which flows southward from the pockets of the rich throughout the winter has no doubt helped to keep the red light burning. Now all has changed, however. The various vice crusades and the enactment of prohibition have combined to bring New Orleans to the moral level of other cities of America. There is a violent opposition to the Puritan movement in many sections of the population, and the law is flouted very often, butNew Orleans nevertheless has ceased to present any particular interest to the low pleasure seeker or those of morbid imagination. The city will be the better for it. It is a wonderful place. The inhabitants, after all, were not mainly engaged in the business of pleasure, but in honest trade, and they increase ever. New Orleans is the metropolis of the South, and has a vast and growing commerce which is rendered picturesque by the glamour of that abundance of Nature in the midst of which she is founded.One pictures New Orleans as a city of men in white, with white hats as well as white clothes, men smoking heavy, black cigars, or sauntering idly in the company of exotic-looking ladies; a city of wide open streets and white houses, of many open-air cafés and garden theatres and luxuriant parks, a place certainly of fashion and gayety and elegant living. But what I found on my first impression was an unpainted city, a mass of houses mostly wooden, but mouldering, pallid, and peeling, of every hue of decay. Some walls seemed ready to fall out, some ready to fall in. Man of the period 1920, European, industrialized, diminutive, clad in sober garb, pursued the common way of life. The cheap lunch shop, hall-mark of American civilization, identified the city as American. There were the usual lofty, ramshackle caravanserai with Negro bell boys and the clatter of ice water, the usual public gardens strewn with the newspapersof the day. But though it was winter, the weather was hot. The atmosphere was dense and warm, and the closeness was not dissipated even by the wind when it came. A gale blew in from the Gulf. It scattered warm rain in the city, it rushed through multitudes of palm trees in the suburbs outside.The American part of the city is vast and residential and conventional. The business section expresses business; the home section is uptown and removed from the life of the center. If there were only this “new” part, nothing would distinguish New Orleans from other cities. But it has itsvieux carréein which its history is written, the old, or French, part of the town. The American side is continually rebuilding itself, but the French remains as it was. It has not torn itself down and got rebuilt in modern style. Its great public place is Jackson Square, flanked by the market, and that is beautifully prim and French, but it is foiled by ugly railings and municipal sheds. Nevertheless, it holds one more than does the architectural grandeur of Lafayette Square, in the American half, with its stupendously grand Post Office and Town Hall; and the subdued simplicity of Dauphine Street and Chartres and Bienville and many others is better than any quantity of the new and takes one back in mind to Old Paris and Old London. With all its Creole restaurants and cheap markets and Frenchchurches, it reminded me forcibly of Soho, in London, but of course it is larger and grander.Once a tongue of the Mississippi divided the old from the new, a long and narrow strip of somewhat torpid water. Now it has been filled up, though where the water was it is in some places green with grass. Six lines of electric cars and four streams of other traffic go up and down Canal Street, as it is now called. It is a great highway, finer in some respects than the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, certainly broader. On one side of it and down to the water edge it is definitely and undoubtedly old; on the other it is definitely and undoubtedly new. On one side is reality and matter of fact, on the other glamour and color; on one you make or lose money, on the other you have or miss adventures; one is prose, the other poetry; and it is well understood in New Orleans. You work in one, you live a conventional home life in one, but in the other you seek pleasure and adventures away from home. Not that you cannot dine on the new side, where there are costly and luxurious hotels, but an interesting and characteristic story might be written of a man who stayed too long over his wine in the new part, and then, late at night, strayed across this broad, dark Lethe which divides old from new, to lose himself on the farther side—an adventure and a dream.The foreign streets are of red brick andpainted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and balconies. The houses are crowded within. Red painted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and show a bed occupying half a tiny room, and perhaps a Creole lady in the bed. There is not much squeamishness in the Creoles. French is spoken everywhere, and often English is not understood. Most of the people are Catholic, and are related spiritually to “Mother Church.” Old St. Louis Cathedral, with its spiky tower, is full of people of a Sunday morning, and the service is so perfunctory that it is clear it is no mission church, but one long established and sure. There are monastical institutions, even for the Negroes. While Irish Catholics do not like Negroes, the French and Spanish do. Specially interesting is the Convent of the Sacred Heart, with its black Mother Superior and its happy, placid Negro Catholicism. The best of the Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles. The Creoles are the cross-breed of French and Spaniard and their descendants. Strictly speaking, no Negroes are Creoles, but the descendants of the slaves of the Creoles and in general the French and Spanish-speaking Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles, and are generally indulged in the appellation. Creoles indeed have not much prejudice against color, being much mixed themselves, and in any case of French extraction, and the French have never had much sense of racial distinction. Tospeak French is a sign of belonging to society in New Orleans. The opening of the opera season at the French Opera House (lately burned down) is the event of the winter, and everyone of importancemustbe present. The next sign of good taste is to know cuisine, and to be able to differentiate thedelicacesand the subtleties of the famous Creole chefs.I visited the mayor, Catholic, but of German name. He could not easily have kept his mayoralty with such a name in England. But here he was very popular. He was a human pyramid in long, voluminous morning coat, smoking a cigar as he worked, but walking with a ponderous and poised walk, and exhibiting a front of truly mayoral proportions. He said, concerning the Negroes, “We have no trouble with them here; we get on very well together. They are outside politics; that makes it much easier. If they had the power to vote, of course it would be different.” New Orleans is one of those places where a Negro’s grandfather must have voted if he is to vote, and he must prove that his grandfather voted. I demurred to the mayor. “The Negroes seem very suspicious of the Whites, and hostile,” said I. He thought not. It was evidently his set policy to have that point of view. Politically he could not afford to be strongly interested in the Negro ferment. For although the disenfranchised Negro population thought him friendly to them, the Whitesalso thought him “sound on the nigger question.” No white man who expressed sympathy for the Negro could possibly succeed in Louisiana politics. There was proceeding while I was there a violent election campaign for the governorship of the State, and it was curious that, though the Negro could take little personal part in the choosing of the governor, he nevertheless took almost first place in the political discussions. Soundness on the Negro question seemed to be the chief test of candidacy. A man who might betray lynchers to justice or anything of that kind was evidently feared by the white population. Nevertheless, as I have said, the Creoles were on friendly terms with the Negroes. It is the Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American section of the population, the undifferentiated Southern Whites, who determine the way of politics here, as elsewhere in the South. It is likely that if the Creoles were left to themselves with the Negro population, they would grant them full rights, not only in the courts and in suffrage, but socially. The Negroes know this, and are therefore on very good terms with the French-speaking population.Nevertheless, it must be said that but for a handful of leaders the Negro population is more dull, more impassive, and ignorant than elsewhere. A black proletariat of a hundred thousand ought to be able to raise on its broad base a fine column of intelligence and business.There ought to be large and flourishing groups of doctors and lawyers and shopkeepers, but here, as at Birmingham, there is the usual Insurance Society’s building, which is all-in-all. And Negro insurance is little more than the organization of burying clubs, with the Negro undertakers as prime beneficiaries. The biggest Negro business throughout the South is connected with burying Negroes. It is sad, but it is characteristic of this era of their development. New Orleans has its “Pythian Building,” its temple of the Knights of Pythias, of which the debonair Mr. Green is Grand Master, not only for the State of Louisiana, but for the world. This is the civic center of the Negro’s life in New Orleans, and, like the Penny Bank Building of Birmingham, and its sister building at Jacksonville, houses many activities. The Pythian Temple of New Orleans is said to be the finest Negro building in the United States. It is a fine edifice, and in America business is judged much more by the building it inhabits than in Europe. An integral part of the temple is a very useful theatre, not a cinema hall, but a genuine stage for the “legitimate” drama. Here, no doubt, the Knights of Pythias appear in full regalia and parade to do the pseudo ritual of the society. But the theatre is used for all manner of purposes.I was present one Sunday afternoon at a local meeting of the National Association. The SouthernWhite is opposed to the Association, and would do much to thwart it if he knew much about it. But the Southern Whites do not mix with Negro intellectuals, and are content to live in that paradise indicated by the mayor—We get on all right with them down here.When, however, a bad lynching takes place the local white population soon hears of the National Association. It sends its representatives down from New York to investigate the facts. In such cases facts are the last things the white community wish brought to light, and then the National Association is discovered and roundly abused. Its representatives are sometimes white, which makes them more dangerous from a Southern point of view. Attempts are made to “railroad” them—run them out of town.The case of Mr. Shillady, in Texas, must be mentioned here. He is the white secretary of this militant association, and has done very valuable work for his country by investigating and authenticating the details of mob murders. Texas has a bad record for lynching, rioting, and lawlessness. The Texan people, however, would not have him, and he was actually thrashed publicly by a judge and a constable. It was done in front of the Driscoll Hotel, Austin, where Shillady was staying. Having been assaulted in this way, he was put on a Northern train and told to leave it at his peril. The judgeremains still judge, the constable remains still a constable—if he be not now a sergeant or inspector. When we sing “Down Texas Way” that is what it means.The local meeting this Sunday afternoon was of a quarrelsome character. A well-known and devoted Negro leader had been accused in a New Orleans Negro paper of “selling out the colored folk” at St. Louis. There had been great enthusiasm in the forming of what is called the “American Legion,” a national club of all who had served or worn an American uniform in the Great War. Negro membership of the Legion was apparently being barred in the South, and some wrong-headed Negro journalist had accused an old Creole Negro of attending the St. Louis inaugural gathering of the Legion and agreeing that Negro soldiers and sailors should be excluded.A violent personal quarrel banged from man to man. As I was asked to speak, I told them I thought they could ill afford to quarrel among themselves. Nevertheless, I had noticed a marked disposition to quarrel among the educated Negroes. Loyalty to one another was not one of their characteristics. No people could do much who did not prize unity more than discord. While so many were against them all, how absurd to spend an afternoon quarreling with one another!This was warmly applauded, though no doubtone might as well sit in Canute’s chair and “bid the main flood bate its usual height,” as bid them cease to quarrel. They brought the fighting instinct out of Africa, and still longed to wield the battle-axe.Besides the Pythian Temple Block, New Orleans has also a sort of South Street, a cheap line of shops with “swell toggery” for Negroes. Negro suit-pressing establishments, barbers, and the like, pawnshops, and what not. This is South Rampart, and on it is the People’s Drug Store, a hive of Negro life. Up above the store Mrs. Camille Cohen-Bell operates an insurance company, and her father, W. L. Cohen, runs for what it is worth in opinion (it cannot count much in votes), the Negro Republican party.During a fortnight in New Orleans I visited frequently this pleasant company of Negro Creoles, the well-educated Mrs. Bell, who loved to speak French, and her ebullient father. The place was haunted by undertakers. It appeared that when a Negro was insured in the company he was allotted to an undertaker in case of death. Undertakers therefore became very anxious when clients moved out of their parish. If any one fell sick away from home, and there was the likelihood of his dying and being buried by a stranger, the fret of the local buriers was comical.I met here a very advanced Negro lady who gave out very positive views on morality. Thepresence of a white man was perhaps a challenge to her mind. Some white woman called Jean Gordon had been making a missionary address to the Negroes on moral purity and proper behavior at a large Baptist church. I did not hear Jean Gordon, but her black protagonist was so forceful I asked her to write a statement of what she thought. This was her answer to Jean Gordon:“ ... Jean Gordon states that every young colored girl knows no white man may marry her under the law, and if she brings into the world an illegitimate child she is not fit to be a mother. All very true. Now, I daresay that every young colored girl is aware of this fact, but, judging from the way the white men run after these colored girls, either they (the white men) are in ignorance of the law, or it is their object flagrantly to disobey it. There is one thing I wish all white men and women to bear in mind, when they refer to illicit relations of white men and black women, and vice versa—it is this: the laws of this Southland are made by white men, and no sooner have they made these laws than they get busy finding ways to break them and evading punishment for so doing. It is a well-known fact that no Negro woman seeks the attentions of a white man—rather is the shoe on the other foot, and Negro women have a very hard time making Whites keep in their places. However, the attraction is not confined to themen of the white race, for good-looking colored men have as hard a time as the good-looking colored women. So, it seems to me that if Jean Gordon should address an audience of white men and women, and plead with them to teach their boys, husbands, brothers, and fathers the necessity of respecting the laws, and the women of all races, then colored young women would have no trouble keeping their virtue and their morals. All honor is due to the Negro women, for no one knows better than Jean Gordon herself the terrible pressure brought against them by white men who seek to force their attentions on them. The wonder of it is that so many of them are able to hold out against such odds, but God is in His heaven and does not sleep. So, I say, let the white women get busy and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? I am able to give a partial reason—THE FORCE OF HABIT! The white man has grown so accustomed to seducing Negro women and getting by with it, that the virtue of his own women has come to mean nothing to him.“We now come to Jean Gordon’s statement relative to ‘wild stories are being circulated that the Negro won the great world war....’ No intelligent Negro can claim that the Negro won the world war, but every intelligent man, woman, and child, in this country and on the other side, is aware that the Negro did his share in winning it over there, and did his full share over here. The Negro has participated in every war in which this country has engaged, and at no time did he retreat nor show the yellow streak. No one can cite an instance where a Negro protested against going to the front. Against propaganda that was overwhelming, the Negro remained loyal. The first Negroes to set foot on French soil were from Louisiana—longshoremen; they were not soldiers, true, but they did what they were sent to do, and did it well. Very few white regiments from Louisiana saw the firing line, yet they are all soldiers. No doubt, had they been sent to the front, they would have fought, but so would every black citizen of the United States. However, if it is true that ‘comparatively few of them fought when the total of the millions of white men who died in that struggle is considered,’ the reason for that is that the South did its level best to keep the Negro out of the war as a soldier. And it must be known that every white man who fought and died was not an American! Every black man who fought did his part creditably,as has ever been the case. Whole Negro regiments were decorated by the French, and bear in mind that among those who were the first to be decorated by the French were American Negroes! As for the fighting qualities of the Negro, all I need do is to refer any ‘doubting Thomas’ to Xon Hill. Nothing more need be said. And I repeat for all concerned that while the Negro did not win the world war,he did his share in helping to win itover there, and he and his women who remained over here helped to win it by laboring and giving funds.... The Negro dug trenches, he fought, he died on the battlefield, he gave of his money and his labor over here, and his women gave of their money and labor.Didthe Negro help win the great world war?I’ll say he did!!!Will anyone say he did not? If anyone has done more, let him come forward.“Before concluding, I wish to ask Jean Gordon just why it is she and the women of the South are so bitterly opposed to giving suffrage to Negro women? Do they fear us? Yea, they need to fear us, for we have made up our minds that we are going to help our men of the South get their rights, and Jean Gordon, being a woman, is fully aware that when a woman wills a thing, it is as good as done. The Negro men are going to come out on top, and their women are going to see to it. The Negro men are going to learn to protect their women from the snaresof white men, and their women are going to help them do this, too.... No longer does a Negro woman consider it an honor to have a white man for a ‘friend’—a lover; gradually have we made her understand that it is an insult, and she now tells her father, brother, or husband, as the case may be, and it is up to this man to defend the virtue of his female relative, in thesame waythe white man defends his. No more do we hear nice-looking colored boys bragging that such and such a white woman is quite crazy for him, for we have shown him that her affection for him is likely to lead him into trouble, so, having quite a variety of colors to choose from in the women of his own race (thanks to the white man for that), the Negro boy runs along with the kind of girl who pleases him, and keeps out of trouble. Very often, though, the White does not let him stay out of trouble—there are so many ways devised by these nice white people to hurt the Negro who is peaceably bent. The Negro has been patient, true, but we all know there is an end to all patience. I hope the time has come when the Whites of this section will take up more time in improving themselves and less time in seeing the error of our ways. We both of us have much to do, but we Negroes are aware of it, and are anxious to improve ourselves, but we are unable to take pattern after those who are more in need of lessons than we. The Negro is bound to come outon top—even though he is in a hopeless minority. Right will ever and always crush Might; for reference, see William Hohenzollern!”By this sulphurous little smoke one may know of subterranean fire. When the earthquake comes the Jean Gordons will fall down and the new Negro woman will stand forth. White society in places like New Orleans may one day be overthrown unless it can live for ideals and reform its institutions. Much depends on the law which is corrupted and much on the churches now in decay. Literature in New Orleans is nigh dead, so I will not mention that.XIITHE NEW MIND OF THE NEGROResentmentis the main characteristic of the Negro forward movement. In endeavoring to understand the Negro mind a maximum is gained by answering the question:What does it mean to have been a slave?Analysis of racial consciousness at once brings to light in the case of the Negro a slave mentality. He has been pre-dispositioned by slavery.To have been a slave, or to be the child of a slave, means to have an old unpaid grudge in the blood; to have, in fact,resentmenteither smouldering or abeyant or militant. If it does not develop in the slave it will develop in the child of the slave or the child of the child. It may not take a violent form. Certain circumstances, such as prosperity, have power to neutralize it. On the other hand, certain other circumstances have power to bring it more rapidly to a head. The virus feeds on grievances, will even feed on imaginary grievances, but most certainly will grow apace on real grievances. In all seriousness, there is nothing like burning people alive for bringing out active spite and hate. Because of burning and lynching, thewhole of American Negrodom swells larger in resentment, day by day, and moon by moon.The character of ex-slave, and the child of one who was a slave, is aptly shown by the way the Negro treats animals, in the way also in which he treats those Negroes who happen to come under him.It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals, though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves.For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master. A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is learning how to torture.The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro, the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals which is quite other. And toward human beings in their power or employ they often have a pointof view which is hateful. The peasant workman in the power of theKulakpeasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in the power of a slave is so much worse!In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it. To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst, it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave, he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway. They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism in Russia. Bolshevismis eminently a slave movement. The children of the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great world struggle.There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the victims of the enragedNegroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises, may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic.Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled, and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous stuff of revolution.A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied equally to theNegro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to the two vital questions:1.Is it fitting, and can America condone the use of colored troops to fight white enemies?2.When many white citizens have such a violent animus against the Negro, is it practicable to use the latter in the army?The first of these questions was evaded by America as it had been from the first by France. There are many who think that the use of “native” troops against the Germans was more indefensible than the German use of poison gas. For, by using colored troops against Whites in a white man’s quarrel, the moral leadership of the Whites is obviously thrown away, and there are bound to be serious after-effects in the weakening of morale.The second question was merely an important practical detail that had been overlooked. Theoretically, all American citizens are equal. The laws apply without distinction of race or color. In practice, equality is denied. What more natural than to continue in the theoretical assumption of equality, and hope that divergency in practice might be overlooked. What more absurd, however, than to take a man who is beingillegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that community?The Northern white soldier did not, however, feel ill disposed toward the black soldier, and I have met those who saw deeds of heroism done by Negroes, and many who saw them wounded and suffering in the common cause, and felt drawn toward them, to help them and their brothers. But whatever may have been the common feeling about Negro soldiers in the United States, it was definitely hostile to them in the camps in France. There emerged two characteristic points of view: (1) That it was good to kill off as many Negroes as possible, as that helped to solve the Negro problem. (2) That the Negro was not worthy to fight for his country.Not much for patriotism to feed on there! There seems never to have been any resolve to make first-class Negro regiments, and those units who served in France were by no means adequately trained. By all competent accounts they were very slack, and it goes without saying that an almost superhuman effort of discipline was necessary to obtain complete steadiness in this terrible war. It was common to endeavor to terrorize the Negroes by alarming and exaggerated accounts of the horrors of battle. Negroes were talked to by Whites in a very unsoldierly way. Baiting them and scaring them was thought to be better sport than dealing withthem sternly and seriously. There is no doubt also that some white soldiers rejoiced to see the Negro put back into the slavery position and forced to obey on pain of death. There are those who cannot forgive the Negro having got free from slavery, and for them the spectacle of the Negro in the rank and file afforded much pleasure. Threating Negroes with a court-martial and death sentence became a characteristic jest.The white man, however, soon found that the Negro fell into the humor of the war more readily than into the tragedy of it. It agreed with his own sense of humor. It was soon impossible to scare the raw recruits with yarns. The idea of running away from a machine gun became natural and hilarious. The dangers from night-bombing raiders over the lines were facetiously exaggerated. Hiding best became a humorous point of honor, and one Negro would vaunt against another how far he fled. Private soldiers chaffed their officers on the subject of death. Asked what “going over the top” meant, the raw recruit would answer: “I know; it means Good mornin’, Jesus.” In short, in nearly every Negro unit there set in a humoresque attitude to the war.Officer: The Germans are going to start an offensive.Negro Soldier: That so, cap? Then we’se spread the news over France.As the popular joke has it.The Negro officer then began to receive the white man’s attention. Having trained many colored officers, Negroes often of education and means and refinement, and having given them commission and uniform, the Staff came to the conclusion that they had made a mistake. The white Southern officer stirred up trouble, the white ranker would not salute. There was the usual sordid squabble in officers’ messes. And then the upshot—a great number of Negro officers subjected to the humiliation of losing their commissions and being placed in the ranks. This discouragement necessarily set the Negro officer thinking. It cultivated his resentment. It sowed in his heart the seed of national disaffection.The next serious trouble was that of the French women and the Negro. The indifference of white women whether the man they walked with was black or brown or white was taken as an intolerable affront by Southerners. They felt called upon to interfere and save the French woman from herself. The rape legend was imported, and every effort was made to infect the French male with race prejudice. Happily, the propaganda failed. For one thing, Puritanism does not easily take root in a French heart, and for another, the French have no instinctive horror of Negroes. Possibly the rape legend even made the Negro a little ornamental from the point of view ofamour. “Black Americantroops in France have given rise to as many complaints of attempted rape as all the rest of the army ‘Les troupes noires Americaines en France ont donné lieu, a elle seules, a autant de plaintes pour tentatives de viol, que tout le reste de l’Armée,’” as an army order puts it.Negro honor, however, demands that the charge be rebutted, and the matter has been thoroughly investigated. There does not seem to be much in it. As every one knows who served in the ranks, women of easy virtue were extremely plentiful and complaisant. The need might easily have been to protect the Negro from the women rather than the women from the Negro.The fact is simply that the Negro walking with a white woman is to the Southern American White as a red rag to a bull. And as by nature this White is unrestrained and unreasonable, he seeks by all means, fair or foul, to part them.Finally, the culmination of the story of the American Negro in the war is that the White denied him any valor or prowess or military virtue of any kind, said the Negro was a coward and a runaway and utterly useless in the fighting line. Fighting units were taken off their allotted duty and changed to labor units. Regiments were ordered home; whole brigades were given as a present to the grateful French. Theymay have been rather inefficient. But, if so, that was due to bad training. Negroes have fought magnificently in America’s wars of the past. They are a great fighting race, and they are capable of discipline.I listened when at New Orleans to a lecture given by Sergeant Needham Roberts of the 369th U. S. Infantry, a handsome young Negro warrior, twice wounded, the first American to be decorated by the French Government. He was entirely patriotic, and made the apathetic Negro audience stand to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He told how he ran away from home to enlist, trained with a mass of black strangers, went across the ocean—quite a terrifying experience for some of these young soldiers, who but for the war had never crossed the sea. He gave his first impressions of France and of the line, the exaggerated fright of shell explosions and night attacks and bombs from the air. They were just getting used to the first aspect of war when one day the news flew round—“We are all ordered home again.” Official orders to that effect quickly followed. They had all packed up and were marching to entrain for Cherbourg when, according to the sergeant, Foch intervened.“Why are you sending them back?” said he.“They are not wanted.”Foch seemed astonished.“If you cannot use them, I can,” said the French marshal.And then, hurray!—we were attached to the French.It was no playground, the French front, but, as ever, a sterner piece of reality than American or British. The Negroes were hotly engaged and had many casualties. Roberts won his Croix de Guerre for a feat which he performed with his chum, Pete Johnson. They had been left at an advanced listening post and apparently overlooked—not relieved for three days and three nights. The division had been relieved. On the third night the Germans made a raid which the two Negro soldiers repelled by themselves, first throwing out their bombs, then firing, and finishing with a remarkable bit of butchery with the bayonet. The Germans whom they did not put out of action they put to flight. How many Germans lay dead it would be difficult to say. The number probably grew like those of Falstaff’s men in buckram, but I did hear twenty mentioned.There was no doubt about the fact that Sergeant Roberts was a jolly soldier—a “bonny faechter”—and he made himself on good terms with his audience very quickly. He came from New York, and had swung along Fifth Avenue with the heroes of New York’s Fighting Fifteenth. He was full of the faith of the North, horribly depressed by the atmosphere of theSouth, above all by the passivity and apathy of the Negroes of New Orleans. He had better keep north of the Mason-Dixon line, for he is evidently a born fighter.If the war itself was a persistent educator of the Negro, his subsequent treatment after the Armistice enforced very terribly what he learned. It would be hardly worth while to enlarge on this in detail. The fact which I wished to isolate is the growing resentment of the colored people, the fact that some twelve millions are becoming highly charged with resentment.As illustration of this resentment one could quote much from the spoken and the written word of the Negroes. But a poem, or part of a poem, may suffice. It is Archibald Grimké’s “Thirteen Black Soldiers.” The 24th United States Infantry, a Negro regiment, was sent to Houston, Texas, and was received with lack of sympathy and some hostility by the population. A series of petty troubles culminated in a riot and mutiny. Sixty-four Negroes were court-martialled, and thirteen were sentenced to death, and hanged. It seems to show a lack of foresight to station a Negro regiment among such a hostile people as the Texans. They are more the enemies of the Negroes than were the Germans, and there was certainty of trouble. Grimké’s poem expresses the boiling resentment to which I have referred.She hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers,She hanged them for mutiny and murder,She hanged them after she had put on them her uniform,After she had put on them her uniform, the uniform of her soldiers,She told them they were to be brave, to fight and, if needs be, to die for her.This was many years before she hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.She told them to go there and they went,To come here and they came, her brave black soldiers.For her they went without food and water,For her they suffered cold and heat,For her they marched by day,For her they watched by night,For her in strange lands they stood fearless,For her in strange lands they watched shelterless,For her in strange lands they fought,For her in strange lands they bled,For her they faced fevers and fierce men,For her they were always and everywhere ready to die.And now she has hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.For murder and mutiny she hanged them in anger and hate,Hanged them in secret and dark and disgrace,In secret and dark she disowned them,In secret and dark buried them and left them in nameless disgrace.Why did she hang them, her thirteen black soldiers?What had they done to merit such fate?She sent them to Houston, to Houston, in Texas,She sent them in her uniform to this Southern city,She sent them, her soldiers, her thirteen brave soldiers,They went at her bidding to Houston,They went where they were ordered.They could not choose another place,For they were soldiers and went where they were ordered.They marched into Houston not knowing what awaited them.Insult awaited them and violence.Insult and violence hissed at them from house windows and struck at them in the streets,American colorphobia hissed and struck at them as they passed by on the streets.In the street cars they met discrimination and insult,“They are not soldiers, they and their uniforms,They are but common niggers,They must be treated like common niggers,They and their uniform.”So hissed colorphobia, indigenous to Texas.And then it squirted its venom on them,Squirted its venom on them and on their uniform.And what did she do, she who put that uniform on them,And bade them to do and die if needs be for her?Did she raise an arm to protect them?Did she raise her voice to frighten away the reptilian thing?Did she lift a finger or say a word of rebuke at it?Did she do anything in defence of her black soldiers?She did nothing. She sat complacent, indifferent in her seat of power.She had eyes, but she refused to see what Houston was doing to her black soldiers,She had ears, but she stuffed them with cotton,That she might not hear the murmured rage of her black soldiers,They suffered alone, they were defenceless against insult and violence,For she would not see them nor hear them nor protect them.Then in desperation they smote the reptilian thing,They smote it as they had smitten before her enemies,For was it not her enemy, the reptilian thing, as well as their own?They in an hour of madness smote it in battle furiously,And it shrank back from their blows hysterical,Terror and fear of death seized it, and it cried unto her to help.And she, who would not hear her black soldiers in their dire need,She, who put her uniform on them, heard their enemy.She flew at its call and hanged her brave black soldiers.She hanged them for doing for themselves what she ought to have done for them,She hanged them for resenting insult to her uniform,She hanged them for defending from violence her brave black soldiers.They marched with the dignity of brave men to the gallows,With the souls of warriors they marched without a whimper to their doom.And so they were hanged, her thirteen black soldiers,And so they lie buried in nameless disgrace.Is the watchword of Dr. Du Bois to be wondered?—We return.We return from fighting.We return fighting.I met at Memphis, Tennessee, one of the few Southern white men who are sympathetic to the Negro and understand the gravity of the situation. This was Mr. Bolton Smith, a rich business man, a member of the Rotary Clubquand meme. As one who among other activities advances money on the security of real estate in the Mississippi Delta, he necessarily has been brought a great deal into contact with the Negro. Society in Memphis looked at him somewhat askance because he did not share the current conventional view, but he was not blackballed, only indulgently laughed at as one who had a weak spot in his mental armor. In places remote from Memphis, however, his views receive weighty consideration.If he had his way he would give the Negro his right and his due, and stop lynching. He does not believe the Negro wishes “social equality,” the right to mix indiscriminately with white people, in schools, in trains, in marriage. He thinks the Negro prefers to be separate as long as there is no implied dishonor. He made a special study of the Frederick Douglass School at Cincinnati, an all black school which is admirably conducted, and found that bythemselves the Negroes progress more than when mixed with Whites. As Cincinnati is a city on the northern fringe, with northern institutions, the Negroes had the choice to go to mixed schools with white children if they desired, but they preferred to be by themselves, and indeed did better by themselves. As regards Jim Crow cars, Smith said he would give equal comfort and equal facilities in colored cars and in colored waiting rooms. He does not think the Negro desires to be in a Pullman car where there are white women. It works without scandal in the North, but there is too much risk of the woman going into hysterics in the South, and the Negro getting lynched at a wayside station. He believes in abandoning “the policy of pin pricks,” and, above all, in suppressing lynching and race riot.He was, however, strongly opposed to Du Bois and the National Association. He considered that Du Bois was leading the Negroes wrongly, leading them in fact to a worse calamity than any which had yet overtaken them. “If the Negro resorts to force,” said Mr. Smith to me, “he will be destroyed. In peace and in law the white man fails to understand how to handle the Negro, but if it comes to force, the issue becomes quite simple for the white man, and the Negro stands little more chance than a savage. Christianity alone can save the Negro, and the leaders of the National Associationare leading the people away from Christianity.” He wished all Negroes could see how fatal it is for them to abandon Christianity.“If it were not for the lynchings, the National Association and its newspaper would shrink to very small proportions. Every time a Negro is lynched it adds a thousand to the circulation of theCrisis, and a burning adds ten thousand,” said he.“Hell would soon lose its heat should sin expire,” said I. I was inclined to agree that the only way was through Christianity. But there is such a thing as the wrath of God, and it is not incompatible with Divine Fatherhood and all-merciful Providence. John Brown has been greatly condemned, but he was not outside Christianity—surely he was a child of God. He used to think that without much shedding of blood the crimes of this guilty land could be purged away, but now....I do not think the white South will be able to avert the wrath of God by machine guns, nor will it quell the Negro by force once the Negro moves from the depths of his being. Better than believe in meeting the great wrath is to be advised betimes and mend one’s ways. Was not the Civil War a sufficient bloodletting? Could not the lesson be learned?It is certainly in vain to work directly against Du Bois when his power as a leader of revolt could be removed utterly by stopping the lynching.The U. S. Postmaster General refused postal facilities to one number of his newspaper because it was going too far in stirring up sedition, but it was ineffectual, and was, on the contrary, a useful advertisement for the paper. And then, is it not known there are far more advanced groups of Negroes than that of the association of which Dr. Du Bois is president? There are those who laugh Du Bois to scorn as a Moderate. There are those who have sworn that for every Negro done to death by the mob two white men shall somehow perish. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is the gospel—or rather, two eyes for one. Something is being started which will not cease with a recital of the Beatitudes. If America does not cast out the devil of class hate from the midst of her she will again be ravished by the Angel of Death as in the Civil War. The established peaceful routine of a country like America is very deceptive. All seems so permanent, so unshakable. The new refinement, the new politeness and well-lined culture, and vast commercial organization and press suggest that no calamity could overtake them. The force that makes for disruption and anarchy is generated silently and secretly. It accumulates, accumulates, and one day it must discharge itself. Its name is resentment, and its first expression is revenge.

XEXODUSTheNegro’s refrain, “Let My People Go,” continues to have a strong emotional appeal. Though devoted to the Southland in an intense, sentimental way, for the Negro has an infinitely pathetic love of home, he has come sorrowfully to the conclusion—he must go away from here. It is strange, because homesickness is almost a mania with the Negro. He relates himself to the white master’s house where he works, to the rude cabin where his family live, to his church, to the “home niggers,” in an extravagant pathological way which has nothing to do with gratitude. Perhaps it is because as a people the slaves were uprooted out of a home in Africa, and they have a haunting melancholy in the hidden depths of their souls. I believe their childish idealization of heaven in their hymns is fundamentally a sort of homesickness. The Negro is not a natural nomad or vagrant like the Russian, the Jew, the Tartar. He must have been as geographically fixed in his native haunts in Africa. Judge, then, how great a disturbancemust take place before the Negro en masse would be ready to emigrate. Yet so it is to-day. With consternation in their aspect, whole families, whole communities, are waiting—to go North. And hundreds of thousands of them are on the move. Of course it is not a complete change of scene. The North has its Negro masses too. One rather loses sight of them among the Whites, but they are there. And they do not cease to invite their unhappy brothers and sisters down South to throw up everything and come North.While it is commonly said that the Negro cannot stand the colder climate of the North, there is, however, not much evidence to that effect. As their orators are proud to declaim—the only civilized man to accompany Peary to the actual North Pole was his trusted servant, Matt Henson, a Negro. To some delicate Negroes, no doubt, a severe climate would be fatal, but that is true for Whites as well as Negroes. On the whole, the Northern air seems to be good for the Negro if he can stand it. The Negroes of New York and Chicago and Boston, and the Canadian Negroes, are firmer in flesh and in will than those who live in the South. And they are certainly more energetic. They yield more hope for the race as a whole than do the others. Perhaps one ought to discount this fact in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes. There is nothingthat will undermine the constitution more than terror and nervous depression. Security is the real Negro ozone.There has been during the last three years a steady migration of Negroes northward. This has been primarily due to the stoppage of foreign immigration and the consequent labor shortage in the districts which depended on the immigrant. The reasons why the Negro was ready to leave his Southern habitat have been summarized in the U. S. Department of Labor Report:[5]“General dissatisfaction with conditions, ravages of boll weevil, floods, change of crop system, low wages, poor houses on plantations, poor school facilities, unsatisfactory crop settlements, rough treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching, desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends in the North, and, finally, advice of white friends in the South where crops had failed.”It is impossible to calculate the numbers with any likelihood of accuracy. Even the census of 1920 will hardly indicate what has taken place—for no one can say what allowance ought to be made for natural increase in the last ten years. But the insurance companies reckon that between May, 1916, and September, 1917,between thirty-five and forty thousand Negroes left Georgia. Perhaps the net loss to the South has been a quarter of a million, the majority young, single men and women. Some certainly put the figure higher. The movement has slowed down, owing to the after-the-war stagnancy in trade, the very bad housing conditions in the North, the race riot in Chicago, and other retarding influences. With a revival of trade it may go on more rapidly. Certainly whenever a countryside in the South is visited by some special act of violence there is a tendency for the colored population to flee. Unfortunately, the lot of migrants of the type of Negroes is always a hard one. It is difficult to settle down in a new community. Irregular habits bring disease. Provincial dullness makes it difficult to find a job or to evade sharpers. Unfortunately, also, Negroes are not by nature altruistic, not clannish like the Jews. They do not help one another in distress as much as poor Whites do. So many who flee northward inevitably come to grief.It is urged in the South that the North is not entirely appreciative of the influx of so many Negroes. But, on the other hand, it is alleged that the large Northern companies sent their agents into every State in the South seeking labor. It was certainly useful to the companies. And although the loose and nondescript unemployed immigrants were guilty of a number ofcrimes, it is generally held that those who found employment proved very steady and reliable. The Negro proved a safe man in the munition factory, and it was found he could do a white man’s job in a mine and in the steel works. The employers of labor were well pleased. But there was a section of the community that was not pleased, and that was the working class—the poor Whites once more, who saw in Negro migration an influx of non-union labor, depressing wages, and lowering the standard of living. The workingmen speedily quarreled with the Negro—seeing in him the oft encountered strike breaker. Those who have gone through the Negro district of Chicago, with its filthy, ramshackle frame buildings occupied by Negro families, a family to a room, know how appalling is the aspect of the Negro there. In the old days the white population took it as a matter of course, as they did so many other things in this evil industrial conglomeration so aptly called theJungle. But too much competition and too many unfamiliar, gloomy Negro faces on the streets caused the nervous shock which accounted for the Chicago riots, begun strangely enough not by a Negro attack, but by a white youth knocking a Negro boy off a raft on the lake and drowning him. The three days’ free fight which ensued was one of the most disillusioning episodes in the history of Northern friendship for the Negro.Nevertheless, Negro leaders still cry “Come North!”There have always been those who thought that the Negro problem could be solved by encouraging migration. The exodus to the North was hailed as a partial liquidation of the Southern trouble. Doubtless an even distribution of Negroes over the whole of the country would put them in the desired minority as regards Whites. Outnumbered by ten to one, they would never seem to threaten to grasp electoral control or be in a position to use physical force with a chance of success. But these are highly theoretical suppositions. Even at the present great rate of exodus it would take hundreds of years to even them out, and there is no reason to think that the emigrants would distribute themselves easily. They would probably crowd more and more into the large cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh, and be as much involved in evil conditions there as they were in the South.Another popular misconception is that it is possible to find a home for the Negro in Africa, and get rid of him that way. Men say airily, “Pack them all off to Liberia,” as they used to say, “Send the Jews back to Palestine.” It is not a practical proposal. Abraham Lincoln held this view, and he opened negotiations with foreign governments in order to find suitableterritory for Negro colonization, but he gave up the idea when General Butler, who investigated the matter for him, convinced him that the Negro birth rate was greater than any possible rate of transport.What was true in 1865 ought to be more obvious to-day. It is a physical impossibility to transport those twelve millions and their progeny to Africa. If a large instalment were taken, would they not perish from starvation and disease? The eyes of the world would be on the United States doing such a thing, and they would be involved in a terrible scandal.But, indeed, the first to cry out “Give us back our niggers” would be the South; for her whole prosperity has a foundation of Negro labor. Take away the black population, and the white farmers, and traders, and financiers would be so impoverished that they also would want to emigrate to Africa.In a material way would not the whole continent of America suffer greatly? You cannot withdraw twelve million from the laboring class and go on as before. It is a ridiculous solution. The only reason for giving it place in serious criticism is that so many people nurse the delusion that the problem can be solved by deportation. It stands in the way when people would otherwise face the facts honestly—our forefathers introduced the Negro into our midst, he is here to stay, and we have to findout what is best for him and best for the White, taking the facts as they are.One good purpose has, however, been served by the encouragement of Negro emigration back to Africa. It has kept the Negro in touch with his original home. It has broadened the Negro’s outlook and started a Negro Zionism—a sentiment for Africa. The Negro loves large conceptions—the universal tempts his mind as it tempts that of the Slav. In short, Liberianism has possessed the Negro of a world movement.

EXODUS

TheNegro’s refrain, “Let My People Go,” continues to have a strong emotional appeal. Though devoted to the Southland in an intense, sentimental way, for the Negro has an infinitely pathetic love of home, he has come sorrowfully to the conclusion—he must go away from here. It is strange, because homesickness is almost a mania with the Negro. He relates himself to the white master’s house where he works, to the rude cabin where his family live, to his church, to the “home niggers,” in an extravagant pathological way which has nothing to do with gratitude. Perhaps it is because as a people the slaves were uprooted out of a home in Africa, and they have a haunting melancholy in the hidden depths of their souls. I believe their childish idealization of heaven in their hymns is fundamentally a sort of homesickness. The Negro is not a natural nomad or vagrant like the Russian, the Jew, the Tartar. He must have been as geographically fixed in his native haunts in Africa. Judge, then, how great a disturbancemust take place before the Negro en masse would be ready to emigrate. Yet so it is to-day. With consternation in their aspect, whole families, whole communities, are waiting—to go North. And hundreds of thousands of them are on the move. Of course it is not a complete change of scene. The North has its Negro masses too. One rather loses sight of them among the Whites, but they are there. And they do not cease to invite their unhappy brothers and sisters down South to throw up everything and come North.

While it is commonly said that the Negro cannot stand the colder climate of the North, there is, however, not much evidence to that effect. As their orators are proud to declaim—the only civilized man to accompany Peary to the actual North Pole was his trusted servant, Matt Henson, a Negro. To some delicate Negroes, no doubt, a severe climate would be fatal, but that is true for Whites as well as Negroes. On the whole, the Northern air seems to be good for the Negro if he can stand it. The Negroes of New York and Chicago and Boston, and the Canadian Negroes, are firmer in flesh and in will than those who live in the South. And they are certainly more energetic. They yield more hope for the race as a whole than do the others. Perhaps one ought to discount this fact in the light of the extra prosperity and happiness of the Northern Negroes. There is nothingthat will undermine the constitution more than terror and nervous depression. Security is the real Negro ozone.

There has been during the last three years a steady migration of Negroes northward. This has been primarily due to the stoppage of foreign immigration and the consequent labor shortage in the districts which depended on the immigrant. The reasons why the Negro was ready to leave his Southern habitat have been summarized in the U. S. Department of Labor Report:[5]

“General dissatisfaction with conditions, ravages of boll weevil, floods, change of crop system, low wages, poor houses on plantations, poor school facilities, unsatisfactory crop settlements, rough treatment, cruelty of the law officers, unfairness in courts, lynching, desire for travel, labor agents, the Negro press, letters from friends in the North, and, finally, advice of white friends in the South where crops had failed.”

It is impossible to calculate the numbers with any likelihood of accuracy. Even the census of 1920 will hardly indicate what has taken place—for no one can say what allowance ought to be made for natural increase in the last ten years. But the insurance companies reckon that between May, 1916, and September, 1917,between thirty-five and forty thousand Negroes left Georgia. Perhaps the net loss to the South has been a quarter of a million, the majority young, single men and women. Some certainly put the figure higher. The movement has slowed down, owing to the after-the-war stagnancy in trade, the very bad housing conditions in the North, the race riot in Chicago, and other retarding influences. With a revival of trade it may go on more rapidly. Certainly whenever a countryside in the South is visited by some special act of violence there is a tendency for the colored population to flee. Unfortunately, the lot of migrants of the type of Negroes is always a hard one. It is difficult to settle down in a new community. Irregular habits bring disease. Provincial dullness makes it difficult to find a job or to evade sharpers. Unfortunately, also, Negroes are not by nature altruistic, not clannish like the Jews. They do not help one another in distress as much as poor Whites do. So many who flee northward inevitably come to grief.

It is urged in the South that the North is not entirely appreciative of the influx of so many Negroes. But, on the other hand, it is alleged that the large Northern companies sent their agents into every State in the South seeking labor. It was certainly useful to the companies. And although the loose and nondescript unemployed immigrants were guilty of a number ofcrimes, it is generally held that those who found employment proved very steady and reliable. The Negro proved a safe man in the munition factory, and it was found he could do a white man’s job in a mine and in the steel works. The employers of labor were well pleased. But there was a section of the community that was not pleased, and that was the working class—the poor Whites once more, who saw in Negro migration an influx of non-union labor, depressing wages, and lowering the standard of living. The workingmen speedily quarreled with the Negro—seeing in him the oft encountered strike breaker. Those who have gone through the Negro district of Chicago, with its filthy, ramshackle frame buildings occupied by Negro families, a family to a room, know how appalling is the aspect of the Negro there. In the old days the white population took it as a matter of course, as they did so many other things in this evil industrial conglomeration so aptly called theJungle. But too much competition and too many unfamiliar, gloomy Negro faces on the streets caused the nervous shock which accounted for the Chicago riots, begun strangely enough not by a Negro attack, but by a white youth knocking a Negro boy off a raft on the lake and drowning him. The three days’ free fight which ensued was one of the most disillusioning episodes in the history of Northern friendship for the Negro.

Nevertheless, Negro leaders still cry “Come North!”

There have always been those who thought that the Negro problem could be solved by encouraging migration. The exodus to the North was hailed as a partial liquidation of the Southern trouble. Doubtless an even distribution of Negroes over the whole of the country would put them in the desired minority as regards Whites. Outnumbered by ten to one, they would never seem to threaten to grasp electoral control or be in a position to use physical force with a chance of success. But these are highly theoretical suppositions. Even at the present great rate of exodus it would take hundreds of years to even them out, and there is no reason to think that the emigrants would distribute themselves easily. They would probably crowd more and more into the large cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh, and be as much involved in evil conditions there as they were in the South.

Another popular misconception is that it is possible to find a home for the Negro in Africa, and get rid of him that way. Men say airily, “Pack them all off to Liberia,” as they used to say, “Send the Jews back to Palestine.” It is not a practical proposal. Abraham Lincoln held this view, and he opened negotiations with foreign governments in order to find suitableterritory for Negro colonization, but he gave up the idea when General Butler, who investigated the matter for him, convinced him that the Negro birth rate was greater than any possible rate of transport.

What was true in 1865 ought to be more obvious to-day. It is a physical impossibility to transport those twelve millions and their progeny to Africa. If a large instalment were taken, would they not perish from starvation and disease? The eyes of the world would be on the United States doing such a thing, and they would be involved in a terrible scandal.

But, indeed, the first to cry out “Give us back our niggers” would be the South; for her whole prosperity has a foundation of Negro labor. Take away the black population, and the white farmers, and traders, and financiers would be so impoverished that they also would want to emigrate to Africa.

In a material way would not the whole continent of America suffer greatly? You cannot withdraw twelve million from the laboring class and go on as before. It is a ridiculous solution. The only reason for giving it place in serious criticism is that so many people nurse the delusion that the problem can be solved by deportation. It stands in the way when people would otherwise face the facts honestly—our forefathers introduced the Negro into our midst, he is here to stay, and we have to findout what is best for him and best for the White, taking the facts as they are.

One good purpose has, however, been served by the encouragement of Negro emigration back to Africa. It has kept the Negro in touch with his original home. It has broadened the Negro’s outlook and started a Negro Zionism—a sentiment for Africa. The Negro loves large conceptions—the universal tempts his mind as it tempts that of the Slav. In short, Liberianism has possessed the Negro of a world movement.

XIIN NORTH FLORIDA AND NEW ORLEANSLynchingis more associated with the cotton-growing districts than with others. It is not a fact that the further south you go the more violent the temper of the people. Southeastern Georgia, where the main business is lumbering and rice growing, has a better record than the cotton-growing interior. The cotton planters are aware of this, and it is not uncommon to curse the cotton and wish they could turn to something else. Cotton is not a popular industry. In the old days it bound slavery upon planter and Negro—for cotton necessitates cheap labor—and now it keeps the Negro down and perpetuates an ungenerous type of life.I worked down the Atlantic coast to Brunswick and Jacksonville, preparing in mind for some sort of joyful surprise when I should enter Florida. Brunswick is one of the oldest ports in Georgia. As far as records go, it has never been disgraced by a lynching. Its background of industry is chiefly timber, and the eye looks in vain for a cotton bale or a cotton blossom. It is a peaceful little city, all sand and low palm and scrub, with innumerable grasshoppers and butterflies even in December. An open-streetedport with placid, happy Negroes and no race movement of any kind.At Jacksonville one experiences a complete change of air. It is the climate of Florida, and the difference between cotton and fruit. The difference also between much sombre business and some gilded pleasure. When the rich from the North step out of their cars in Florida and take their ease at Palm Beach, they naturally would not care to be mixed up in the South’s pet sport. Lynchings are bad business in Florida, for if the things occurred there that take place in the neighboring State of Georgia it would certainly frighten away many polite and wealthy visitors. As regards the white woman also, the Floridians do not so assiduously libel the Negro as do the Georgians. Ladies need not be afraid to visit the watering places; the colored man is said to have his passions well under control. Most of the trouble that does occur is in more obscure places, and more in northern than in southern Florida.Jacksonville is a large port with a population bordering on a hundred thousand. Naturally, there are masses of poor as well as numbers of rich. There is employment for a great quantity of Negro labor, and on the streets one may observe the characteristics of a large maritime city. What strikes an Englishman visiting these Atlantic ports—Baltimore, Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, when compared with Hull, Cardiff,Liverpool, London Docks, etc.—is the absence of that somewhat agitating phenomenon of black dock laborers walking out with poor white girls. You may see them any evening in England. As a natural and instinctive thing, most Whites resent it, and street fights in England are the not uncommon result. In America, walking out with Negroes either innocently or otherwise is impossible. Riots and lynchings do not arise from that reason, but from alleged individual assaults upon white women. It should be remarked that womanhood in America ispracticallyidealized. The public as a whole is disinclined to tolerate a woman smoking or drinking, or bathing in inadequate attire, or even “spooning.” It would not occur to a poor white factory girl as even possible to walk out with a Negro. Her moral self-esteem is higher than that of her English sister. The girls who are seen walking out with Negroes in London belong more often to a class which is economically or morally submerged.The Jacksonville Negroes were in a state of considerable anxiety and ferment when I was there. Not because of white-woman trouble, but in anticipation of a riot breaking out on one plea or another. A bad lynching had occurred in the preceding September. A drunken White quarreled with a Negro taxi driver, threatened him and exasperated him, whereupon a conflict ensued in which the White was killed. The whitemob then rounded up every Negro chauffeur in the city and terrified a great number of homes, because the lyncher does not care whether he lynches the right Negro or not, as long as one of them suffers. And in this case two paid the penalty. Undoubtedly the horror and terror of being taken by the mob is the worst of an execution of this kind.The Negroes were very suspicious of white men, and I did not make much progress inquiring into their ways of life. I found, however, a considerably inflated prosperity of churches, due to the philanthropy of Northern visitors, and a well-to-do black proletariat working in the shipbuilding yard and the docks. Nearly all the work done by them was, however, unskilled, and they were only taken as substitutes on skilled work. Substitutes earned as much as seven dollars a day. There is a “Colored” Bank and, as at Birmingham, a so-called “skyscraper” of six stories accommodating all and sundry of trades and professions. Once more, successful drug stores and burial parlors, and a Mme. Nettie Price with beauty establishment. I called at the War Camp Community Club for colored soldiers and sailors—not so enterprising as the one I visited at Norfolk—but the right sort of institution, well used in a proper and discreet way.I crossed the neck of land to Pensacola, passing through Tallahassee, a district where fineleaves of tobacco for cigar wrapping are grown under trellis. Orange groves hung in plenteous fruit just ripe to pick, changing from green to gold. Pensacola is a port with a great history of its own involving Spanish, British, French, American history. Its background is of orange groves and pecan orchards. The pecan nut, a refinement from the walnut, is so prized in the rest of the United States that one can make a good living and save money on a planting of a hundred or so trees. The main street of Pensacola, leading down to the long pier, is very picturesque, with its mariners’ grocers and marine stores. A passenger vessel plies weekly to Mobile, the great fruit port of southern Alabama, and it is possible to get a passage on cargo boats going to New Orleans. Before the war there was much maritime traffic, but few of the vessels which sailed away to do transport and other war duties have returned.Pensacola claims to be the oldest white city in the United States, disputing the matter with St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and is taking the question very seriously in view of any celebration. It is not an important place, but is building toward its own supposed greatness, has a fine new railway station and huge, white stone post office and mammoth hotel. These buildings are puzzling in a town where life seems so placid.Here was a bad lynching for rape a year ago,and a Negro was burned to death. Representations were made to the governor of Florida on the matter. The governor, Sidney I. Catts, replied that he made every effort to keep down lynching in the State, but he could not bring the lynchers to trial, as the citizenship of the State would not stand for it. Apparently he condoned the burning of the Negro, because it was a clear case of sexual wantonness and violence on the part of one of the Negro race. It is somewhat surprising that the chief officer of the law should thus fail to uphold the law. Who is to uphold it if he do not? A contrast this, to the heroic behavior of Mayor Smith of Omaha!Nature did not intend the Gulf of Mexico as a frame for lynching, nor that those happy, blue skies should look down on human candles. If ever there was a serene and happy place in the world it is here, and there is scope for all races to live and to let live. Health is on the shoulder of the winds that blow; fish and fruit and grain and sugar are abundant. Are not the harbors bobbing with grapefruit; upon occasion does not every boy suck the natural sugar from the cane? The luscious canteloupe fills with the sun; peaches and nectarines swell to double sizes of lusciousness and sweetness. Visitors, moreover, bring a plenitude of dollars and scatter them as they go. Jacksonville, Tallahassee,Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans—they are more blest by Nature than other cities of the South.Personally, I preferred New Orleans. It is the finest and most interesting city in which to live. It is by far the largest city of the South, Atlanta coming second, and Birmingham, Alabama, third. It is the great port of the vast Mississippi River, and is the head of what was a mighty river traffic. It faces south, and is more related to France and Spain and the Indies than to Britain and Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Like New York, it has also a strange mixture of races, but they are southern races.Of course it has been notorious as a city of pleasure and fast living. Everyone says to the tourist, “When you get to New Orleans, you’ll see ‘life,’” by which is meant the life-wasting of the immoral. Its reputation in that respect resembled that of Cairo, and the curious, even if they did not wish to taste, could pay to be shown round and thus satisfy their eyes by looking upon evil. The money which flows southward from the pockets of the rich throughout the winter has no doubt helped to keep the red light burning. Now all has changed, however. The various vice crusades and the enactment of prohibition have combined to bring New Orleans to the moral level of other cities of America. There is a violent opposition to the Puritan movement in many sections of the population, and the law is flouted very often, butNew Orleans nevertheless has ceased to present any particular interest to the low pleasure seeker or those of morbid imagination. The city will be the better for it. It is a wonderful place. The inhabitants, after all, were not mainly engaged in the business of pleasure, but in honest trade, and they increase ever. New Orleans is the metropolis of the South, and has a vast and growing commerce which is rendered picturesque by the glamour of that abundance of Nature in the midst of which she is founded.One pictures New Orleans as a city of men in white, with white hats as well as white clothes, men smoking heavy, black cigars, or sauntering idly in the company of exotic-looking ladies; a city of wide open streets and white houses, of many open-air cafés and garden theatres and luxuriant parks, a place certainly of fashion and gayety and elegant living. But what I found on my first impression was an unpainted city, a mass of houses mostly wooden, but mouldering, pallid, and peeling, of every hue of decay. Some walls seemed ready to fall out, some ready to fall in. Man of the period 1920, European, industrialized, diminutive, clad in sober garb, pursued the common way of life. The cheap lunch shop, hall-mark of American civilization, identified the city as American. There were the usual lofty, ramshackle caravanserai with Negro bell boys and the clatter of ice water, the usual public gardens strewn with the newspapersof the day. But though it was winter, the weather was hot. The atmosphere was dense and warm, and the closeness was not dissipated even by the wind when it came. A gale blew in from the Gulf. It scattered warm rain in the city, it rushed through multitudes of palm trees in the suburbs outside.The American part of the city is vast and residential and conventional. The business section expresses business; the home section is uptown and removed from the life of the center. If there were only this “new” part, nothing would distinguish New Orleans from other cities. But it has itsvieux carréein which its history is written, the old, or French, part of the town. The American side is continually rebuilding itself, but the French remains as it was. It has not torn itself down and got rebuilt in modern style. Its great public place is Jackson Square, flanked by the market, and that is beautifully prim and French, but it is foiled by ugly railings and municipal sheds. Nevertheless, it holds one more than does the architectural grandeur of Lafayette Square, in the American half, with its stupendously grand Post Office and Town Hall; and the subdued simplicity of Dauphine Street and Chartres and Bienville and many others is better than any quantity of the new and takes one back in mind to Old Paris and Old London. With all its Creole restaurants and cheap markets and Frenchchurches, it reminded me forcibly of Soho, in London, but of course it is larger and grander.Once a tongue of the Mississippi divided the old from the new, a long and narrow strip of somewhat torpid water. Now it has been filled up, though where the water was it is in some places green with grass. Six lines of electric cars and four streams of other traffic go up and down Canal Street, as it is now called. It is a great highway, finer in some respects than the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, certainly broader. On one side of it and down to the water edge it is definitely and undoubtedly old; on the other it is definitely and undoubtedly new. On one side is reality and matter of fact, on the other glamour and color; on one you make or lose money, on the other you have or miss adventures; one is prose, the other poetry; and it is well understood in New Orleans. You work in one, you live a conventional home life in one, but in the other you seek pleasure and adventures away from home. Not that you cannot dine on the new side, where there are costly and luxurious hotels, but an interesting and characteristic story might be written of a man who stayed too long over his wine in the new part, and then, late at night, strayed across this broad, dark Lethe which divides old from new, to lose himself on the farther side—an adventure and a dream.The foreign streets are of red brick andpainted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and balconies. The houses are crowded within. Red painted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and show a bed occupying half a tiny room, and perhaps a Creole lady in the bed. There is not much squeamishness in the Creoles. French is spoken everywhere, and often English is not understood. Most of the people are Catholic, and are related spiritually to “Mother Church.” Old St. Louis Cathedral, with its spiky tower, is full of people of a Sunday morning, and the service is so perfunctory that it is clear it is no mission church, but one long established and sure. There are monastical institutions, even for the Negroes. While Irish Catholics do not like Negroes, the French and Spanish do. Specially interesting is the Convent of the Sacred Heart, with its black Mother Superior and its happy, placid Negro Catholicism. The best of the Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles. The Creoles are the cross-breed of French and Spaniard and their descendants. Strictly speaking, no Negroes are Creoles, but the descendants of the slaves of the Creoles and in general the French and Spanish-speaking Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles, and are generally indulged in the appellation. Creoles indeed have not much prejudice against color, being much mixed themselves, and in any case of French extraction, and the French have never had much sense of racial distinction. Tospeak French is a sign of belonging to society in New Orleans. The opening of the opera season at the French Opera House (lately burned down) is the event of the winter, and everyone of importancemustbe present. The next sign of good taste is to know cuisine, and to be able to differentiate thedelicacesand the subtleties of the famous Creole chefs.I visited the mayor, Catholic, but of German name. He could not easily have kept his mayoralty with such a name in England. But here he was very popular. He was a human pyramid in long, voluminous morning coat, smoking a cigar as he worked, but walking with a ponderous and poised walk, and exhibiting a front of truly mayoral proportions. He said, concerning the Negroes, “We have no trouble with them here; we get on very well together. They are outside politics; that makes it much easier. If they had the power to vote, of course it would be different.” New Orleans is one of those places where a Negro’s grandfather must have voted if he is to vote, and he must prove that his grandfather voted. I demurred to the mayor. “The Negroes seem very suspicious of the Whites, and hostile,” said I. He thought not. It was evidently his set policy to have that point of view. Politically he could not afford to be strongly interested in the Negro ferment. For although the disenfranchised Negro population thought him friendly to them, the Whitesalso thought him “sound on the nigger question.” No white man who expressed sympathy for the Negro could possibly succeed in Louisiana politics. There was proceeding while I was there a violent election campaign for the governorship of the State, and it was curious that, though the Negro could take little personal part in the choosing of the governor, he nevertheless took almost first place in the political discussions. Soundness on the Negro question seemed to be the chief test of candidacy. A man who might betray lynchers to justice or anything of that kind was evidently feared by the white population. Nevertheless, as I have said, the Creoles were on friendly terms with the Negroes. It is the Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American section of the population, the undifferentiated Southern Whites, who determine the way of politics here, as elsewhere in the South. It is likely that if the Creoles were left to themselves with the Negro population, they would grant them full rights, not only in the courts and in suffrage, but socially. The Negroes know this, and are therefore on very good terms with the French-speaking population.Nevertheless, it must be said that but for a handful of leaders the Negro population is more dull, more impassive, and ignorant than elsewhere. A black proletariat of a hundred thousand ought to be able to raise on its broad base a fine column of intelligence and business.There ought to be large and flourishing groups of doctors and lawyers and shopkeepers, but here, as at Birmingham, there is the usual Insurance Society’s building, which is all-in-all. And Negro insurance is little more than the organization of burying clubs, with the Negro undertakers as prime beneficiaries. The biggest Negro business throughout the South is connected with burying Negroes. It is sad, but it is characteristic of this era of their development. New Orleans has its “Pythian Building,” its temple of the Knights of Pythias, of which the debonair Mr. Green is Grand Master, not only for the State of Louisiana, but for the world. This is the civic center of the Negro’s life in New Orleans, and, like the Penny Bank Building of Birmingham, and its sister building at Jacksonville, houses many activities. The Pythian Temple of New Orleans is said to be the finest Negro building in the United States. It is a fine edifice, and in America business is judged much more by the building it inhabits than in Europe. An integral part of the temple is a very useful theatre, not a cinema hall, but a genuine stage for the “legitimate” drama. Here, no doubt, the Knights of Pythias appear in full regalia and parade to do the pseudo ritual of the society. But the theatre is used for all manner of purposes.I was present one Sunday afternoon at a local meeting of the National Association. The SouthernWhite is opposed to the Association, and would do much to thwart it if he knew much about it. But the Southern Whites do not mix with Negro intellectuals, and are content to live in that paradise indicated by the mayor—We get on all right with them down here.When, however, a bad lynching takes place the local white population soon hears of the National Association. It sends its representatives down from New York to investigate the facts. In such cases facts are the last things the white community wish brought to light, and then the National Association is discovered and roundly abused. Its representatives are sometimes white, which makes them more dangerous from a Southern point of view. Attempts are made to “railroad” them—run them out of town.The case of Mr. Shillady, in Texas, must be mentioned here. He is the white secretary of this militant association, and has done very valuable work for his country by investigating and authenticating the details of mob murders. Texas has a bad record for lynching, rioting, and lawlessness. The Texan people, however, would not have him, and he was actually thrashed publicly by a judge and a constable. It was done in front of the Driscoll Hotel, Austin, where Shillady was staying. Having been assaulted in this way, he was put on a Northern train and told to leave it at his peril. The judgeremains still judge, the constable remains still a constable—if he be not now a sergeant or inspector. When we sing “Down Texas Way” that is what it means.The local meeting this Sunday afternoon was of a quarrelsome character. A well-known and devoted Negro leader had been accused in a New Orleans Negro paper of “selling out the colored folk” at St. Louis. There had been great enthusiasm in the forming of what is called the “American Legion,” a national club of all who had served or worn an American uniform in the Great War. Negro membership of the Legion was apparently being barred in the South, and some wrong-headed Negro journalist had accused an old Creole Negro of attending the St. Louis inaugural gathering of the Legion and agreeing that Negro soldiers and sailors should be excluded.A violent personal quarrel banged from man to man. As I was asked to speak, I told them I thought they could ill afford to quarrel among themselves. Nevertheless, I had noticed a marked disposition to quarrel among the educated Negroes. Loyalty to one another was not one of their characteristics. No people could do much who did not prize unity more than discord. While so many were against them all, how absurd to spend an afternoon quarreling with one another!This was warmly applauded, though no doubtone might as well sit in Canute’s chair and “bid the main flood bate its usual height,” as bid them cease to quarrel. They brought the fighting instinct out of Africa, and still longed to wield the battle-axe.Besides the Pythian Temple Block, New Orleans has also a sort of South Street, a cheap line of shops with “swell toggery” for Negroes. Negro suit-pressing establishments, barbers, and the like, pawnshops, and what not. This is South Rampart, and on it is the People’s Drug Store, a hive of Negro life. Up above the store Mrs. Camille Cohen-Bell operates an insurance company, and her father, W. L. Cohen, runs for what it is worth in opinion (it cannot count much in votes), the Negro Republican party.During a fortnight in New Orleans I visited frequently this pleasant company of Negro Creoles, the well-educated Mrs. Bell, who loved to speak French, and her ebullient father. The place was haunted by undertakers. It appeared that when a Negro was insured in the company he was allotted to an undertaker in case of death. Undertakers therefore became very anxious when clients moved out of their parish. If any one fell sick away from home, and there was the likelihood of his dying and being buried by a stranger, the fret of the local buriers was comical.I met here a very advanced Negro lady who gave out very positive views on morality. Thepresence of a white man was perhaps a challenge to her mind. Some white woman called Jean Gordon had been making a missionary address to the Negroes on moral purity and proper behavior at a large Baptist church. I did not hear Jean Gordon, but her black protagonist was so forceful I asked her to write a statement of what she thought. This was her answer to Jean Gordon:“ ... Jean Gordon states that every young colored girl knows no white man may marry her under the law, and if she brings into the world an illegitimate child she is not fit to be a mother. All very true. Now, I daresay that every young colored girl is aware of this fact, but, judging from the way the white men run after these colored girls, either they (the white men) are in ignorance of the law, or it is their object flagrantly to disobey it. There is one thing I wish all white men and women to bear in mind, when they refer to illicit relations of white men and black women, and vice versa—it is this: the laws of this Southland are made by white men, and no sooner have they made these laws than they get busy finding ways to break them and evading punishment for so doing. It is a well-known fact that no Negro woman seeks the attentions of a white man—rather is the shoe on the other foot, and Negro women have a very hard time making Whites keep in their places. However, the attraction is not confined to themen of the white race, for good-looking colored men have as hard a time as the good-looking colored women. So, it seems to me that if Jean Gordon should address an audience of white men and women, and plead with them to teach their boys, husbands, brothers, and fathers the necessity of respecting the laws, and the women of all races, then colored young women would have no trouble keeping their virtue and their morals. All honor is due to the Negro women, for no one knows better than Jean Gordon herself the terrible pressure brought against them by white men who seek to force their attentions on them. The wonder of it is that so many of them are able to hold out against such odds, but God is in His heaven and does not sleep. So, I say, let the white women get busy and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? I am able to give a partial reason—THE FORCE OF HABIT! The white man has grown so accustomed to seducing Negro women and getting by with it, that the virtue of his own women has come to mean nothing to him.“We now come to Jean Gordon’s statement relative to ‘wild stories are being circulated that the Negro won the great world war....’ No intelligent Negro can claim that the Negro won the world war, but every intelligent man, woman, and child, in this country and on the other side, is aware that the Negro did his share in winning it over there, and did his full share over here. The Negro has participated in every war in which this country has engaged, and at no time did he retreat nor show the yellow streak. No one can cite an instance where a Negro protested against going to the front. Against propaganda that was overwhelming, the Negro remained loyal. The first Negroes to set foot on French soil were from Louisiana—longshoremen; they were not soldiers, true, but they did what they were sent to do, and did it well. Very few white regiments from Louisiana saw the firing line, yet they are all soldiers. No doubt, had they been sent to the front, they would have fought, but so would every black citizen of the United States. However, if it is true that ‘comparatively few of them fought when the total of the millions of white men who died in that struggle is considered,’ the reason for that is that the South did its level best to keep the Negro out of the war as a soldier. And it must be known that every white man who fought and died was not an American! Every black man who fought did his part creditably,as has ever been the case. Whole Negro regiments were decorated by the French, and bear in mind that among those who were the first to be decorated by the French were American Negroes! As for the fighting qualities of the Negro, all I need do is to refer any ‘doubting Thomas’ to Xon Hill. Nothing more need be said. And I repeat for all concerned that while the Negro did not win the world war,he did his share in helping to win itover there, and he and his women who remained over here helped to win it by laboring and giving funds.... The Negro dug trenches, he fought, he died on the battlefield, he gave of his money and his labor over here, and his women gave of their money and labor.Didthe Negro help win the great world war?I’ll say he did!!!Will anyone say he did not? If anyone has done more, let him come forward.“Before concluding, I wish to ask Jean Gordon just why it is she and the women of the South are so bitterly opposed to giving suffrage to Negro women? Do they fear us? Yea, they need to fear us, for we have made up our minds that we are going to help our men of the South get their rights, and Jean Gordon, being a woman, is fully aware that when a woman wills a thing, it is as good as done. The Negro men are going to come out on top, and their women are going to see to it. The Negro men are going to learn to protect their women from the snaresof white men, and their women are going to help them do this, too.... No longer does a Negro woman consider it an honor to have a white man for a ‘friend’—a lover; gradually have we made her understand that it is an insult, and she now tells her father, brother, or husband, as the case may be, and it is up to this man to defend the virtue of his female relative, in thesame waythe white man defends his. No more do we hear nice-looking colored boys bragging that such and such a white woman is quite crazy for him, for we have shown him that her affection for him is likely to lead him into trouble, so, having quite a variety of colors to choose from in the women of his own race (thanks to the white man for that), the Negro boy runs along with the kind of girl who pleases him, and keeps out of trouble. Very often, though, the White does not let him stay out of trouble—there are so many ways devised by these nice white people to hurt the Negro who is peaceably bent. The Negro has been patient, true, but we all know there is an end to all patience. I hope the time has come when the Whites of this section will take up more time in improving themselves and less time in seeing the error of our ways. We both of us have much to do, but we Negroes are aware of it, and are anxious to improve ourselves, but we are unable to take pattern after those who are more in need of lessons than we. The Negro is bound to come outon top—even though he is in a hopeless minority. Right will ever and always crush Might; for reference, see William Hohenzollern!”By this sulphurous little smoke one may know of subterranean fire. When the earthquake comes the Jean Gordons will fall down and the new Negro woman will stand forth. White society in places like New Orleans may one day be overthrown unless it can live for ideals and reform its institutions. Much depends on the law which is corrupted and much on the churches now in decay. Literature in New Orleans is nigh dead, so I will not mention that.

IN NORTH FLORIDA AND NEW ORLEANS

Lynchingis more associated with the cotton-growing districts than with others. It is not a fact that the further south you go the more violent the temper of the people. Southeastern Georgia, where the main business is lumbering and rice growing, has a better record than the cotton-growing interior. The cotton planters are aware of this, and it is not uncommon to curse the cotton and wish they could turn to something else. Cotton is not a popular industry. In the old days it bound slavery upon planter and Negro—for cotton necessitates cheap labor—and now it keeps the Negro down and perpetuates an ungenerous type of life.

I worked down the Atlantic coast to Brunswick and Jacksonville, preparing in mind for some sort of joyful surprise when I should enter Florida. Brunswick is one of the oldest ports in Georgia. As far as records go, it has never been disgraced by a lynching. Its background of industry is chiefly timber, and the eye looks in vain for a cotton bale or a cotton blossom. It is a peaceful little city, all sand and low palm and scrub, with innumerable grasshoppers and butterflies even in December. An open-streetedport with placid, happy Negroes and no race movement of any kind.

At Jacksonville one experiences a complete change of air. It is the climate of Florida, and the difference between cotton and fruit. The difference also between much sombre business and some gilded pleasure. When the rich from the North step out of their cars in Florida and take their ease at Palm Beach, they naturally would not care to be mixed up in the South’s pet sport. Lynchings are bad business in Florida, for if the things occurred there that take place in the neighboring State of Georgia it would certainly frighten away many polite and wealthy visitors. As regards the white woman also, the Floridians do not so assiduously libel the Negro as do the Georgians. Ladies need not be afraid to visit the watering places; the colored man is said to have his passions well under control. Most of the trouble that does occur is in more obscure places, and more in northern than in southern Florida.

Jacksonville is a large port with a population bordering on a hundred thousand. Naturally, there are masses of poor as well as numbers of rich. There is employment for a great quantity of Negro labor, and on the streets one may observe the characteristics of a large maritime city. What strikes an Englishman visiting these Atlantic ports—Baltimore, Norfolk, Savannah, Jacksonville, when compared with Hull, Cardiff,Liverpool, London Docks, etc.—is the absence of that somewhat agitating phenomenon of black dock laborers walking out with poor white girls. You may see them any evening in England. As a natural and instinctive thing, most Whites resent it, and street fights in England are the not uncommon result. In America, walking out with Negroes either innocently or otherwise is impossible. Riots and lynchings do not arise from that reason, but from alleged individual assaults upon white women. It should be remarked that womanhood in America ispracticallyidealized. The public as a whole is disinclined to tolerate a woman smoking or drinking, or bathing in inadequate attire, or even “spooning.” It would not occur to a poor white factory girl as even possible to walk out with a Negro. Her moral self-esteem is higher than that of her English sister. The girls who are seen walking out with Negroes in London belong more often to a class which is economically or morally submerged.

The Jacksonville Negroes were in a state of considerable anxiety and ferment when I was there. Not because of white-woman trouble, but in anticipation of a riot breaking out on one plea or another. A bad lynching had occurred in the preceding September. A drunken White quarreled with a Negro taxi driver, threatened him and exasperated him, whereupon a conflict ensued in which the White was killed. The whitemob then rounded up every Negro chauffeur in the city and terrified a great number of homes, because the lyncher does not care whether he lynches the right Negro or not, as long as one of them suffers. And in this case two paid the penalty. Undoubtedly the horror and terror of being taken by the mob is the worst of an execution of this kind.

The Negroes were very suspicious of white men, and I did not make much progress inquiring into their ways of life. I found, however, a considerably inflated prosperity of churches, due to the philanthropy of Northern visitors, and a well-to-do black proletariat working in the shipbuilding yard and the docks. Nearly all the work done by them was, however, unskilled, and they were only taken as substitutes on skilled work. Substitutes earned as much as seven dollars a day. There is a “Colored” Bank and, as at Birmingham, a so-called “skyscraper” of six stories accommodating all and sundry of trades and professions. Once more, successful drug stores and burial parlors, and a Mme. Nettie Price with beauty establishment. I called at the War Camp Community Club for colored soldiers and sailors—not so enterprising as the one I visited at Norfolk—but the right sort of institution, well used in a proper and discreet way.

I crossed the neck of land to Pensacola, passing through Tallahassee, a district where fineleaves of tobacco for cigar wrapping are grown under trellis. Orange groves hung in plenteous fruit just ripe to pick, changing from green to gold. Pensacola is a port with a great history of its own involving Spanish, British, French, American history. Its background is of orange groves and pecan orchards. The pecan nut, a refinement from the walnut, is so prized in the rest of the United States that one can make a good living and save money on a planting of a hundred or so trees. The main street of Pensacola, leading down to the long pier, is very picturesque, with its mariners’ grocers and marine stores. A passenger vessel plies weekly to Mobile, the great fruit port of southern Alabama, and it is possible to get a passage on cargo boats going to New Orleans. Before the war there was much maritime traffic, but few of the vessels which sailed away to do transport and other war duties have returned.

Pensacola claims to be the oldest white city in the United States, disputing the matter with St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and is taking the question very seriously in view of any celebration. It is not an important place, but is building toward its own supposed greatness, has a fine new railway station and huge, white stone post office and mammoth hotel. These buildings are puzzling in a town where life seems so placid.

Here was a bad lynching for rape a year ago,and a Negro was burned to death. Representations were made to the governor of Florida on the matter. The governor, Sidney I. Catts, replied that he made every effort to keep down lynching in the State, but he could not bring the lynchers to trial, as the citizenship of the State would not stand for it. Apparently he condoned the burning of the Negro, because it was a clear case of sexual wantonness and violence on the part of one of the Negro race. It is somewhat surprising that the chief officer of the law should thus fail to uphold the law. Who is to uphold it if he do not? A contrast this, to the heroic behavior of Mayor Smith of Omaha!

Nature did not intend the Gulf of Mexico as a frame for lynching, nor that those happy, blue skies should look down on human candles. If ever there was a serene and happy place in the world it is here, and there is scope for all races to live and to let live. Health is on the shoulder of the winds that blow; fish and fruit and grain and sugar are abundant. Are not the harbors bobbing with grapefruit; upon occasion does not every boy suck the natural sugar from the cane? The luscious canteloupe fills with the sun; peaches and nectarines swell to double sizes of lusciousness and sweetness. Visitors, moreover, bring a plenitude of dollars and scatter them as they go. Jacksonville, Tallahassee,Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans—they are more blest by Nature than other cities of the South.

Personally, I preferred New Orleans. It is the finest and most interesting city in which to live. It is by far the largest city of the South, Atlanta coming second, and Birmingham, Alabama, third. It is the great port of the vast Mississippi River, and is the head of what was a mighty river traffic. It faces south, and is more related to France and Spain and the Indies than to Britain and Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Like New York, it has also a strange mixture of races, but they are southern races.

Of course it has been notorious as a city of pleasure and fast living. Everyone says to the tourist, “When you get to New Orleans, you’ll see ‘life,’” by which is meant the life-wasting of the immoral. Its reputation in that respect resembled that of Cairo, and the curious, even if they did not wish to taste, could pay to be shown round and thus satisfy their eyes by looking upon evil. The money which flows southward from the pockets of the rich throughout the winter has no doubt helped to keep the red light burning. Now all has changed, however. The various vice crusades and the enactment of prohibition have combined to bring New Orleans to the moral level of other cities of America. There is a violent opposition to the Puritan movement in many sections of the population, and the law is flouted very often, butNew Orleans nevertheless has ceased to present any particular interest to the low pleasure seeker or those of morbid imagination. The city will be the better for it. It is a wonderful place. The inhabitants, after all, were not mainly engaged in the business of pleasure, but in honest trade, and they increase ever. New Orleans is the metropolis of the South, and has a vast and growing commerce which is rendered picturesque by the glamour of that abundance of Nature in the midst of which she is founded.

One pictures New Orleans as a city of men in white, with white hats as well as white clothes, men smoking heavy, black cigars, or sauntering idly in the company of exotic-looking ladies; a city of wide open streets and white houses, of many open-air cafés and garden theatres and luxuriant parks, a place certainly of fashion and gayety and elegant living. But what I found on my first impression was an unpainted city, a mass of houses mostly wooden, but mouldering, pallid, and peeling, of every hue of decay. Some walls seemed ready to fall out, some ready to fall in. Man of the period 1920, European, industrialized, diminutive, clad in sober garb, pursued the common way of life. The cheap lunch shop, hall-mark of American civilization, identified the city as American. There were the usual lofty, ramshackle caravanserai with Negro bell boys and the clatter of ice water, the usual public gardens strewn with the newspapersof the day. But though it was winter, the weather was hot. The atmosphere was dense and warm, and the closeness was not dissipated even by the wind when it came. A gale blew in from the Gulf. It scattered warm rain in the city, it rushed through multitudes of palm trees in the suburbs outside.

The American part of the city is vast and residential and conventional. The business section expresses business; the home section is uptown and removed from the life of the center. If there were only this “new” part, nothing would distinguish New Orleans from other cities. But it has itsvieux carréein which its history is written, the old, or French, part of the town. The American side is continually rebuilding itself, but the French remains as it was. It has not torn itself down and got rebuilt in modern style. Its great public place is Jackson Square, flanked by the market, and that is beautifully prim and French, but it is foiled by ugly railings and municipal sheds. Nevertheless, it holds one more than does the architectural grandeur of Lafayette Square, in the American half, with its stupendously grand Post Office and Town Hall; and the subdued simplicity of Dauphine Street and Chartres and Bienville and many others is better than any quantity of the new and takes one back in mind to Old Paris and Old London. With all its Creole restaurants and cheap markets and Frenchchurches, it reminded me forcibly of Soho, in London, but of course it is larger and grander.

Once a tongue of the Mississippi divided the old from the new, a long and narrow strip of somewhat torpid water. Now it has been filled up, though where the water was it is in some places green with grass. Six lines of electric cars and four streams of other traffic go up and down Canal Street, as it is now called. It is a great highway, finer in some respects than the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, certainly broader. On one side of it and down to the water edge it is definitely and undoubtedly old; on the other it is definitely and undoubtedly new. On one side is reality and matter of fact, on the other glamour and color; on one you make or lose money, on the other you have or miss adventures; one is prose, the other poetry; and it is well understood in New Orleans. You work in one, you live a conventional home life in one, but in the other you seek pleasure and adventures away from home. Not that you cannot dine on the new side, where there are costly and luxurious hotels, but an interesting and characteristic story might be written of a man who stayed too long over his wine in the new part, and then, late at night, strayed across this broad, dark Lethe which divides old from new, to lose himself on the farther side—an adventure and a dream.

The foreign streets are of red brick andpainted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and balconies. The houses are crowded within. Red painted wood, with vine-wreathed verandas and show a bed occupying half a tiny room, and perhaps a Creole lady in the bed. There is not much squeamishness in the Creoles. French is spoken everywhere, and often English is not understood. Most of the people are Catholic, and are related spiritually to “Mother Church.” Old St. Louis Cathedral, with its spiky tower, is full of people of a Sunday morning, and the service is so perfunctory that it is clear it is no mission church, but one long established and sure. There are monastical institutions, even for the Negroes. While Irish Catholics do not like Negroes, the French and Spanish do. Specially interesting is the Convent of the Sacred Heart, with its black Mother Superior and its happy, placid Negro Catholicism. The best of the Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles. The Creoles are the cross-breed of French and Spaniard and their descendants. Strictly speaking, no Negroes are Creoles, but the descendants of the slaves of the Creoles and in general the French and Spanish-speaking Negroes call themselves Negro Creoles, and are generally indulged in the appellation. Creoles indeed have not much prejudice against color, being much mixed themselves, and in any case of French extraction, and the French have never had much sense of racial distinction. Tospeak French is a sign of belonging to society in New Orleans. The opening of the opera season at the French Opera House (lately burned down) is the event of the winter, and everyone of importancemustbe present. The next sign of good taste is to know cuisine, and to be able to differentiate thedelicacesand the subtleties of the famous Creole chefs.

I visited the mayor, Catholic, but of German name. He could not easily have kept his mayoralty with such a name in England. But here he was very popular. He was a human pyramid in long, voluminous morning coat, smoking a cigar as he worked, but walking with a ponderous and poised walk, and exhibiting a front of truly mayoral proportions. He said, concerning the Negroes, “We have no trouble with them here; we get on very well together. They are outside politics; that makes it much easier. If they had the power to vote, of course it would be different.” New Orleans is one of those places where a Negro’s grandfather must have voted if he is to vote, and he must prove that his grandfather voted. I demurred to the mayor. “The Negroes seem very suspicious of the Whites, and hostile,” said I. He thought not. It was evidently his set policy to have that point of view. Politically he could not afford to be strongly interested in the Negro ferment. For although the disenfranchised Negro population thought him friendly to them, the Whitesalso thought him “sound on the nigger question.” No white man who expressed sympathy for the Negro could possibly succeed in Louisiana politics. There was proceeding while I was there a violent election campaign for the governorship of the State, and it was curious that, though the Negro could take little personal part in the choosing of the governor, he nevertheless took almost first place in the political discussions. Soundness on the Negro question seemed to be the chief test of candidacy. A man who might betray lynchers to justice or anything of that kind was evidently feared by the white population. Nevertheless, as I have said, the Creoles were on friendly terms with the Negroes. It is the Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American section of the population, the undifferentiated Southern Whites, who determine the way of politics here, as elsewhere in the South. It is likely that if the Creoles were left to themselves with the Negro population, they would grant them full rights, not only in the courts and in suffrage, but socially. The Negroes know this, and are therefore on very good terms with the French-speaking population.

Nevertheless, it must be said that but for a handful of leaders the Negro population is more dull, more impassive, and ignorant than elsewhere. A black proletariat of a hundred thousand ought to be able to raise on its broad base a fine column of intelligence and business.There ought to be large and flourishing groups of doctors and lawyers and shopkeepers, but here, as at Birmingham, there is the usual Insurance Society’s building, which is all-in-all. And Negro insurance is little more than the organization of burying clubs, with the Negro undertakers as prime beneficiaries. The biggest Negro business throughout the South is connected with burying Negroes. It is sad, but it is characteristic of this era of their development. New Orleans has its “Pythian Building,” its temple of the Knights of Pythias, of which the debonair Mr. Green is Grand Master, not only for the State of Louisiana, but for the world. This is the civic center of the Negro’s life in New Orleans, and, like the Penny Bank Building of Birmingham, and its sister building at Jacksonville, houses many activities. The Pythian Temple of New Orleans is said to be the finest Negro building in the United States. It is a fine edifice, and in America business is judged much more by the building it inhabits than in Europe. An integral part of the temple is a very useful theatre, not a cinema hall, but a genuine stage for the “legitimate” drama. Here, no doubt, the Knights of Pythias appear in full regalia and parade to do the pseudo ritual of the society. But the theatre is used for all manner of purposes.

I was present one Sunday afternoon at a local meeting of the National Association. The SouthernWhite is opposed to the Association, and would do much to thwart it if he knew much about it. But the Southern Whites do not mix with Negro intellectuals, and are content to live in that paradise indicated by the mayor—We get on all right with them down here.

When, however, a bad lynching takes place the local white population soon hears of the National Association. It sends its representatives down from New York to investigate the facts. In such cases facts are the last things the white community wish brought to light, and then the National Association is discovered and roundly abused. Its representatives are sometimes white, which makes them more dangerous from a Southern point of view. Attempts are made to “railroad” them—run them out of town.

The case of Mr. Shillady, in Texas, must be mentioned here. He is the white secretary of this militant association, and has done very valuable work for his country by investigating and authenticating the details of mob murders. Texas has a bad record for lynching, rioting, and lawlessness. The Texan people, however, would not have him, and he was actually thrashed publicly by a judge and a constable. It was done in front of the Driscoll Hotel, Austin, where Shillady was staying. Having been assaulted in this way, he was put on a Northern train and told to leave it at his peril. The judgeremains still judge, the constable remains still a constable—if he be not now a sergeant or inspector. When we sing “Down Texas Way” that is what it means.

The local meeting this Sunday afternoon was of a quarrelsome character. A well-known and devoted Negro leader had been accused in a New Orleans Negro paper of “selling out the colored folk” at St. Louis. There had been great enthusiasm in the forming of what is called the “American Legion,” a national club of all who had served or worn an American uniform in the Great War. Negro membership of the Legion was apparently being barred in the South, and some wrong-headed Negro journalist had accused an old Creole Negro of attending the St. Louis inaugural gathering of the Legion and agreeing that Negro soldiers and sailors should be excluded.

A violent personal quarrel banged from man to man. As I was asked to speak, I told them I thought they could ill afford to quarrel among themselves. Nevertheless, I had noticed a marked disposition to quarrel among the educated Negroes. Loyalty to one another was not one of their characteristics. No people could do much who did not prize unity more than discord. While so many were against them all, how absurd to spend an afternoon quarreling with one another!

This was warmly applauded, though no doubtone might as well sit in Canute’s chair and “bid the main flood bate its usual height,” as bid them cease to quarrel. They brought the fighting instinct out of Africa, and still longed to wield the battle-axe.

Besides the Pythian Temple Block, New Orleans has also a sort of South Street, a cheap line of shops with “swell toggery” for Negroes. Negro suit-pressing establishments, barbers, and the like, pawnshops, and what not. This is South Rampart, and on it is the People’s Drug Store, a hive of Negro life. Up above the store Mrs. Camille Cohen-Bell operates an insurance company, and her father, W. L. Cohen, runs for what it is worth in opinion (it cannot count much in votes), the Negro Republican party.

During a fortnight in New Orleans I visited frequently this pleasant company of Negro Creoles, the well-educated Mrs. Bell, who loved to speak French, and her ebullient father. The place was haunted by undertakers. It appeared that when a Negro was insured in the company he was allotted to an undertaker in case of death. Undertakers therefore became very anxious when clients moved out of their parish. If any one fell sick away from home, and there was the likelihood of his dying and being buried by a stranger, the fret of the local buriers was comical.

I met here a very advanced Negro lady who gave out very positive views on morality. Thepresence of a white man was perhaps a challenge to her mind. Some white woman called Jean Gordon had been making a missionary address to the Negroes on moral purity and proper behavior at a large Baptist church. I did not hear Jean Gordon, but her black protagonist was so forceful I asked her to write a statement of what she thought. This was her answer to Jean Gordon:

“ ... Jean Gordon states that every young colored girl knows no white man may marry her under the law, and if she brings into the world an illegitimate child she is not fit to be a mother. All very true. Now, I daresay that every young colored girl is aware of this fact, but, judging from the way the white men run after these colored girls, either they (the white men) are in ignorance of the law, or it is their object flagrantly to disobey it. There is one thing I wish all white men and women to bear in mind, when they refer to illicit relations of white men and black women, and vice versa—it is this: the laws of this Southland are made by white men, and no sooner have they made these laws than they get busy finding ways to break them and evading punishment for so doing. It is a well-known fact that no Negro woman seeks the attentions of a white man—rather is the shoe on the other foot, and Negro women have a very hard time making Whites keep in their places. However, the attraction is not confined to themen of the white race, for good-looking colored men have as hard a time as the good-looking colored women. So, it seems to me that if Jean Gordon should address an audience of white men and women, and plead with them to teach their boys, husbands, brothers, and fathers the necessity of respecting the laws, and the women of all races, then colored young women would have no trouble keeping their virtue and their morals. All honor is due to the Negro women, for no one knows better than Jean Gordon herself the terrible pressure brought against them by white men who seek to force their attentions on them. The wonder of it is that so many of them are able to hold out against such odds, but God is in His heaven and does not sleep. So, I say, let the white women get busy and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? I am able to give a partial reason—THE FORCE OF HABIT! The white man has grown so accustomed to seducing Negro women and getting by with it, that the virtue of his own women has come to mean nothing to him.

“We now come to Jean Gordon’s statement relative to ‘wild stories are being circulated that the Negro won the great world war....’ No intelligent Negro can claim that the Negro won the world war, but every intelligent man, woman, and child, in this country and on the other side, is aware that the Negro did his share in winning it over there, and did his full share over here. The Negro has participated in every war in which this country has engaged, and at no time did he retreat nor show the yellow streak. No one can cite an instance where a Negro protested against going to the front. Against propaganda that was overwhelming, the Negro remained loyal. The first Negroes to set foot on French soil were from Louisiana—longshoremen; they were not soldiers, true, but they did what they were sent to do, and did it well. Very few white regiments from Louisiana saw the firing line, yet they are all soldiers. No doubt, had they been sent to the front, they would have fought, but so would every black citizen of the United States. However, if it is true that ‘comparatively few of them fought when the total of the millions of white men who died in that struggle is considered,’ the reason for that is that the South did its level best to keep the Negro out of the war as a soldier. And it must be known that every white man who fought and died was not an American! Every black man who fought did his part creditably,as has ever been the case. Whole Negro regiments were decorated by the French, and bear in mind that among those who were the first to be decorated by the French were American Negroes! As for the fighting qualities of the Negro, all I need do is to refer any ‘doubting Thomas’ to Xon Hill. Nothing more need be said. And I repeat for all concerned that while the Negro did not win the world war,he did his share in helping to win itover there, and he and his women who remained over here helped to win it by laboring and giving funds.... The Negro dug trenches, he fought, he died on the battlefield, he gave of his money and his labor over here, and his women gave of their money and labor.Didthe Negro help win the great world war?I’ll say he did!!!Will anyone say he did not? If anyone has done more, let him come forward.

“Before concluding, I wish to ask Jean Gordon just why it is she and the women of the South are so bitterly opposed to giving suffrage to Negro women? Do they fear us? Yea, they need to fear us, for we have made up our minds that we are going to help our men of the South get their rights, and Jean Gordon, being a woman, is fully aware that when a woman wills a thing, it is as good as done. The Negro men are going to come out on top, and their women are going to see to it. The Negro men are going to learn to protect their women from the snaresof white men, and their women are going to help them do this, too.... No longer does a Negro woman consider it an honor to have a white man for a ‘friend’—a lover; gradually have we made her understand that it is an insult, and she now tells her father, brother, or husband, as the case may be, and it is up to this man to defend the virtue of his female relative, in thesame waythe white man defends his. No more do we hear nice-looking colored boys bragging that such and such a white woman is quite crazy for him, for we have shown him that her affection for him is likely to lead him into trouble, so, having quite a variety of colors to choose from in the women of his own race (thanks to the white man for that), the Negro boy runs along with the kind of girl who pleases him, and keeps out of trouble. Very often, though, the White does not let him stay out of trouble—there are so many ways devised by these nice white people to hurt the Negro who is peaceably bent. The Negro has been patient, true, but we all know there is an end to all patience. I hope the time has come when the Whites of this section will take up more time in improving themselves and less time in seeing the error of our ways. We both of us have much to do, but we Negroes are aware of it, and are anxious to improve ourselves, but we are unable to take pattern after those who are more in need of lessons than we. The Negro is bound to come outon top—even though he is in a hopeless minority. Right will ever and always crush Might; for reference, see William Hohenzollern!”

By this sulphurous little smoke one may know of subterranean fire. When the earthquake comes the Jean Gordons will fall down and the new Negro woman will stand forth. White society in places like New Orleans may one day be overthrown unless it can live for ideals and reform its institutions. Much depends on the law which is corrupted and much on the churches now in decay. Literature in New Orleans is nigh dead, so I will not mention that.

XIITHE NEW MIND OF THE NEGROResentmentis the main characteristic of the Negro forward movement. In endeavoring to understand the Negro mind a maximum is gained by answering the question:What does it mean to have been a slave?Analysis of racial consciousness at once brings to light in the case of the Negro a slave mentality. He has been pre-dispositioned by slavery.To have been a slave, or to be the child of a slave, means to have an old unpaid grudge in the blood; to have, in fact,resentmenteither smouldering or abeyant or militant. If it does not develop in the slave it will develop in the child of the slave or the child of the child. It may not take a violent form. Certain circumstances, such as prosperity, have power to neutralize it. On the other hand, certain other circumstances have power to bring it more rapidly to a head. The virus feeds on grievances, will even feed on imaginary grievances, but most certainly will grow apace on real grievances. In all seriousness, there is nothing like burning people alive for bringing out active spite and hate. Because of burning and lynching, thewhole of American Negrodom swells larger in resentment, day by day, and moon by moon.The character of ex-slave, and the child of one who was a slave, is aptly shown by the way the Negro treats animals, in the way also in which he treats those Negroes who happen to come under him.It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals, though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves.For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master. A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is learning how to torture.The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro, the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals which is quite other. And toward human beings in their power or employ they often have a pointof view which is hateful. The peasant workman in the power of theKulakpeasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in the power of a slave is so much worse!In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it. To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst, it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave, he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway. They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism in Russia. Bolshevismis eminently a slave movement. The children of the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great world struggle.There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the victims of the enragedNegroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises, may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic.Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled, and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous stuff of revolution.A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied equally to theNegro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to the two vital questions:1.Is it fitting, and can America condone the use of colored troops to fight white enemies?2.When many white citizens have such a violent animus against the Negro, is it practicable to use the latter in the army?The first of these questions was evaded by America as it had been from the first by France. There are many who think that the use of “native” troops against the Germans was more indefensible than the German use of poison gas. For, by using colored troops against Whites in a white man’s quarrel, the moral leadership of the Whites is obviously thrown away, and there are bound to be serious after-effects in the weakening of morale.The second question was merely an important practical detail that had been overlooked. Theoretically, all American citizens are equal. The laws apply without distinction of race or color. In practice, equality is denied. What more natural than to continue in the theoretical assumption of equality, and hope that divergency in practice might be overlooked. What more absurd, however, than to take a man who is beingillegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that community?The Northern white soldier did not, however, feel ill disposed toward the black soldier, and I have met those who saw deeds of heroism done by Negroes, and many who saw them wounded and suffering in the common cause, and felt drawn toward them, to help them and their brothers. But whatever may have been the common feeling about Negro soldiers in the United States, it was definitely hostile to them in the camps in France. There emerged two characteristic points of view: (1) That it was good to kill off as many Negroes as possible, as that helped to solve the Negro problem. (2) That the Negro was not worthy to fight for his country.Not much for patriotism to feed on there! There seems never to have been any resolve to make first-class Negro regiments, and those units who served in France were by no means adequately trained. By all competent accounts they were very slack, and it goes without saying that an almost superhuman effort of discipline was necessary to obtain complete steadiness in this terrible war. It was common to endeavor to terrorize the Negroes by alarming and exaggerated accounts of the horrors of battle. Negroes were talked to by Whites in a very unsoldierly way. Baiting them and scaring them was thought to be better sport than dealing withthem sternly and seriously. There is no doubt also that some white soldiers rejoiced to see the Negro put back into the slavery position and forced to obey on pain of death. There are those who cannot forgive the Negro having got free from slavery, and for them the spectacle of the Negro in the rank and file afforded much pleasure. Threating Negroes with a court-martial and death sentence became a characteristic jest.The white man, however, soon found that the Negro fell into the humor of the war more readily than into the tragedy of it. It agreed with his own sense of humor. It was soon impossible to scare the raw recruits with yarns. The idea of running away from a machine gun became natural and hilarious. The dangers from night-bombing raiders over the lines were facetiously exaggerated. Hiding best became a humorous point of honor, and one Negro would vaunt against another how far he fled. Private soldiers chaffed their officers on the subject of death. Asked what “going over the top” meant, the raw recruit would answer: “I know; it means Good mornin’, Jesus.” In short, in nearly every Negro unit there set in a humoresque attitude to the war.Officer: The Germans are going to start an offensive.Negro Soldier: That so, cap? Then we’se spread the news over France.As the popular joke has it.The Negro officer then began to receive the white man’s attention. Having trained many colored officers, Negroes often of education and means and refinement, and having given them commission and uniform, the Staff came to the conclusion that they had made a mistake. The white Southern officer stirred up trouble, the white ranker would not salute. There was the usual sordid squabble in officers’ messes. And then the upshot—a great number of Negro officers subjected to the humiliation of losing their commissions and being placed in the ranks. This discouragement necessarily set the Negro officer thinking. It cultivated his resentment. It sowed in his heart the seed of national disaffection.The next serious trouble was that of the French women and the Negro. The indifference of white women whether the man they walked with was black or brown or white was taken as an intolerable affront by Southerners. They felt called upon to interfere and save the French woman from herself. The rape legend was imported, and every effort was made to infect the French male with race prejudice. Happily, the propaganda failed. For one thing, Puritanism does not easily take root in a French heart, and for another, the French have no instinctive horror of Negroes. Possibly the rape legend even made the Negro a little ornamental from the point of view ofamour. “Black Americantroops in France have given rise to as many complaints of attempted rape as all the rest of the army ‘Les troupes noires Americaines en France ont donné lieu, a elle seules, a autant de plaintes pour tentatives de viol, que tout le reste de l’Armée,’” as an army order puts it.Negro honor, however, demands that the charge be rebutted, and the matter has been thoroughly investigated. There does not seem to be much in it. As every one knows who served in the ranks, women of easy virtue were extremely plentiful and complaisant. The need might easily have been to protect the Negro from the women rather than the women from the Negro.The fact is simply that the Negro walking with a white woman is to the Southern American White as a red rag to a bull. And as by nature this White is unrestrained and unreasonable, he seeks by all means, fair or foul, to part them.Finally, the culmination of the story of the American Negro in the war is that the White denied him any valor or prowess or military virtue of any kind, said the Negro was a coward and a runaway and utterly useless in the fighting line. Fighting units were taken off their allotted duty and changed to labor units. Regiments were ordered home; whole brigades were given as a present to the grateful French. Theymay have been rather inefficient. But, if so, that was due to bad training. Negroes have fought magnificently in America’s wars of the past. They are a great fighting race, and they are capable of discipline.I listened when at New Orleans to a lecture given by Sergeant Needham Roberts of the 369th U. S. Infantry, a handsome young Negro warrior, twice wounded, the first American to be decorated by the French Government. He was entirely patriotic, and made the apathetic Negro audience stand to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He told how he ran away from home to enlist, trained with a mass of black strangers, went across the ocean—quite a terrifying experience for some of these young soldiers, who but for the war had never crossed the sea. He gave his first impressions of France and of the line, the exaggerated fright of shell explosions and night attacks and bombs from the air. They were just getting used to the first aspect of war when one day the news flew round—“We are all ordered home again.” Official orders to that effect quickly followed. They had all packed up and were marching to entrain for Cherbourg when, according to the sergeant, Foch intervened.“Why are you sending them back?” said he.“They are not wanted.”Foch seemed astonished.“If you cannot use them, I can,” said the French marshal.And then, hurray!—we were attached to the French.It was no playground, the French front, but, as ever, a sterner piece of reality than American or British. The Negroes were hotly engaged and had many casualties. Roberts won his Croix de Guerre for a feat which he performed with his chum, Pete Johnson. They had been left at an advanced listening post and apparently overlooked—not relieved for three days and three nights. The division had been relieved. On the third night the Germans made a raid which the two Negro soldiers repelled by themselves, first throwing out their bombs, then firing, and finishing with a remarkable bit of butchery with the bayonet. The Germans whom they did not put out of action they put to flight. How many Germans lay dead it would be difficult to say. The number probably grew like those of Falstaff’s men in buckram, but I did hear twenty mentioned.There was no doubt about the fact that Sergeant Roberts was a jolly soldier—a “bonny faechter”—and he made himself on good terms with his audience very quickly. He came from New York, and had swung along Fifth Avenue with the heroes of New York’s Fighting Fifteenth. He was full of the faith of the North, horribly depressed by the atmosphere of theSouth, above all by the passivity and apathy of the Negroes of New Orleans. He had better keep north of the Mason-Dixon line, for he is evidently a born fighter.If the war itself was a persistent educator of the Negro, his subsequent treatment after the Armistice enforced very terribly what he learned. It would be hardly worth while to enlarge on this in detail. The fact which I wished to isolate is the growing resentment of the colored people, the fact that some twelve millions are becoming highly charged with resentment.As illustration of this resentment one could quote much from the spoken and the written word of the Negroes. But a poem, or part of a poem, may suffice. It is Archibald Grimké’s “Thirteen Black Soldiers.” The 24th United States Infantry, a Negro regiment, was sent to Houston, Texas, and was received with lack of sympathy and some hostility by the population. A series of petty troubles culminated in a riot and mutiny. Sixty-four Negroes were court-martialled, and thirteen were sentenced to death, and hanged. It seems to show a lack of foresight to station a Negro regiment among such a hostile people as the Texans. They are more the enemies of the Negroes than were the Germans, and there was certainty of trouble. Grimké’s poem expresses the boiling resentment to which I have referred.She hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers,She hanged them for mutiny and murder,She hanged them after she had put on them her uniform,After she had put on them her uniform, the uniform of her soldiers,She told them they were to be brave, to fight and, if needs be, to die for her.This was many years before she hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.She told them to go there and they went,To come here and they came, her brave black soldiers.For her they went without food and water,For her they suffered cold and heat,For her they marched by day,For her they watched by night,For her in strange lands they stood fearless,For her in strange lands they watched shelterless,For her in strange lands they fought,For her in strange lands they bled,For her they faced fevers and fierce men,For her they were always and everywhere ready to die.And now she has hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.For murder and mutiny she hanged them in anger and hate,Hanged them in secret and dark and disgrace,In secret and dark she disowned them,In secret and dark buried them and left them in nameless disgrace.Why did she hang them, her thirteen black soldiers?What had they done to merit such fate?She sent them to Houston, to Houston, in Texas,She sent them in her uniform to this Southern city,She sent them, her soldiers, her thirteen brave soldiers,They went at her bidding to Houston,They went where they were ordered.They could not choose another place,For they were soldiers and went where they were ordered.They marched into Houston not knowing what awaited them.Insult awaited them and violence.Insult and violence hissed at them from house windows and struck at them in the streets,American colorphobia hissed and struck at them as they passed by on the streets.In the street cars they met discrimination and insult,“They are not soldiers, they and their uniforms,They are but common niggers,They must be treated like common niggers,They and their uniform.”So hissed colorphobia, indigenous to Texas.And then it squirted its venom on them,Squirted its venom on them and on their uniform.And what did she do, she who put that uniform on them,And bade them to do and die if needs be for her?Did she raise an arm to protect them?Did she raise her voice to frighten away the reptilian thing?Did she lift a finger or say a word of rebuke at it?Did she do anything in defence of her black soldiers?She did nothing. She sat complacent, indifferent in her seat of power.She had eyes, but she refused to see what Houston was doing to her black soldiers,She had ears, but she stuffed them with cotton,That she might not hear the murmured rage of her black soldiers,They suffered alone, they were defenceless against insult and violence,For she would not see them nor hear them nor protect them.Then in desperation they smote the reptilian thing,They smote it as they had smitten before her enemies,For was it not her enemy, the reptilian thing, as well as their own?They in an hour of madness smote it in battle furiously,And it shrank back from their blows hysterical,Terror and fear of death seized it, and it cried unto her to help.And she, who would not hear her black soldiers in their dire need,She, who put her uniform on them, heard their enemy.She flew at its call and hanged her brave black soldiers.She hanged them for doing for themselves what she ought to have done for them,She hanged them for resenting insult to her uniform,She hanged them for defending from violence her brave black soldiers.They marched with the dignity of brave men to the gallows,With the souls of warriors they marched without a whimper to their doom.And so they were hanged, her thirteen black soldiers,And so they lie buried in nameless disgrace.Is the watchword of Dr. Du Bois to be wondered?—We return.We return from fighting.We return fighting.I met at Memphis, Tennessee, one of the few Southern white men who are sympathetic to the Negro and understand the gravity of the situation. This was Mr. Bolton Smith, a rich business man, a member of the Rotary Clubquand meme. As one who among other activities advances money on the security of real estate in the Mississippi Delta, he necessarily has been brought a great deal into contact with the Negro. Society in Memphis looked at him somewhat askance because he did not share the current conventional view, but he was not blackballed, only indulgently laughed at as one who had a weak spot in his mental armor. In places remote from Memphis, however, his views receive weighty consideration.If he had his way he would give the Negro his right and his due, and stop lynching. He does not believe the Negro wishes “social equality,” the right to mix indiscriminately with white people, in schools, in trains, in marriage. He thinks the Negro prefers to be separate as long as there is no implied dishonor. He made a special study of the Frederick Douglass School at Cincinnati, an all black school which is admirably conducted, and found that bythemselves the Negroes progress more than when mixed with Whites. As Cincinnati is a city on the northern fringe, with northern institutions, the Negroes had the choice to go to mixed schools with white children if they desired, but they preferred to be by themselves, and indeed did better by themselves. As regards Jim Crow cars, Smith said he would give equal comfort and equal facilities in colored cars and in colored waiting rooms. He does not think the Negro desires to be in a Pullman car where there are white women. It works without scandal in the North, but there is too much risk of the woman going into hysterics in the South, and the Negro getting lynched at a wayside station. He believes in abandoning “the policy of pin pricks,” and, above all, in suppressing lynching and race riot.He was, however, strongly opposed to Du Bois and the National Association. He considered that Du Bois was leading the Negroes wrongly, leading them in fact to a worse calamity than any which had yet overtaken them. “If the Negro resorts to force,” said Mr. Smith to me, “he will be destroyed. In peace and in law the white man fails to understand how to handle the Negro, but if it comes to force, the issue becomes quite simple for the white man, and the Negro stands little more chance than a savage. Christianity alone can save the Negro, and the leaders of the National Associationare leading the people away from Christianity.” He wished all Negroes could see how fatal it is for them to abandon Christianity.“If it were not for the lynchings, the National Association and its newspaper would shrink to very small proportions. Every time a Negro is lynched it adds a thousand to the circulation of theCrisis, and a burning adds ten thousand,” said he.“Hell would soon lose its heat should sin expire,” said I. I was inclined to agree that the only way was through Christianity. But there is such a thing as the wrath of God, and it is not incompatible with Divine Fatherhood and all-merciful Providence. John Brown has been greatly condemned, but he was not outside Christianity—surely he was a child of God. He used to think that without much shedding of blood the crimes of this guilty land could be purged away, but now....I do not think the white South will be able to avert the wrath of God by machine guns, nor will it quell the Negro by force once the Negro moves from the depths of his being. Better than believe in meeting the great wrath is to be advised betimes and mend one’s ways. Was not the Civil War a sufficient bloodletting? Could not the lesson be learned?It is certainly in vain to work directly against Du Bois when his power as a leader of revolt could be removed utterly by stopping the lynching.The U. S. Postmaster General refused postal facilities to one number of his newspaper because it was going too far in stirring up sedition, but it was ineffectual, and was, on the contrary, a useful advertisement for the paper. And then, is it not known there are far more advanced groups of Negroes than that of the association of which Dr. Du Bois is president? There are those who laugh Du Bois to scorn as a Moderate. There are those who have sworn that for every Negro done to death by the mob two white men shall somehow perish. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is the gospel—or rather, two eyes for one. Something is being started which will not cease with a recital of the Beatitudes. If America does not cast out the devil of class hate from the midst of her she will again be ravished by the Angel of Death as in the Civil War. The established peaceful routine of a country like America is very deceptive. All seems so permanent, so unshakable. The new refinement, the new politeness and well-lined culture, and vast commercial organization and press suggest that no calamity could overtake them. The force that makes for disruption and anarchy is generated silently and secretly. It accumulates, accumulates, and one day it must discharge itself. Its name is resentment, and its first expression is revenge.

THE NEW MIND OF THE NEGRO

Resentmentis the main characteristic of the Negro forward movement. In endeavoring to understand the Negro mind a maximum is gained by answering the question:What does it mean to have been a slave?Analysis of racial consciousness at once brings to light in the case of the Negro a slave mentality. He has been pre-dispositioned by slavery.

To have been a slave, or to be the child of a slave, means to have an old unpaid grudge in the blood; to have, in fact,resentmenteither smouldering or abeyant or militant. If it does not develop in the slave it will develop in the child of the slave or the child of the child. It may not take a violent form. Certain circumstances, such as prosperity, have power to neutralize it. On the other hand, certain other circumstances have power to bring it more rapidly to a head. The virus feeds on grievances, will even feed on imaginary grievances, but most certainly will grow apace on real grievances. In all seriousness, there is nothing like burning people alive for bringing out active spite and hate. Because of burning and lynching, thewhole of American Negrodom swells larger in resentment, day by day, and moon by moon.

The character of ex-slave, and the child of one who was a slave, is aptly shown by the way the Negro treats animals, in the way also in which he treats those Negroes who happen to come under him.

It is appalling to hear a Negro say to a horse struggling with a heavy load: “I’ll take a stick and beat you to death,” and to realize that the voice of the tyrannous master is being repeated as by a human phonograph. If the American Negroes are more cruel to animals, though quick to understand their ways, it is because they conceive of themselves as masters and the animals as their slaves.

For while a man is a slave he is learning in one way to be a master. A slave’s children are more ready to be tyrannous than the children of one who never has been a slave. When a slave is being flogged he is learning racially how to flog when he gets a chance. His children will have a flogging spirit in them. When he is being tortured he is learning how to torture.

The Anglo-Saxon looks upon animals as friends and equals. He loves his horse and his dog, he honors the fox and the bear. Not so the Negro, the Russian peasant, the Jew. They have an attitude toward the animals which is quite other. And toward human beings in their power or employ they often have a pointof view which is hateful. The peasant workman in the power of theKulakpeasant, the Jewish seamstress in the power of the Jew who owns the “sweatshop,” the Negro workman under the Negro boss or foreman! To be in the power of a master is bad, but to be in the power of a slave is so much worse!

In a land where the slave class is gaining power there is therefore a great deal of resentment in the air. America has it; Russia has it. To-day all the world has it. In the Great War the youth of almost every country underwent the yoke of military slavery, and what resentment there is against the masters! In Germany, where that slavery was worst, it raised Spartacus from death. And who was this Spartacus who has suddenly become a type and given a name to a movement? Himself a slave, he led an insurrection of slaves against Rome. The masters defeated him and killed him, and the heads of hundreds of his followers were impaled on spikes upon all roads which led to Rome—a warning and a witness to all other slaves of that and other times. Bitter and malignant blood-stained faces stared at the passers-by upon the Roman highway. They stare still in history, and they stare to-day, not from pikes, but from an infinite number of children of slaves. Spartacus lives.

What is called the Spartacus movement in Germany is called Bolshevism in Russia. Bolshevismis eminently a slave movement. The children of the serfs have grasped everything. Its first expression has been class war and revenge on the master class. There is so much of slave in the Russian that his racial name is Slav. Now comes out all the resentment and ill feeling of centuries. Unlike the followers of Spartacus, the Russian serf has triumphed, and instead of having his head impaled he has been able to impale the heads of his masters. From his example all slaves and children of slaves throughout the world have taken courage. Russian serfs and military slaves and wage slaves and Negroes are finding an accord, and here we have the foundation for a grand proletarian revolutionary movement throughout the world.

It may be objected that the American Negroes are not Bolshevik. They are not in name, but they are potentially of the same spirit. They hate the white proletariat because the latter uses them ill, but curiously enough they have a common cause. The leaders of the Negro forward movement are almost exclusively Bolshevik in spirit. We cannot wonder at it. Persecution has developed a great resentment and class hate. When the time comes, Dr. Du Bois and Johnson and Walter White and Pickens and the rest will know whose side they are on in the great world struggle.

There are those who will say that if ever the lynching mob become the victims of the enragedNegroes no one will shed tears but the lynchers themselves. They say the lyncher knows that he is wrong and has been told so often enough. Thus, in a pedagogic way, think the wiseheads who do not stray out of doors when a Negro is being killed. Thus think also the governors of the States, the sheriffs, the judges, the police, and the law. But they are fond and foolish. It is not the lynching crowd on whom vengeance will ultimately be taken. The Negro mob, when it rises, may easily join with the lynchers and make common cause against those who should have administered the law, and against those who have stood idly by. In those days we may see the ugly crowd making its way to the Pilate governors, who so often wash their hands, and beating them to death and burning their wives. That is the real movement. There is nothing very reasonable in it, but the risen mob is not guided by logic.

Resentment is the principal feeling of the Negro soldiers returned from France. It is an example of how modern life, undirected, uncontrolled, and unadvised, is manufacturing ever and ever more of the dangerous stuff of revolution.

A policy as to the use of Negro citizens in the Great War was not come to in the United States. Once more the seemingly unworkable theories of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were applied equally to theNegro as to the white man, as if the Negro were only a white man with a dark skin. Negroes were conscripted equally with white men, drilled and equipped, and sent to France, without any regard to the two vital questions:

The first of these questions was evaded by America as it had been from the first by France. There are many who think that the use of “native” troops against the Germans was more indefensible than the German use of poison gas. For, by using colored troops against Whites in a white man’s quarrel, the moral leadership of the Whites is obviously thrown away, and there are bound to be serious after-effects in the weakening of morale.

The second question was merely an important practical detail that had been overlooked. Theoretically, all American citizens are equal. The laws apply without distinction of race or color. In practice, equality is denied. What more natural than to continue in the theoretical assumption of equality, and hope that divergency in practice might be overlooked. What more absurd, however, than to take a man who is beingillegally disfranchised by the community and make him fight for that community?

The Northern white soldier did not, however, feel ill disposed toward the black soldier, and I have met those who saw deeds of heroism done by Negroes, and many who saw them wounded and suffering in the common cause, and felt drawn toward them, to help them and their brothers. But whatever may have been the common feeling about Negro soldiers in the United States, it was definitely hostile to them in the camps in France. There emerged two characteristic points of view: (1) That it was good to kill off as many Negroes as possible, as that helped to solve the Negro problem. (2) That the Negro was not worthy to fight for his country.

Not much for patriotism to feed on there! There seems never to have been any resolve to make first-class Negro regiments, and those units who served in France were by no means adequately trained. By all competent accounts they were very slack, and it goes without saying that an almost superhuman effort of discipline was necessary to obtain complete steadiness in this terrible war. It was common to endeavor to terrorize the Negroes by alarming and exaggerated accounts of the horrors of battle. Negroes were talked to by Whites in a very unsoldierly way. Baiting them and scaring them was thought to be better sport than dealing withthem sternly and seriously. There is no doubt also that some white soldiers rejoiced to see the Negro put back into the slavery position and forced to obey on pain of death. There are those who cannot forgive the Negro having got free from slavery, and for them the spectacle of the Negro in the rank and file afforded much pleasure. Threating Negroes with a court-martial and death sentence became a characteristic jest.

The white man, however, soon found that the Negro fell into the humor of the war more readily than into the tragedy of it. It agreed with his own sense of humor. It was soon impossible to scare the raw recruits with yarns. The idea of running away from a machine gun became natural and hilarious. The dangers from night-bombing raiders over the lines were facetiously exaggerated. Hiding best became a humorous point of honor, and one Negro would vaunt against another how far he fled. Private soldiers chaffed their officers on the subject of death. Asked what “going over the top” meant, the raw recruit would answer: “I know; it means Good mornin’, Jesus.” In short, in nearly every Negro unit there set in a humoresque attitude to the war.

Officer: The Germans are going to start an offensive.

Negro Soldier: That so, cap? Then we’se spread the news over France.

As the popular joke has it.

The Negro officer then began to receive the white man’s attention. Having trained many colored officers, Negroes often of education and means and refinement, and having given them commission and uniform, the Staff came to the conclusion that they had made a mistake. The white Southern officer stirred up trouble, the white ranker would not salute. There was the usual sordid squabble in officers’ messes. And then the upshot—a great number of Negro officers subjected to the humiliation of losing their commissions and being placed in the ranks. This discouragement necessarily set the Negro officer thinking. It cultivated his resentment. It sowed in his heart the seed of national disaffection.

The next serious trouble was that of the French women and the Negro. The indifference of white women whether the man they walked with was black or brown or white was taken as an intolerable affront by Southerners. They felt called upon to interfere and save the French woman from herself. The rape legend was imported, and every effort was made to infect the French male with race prejudice. Happily, the propaganda failed. For one thing, Puritanism does not easily take root in a French heart, and for another, the French have no instinctive horror of Negroes. Possibly the rape legend even made the Negro a little ornamental from the point of view ofamour. “Black Americantroops in France have given rise to as many complaints of attempted rape as all the rest of the army ‘Les troupes noires Americaines en France ont donné lieu, a elle seules, a autant de plaintes pour tentatives de viol, que tout le reste de l’Armée,’” as an army order puts it.

Negro honor, however, demands that the charge be rebutted, and the matter has been thoroughly investigated. There does not seem to be much in it. As every one knows who served in the ranks, women of easy virtue were extremely plentiful and complaisant. The need might easily have been to protect the Negro from the women rather than the women from the Negro.

The fact is simply that the Negro walking with a white woman is to the Southern American White as a red rag to a bull. And as by nature this White is unrestrained and unreasonable, he seeks by all means, fair or foul, to part them.

Finally, the culmination of the story of the American Negro in the war is that the White denied him any valor or prowess or military virtue of any kind, said the Negro was a coward and a runaway and utterly useless in the fighting line. Fighting units were taken off their allotted duty and changed to labor units. Regiments were ordered home; whole brigades were given as a present to the grateful French. Theymay have been rather inefficient. But, if so, that was due to bad training. Negroes have fought magnificently in America’s wars of the past. They are a great fighting race, and they are capable of discipline.

I listened when at New Orleans to a lecture given by Sergeant Needham Roberts of the 369th U. S. Infantry, a handsome young Negro warrior, twice wounded, the first American to be decorated by the French Government. He was entirely patriotic, and made the apathetic Negro audience stand to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He told how he ran away from home to enlist, trained with a mass of black strangers, went across the ocean—quite a terrifying experience for some of these young soldiers, who but for the war had never crossed the sea. He gave his first impressions of France and of the line, the exaggerated fright of shell explosions and night attacks and bombs from the air. They were just getting used to the first aspect of war when one day the news flew round—“We are all ordered home again.” Official orders to that effect quickly followed. They had all packed up and were marching to entrain for Cherbourg when, according to the sergeant, Foch intervened.

“Why are you sending them back?” said he.

“They are not wanted.”

Foch seemed astonished.

“If you cannot use them, I can,” said the French marshal.

And then, hurray!—we were attached to the French.

It was no playground, the French front, but, as ever, a sterner piece of reality than American or British. The Negroes were hotly engaged and had many casualties. Roberts won his Croix de Guerre for a feat which he performed with his chum, Pete Johnson. They had been left at an advanced listening post and apparently overlooked—not relieved for three days and three nights. The division had been relieved. On the third night the Germans made a raid which the two Negro soldiers repelled by themselves, first throwing out their bombs, then firing, and finishing with a remarkable bit of butchery with the bayonet. The Germans whom they did not put out of action they put to flight. How many Germans lay dead it would be difficult to say. The number probably grew like those of Falstaff’s men in buckram, but I did hear twenty mentioned.

There was no doubt about the fact that Sergeant Roberts was a jolly soldier—a “bonny faechter”—and he made himself on good terms with his audience very quickly. He came from New York, and had swung along Fifth Avenue with the heroes of New York’s Fighting Fifteenth. He was full of the faith of the North, horribly depressed by the atmosphere of theSouth, above all by the passivity and apathy of the Negroes of New Orleans. He had better keep north of the Mason-Dixon line, for he is evidently a born fighter.

If the war itself was a persistent educator of the Negro, his subsequent treatment after the Armistice enforced very terribly what he learned. It would be hardly worth while to enlarge on this in detail. The fact which I wished to isolate is the growing resentment of the colored people, the fact that some twelve millions are becoming highly charged with resentment.

As illustration of this resentment one could quote much from the spoken and the written word of the Negroes. But a poem, or part of a poem, may suffice. It is Archibald Grimké’s “Thirteen Black Soldiers.” The 24th United States Infantry, a Negro regiment, was sent to Houston, Texas, and was received with lack of sympathy and some hostility by the population. A series of petty troubles culminated in a riot and mutiny. Sixty-four Negroes were court-martialled, and thirteen were sentenced to death, and hanged. It seems to show a lack of foresight to station a Negro regiment among such a hostile people as the Texans. They are more the enemies of the Negroes than were the Germans, and there was certainty of trouble. Grimké’s poem expresses the boiling resentment to which I have referred.

She hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers,She hanged them for mutiny and murder,She hanged them after she had put on them her uniform,After she had put on them her uniform, the uniform of her soldiers,She told them they were to be brave, to fight and, if needs be, to die for her.This was many years before she hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.She told them to go there and they went,To come here and they came, her brave black soldiers.For her they went without food and water,For her they suffered cold and heat,For her they marched by day,For her they watched by night,For her in strange lands they stood fearless,For her in strange lands they watched shelterless,For her in strange lands they fought,For her in strange lands they bled,For her they faced fevers and fierce men,For her they were always and everywhere ready to die.And now she has hanged them, her thirteen black soldiers.For murder and mutiny she hanged them in anger and hate,Hanged them in secret and dark and disgrace,In secret and dark she disowned them,In secret and dark buried them and left them in nameless disgrace.Why did she hang them, her thirteen black soldiers?

What had they done to merit such fate?She sent them to Houston, to Houston, in Texas,She sent them in her uniform to this Southern city,She sent them, her soldiers, her thirteen brave soldiers,They went at her bidding to Houston,They went where they were ordered.They could not choose another place,For they were soldiers and went where they were ordered.They marched into Houston not knowing what awaited them.Insult awaited them and violence.Insult and violence hissed at them from house windows and struck at them in the streets,American colorphobia hissed and struck at them as they passed by on the streets.In the street cars they met discrimination and insult,“They are not soldiers, they and their uniforms,They are but common niggers,They must be treated like common niggers,They and their uniform.”So hissed colorphobia, indigenous to Texas.And then it squirted its venom on them,Squirted its venom on them and on their uniform.

And what did she do, she who put that uniform on them,And bade them to do and die if needs be for her?Did she raise an arm to protect them?Did she raise her voice to frighten away the reptilian thing?Did she lift a finger or say a word of rebuke at it?Did she do anything in defence of her black soldiers?She did nothing. She sat complacent, indifferent in her seat of power.She had eyes, but she refused to see what Houston was doing to her black soldiers,She had ears, but she stuffed them with cotton,That she might not hear the murmured rage of her black soldiers,They suffered alone, they were defenceless against insult and violence,For she would not see them nor hear them nor protect them.Then in desperation they smote the reptilian thing,They smote it as they had smitten before her enemies,For was it not her enemy, the reptilian thing, as well as their own?They in an hour of madness smote it in battle furiously,And it shrank back from their blows hysterical,Terror and fear of death seized it, and it cried unto her to help.And she, who would not hear her black soldiers in their dire need,She, who put her uniform on them, heard their enemy.She flew at its call and hanged her brave black soldiers.She hanged them for doing for themselves what she ought to have done for them,She hanged them for resenting insult to her uniform,She hanged them for defending from violence her brave black soldiers.They marched with the dignity of brave men to the gallows,With the souls of warriors they marched without a whimper to their doom.And so they were hanged, her thirteen black soldiers,And so they lie buried in nameless disgrace.

Is the watchword of Dr. Du Bois to be wondered?—

We return.We return from fighting.We return fighting.

I met at Memphis, Tennessee, one of the few Southern white men who are sympathetic to the Negro and understand the gravity of the situation. This was Mr. Bolton Smith, a rich business man, a member of the Rotary Clubquand meme. As one who among other activities advances money on the security of real estate in the Mississippi Delta, he necessarily has been brought a great deal into contact with the Negro. Society in Memphis looked at him somewhat askance because he did not share the current conventional view, but he was not blackballed, only indulgently laughed at as one who had a weak spot in his mental armor. In places remote from Memphis, however, his views receive weighty consideration.

If he had his way he would give the Negro his right and his due, and stop lynching. He does not believe the Negro wishes “social equality,” the right to mix indiscriminately with white people, in schools, in trains, in marriage. He thinks the Negro prefers to be separate as long as there is no implied dishonor. He made a special study of the Frederick Douglass School at Cincinnati, an all black school which is admirably conducted, and found that bythemselves the Negroes progress more than when mixed with Whites. As Cincinnati is a city on the northern fringe, with northern institutions, the Negroes had the choice to go to mixed schools with white children if they desired, but they preferred to be by themselves, and indeed did better by themselves. As regards Jim Crow cars, Smith said he would give equal comfort and equal facilities in colored cars and in colored waiting rooms. He does not think the Negro desires to be in a Pullman car where there are white women. It works without scandal in the North, but there is too much risk of the woman going into hysterics in the South, and the Negro getting lynched at a wayside station. He believes in abandoning “the policy of pin pricks,” and, above all, in suppressing lynching and race riot.

He was, however, strongly opposed to Du Bois and the National Association. He considered that Du Bois was leading the Negroes wrongly, leading them in fact to a worse calamity than any which had yet overtaken them. “If the Negro resorts to force,” said Mr. Smith to me, “he will be destroyed. In peace and in law the white man fails to understand how to handle the Negro, but if it comes to force, the issue becomes quite simple for the white man, and the Negro stands little more chance than a savage. Christianity alone can save the Negro, and the leaders of the National Associationare leading the people away from Christianity.” He wished all Negroes could see how fatal it is for them to abandon Christianity.

“If it were not for the lynchings, the National Association and its newspaper would shrink to very small proportions. Every time a Negro is lynched it adds a thousand to the circulation of theCrisis, and a burning adds ten thousand,” said he.

“Hell would soon lose its heat should sin expire,” said I. I was inclined to agree that the only way was through Christianity. But there is such a thing as the wrath of God, and it is not incompatible with Divine Fatherhood and all-merciful Providence. John Brown has been greatly condemned, but he was not outside Christianity—surely he was a child of God. He used to think that without much shedding of blood the crimes of this guilty land could be purged away, but now....

I do not think the white South will be able to avert the wrath of God by machine guns, nor will it quell the Negro by force once the Negro moves from the depths of his being. Better than believe in meeting the great wrath is to be advised betimes and mend one’s ways. Was not the Civil War a sufficient bloodletting? Could not the lesson be learned?

It is certainly in vain to work directly against Du Bois when his power as a leader of revolt could be removed utterly by stopping the lynching.The U. S. Postmaster General refused postal facilities to one number of his newspaper because it was going too far in stirring up sedition, but it was ineffectual, and was, on the contrary, a useful advertisement for the paper. And then, is it not known there are far more advanced groups of Negroes than that of the association of which Dr. Du Bois is president? There are those who laugh Du Bois to scorn as a Moderate. There are those who have sworn that for every Negro done to death by the mob two white men shall somehow perish. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is the gospel—or rather, two eyes for one. Something is being started which will not cease with a recital of the Beatitudes. If America does not cast out the devil of class hate from the midst of her she will again be ravished by the Angel of Death as in the Civil War. The established peaceful routine of a country like America is very deceptive. All seems so permanent, so unshakable. The new refinement, the new politeness and well-lined culture, and vast commercial organization and press suggest that no calamity could overtake them. The force that makes for disruption and anarchy is generated silently and secretly. It accumulates, accumulates, and one day it must discharge itself. Its name is resentment, and its first expression is revenge.

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