XIII

XIIINEGRO LEADERSHIPDr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, as the leader of the militant movement, is the greatest force among the Negroes to-day. Light of skin, short of stature, square-headed, he would pass easily in Southern Europe or in Russia as a white man. He looks rather like a highly polished Jewish professor. Considered carefully, however, it will be realized that behind an impassive mask-like face is an emotional and fiery nature. There is a white heat of resentment in him, and a decisionnot to forgive. Possibly his devotion to the cause and the race drags him down a little. For he is possessed of an unusual literary genius. The fire that ran in the veins of Dumas and of Pushkin is in him also, and as a master of the written word he stands entirely without rival in the American Negro world. In that respect he is altogether a greater man than Booker T. Washington. The latter was a practical genius, and what is gall and wormwood in the bosom of Du Bois was the milk of human kindness in his more sooty, natural breast. “I’m going to shout ‘Glory!’ when this world is afire, and I don’t feel noways tired,” he used alwaysto be saying. “Booker T.,” as he is affectionately called, was the wonderful colored baby of the first days of freedom. His, “Up from Slavery,” which he wrote, and the vocational institute of Tuskegee, Alabama, are the chief monuments which he left behind him. But his portrait is almost as common in Negro cabins as pictures of the Tsar used to be in Russianizbas. “Our Booker T.,” the Negroes say lovingly and possessingly, looking upon the first of their number who rose from the dark depths of servitude, first fruits of them that slept. Freedom and Hope raised Booker T. Washington, but now he is dead a new time needs a new leader. Fain would the Whites have “Booker T.” back. The amenable Negro leader is much more to their taste than the militant one.Many years ago Du Bois wrote “Souls of Black Folk,” which is a fascinating personal study. It has a true literary quality which raises it from the ruck of ephemeral publications to an enduring place. It is, however, immature. There is an emphasis of personal culture, and a note of self-pity, which a more developed writer would have been at pains to transmute. But the gift is unmistakable. You perceive it again and in better measure in “Darkwater,” published this year.It has taken the war and the recent increased persecution of the Negro people to bring out the real power of Du Bois. As a labor leadersaid to me, “He is first of all a statesman and a politician. He is leading the Negroes. I wonder where he will lead them to?”Certainly no other Negro in the United States is regarded by so many others as his leader. No doubt most of the quiet, cautious, and traditionally religious Negroes fight shy of him. But they, for their part, have no leader. Dr. Moton, the lineal descendant of Booker Washington at Tuskegee Institute, is only a leader in the sense that Dr. Arnold of Rugby might be considered a leader. He is there in his place. He is a great light, and is taken for granted.In August, 1919, Dr. Moton wrote to the President, warning him of the growing tension:“I want especially to call your attention to the intense feeling on the part of the colored people throughout the country toward white people, and the apparent revolutionary attitude of many Negroes, which shows itself in a desire to have justice at any cost. The riots in Washington and Chicago and near riots in many other cities have not surprised me in the least. I predicted in an address several months ago, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hampton Institute, on the second of May—ex-President Taft and Mr. George Foster Peabody were present at the time—that this would happen if the matter was not taken hold of vigorously by the thoughtful elements of both races.“I think the time is at hand, and I think of nothing that would have a more salutary effect on the whole situation now than if you should in your own wise way, as you did a year ago, make a statement regarding mob law; laying especial stress on lynching and every form of injustice and unfairness. You would lose nothing by specifically referring to the lynching record in the past six months; many of them have been attended with unusual horrors, and it would be easy to do it now because of the two most recent riots in the North, notably, Washington and Chicago. The South was never more ready to listen than at present to that kind of advice, and it would have a tremendously stabilizing effect, as I have said, on the members of my race.“You very probably saw the account of the lynching in Georgia of an old colored man seventy years of age, who shot one of two intoxicated white men in his attempt to protect two colored girls who had been commanded to come out of their home in the night by these two men. The colored man killed the white man after he had been shot by one of the white men because he had simply protested.“I am enclosing the lynching record for the past six months and an editorial from the AtlantaConstitution, which strongly denounces mob violence.“With all kind wishes, and assuring you ofno desire to add to your burdens, but simply to call attention to what seems to me vital not only for the interest of the twelve millions of black people, but equally as important for the welfare of the millions of Whites whom they touch, I am,“Very sincerely and gratefully,“R. R. Moton.”In reply to this letter, President Wilson wrote Dr. Moton as follows:“My dear Dr. Moton:“Thank you sincerely for your letter of August eighth. It conveys information and suggestions, the importance of which I fully realize and for which I am sincerely obliged. I will take the suggestions you make under very serious consideration, because I realize how critical the situation has become and how important it is to steady affairs in every possible way.“Again thanking you for your public-spirited co-operation,“Cordially and sincerely yours,“Woodrow Wilson.”With this conventional reply the matter closes, and things in America became steadily worse in the months which followed. The twilight peace of Tuskegee has been in contrast with the loud, clamorous denunciations fromDr. Du Bois. For Du Bois gives forth new words of leadership each month. He has a voice like a trumpet and must be heard. Therefore, he is the leader.Associated with him are many brilliant men of whom the most powerful is the poet and orator, James Welldon Johnson, a darker man than Du Bois, slender and taller. He is energetic, and may constantly be heard from platforms in New York and elsewhere. I heard him speak. I was not moved by him as by Dean Pickens, but he is more intense and has the reputation of extraordinary brilliance at times.If the persecution were lifted from off the Negro race there would doubtless be room for quiet educational leadership, and flamboyancy would fail. White sympathizers such as Mr. Bolton Smith of Memphis emphasize the value of the quieter, more unobtrusive work done in places like Piney Woods School, the Frederick Douglass School, by Laurence Jones and Principal Russell. But of course peaceful growth is impossible until the mass of the people are guaranteed against the present terrifying mob violence and general social injustice.On the other hand, it does not follow that Du Bois is a new Moses leading his people to a Promised Land. He may be leading them to terrific bloodshed and slaughter. He may be leading them to a complete racial fiasco, not because he wants to do so or can do otherwise,but because perhaps that fiasco is written on the American Negro’s card of destiny.The Negroes are arming themselves. They are more ready to retaliate—to quote a letter from Memphis: “There is an increased determination on the part of great numbers of Negroes to defend their rights by force.... The Negro is emotional, and the masses of them are quite ready to think they are oppressed in matters in which they are not oppressed at all, and therefore to use force on unjustifiable occasions. This shows itself in the increased use of firearms by petty thieves against the police. A Negro was arrested here recently on the charge of selling stolen chickens. His home was known. It was inconceivable that the ordinary white petty thief would shoot officers of the law in order to prevent an arrest which probably would have resulted in a comparatively small punishment, but this man murdered an officer and is to be hung. The same thing has occurred here several times. Under these circumstances it is difficult to induce the police to hold the proper attitude toward the Negro. They never know when he is going to shoot, and so it is natural that they should shoot a Negro much quicker than they would a white man. This begets in its turn a feeling of resentment which makes the relations between the Negro and the police more difficult. I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that when a minority tries to protectitself—although it may use only the weapons which the majority in the past has been accustomed to use in defending itself against tyranny, the minority is apt to find itself condemned in the eyes of the public. Take the attitude which the mass of Americans are occupying with reference to the Reds and their deportation.... A small number of the Reds have appealed to force—the whole crowd are more or less outlawed by American public opinion. What I am apprehensive of if the Negroes continue to follow Du Bois is just such an embitterment of relations between the two races. I do not believe that the race relation in Chicago is the better for the race riot. On the other hand, in Europe, every revolution usually resulted sooner or later in greater freedom even where the revolution was suppressed. My experience with Negro uprisings has been precisely the reverse. Such progress as the Negro has made has been by education and the awakening of the conscience of the white man.“To put the matter in a few words, the problem that I would like immensely to emphasize to you, is the wholly abnormal position of the minority seeking its rights. We are apt to think that the Negro can achieve these rights in the way that our ancestors achieved theirs against the aristocracy, but unless I am utterly wrong, that view is doomed to failure and if followed will result in embittering the relationsbetween the races so that segregation or deportation or extermination must result. Personally I do not believe that we will fail, but if we succeed it will be in spite of Du Bois and of the attitude of armed resistance. Never was a better illustration of the wisdom under certain conditions of the Tolstoi attitude of non-resistance.”That of course is nicely deduced, but events are not ruled by wisdom and logic. It might very well have been said to the Israelites during the long period of the Plagues. It is such a period in the history of the Negroes.XIVTHE WORLD ASPECTTheAmerican Negroes are the aristocrats of the Negro world. It may be a paradox to assume that a proletariat can become an aristocracy, but an aristocracy is the best a race can produce in culture and manners. No doubt African Negrodom is made up of a great number of races, but all seem to have one common interest and to yield more homage to the name of Africa itself than to any constituent part, kingdom, or state or pasture. The American Negro is beginning to lead Africa as he is leading the Indies. The reason is that the children of the American slaves have made the greatest cultural progress of all Negroes. Though persecution has been less in some parts of Africa and on the West Indian islands, opportunity has also been less. In 1863 America committed herself to the task of raising her millions of black slaves to the cultural level of white citizenship. But no one has ever essayed to raise the savage masses of Africa much higher than the baptismal font. It is always pointed out to the American Negro that his good fortune is prodigious. The Negro retorts that if he hasgood fortune his fathers paid for it in the sufferings of slavery, and he still pays in the price of lynching. Yet, of course, the Negroes in Africa have suffered greatly, and their fathers suffered greatly. No Negro can deny that he owes America much. And Africa owes, or will owe, more still.In America the door at least stands open for Negro progress. In Africa, and especially in South Africa, it is not quite certain that the door is not closed. If the door remains ajar it is not because the white man wills it, but because the American Negro has got his foot in. A low Commercial-Imperial idea reigns. The native is, “the labor on the spot.” An unfailing supply of cheap native labor is considered the great desideratum. Attempts on the Negro’s part to raise himself by education or by technical skill are looked upon with suspicion, and one must remember that as far as the British Empire or French or Belgian mandatorial regions are concerned there are no institutions in Africa comparable to Tuskegee and Hampton. If the labor unions in the United States are foolishly antagonistic to the progress of Negro skilled labor, they are twice more so in South Africa. If there is peonage in America there is an abundance of pseudo slavery in Africa, and while the American trolley car has its Jim Crow section the South African one often has not even that, and the Negro mustwalk unless accompanied by white employer. An open hostility has arisen between Black and White which much resembles that of the Southern States of America. If it were not for the leadership of the American Negroes it would not be promising for Negrodom as a whole.Of course there is a vital difference between the British Empire and the United States; the people of the empire are subjects, and of the republic they are citizens. While Britain technically rules her four hundred million colored subjectsfrom above downwardAmerica theoretically holds that all her people are free and equal. The American ideal is higher, the British more practical.There is another difference, and it is that our Blacks, except in the Indies, are mostly indigenous, and have not been transplanted from their native wilds. They have not been slaves and have not the slave psychology. In Africa the white man is in contact with masses of natives in a primitive condition; in the United States the Negro has been definitely cut off from his kith and kin. The American Negro was set free in a land rampant with democratic ideals and possessed of a sublime belief in human progress. But Africa has been and is increasingly a commercial domain whose only function from the modern white man’s point of view is the making of material fortune. The white man in Africa is much more exclusively a dollarhunter than the American. And though Britain has been much praised for letting South Africa govern herself it does not seem as if the Union was mating much progress in ideals and culture. The King of England was a better friend to the native than the local government is proving itself to be.A blatant anti-nigger tendency is growing throughout the British Empire, and it is very vulgar, very undignified, and at the same time disgraceful. It applies to India and Egypt as much as to Africa. It is due perhaps to a general deterioration in education and training. One may remark that those who complain of the ways of their servants are generally unfitted to have servants, and it is characteristic ofparvenusto ill treat those beneath them, and I would say if a white man cannot get on well with a Negro it is a sign that he is not a gentleman. But the genuine type of English gentleman is passing. To think that the race of Livingstone and Stanley and Harry Johnston should be pitifully complaining about the Negroes, as if God had not made them aright!The British people used to be able to manage native races well—in the age of the Victorian, when the Englishman could treat his native servant as if he were a gentleman also, never doubting that in God’s sight an equal dignity invested both master and man. Read the memoirs and letters of colonial people of timepast, and then compare with the current noisy prejudice in India and Africa. The falling away is appalling. And the “natives” know the change which has been coming about—the new type of officer and employer, the man with the whisky brain, the mind stocked with music-hall funniosity and pseudo cynicism, the grumbler, the man who expects everything to have been arranged for his comfort and success beforehand. Astonishing to hear young officers calling even Hindoos and Syrians and Arabs niggers! The native instinctively knows the man of restraint and good manners and human dignity and properly trained unselfishness. The lowest coolie can tell the difference between a gentleman and a cad; and the educated colored man, while he respects in the deepest way the nation of Shakespeare and Burke and Wellington and Gordon, is puzzled to find a common spirit in the English-speaking people of to-day.“I was reared in an atmosphere of admiration—almost of veneration—for England,” says Dr. Du Bois. “I had always looked on England as the best administrator of colored peoples, and laid her success to her system of justice,” but he wavers in that faith now, having heard the new story of Hindoos and Arabs and the Negroes of South Africa and Negroes of West Africa.In converse with Professor Hoffmann in NewOrleans, a British subject formerly in the service of the British Government in Northern Nigeria, an extremely capable and enlightened Negro, now head master of a colored school, I found confirmation of this. His impression of the change of spirit in the empire was similar to that expressed by Du Bois, and I found admiration of British rule giving way to doubt in many Negro minds. Indeed it has been possible for American Anglophobes to do a good deal of propaganda among the Negroes by representing how badly the natives now fare under British rule. There is some exaggeration in this respect, but it makes an important impression on the mind of the American Negro. He has begun to feel a care and an anxiety for the condition of his brethren overseas. The educated Negro of the United States now feels a responsibility toward the African Negro, and also toward all dark-skinned people whatsoever.The assumption by the Negro of a common ground with the natives of India is somewhat surprising and amusing. There is no ethnological common ground. But the color bar of the British Empire applies almost as stringently to the Indians as to the Negroes. “We’ll smash them all to hell,” says a bellicose Negro stranger to a young Hindoo student at Washington, much to the astonishment of the latter.The advanced Negroes of America place the liberation of the peoples of India and Egypt in the very foreground of their world policy. They say also that the natives of South Africa must be delivered from the Union of South Africa.One thing is certain, and that is that the British Empire will not hold together for long unless the Whites can manage the Blacks, and uphold the standard of justice which was formerly lived by. Votes are not necessary, but ordinary human rights of free existence and opportunity are necessary. The empire is at the crossroads. It is a question whether it can be held together by good will, or whether Britain will be forced to inaugurate a rule of force and obedience. The old conception of good will is being tested in South Africa and Egypt and India as it is in Ireland. Possibly as a result of the war, political circumstances may force it back to the ideal of force and a paramount central authority. The belief of native races in the King, and their hatred of the King’s intermediaries, is characteristic of the time. The American Negro is keeping a sharp lookout on the lot of colored people within the British Empire. As he leads in intelligence, in ideals, and in material wealth, he intends to missionarize the native world in the name of civilization. The missionaries are called agitators; their press seditious; their ideals dangerous; but words donot alter the fact that the flag of Pan-African unity has been raised, and the common needs of all dark-skinned races have been mooted.The Republic of Liberia has often been dismissed as a failure, by the white man. But it is destined to be America’s advanced post in Africa for Black civilizing Black. I was fortunate in meeting in America Bishop Lloyd, just returned from Liberia, and he gave a very interesting account of the positive side of development there. First of all the American Negro is the élite, the aristocracy of Liberia. He is taking upon himself the immense task of educating the Negro masses of the interior. In this and in commerce and in the establishment of law and order, Liberia is very successful. America and American ideals are a gospel to the Liberian Negroes. Never a word is said of the injustices and sufferings which attend Negro life in the States, but on the contrary America is regarded as a Negro Paradise. When America declared war on Germany it was the joy of Liberia to declare war also, and her war effort was remarkable.It is somewhat curious that while British difficulties with native races obtain large advertisement in the United States and elsewhere, the lynchings and burnings and race riots of America are in general successfully hushed up within the States where they occur. But of course the American Negro is very proud of theAmerica which he feels he helped in no small way to make. America has given the Negro an ideal, and she is to him religion. All that is new in the Negro movement, moreover, takes its rise from America.We have seen inaugurated in New York recently the so-called “Black Star Line,” a line of steamships owned by Negroes, and manned by Negroes. Its object is to trade with Negro communities, and advance the common interests of the dark-skinned people throughout the world. Whether it is destined to succeed depends on the soundness of its financial backing. But it is an interesting adventure. Its first ship out of New York carried out the last cargo of whisky before “Prohibition” set in. A storm forced the vessel back to port after the port had become legally “dry,” and some thought the cargo would be seized. It was said there were many leaks to the ship, but after many parleys and reconnaissances with white officials theYarmouth, afterwards namedFrederick Douglass, got away.It is generally advertised under the caption “OVER THE TOP—FOR WHAT?” and was started by a Negro orator called the Hon. Marcus Garvey. He founded a society known as The Universal Negro Improvement Association which boasts now a membership of over two millions in America, Africa, and the Indies. This is a militant organization. But its membershipis evidently useful as a ready-to-hand investing public who can be persuaded to put its money into a whole series of Negro business enterprises, such as “The Negro Factories Corporation,” “West Indies Trading Association of Canada,” and, of course, the Black Star Line. The association has its organ, “The Negro World,” and it meets, as far as New York is concerned, at a place called popularly “The Subway Church,” between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. Whites are not wanted, and indeed not admitted, but the crowds are so huge it is possible to slip in. Musical features alternate with impassioned oratory. Whether, like a bubble blown from the soap of commerce and the water and air of humanitarianism, this will burst and let the members down, or whether it is sound and genuine, it is at least instructive and interesting in its developments. The lecturers and speakers choose the largest terms of thought, and visualize always some four hundred millions of colored brethren throughout the world. A universal convention is even to be called.How theYarmouthfared with the rest of her “wet cargo” during its six months’ trip has not been made public, but the Negroes hailed the progress of the vessel as a “diplomatic triumph,” and when it returned to New York an accession of 25,000 new members was announced. Five thousand in Cuba, two thousandfive hundred in Jamaica, eight thousand in Panama, seven thousand in Bocas del Toro and Port Limon; the staff of the ship and its “ambassadors” were feted on their return. All made speeches, and all were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm. Thus, at the “Star Casino” one of the ambassadors described the arrival at Jamaica:“At last we came in sight of the emerald isle of the Caribbean Sea—that beautiful island that is ever green—that wonderful island Jamaica; and dear indeed is the island of Jamaica to me. With pleasure I saw the people as they crowded along the docks to catch the first view of our steamer, the first ship of the Black Star Line. I could hear the hurrahs and the huzzahs as she majestically wended her way up to Port Royal. We had taken on board our Negro pilot, who piloted us into the harbor of Kingston, one of the finest harbors of the world. As she sped along, the people of Kingston were running down the streets in order that they might catch a sight of theYarmouth. We steamed to the dock and they came on board. They did not wait for invitation to the captain’s cabin, but came up to the wheelhouse, they came into the chart room, they invaded every portion of the ship.... On the second night after our arrival a grand reception was arranged.”The ship made a triumphal entry wherevershe arrived. At one port where the ropes were thrown out from the ship, the Negroes seized them, pulled her alongside the dock of a fruit company, and then with their hands pulled the vessel itself the entire length of the quay. No one had ever seen the like, but the Blacks wanted to feel it with their hands—their own ship.This was strictly a new-world voyage, and a comparatively easy one, with plenty of passengers and of freight. The cry is for more ships and bigger enterprise, and if the company makes good Africa will no doubt see Africa come riding toward itself on the waves. It is possible, however, that the Whites of Africa may prove more hostile than those of the easy-going States of South America and the Indies. The news of the Negro line is no doubt very rousing for all intelligent colored people.What in reality is Black Internationalism is hardly realized as yet, especially by Great Britain. Anything said against the Negroes is heard by a vast number of educated and intelligent colored people. Thus you find the words of the Germanophile E. D. Morel used to stir the masses against Britain. Says Morel, according to the Negroes: “The results of installing black barbarians among European communities are inevitable.... The African is the most developed sexually of any.... Sexually, they are unrestrained and unrestrainable. That is perfectlywell known.... For the working classes the importation of Negro mercenaries by the hundred thousand from the heart of Africa to fight the battles and execute the lusts of capitalist governments in the heart of Europe is a terrific portent. The workers alike of Britain, France, and Italy will be ill advised if they allow it to pass in silence.” And when theDaily Heraldsays that “Wherever there are black troops who have been long distant from their own womenfolk there follows a ghastly outbreak of prostitution, rape, and syphilis” it is necessarily treated as a slur by Negroes. A Negro writer who protested in a well-written and cogent letter to that newspaper fails to get his letter printed, but he prints it all right in the Negro press of America, and asks, “Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the sex-vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?”If there is a race riot as at Cardiff or Liverpool, or if a scheme is mooted to dispossess the squatters of Rhodesia of more of their land, or a General Dyer machine-guns a crowd of civilians in the name of keeping order in India—it is absurd to think of the matter locally and provincially. It is discussed throughout the world. It is impossible to act now as if the subject races had no collective consciousness.So much for the point of view of the world outside America. There is another point ofview which is perhaps closer to those subjects specially treated in this volume. What the world does to the native and says of him are known in America. America has power to help the native races of dark color throughout the world, and many Americans, white as well as dark, are willing to do so. But there is one very serious difficulty, and that is the moral sanction.While those things occur; such as burning Negroes at the stake and denying them the equable justice of a true Court of Law, America has no right to speak; her truly grand idealism is rendered almost wholly impotent. It was the same in the promulgation of the League of Nations and the idea of helping small nations; it is the same with regard to American interference, in the name of human rights and ideals, in the Irish question. It can always be objected: Why do you not look after your own subjects first, and save your Negroes? An American said to me in Philadelphia: “I am not overfond of the Bolsheviks, but of one thing I am glad—The red hand of the Tsar will never rule again.”No?And another said: “Thank God the pogroms are over.”Are they?And a third said: “I am sorry America refused to take a mandate for Armenia.”But why not take a mandate for Georgia and Mississippi?In 1919, when the question of American delegations to Ireland was being discussed, a member in the British House of Commons asked if a British delegation could not be sent to America to investigate conditions among the Negroes.Mr. Bonar Law thought that a very humorous suggestion. The very humor of it was sufficient answer to America. No need for Britain to send investigators.As long as America with her ideals was enough unto herself the Negro question was strictly her affair. But when she takes the moral leadership of the civilized world it becomes to a certain extent every one’s affair.The point is that America as a whole cannot afford to tolerate what is done locally in particular States. It is not a matter of non-interference from Washington in the local affairs of Georgia and Mississippi and the rest. The baleful happenings in these States rob Americans in other States of their good name, and spoil America’s reputation in the world. The fact that the terms of the Constitution are not carried out, decreases throughout the value of the American citizenship. And the growing scandal causes America’s opinions on world politics to be seriously discounted.Thus though America was antipathetic to the old Tsarist régime, and still talks of the “bloody Tsar,” it is a fact growing daily more obvious that compared with the present régime of the great republic the rule of the Tsar over his subject races was in some ways better. On the other hand, the American press has lately been flooded with the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. The fact is, we, all of us, believe evil readily of a country which is far away, but are not ready to face evils near at home when they affect ourselves.Thus the matter affects the world and America. There is a third interest, and that is exclusively of the Negro himself. He needs a guaranteed charter, an authenticated minimum. If the vote cannot be given him, at least let him have justice; if he cannot be admitted to labor unions let his labor be adequately protected; if an offense against a white woman is regarded as specially heinous and dangerous let the legal punishment be increased; afford his women protection also. If the Whites have changed their minds about slavery let them state how much they sanction—what are its limits. Let the American Republic and the British Empire state their policy with regard to their colored population. Make it clear and manifest.The Negro’s chief danger lies in a consensusof evil opinion concerning him. The South rejoices when a race riot disgraces some Northern city and says: “They’re beginning to find out the Negro isn’t an angel up there.” When a General Dyer uses the machine-gun argument, or a mob of dockers fall foul of Negro immigrants at Cardiff or Liverpool, America smiles and says, “You also?” When there are reports of constant trouble in South Africa someone else says, “So you cannot get on with them either?” and when one is burned to death in Georgia, South Africa says, “So you burn them to death, eh?”Out of a cycle of happenings is derived the thought:No one can afford to feel virtuous about the Negro.That fact no doubt helps the Negro press in the chanting of its sorrows, but it does not help the Negro himself. In fact, it shuts out a good deal of hope which might have been derived from white sympathy, and it threatens the colored peoples as a whole with worse things to be. These are the days of democracies and white proletariats, and both show themselves less friendly toward Negroes and “natives” than the old monarchies. Their hostility is based on an old fashioned ignorant contempt; competition in the labor market, and a sort of fear. Probably it can be overcome in time, but if so it will not be through white enlightenment, but through a world organization and understandingon the part of the colored races. For while throughout the world the Whites degenerate somewhat, these others rise. The gulf between the two is being diminished, and there may come a time not very far away when the white hegemony will be lost.XVUP THE MISSISSIPPIFromNew Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou, Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat. Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles. The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level, and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute sweetnesswhich rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very well in thepralineson which New Orleans prides itself.A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him, and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would seek him in vain if he wished to hide.The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping, felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear, but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands about and callssharply to the workers in Frenchpatois. He may be white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river, works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi, and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation, where a fairstretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes on steadily all the year round.”I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy trains listening to thevers libreof the man who offers in a low voice:chewing gum,cigarettes,iced coco-cola; and the country whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down stream in thousandsupon river steamers are now closely packed in railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore, with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters, and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat calledSenator Cordilland we made barely thirty miles a day, so many were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. Thewooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair, and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter. We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands, and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again. In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women. The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, andthere were only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with tablespoons for their coffee.Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon laid.“Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.We stop at various “landing places,” points and creeks and bends, the boat generally coming close to shore. A long plank is thrown out, and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible music. They lurch with their shoulders, kick out with their flexible knees, and whether taking long strides or marking time they keep in unison with the whole, their heads bent, their eyes half closed and bleared with some inner preoccupation. They are in all manner of ragged garments: one has a lilac-covered hat, another an old dressing gown, others are in sloppy blue overalls, some wear shabby Cuban hats, and they go screeching and singing and dodging knocks on the head, but always keeping step with the dance. The captain, with yesterday’s unlit cigar stuck inthe side of his month, gives directions about each bit of freight, using wonderful expressions of abuse and otherwise “encouraging” the “niggers.” Looking at the “rousters” you can easily understand that dancing of a certain kind is innate with the Negro and springs from him. He has an inborn sense of the beating of time which we call rhythm. It is so exaggerated that it tilts out ridiculously with his stomach and controls inanely his bobbing head and nose and dropping eyes. He looks a savage, but he is spellbound. He is completely illiterate and largely unintelligent, but he has solved the problem of carrying huge cotton bales to the ship, providing a rhythmical physical stream for them to flow upon. It is not half the effort that it would be to white people without rhythm.One of the reasons why the Negroes box so well is because they do it in the same rhythmical way they shift these cotton bales.Presently they commence to sing while they haul up the anchor, and a rowing boat passing us with Negro oarsmen is also choric with bright, hard, rhythmic music. These people understand music and time in their bodies, not in their minds. Their blood and their nerves have consciousness of tempo.The many stops in Mississippi State afford opportunities of going ashore, picking up wild pecan nuts, talking to Negroes at their cabin doors. One never sees a white man. This alongthe Mississippi is the real black belt. According to the census, the Negro is in a clear majority. This causes the Whites to be always apprehensive. The idea prevails that the Black can only be kept in his place by terror. As regards this point of view, the Whites prize above everything solidarity of opinion. They hold that they cannot afford to discuss the matter, and they will tolerate no cleavage. In politics all are of course Democrats, and if the American Democratic party is on the whole much less liable to “splits” than the Republican party, it is largely due to the discipline of the black belt.“They outnumber us ten to one,” says the agent for timber, exaggerating characteristically. “It’s come to such a point hereabout that they’re pulling the white women out of their houses. It’s done every day.”I could not believe that.“But if a Black attacks a white woman hereabouts he is certain to be lynched, and knows it,” said I.“Yes, it’s the only way.”“But there is not a lynching every day?”“No.”“So there are not really so many attacks on the women.”But the day-moth of his thought refused to be caught in a logical net.“Did you ever see a man tarred and feathered?” I asked of the district attorney.“No, but I’ve seen one lynched, and helped to lynch him,” said he.“But lynching isn’t very good for legal business,” I hazarded.He at once felt ruffled.“It doesn’t make any difference to the Negro,” said he. “He hasn’t got a soul. They don’t go to heaven or hell.”“How do you make that out?”“They’re just animals,” said he. “They were never in the Garden of Eden, for Adam and Eve were white. Consequently, as they had no part in original sin, they have no share in our salvation either. Christ did not come to save those who never fell from grace.”“I never heard that before,” said I, and was so greatly amused I could not help showing it.The attorney sought me out afterwards with Biblical proof. The sons of Cain, it appears, took themselves wives from the daughters of men; these other men were not descended from Adam and were probably Negroes—the attorney was perfectly serious. The judge, however, to whom we referred the matter, was of a cynical turn of mind, and chuckled heartily. “I am a subscriber to foreign missions,” said he. “If they have not Adam for their father, why do we send missionaries to Africa?”One of the chief places which I wished to visit was the Negro city of Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. In the blackest part of theState of Mississippi this is a city which is entirely Negro, possesses a Negro mayor, Negro policemen, and indeed is entirely without accommodation for white men. I stayed there a night in a Negro hotel where the old wall paper was in hundreds of peeling strips hanging on the walls, and everything in the bedroom was broken. It is a musical sort of city, all a-jangle with the banjo and the brassy clamor of the gramophone. Places of amusement are many—the Lyceum, the Casino, the Bon-Ton café (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant, etc.; one sees many advertisements of minstrel shows. But it is a working city, and at present, with the high cotton prices, it is tasting real prosperity. It is situated in the rich land of the Delta, very malarial and snake-haunted, and therefore not very suitable for white men, but the district produces the highest quality of cotton in the United States. It is in a way a one-man city, and owes most to Charles Banks, who is one of those agreeable and talented African giants, who, like Dr. Moton and others, seem to have an unexpected capacity for greatness. His energy and calm foresight and his money guarantee the gins and the cottonseed-oil factory and the Negro bank and probably the local newspaper and one or other of the churches.In Mound Bayou is no segregation and no racial trouble, and the Negroes show how happily they can live when unmolested. It is a typeof settlement well worth encouraging. The chief interest of the city just now is the building of a “consolidated school.” All the small schools are to be pulled down, and the money has been subscribed for the building of a handsome new school on modern lines. It will be put up facing the Carnegie Library Building. I was sorry to see the latter devoid of books, and used as a Sunday school, but the building was given before the city was ready for the responsible work of organizing and controlling a public library. I talked in the infants’ school to a strange array of children with heads like marbles, and found a common chord in interest and love for animals. We imitated together all the animals we knew, and agreed that no one who did not love animals ever came to anything in this world. But if they loved their animals, they must love teacher too. I talked in the beautiful Wesleyan church on the difference betweenE pluribus unumandE pluribus duo, but that was to grown-ups—and they were so dull, compared with the children. The point was, however, that though the United States might fail to obtain unity of race, her peoples, white and black and yellow, Teutonic and Slav and the rest, could still be one in ideal.“We are trying here to understand the beauty of being black,” said one of the audience edifyingly. “Solomon’s bride herself was black,” said he.Mound Bayou is the pride of Mississippi, as far as the black part of it is concerned. The crowds that appear when a train comes in remind one of similar pictures in Africa. America seems to have disappeared and Africa to have been substituted. An entirely black South, or even one State entirely black, is, however, unthinkable. The white man has shed too much blood for his ideals there. He can never easily abandon any part of it. He must rise to the standard of his sacrifices. To my eyes, Mound Bayou was a little pathetic—like the sort of small establishment of a woman who has been separated from a rich husband through estrangement or desertion. It is not quite in the nature of things, and is more like a courageous protest than the beginning of something new. It stands, however, as a symbol of incompatibility of temperament.There are many who say that when left to himself the Negro slips back from civilization into a primitive state of laziness or savagery, and they instance life in Haiti and the supposed failure of Liberia. It is said that he does not keep up the white man’s standard, he is not so strenuous, he is not a good organizer, nor dependable. That is not entirely true, but there is some truth in it. Mound Bayou is situated in a highly malarial region, unfitted for white habitation, but being surrounded with the best cotton-growing land in America it ought to beexceedingly prosperous. The best that can be said is that the local planters are in a better plight than their neighbors who are intermingled with Whites. Complete financial failure has threatened the little city in the past, and if it were not for the founder, Mr. Montgomery, and its financier, Mr. Banks, most of the proprietorship must have passed over into white hands. To all appearances, the Negro needs decent white co-operation in business, and mixed commercial relationships are better than segregated ones. The difficulty is to find conscientious business Whites who realize that the prosperity of the Negro is worth while. The fixed idea of the white business man is to fool the Negro and exploit him to the last penny.Mound Bayou has its own Negro cotton buyers, who give a fair price for the cotton. But it is with the greatest difficulty that a Negro planter can obtain from a white buyer the true market price, and it is rare that a landlord who receives cotton bales as rent will take into consideration the enhanced price of cotton, even though the enhancement is supposed to be primarily due to the smallness of the harvest. Where the white man is in control it is true the Negro produces more because he has to in order to live, but he is nevertheless the victim of a systematized swindling, and he knows it. It is causing a growing discontent among the black peasantry, and I was continually told about it.One of the worst riots of 1919 took place on the other side of the river—in the State of Arkansas, at Elaine. It is also in this so-called Delta region. The origin of the riot was rooted in the economic problem. The white buyers and landlords had been consistently defrauding the Negro countryside by overlooking the enhanced value of cotton. Cotton had risen in price from a pre-war average of ten cents a pound to twenty-eight cents in 1917 and actually to forty cents in the current year. Formerly it was generally represented to the Negro that he was always deep in debt for his “rations” or his rent. The white policy was to keep the Negro in debt. It was never the custom to render him accounts or to argue with him when he claimed more than was handed him.“You had a fine crop—you’re just about straight,” was a common greeting in the fall of 1919.But with the prolific Delta crop of cotton and a quadruple price, the discontent of the Negro can be imagined. It was intense, and was growing.There are two versions of the outcome of it. One is that a firm of white lawyers approached some of the Negro planters with an idea of taking the matter to court and seeing what could be obtained in redress. The other is that the Negroes “got together,” organized a body called “The Farmers’ Progressive Union,” which then approached the firm of lawyers on its own account. I incline to think that the former is the more probable. The white firm thought there was money to be made from fighting Negro claims. Some of the Negroes were actually agreed to take the matter to a Federal Grand Jury, and charge the Whites with frustration of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.The Negroes were undoubtedly daring, and held public meetings and used sufficient bravado to alarm the local white population. The rumor flew from farm to farm that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection. Someone discovered a heap of rifles stacked where they had been left and forgotten when the Armistice had interrupted drilling. This gave the necessary color to the idea. Besides the rusty rifles, the Negroes were seen to be not without firearms of one kind or another. The Negro loves weapons, as an Oriental loves jewelry. Shotguns and revolvers in plenty are to be found in the cabins of the colored country folk. The Whites put up aprovocateuras before a pogrom in Russia. He started firing on Negroes at random in the Elaine streets. Then two white officials attempted to break into a Negro meeting, resorted to arms, and were met by firing in return. One of the Whites was killed, the other wounded. This started the three days of destruction in Phillips County. The whole Negro populationwas rounded up by white troops and farmers with rifles. Machine guns were even brought into play against an imaginary black army. A great number of Negroes were put in a stockade under military arrest, many were killed, many wounded. And three hundred were placed in jail and charged with riot and murder. No Whites were arrested. The governor, a Mr. Brough, was largely responsible for this method of investigating the alleged conspiracy of the Negroes to make an insurrection. The whole occurrence was astonishingly ugly, and it was followed by ten-minute trials before exclusively white juries, and swift sentences to electrocution for some Negro prisoners, and to long terms of penal servitude for others. The riot and the trials so exasperated Negroes throughout the United States that there is no doubt a Federal Commission of impartial men might well have been appointed to investigate the whole affair, both as regards its inception and as regards its military culmination and its aftermath of trial and punishment. As it is, though Governor Brough says to the Negroes, “Youdidplan an insurrection,” and though the Whites of Elaine may feel happier and more secure, it is an obvious truism that the white population of other States cannot be feeling more secure because of it, and that the Negroes in other districts feel less secure—they feel theneed to arm. It has caused a great increase in public insecurity. Perhaps because of this the riot has been more discussed than other riots. Somewhat shocked and fretful, the governor, who is probably a brisk business man, and in no way like one of those more neurotic governors of Russian provinces which occur in Aùdreyev’s tales, called a meeting. Some four hundred Whites and tamed Negroes were brought together to see what could be done to improve race relationship. This was a month after these events.TheCommercial Appealof Memphis reports the governor’s remarks:“This meeting has been called for the purpose of a heart-to-heart discussion of the relations between the white people and the Negroes of the State. These relations have become strained, especially by the recent rebellion in Phillips County. I say ‘rebellion’ advisedly and without qualifications, for it was an insurrection, and a damnable one.“And I want to say in the beginning that Arkansas is going to handle her own problems. I do not intend to go to New York City or to Topeka, Kansas. When I want advice from Negroes I shall ask it from Arkansas Negroes, and when I want similar advice from white people, I shall get it from the white people of Arkansas.“I also wish to say that I do not intend to be intimidated by any publications or any letters I may receive. I have already received several letters which said that if I permitted the execution of these twelve Negroes from Phillips County to go through, I would be assassinated. One of the letters contained a crude drawing of a coffin, represented to be my own in case the Negroes were electrocuted. I received one letter to-day which stated that the entire city of Helena would be burned if these Negroes went to their death. But I repeat that I will not be intimidated by any outside influence in this question. Our own questions must be settled within the boundaries of our State, and I believe that there are not enough representative Negroes in the State to do this.”So said the governor, but it is rather a question whether in these days of Leagues of Nations and Alliances and “sympathies” one State like Arkansas, washed partly by a great river, can live entirely within its own boundaries and without outside consideration.The mighty Mississippi rolls onward, bearing the spars and the sands of half the States of America to the sea. And after the massacre at Elaine, for some days, dead bodies of Negroes were washed up on other shores. Doleful messengers, these, on the river of Time.

XIIINEGRO LEADERSHIPDr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, as the leader of the militant movement, is the greatest force among the Negroes to-day. Light of skin, short of stature, square-headed, he would pass easily in Southern Europe or in Russia as a white man. He looks rather like a highly polished Jewish professor. Considered carefully, however, it will be realized that behind an impassive mask-like face is an emotional and fiery nature. There is a white heat of resentment in him, and a decisionnot to forgive. Possibly his devotion to the cause and the race drags him down a little. For he is possessed of an unusual literary genius. The fire that ran in the veins of Dumas and of Pushkin is in him also, and as a master of the written word he stands entirely without rival in the American Negro world. In that respect he is altogether a greater man than Booker T. Washington. The latter was a practical genius, and what is gall and wormwood in the bosom of Du Bois was the milk of human kindness in his more sooty, natural breast. “I’m going to shout ‘Glory!’ when this world is afire, and I don’t feel noways tired,” he used alwaysto be saying. “Booker T.,” as he is affectionately called, was the wonderful colored baby of the first days of freedom. His, “Up from Slavery,” which he wrote, and the vocational institute of Tuskegee, Alabama, are the chief monuments which he left behind him. But his portrait is almost as common in Negro cabins as pictures of the Tsar used to be in Russianizbas. “Our Booker T.,” the Negroes say lovingly and possessingly, looking upon the first of their number who rose from the dark depths of servitude, first fruits of them that slept. Freedom and Hope raised Booker T. Washington, but now he is dead a new time needs a new leader. Fain would the Whites have “Booker T.” back. The amenable Negro leader is much more to their taste than the militant one.Many years ago Du Bois wrote “Souls of Black Folk,” which is a fascinating personal study. It has a true literary quality which raises it from the ruck of ephemeral publications to an enduring place. It is, however, immature. There is an emphasis of personal culture, and a note of self-pity, which a more developed writer would have been at pains to transmute. But the gift is unmistakable. You perceive it again and in better measure in “Darkwater,” published this year.It has taken the war and the recent increased persecution of the Negro people to bring out the real power of Du Bois. As a labor leadersaid to me, “He is first of all a statesman and a politician. He is leading the Negroes. I wonder where he will lead them to?”Certainly no other Negro in the United States is regarded by so many others as his leader. No doubt most of the quiet, cautious, and traditionally religious Negroes fight shy of him. But they, for their part, have no leader. Dr. Moton, the lineal descendant of Booker Washington at Tuskegee Institute, is only a leader in the sense that Dr. Arnold of Rugby might be considered a leader. He is there in his place. He is a great light, and is taken for granted.In August, 1919, Dr. Moton wrote to the President, warning him of the growing tension:“I want especially to call your attention to the intense feeling on the part of the colored people throughout the country toward white people, and the apparent revolutionary attitude of many Negroes, which shows itself in a desire to have justice at any cost. The riots in Washington and Chicago and near riots in many other cities have not surprised me in the least. I predicted in an address several months ago, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hampton Institute, on the second of May—ex-President Taft and Mr. George Foster Peabody were present at the time—that this would happen if the matter was not taken hold of vigorously by the thoughtful elements of both races.“I think the time is at hand, and I think of nothing that would have a more salutary effect on the whole situation now than if you should in your own wise way, as you did a year ago, make a statement regarding mob law; laying especial stress on lynching and every form of injustice and unfairness. You would lose nothing by specifically referring to the lynching record in the past six months; many of them have been attended with unusual horrors, and it would be easy to do it now because of the two most recent riots in the North, notably, Washington and Chicago. The South was never more ready to listen than at present to that kind of advice, and it would have a tremendously stabilizing effect, as I have said, on the members of my race.“You very probably saw the account of the lynching in Georgia of an old colored man seventy years of age, who shot one of two intoxicated white men in his attempt to protect two colored girls who had been commanded to come out of their home in the night by these two men. The colored man killed the white man after he had been shot by one of the white men because he had simply protested.“I am enclosing the lynching record for the past six months and an editorial from the AtlantaConstitution, which strongly denounces mob violence.“With all kind wishes, and assuring you ofno desire to add to your burdens, but simply to call attention to what seems to me vital not only for the interest of the twelve millions of black people, but equally as important for the welfare of the millions of Whites whom they touch, I am,“Very sincerely and gratefully,“R. R. Moton.”In reply to this letter, President Wilson wrote Dr. Moton as follows:“My dear Dr. Moton:“Thank you sincerely for your letter of August eighth. It conveys information and suggestions, the importance of which I fully realize and for which I am sincerely obliged. I will take the suggestions you make under very serious consideration, because I realize how critical the situation has become and how important it is to steady affairs in every possible way.“Again thanking you for your public-spirited co-operation,“Cordially and sincerely yours,“Woodrow Wilson.”With this conventional reply the matter closes, and things in America became steadily worse in the months which followed. The twilight peace of Tuskegee has been in contrast with the loud, clamorous denunciations fromDr. Du Bois. For Du Bois gives forth new words of leadership each month. He has a voice like a trumpet and must be heard. Therefore, he is the leader.Associated with him are many brilliant men of whom the most powerful is the poet and orator, James Welldon Johnson, a darker man than Du Bois, slender and taller. He is energetic, and may constantly be heard from platforms in New York and elsewhere. I heard him speak. I was not moved by him as by Dean Pickens, but he is more intense and has the reputation of extraordinary brilliance at times.If the persecution were lifted from off the Negro race there would doubtless be room for quiet educational leadership, and flamboyancy would fail. White sympathizers such as Mr. Bolton Smith of Memphis emphasize the value of the quieter, more unobtrusive work done in places like Piney Woods School, the Frederick Douglass School, by Laurence Jones and Principal Russell. But of course peaceful growth is impossible until the mass of the people are guaranteed against the present terrifying mob violence and general social injustice.On the other hand, it does not follow that Du Bois is a new Moses leading his people to a Promised Land. He may be leading them to terrific bloodshed and slaughter. He may be leading them to a complete racial fiasco, not because he wants to do so or can do otherwise,but because perhaps that fiasco is written on the American Negro’s card of destiny.The Negroes are arming themselves. They are more ready to retaliate—to quote a letter from Memphis: “There is an increased determination on the part of great numbers of Negroes to defend their rights by force.... The Negro is emotional, and the masses of them are quite ready to think they are oppressed in matters in which they are not oppressed at all, and therefore to use force on unjustifiable occasions. This shows itself in the increased use of firearms by petty thieves against the police. A Negro was arrested here recently on the charge of selling stolen chickens. His home was known. It was inconceivable that the ordinary white petty thief would shoot officers of the law in order to prevent an arrest which probably would have resulted in a comparatively small punishment, but this man murdered an officer and is to be hung. The same thing has occurred here several times. Under these circumstances it is difficult to induce the police to hold the proper attitude toward the Negro. They never know when he is going to shoot, and so it is natural that they should shoot a Negro much quicker than they would a white man. This begets in its turn a feeling of resentment which makes the relations between the Negro and the police more difficult. I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that when a minority tries to protectitself—although it may use only the weapons which the majority in the past has been accustomed to use in defending itself against tyranny, the minority is apt to find itself condemned in the eyes of the public. Take the attitude which the mass of Americans are occupying with reference to the Reds and their deportation.... A small number of the Reds have appealed to force—the whole crowd are more or less outlawed by American public opinion. What I am apprehensive of if the Negroes continue to follow Du Bois is just such an embitterment of relations between the two races. I do not believe that the race relation in Chicago is the better for the race riot. On the other hand, in Europe, every revolution usually resulted sooner or later in greater freedom even where the revolution was suppressed. My experience with Negro uprisings has been precisely the reverse. Such progress as the Negro has made has been by education and the awakening of the conscience of the white man.“To put the matter in a few words, the problem that I would like immensely to emphasize to you, is the wholly abnormal position of the minority seeking its rights. We are apt to think that the Negro can achieve these rights in the way that our ancestors achieved theirs against the aristocracy, but unless I am utterly wrong, that view is doomed to failure and if followed will result in embittering the relationsbetween the races so that segregation or deportation or extermination must result. Personally I do not believe that we will fail, but if we succeed it will be in spite of Du Bois and of the attitude of armed resistance. Never was a better illustration of the wisdom under certain conditions of the Tolstoi attitude of non-resistance.”That of course is nicely deduced, but events are not ruled by wisdom and logic. It might very well have been said to the Israelites during the long period of the Plagues. It is such a period in the history of the Negroes.

NEGRO LEADERSHIP

Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, as the leader of the militant movement, is the greatest force among the Negroes to-day. Light of skin, short of stature, square-headed, he would pass easily in Southern Europe or in Russia as a white man. He looks rather like a highly polished Jewish professor. Considered carefully, however, it will be realized that behind an impassive mask-like face is an emotional and fiery nature. There is a white heat of resentment in him, and a decisionnot to forgive. Possibly his devotion to the cause and the race drags him down a little. For he is possessed of an unusual literary genius. The fire that ran in the veins of Dumas and of Pushkin is in him also, and as a master of the written word he stands entirely without rival in the American Negro world. In that respect he is altogether a greater man than Booker T. Washington. The latter was a practical genius, and what is gall and wormwood in the bosom of Du Bois was the milk of human kindness in his more sooty, natural breast. “I’m going to shout ‘Glory!’ when this world is afire, and I don’t feel noways tired,” he used alwaysto be saying. “Booker T.,” as he is affectionately called, was the wonderful colored baby of the first days of freedom. His, “Up from Slavery,” which he wrote, and the vocational institute of Tuskegee, Alabama, are the chief monuments which he left behind him. But his portrait is almost as common in Negro cabins as pictures of the Tsar used to be in Russianizbas. “Our Booker T.,” the Negroes say lovingly and possessingly, looking upon the first of their number who rose from the dark depths of servitude, first fruits of them that slept. Freedom and Hope raised Booker T. Washington, but now he is dead a new time needs a new leader. Fain would the Whites have “Booker T.” back. The amenable Negro leader is much more to their taste than the militant one.

Many years ago Du Bois wrote “Souls of Black Folk,” which is a fascinating personal study. It has a true literary quality which raises it from the ruck of ephemeral publications to an enduring place. It is, however, immature. There is an emphasis of personal culture, and a note of self-pity, which a more developed writer would have been at pains to transmute. But the gift is unmistakable. You perceive it again and in better measure in “Darkwater,” published this year.

It has taken the war and the recent increased persecution of the Negro people to bring out the real power of Du Bois. As a labor leadersaid to me, “He is first of all a statesman and a politician. He is leading the Negroes. I wonder where he will lead them to?”

Certainly no other Negro in the United States is regarded by so many others as his leader. No doubt most of the quiet, cautious, and traditionally religious Negroes fight shy of him. But they, for their part, have no leader. Dr. Moton, the lineal descendant of Booker Washington at Tuskegee Institute, is only a leader in the sense that Dr. Arnold of Rugby might be considered a leader. He is there in his place. He is a great light, and is taken for granted.

In August, 1919, Dr. Moton wrote to the President, warning him of the growing tension:

“I want especially to call your attention to the intense feeling on the part of the colored people throughout the country toward white people, and the apparent revolutionary attitude of many Negroes, which shows itself in a desire to have justice at any cost. The riots in Washington and Chicago and near riots in many other cities have not surprised me in the least. I predicted in an address several months ago, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hampton Institute, on the second of May—ex-President Taft and Mr. George Foster Peabody were present at the time—that this would happen if the matter was not taken hold of vigorously by the thoughtful elements of both races.“I think the time is at hand, and I think of nothing that would have a more salutary effect on the whole situation now than if you should in your own wise way, as you did a year ago, make a statement regarding mob law; laying especial stress on lynching and every form of injustice and unfairness. You would lose nothing by specifically referring to the lynching record in the past six months; many of them have been attended with unusual horrors, and it would be easy to do it now because of the two most recent riots in the North, notably, Washington and Chicago. The South was never more ready to listen than at present to that kind of advice, and it would have a tremendously stabilizing effect, as I have said, on the members of my race.“You very probably saw the account of the lynching in Georgia of an old colored man seventy years of age, who shot one of two intoxicated white men in his attempt to protect two colored girls who had been commanded to come out of their home in the night by these two men. The colored man killed the white man after he had been shot by one of the white men because he had simply protested.“I am enclosing the lynching record for the past six months and an editorial from the AtlantaConstitution, which strongly denounces mob violence.“With all kind wishes, and assuring you ofno desire to add to your burdens, but simply to call attention to what seems to me vital not only for the interest of the twelve millions of black people, but equally as important for the welfare of the millions of Whites whom they touch, I am,“Very sincerely and gratefully,“R. R. Moton.”

“I want especially to call your attention to the intense feeling on the part of the colored people throughout the country toward white people, and the apparent revolutionary attitude of many Negroes, which shows itself in a desire to have justice at any cost. The riots in Washington and Chicago and near riots in many other cities have not surprised me in the least. I predicted in an address several months ago, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hampton Institute, on the second of May—ex-President Taft and Mr. George Foster Peabody were present at the time—that this would happen if the matter was not taken hold of vigorously by the thoughtful elements of both races.

“I think the time is at hand, and I think of nothing that would have a more salutary effect on the whole situation now than if you should in your own wise way, as you did a year ago, make a statement regarding mob law; laying especial stress on lynching and every form of injustice and unfairness. You would lose nothing by specifically referring to the lynching record in the past six months; many of them have been attended with unusual horrors, and it would be easy to do it now because of the two most recent riots in the North, notably, Washington and Chicago. The South was never more ready to listen than at present to that kind of advice, and it would have a tremendously stabilizing effect, as I have said, on the members of my race.

“You very probably saw the account of the lynching in Georgia of an old colored man seventy years of age, who shot one of two intoxicated white men in his attempt to protect two colored girls who had been commanded to come out of their home in the night by these two men. The colored man killed the white man after he had been shot by one of the white men because he had simply protested.

“I am enclosing the lynching record for the past six months and an editorial from the AtlantaConstitution, which strongly denounces mob violence.

“With all kind wishes, and assuring you ofno desire to add to your burdens, but simply to call attention to what seems to me vital not only for the interest of the twelve millions of black people, but equally as important for the welfare of the millions of Whites whom they touch, I am,

“Very sincerely and gratefully,

“R. R. Moton.”

In reply to this letter, President Wilson wrote Dr. Moton as follows:

“My dear Dr. Moton:“Thank you sincerely for your letter of August eighth. It conveys information and suggestions, the importance of which I fully realize and for which I am sincerely obliged. I will take the suggestions you make under very serious consideration, because I realize how critical the situation has become and how important it is to steady affairs in every possible way.“Again thanking you for your public-spirited co-operation,“Cordially and sincerely yours,“Woodrow Wilson.”

“My dear Dr. Moton:

“Thank you sincerely for your letter of August eighth. It conveys information and suggestions, the importance of which I fully realize and for which I am sincerely obliged. I will take the suggestions you make under very serious consideration, because I realize how critical the situation has become and how important it is to steady affairs in every possible way.

“Again thanking you for your public-spirited co-operation,

“Cordially and sincerely yours,

“Woodrow Wilson.”

With this conventional reply the matter closes, and things in America became steadily worse in the months which followed. The twilight peace of Tuskegee has been in contrast with the loud, clamorous denunciations fromDr. Du Bois. For Du Bois gives forth new words of leadership each month. He has a voice like a trumpet and must be heard. Therefore, he is the leader.

Associated with him are many brilliant men of whom the most powerful is the poet and orator, James Welldon Johnson, a darker man than Du Bois, slender and taller. He is energetic, and may constantly be heard from platforms in New York and elsewhere. I heard him speak. I was not moved by him as by Dean Pickens, but he is more intense and has the reputation of extraordinary brilliance at times.

If the persecution were lifted from off the Negro race there would doubtless be room for quiet educational leadership, and flamboyancy would fail. White sympathizers such as Mr. Bolton Smith of Memphis emphasize the value of the quieter, more unobtrusive work done in places like Piney Woods School, the Frederick Douglass School, by Laurence Jones and Principal Russell. But of course peaceful growth is impossible until the mass of the people are guaranteed against the present terrifying mob violence and general social injustice.

On the other hand, it does not follow that Du Bois is a new Moses leading his people to a Promised Land. He may be leading them to terrific bloodshed and slaughter. He may be leading them to a complete racial fiasco, not because he wants to do so or can do otherwise,but because perhaps that fiasco is written on the American Negro’s card of destiny.

The Negroes are arming themselves. They are more ready to retaliate—to quote a letter from Memphis: “There is an increased determination on the part of great numbers of Negroes to defend their rights by force.... The Negro is emotional, and the masses of them are quite ready to think they are oppressed in matters in which they are not oppressed at all, and therefore to use force on unjustifiable occasions. This shows itself in the increased use of firearms by petty thieves against the police. A Negro was arrested here recently on the charge of selling stolen chickens. His home was known. It was inconceivable that the ordinary white petty thief would shoot officers of the law in order to prevent an arrest which probably would have resulted in a comparatively small punishment, but this man murdered an officer and is to be hung. The same thing has occurred here several times. Under these circumstances it is difficult to induce the police to hold the proper attitude toward the Negro. They never know when he is going to shoot, and so it is natural that they should shoot a Negro much quicker than they would a white man. This begets in its turn a feeling of resentment which makes the relations between the Negro and the police more difficult. I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that when a minority tries to protectitself—although it may use only the weapons which the majority in the past has been accustomed to use in defending itself against tyranny, the minority is apt to find itself condemned in the eyes of the public. Take the attitude which the mass of Americans are occupying with reference to the Reds and their deportation.... A small number of the Reds have appealed to force—the whole crowd are more or less outlawed by American public opinion. What I am apprehensive of if the Negroes continue to follow Du Bois is just such an embitterment of relations between the two races. I do not believe that the race relation in Chicago is the better for the race riot. On the other hand, in Europe, every revolution usually resulted sooner or later in greater freedom even where the revolution was suppressed. My experience with Negro uprisings has been precisely the reverse. Such progress as the Negro has made has been by education and the awakening of the conscience of the white man.

“To put the matter in a few words, the problem that I would like immensely to emphasize to you, is the wholly abnormal position of the minority seeking its rights. We are apt to think that the Negro can achieve these rights in the way that our ancestors achieved theirs against the aristocracy, but unless I am utterly wrong, that view is doomed to failure and if followed will result in embittering the relationsbetween the races so that segregation or deportation or extermination must result. Personally I do not believe that we will fail, but if we succeed it will be in spite of Du Bois and of the attitude of armed resistance. Never was a better illustration of the wisdom under certain conditions of the Tolstoi attitude of non-resistance.”

That of course is nicely deduced, but events are not ruled by wisdom and logic. It might very well have been said to the Israelites during the long period of the Plagues. It is such a period in the history of the Negroes.

XIVTHE WORLD ASPECTTheAmerican Negroes are the aristocrats of the Negro world. It may be a paradox to assume that a proletariat can become an aristocracy, but an aristocracy is the best a race can produce in culture and manners. No doubt African Negrodom is made up of a great number of races, but all seem to have one common interest and to yield more homage to the name of Africa itself than to any constituent part, kingdom, or state or pasture. The American Negro is beginning to lead Africa as he is leading the Indies. The reason is that the children of the American slaves have made the greatest cultural progress of all Negroes. Though persecution has been less in some parts of Africa and on the West Indian islands, opportunity has also been less. In 1863 America committed herself to the task of raising her millions of black slaves to the cultural level of white citizenship. But no one has ever essayed to raise the savage masses of Africa much higher than the baptismal font. It is always pointed out to the American Negro that his good fortune is prodigious. The Negro retorts that if he hasgood fortune his fathers paid for it in the sufferings of slavery, and he still pays in the price of lynching. Yet, of course, the Negroes in Africa have suffered greatly, and their fathers suffered greatly. No Negro can deny that he owes America much. And Africa owes, or will owe, more still.In America the door at least stands open for Negro progress. In Africa, and especially in South Africa, it is not quite certain that the door is not closed. If the door remains ajar it is not because the white man wills it, but because the American Negro has got his foot in. A low Commercial-Imperial idea reigns. The native is, “the labor on the spot.” An unfailing supply of cheap native labor is considered the great desideratum. Attempts on the Negro’s part to raise himself by education or by technical skill are looked upon with suspicion, and one must remember that as far as the British Empire or French or Belgian mandatorial regions are concerned there are no institutions in Africa comparable to Tuskegee and Hampton. If the labor unions in the United States are foolishly antagonistic to the progress of Negro skilled labor, they are twice more so in South Africa. If there is peonage in America there is an abundance of pseudo slavery in Africa, and while the American trolley car has its Jim Crow section the South African one often has not even that, and the Negro mustwalk unless accompanied by white employer. An open hostility has arisen between Black and White which much resembles that of the Southern States of America. If it were not for the leadership of the American Negroes it would not be promising for Negrodom as a whole.Of course there is a vital difference between the British Empire and the United States; the people of the empire are subjects, and of the republic they are citizens. While Britain technically rules her four hundred million colored subjectsfrom above downwardAmerica theoretically holds that all her people are free and equal. The American ideal is higher, the British more practical.There is another difference, and it is that our Blacks, except in the Indies, are mostly indigenous, and have not been transplanted from their native wilds. They have not been slaves and have not the slave psychology. In Africa the white man is in contact with masses of natives in a primitive condition; in the United States the Negro has been definitely cut off from his kith and kin. The American Negro was set free in a land rampant with democratic ideals and possessed of a sublime belief in human progress. But Africa has been and is increasingly a commercial domain whose only function from the modern white man’s point of view is the making of material fortune. The white man in Africa is much more exclusively a dollarhunter than the American. And though Britain has been much praised for letting South Africa govern herself it does not seem as if the Union was mating much progress in ideals and culture. The King of England was a better friend to the native than the local government is proving itself to be.A blatant anti-nigger tendency is growing throughout the British Empire, and it is very vulgar, very undignified, and at the same time disgraceful. It applies to India and Egypt as much as to Africa. It is due perhaps to a general deterioration in education and training. One may remark that those who complain of the ways of their servants are generally unfitted to have servants, and it is characteristic ofparvenusto ill treat those beneath them, and I would say if a white man cannot get on well with a Negro it is a sign that he is not a gentleman. But the genuine type of English gentleman is passing. To think that the race of Livingstone and Stanley and Harry Johnston should be pitifully complaining about the Negroes, as if God had not made them aright!The British people used to be able to manage native races well—in the age of the Victorian, when the Englishman could treat his native servant as if he were a gentleman also, never doubting that in God’s sight an equal dignity invested both master and man. Read the memoirs and letters of colonial people of timepast, and then compare with the current noisy prejudice in India and Africa. The falling away is appalling. And the “natives” know the change which has been coming about—the new type of officer and employer, the man with the whisky brain, the mind stocked with music-hall funniosity and pseudo cynicism, the grumbler, the man who expects everything to have been arranged for his comfort and success beforehand. Astonishing to hear young officers calling even Hindoos and Syrians and Arabs niggers! The native instinctively knows the man of restraint and good manners and human dignity and properly trained unselfishness. The lowest coolie can tell the difference between a gentleman and a cad; and the educated colored man, while he respects in the deepest way the nation of Shakespeare and Burke and Wellington and Gordon, is puzzled to find a common spirit in the English-speaking people of to-day.“I was reared in an atmosphere of admiration—almost of veneration—for England,” says Dr. Du Bois. “I had always looked on England as the best administrator of colored peoples, and laid her success to her system of justice,” but he wavers in that faith now, having heard the new story of Hindoos and Arabs and the Negroes of South Africa and Negroes of West Africa.In converse with Professor Hoffmann in NewOrleans, a British subject formerly in the service of the British Government in Northern Nigeria, an extremely capable and enlightened Negro, now head master of a colored school, I found confirmation of this. His impression of the change of spirit in the empire was similar to that expressed by Du Bois, and I found admiration of British rule giving way to doubt in many Negro minds. Indeed it has been possible for American Anglophobes to do a good deal of propaganda among the Negroes by representing how badly the natives now fare under British rule. There is some exaggeration in this respect, but it makes an important impression on the mind of the American Negro. He has begun to feel a care and an anxiety for the condition of his brethren overseas. The educated Negro of the United States now feels a responsibility toward the African Negro, and also toward all dark-skinned people whatsoever.The assumption by the Negro of a common ground with the natives of India is somewhat surprising and amusing. There is no ethnological common ground. But the color bar of the British Empire applies almost as stringently to the Indians as to the Negroes. “We’ll smash them all to hell,” says a bellicose Negro stranger to a young Hindoo student at Washington, much to the astonishment of the latter.The advanced Negroes of America place the liberation of the peoples of India and Egypt in the very foreground of their world policy. They say also that the natives of South Africa must be delivered from the Union of South Africa.One thing is certain, and that is that the British Empire will not hold together for long unless the Whites can manage the Blacks, and uphold the standard of justice which was formerly lived by. Votes are not necessary, but ordinary human rights of free existence and opportunity are necessary. The empire is at the crossroads. It is a question whether it can be held together by good will, or whether Britain will be forced to inaugurate a rule of force and obedience. The old conception of good will is being tested in South Africa and Egypt and India as it is in Ireland. Possibly as a result of the war, political circumstances may force it back to the ideal of force and a paramount central authority. The belief of native races in the King, and their hatred of the King’s intermediaries, is characteristic of the time. The American Negro is keeping a sharp lookout on the lot of colored people within the British Empire. As he leads in intelligence, in ideals, and in material wealth, he intends to missionarize the native world in the name of civilization. The missionaries are called agitators; their press seditious; their ideals dangerous; but words donot alter the fact that the flag of Pan-African unity has been raised, and the common needs of all dark-skinned races have been mooted.The Republic of Liberia has often been dismissed as a failure, by the white man. But it is destined to be America’s advanced post in Africa for Black civilizing Black. I was fortunate in meeting in America Bishop Lloyd, just returned from Liberia, and he gave a very interesting account of the positive side of development there. First of all the American Negro is the élite, the aristocracy of Liberia. He is taking upon himself the immense task of educating the Negro masses of the interior. In this and in commerce and in the establishment of law and order, Liberia is very successful. America and American ideals are a gospel to the Liberian Negroes. Never a word is said of the injustices and sufferings which attend Negro life in the States, but on the contrary America is regarded as a Negro Paradise. When America declared war on Germany it was the joy of Liberia to declare war also, and her war effort was remarkable.It is somewhat curious that while British difficulties with native races obtain large advertisement in the United States and elsewhere, the lynchings and burnings and race riots of America are in general successfully hushed up within the States where they occur. But of course the American Negro is very proud of theAmerica which he feels he helped in no small way to make. America has given the Negro an ideal, and she is to him religion. All that is new in the Negro movement, moreover, takes its rise from America.We have seen inaugurated in New York recently the so-called “Black Star Line,” a line of steamships owned by Negroes, and manned by Negroes. Its object is to trade with Negro communities, and advance the common interests of the dark-skinned people throughout the world. Whether it is destined to succeed depends on the soundness of its financial backing. But it is an interesting adventure. Its first ship out of New York carried out the last cargo of whisky before “Prohibition” set in. A storm forced the vessel back to port after the port had become legally “dry,” and some thought the cargo would be seized. It was said there were many leaks to the ship, but after many parleys and reconnaissances with white officials theYarmouth, afterwards namedFrederick Douglass, got away.It is generally advertised under the caption “OVER THE TOP—FOR WHAT?” and was started by a Negro orator called the Hon. Marcus Garvey. He founded a society known as The Universal Negro Improvement Association which boasts now a membership of over two millions in America, Africa, and the Indies. This is a militant organization. But its membershipis evidently useful as a ready-to-hand investing public who can be persuaded to put its money into a whole series of Negro business enterprises, such as “The Negro Factories Corporation,” “West Indies Trading Association of Canada,” and, of course, the Black Star Line. The association has its organ, “The Negro World,” and it meets, as far as New York is concerned, at a place called popularly “The Subway Church,” between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. Whites are not wanted, and indeed not admitted, but the crowds are so huge it is possible to slip in. Musical features alternate with impassioned oratory. Whether, like a bubble blown from the soap of commerce and the water and air of humanitarianism, this will burst and let the members down, or whether it is sound and genuine, it is at least instructive and interesting in its developments. The lecturers and speakers choose the largest terms of thought, and visualize always some four hundred millions of colored brethren throughout the world. A universal convention is even to be called.How theYarmouthfared with the rest of her “wet cargo” during its six months’ trip has not been made public, but the Negroes hailed the progress of the vessel as a “diplomatic triumph,” and when it returned to New York an accession of 25,000 new members was announced. Five thousand in Cuba, two thousandfive hundred in Jamaica, eight thousand in Panama, seven thousand in Bocas del Toro and Port Limon; the staff of the ship and its “ambassadors” were feted on their return. All made speeches, and all were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm. Thus, at the “Star Casino” one of the ambassadors described the arrival at Jamaica:“At last we came in sight of the emerald isle of the Caribbean Sea—that beautiful island that is ever green—that wonderful island Jamaica; and dear indeed is the island of Jamaica to me. With pleasure I saw the people as they crowded along the docks to catch the first view of our steamer, the first ship of the Black Star Line. I could hear the hurrahs and the huzzahs as she majestically wended her way up to Port Royal. We had taken on board our Negro pilot, who piloted us into the harbor of Kingston, one of the finest harbors of the world. As she sped along, the people of Kingston were running down the streets in order that they might catch a sight of theYarmouth. We steamed to the dock and they came on board. They did not wait for invitation to the captain’s cabin, but came up to the wheelhouse, they came into the chart room, they invaded every portion of the ship.... On the second night after our arrival a grand reception was arranged.”The ship made a triumphal entry wherevershe arrived. At one port where the ropes were thrown out from the ship, the Negroes seized them, pulled her alongside the dock of a fruit company, and then with their hands pulled the vessel itself the entire length of the quay. No one had ever seen the like, but the Blacks wanted to feel it with their hands—their own ship.This was strictly a new-world voyage, and a comparatively easy one, with plenty of passengers and of freight. The cry is for more ships and bigger enterprise, and if the company makes good Africa will no doubt see Africa come riding toward itself on the waves. It is possible, however, that the Whites of Africa may prove more hostile than those of the easy-going States of South America and the Indies. The news of the Negro line is no doubt very rousing for all intelligent colored people.What in reality is Black Internationalism is hardly realized as yet, especially by Great Britain. Anything said against the Negroes is heard by a vast number of educated and intelligent colored people. Thus you find the words of the Germanophile E. D. Morel used to stir the masses against Britain. Says Morel, according to the Negroes: “The results of installing black barbarians among European communities are inevitable.... The African is the most developed sexually of any.... Sexually, they are unrestrained and unrestrainable. That is perfectlywell known.... For the working classes the importation of Negro mercenaries by the hundred thousand from the heart of Africa to fight the battles and execute the lusts of capitalist governments in the heart of Europe is a terrific portent. The workers alike of Britain, France, and Italy will be ill advised if they allow it to pass in silence.” And when theDaily Heraldsays that “Wherever there are black troops who have been long distant from their own womenfolk there follows a ghastly outbreak of prostitution, rape, and syphilis” it is necessarily treated as a slur by Negroes. A Negro writer who protested in a well-written and cogent letter to that newspaper fails to get his letter printed, but he prints it all right in the Negro press of America, and asks, “Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the sex-vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?”If there is a race riot as at Cardiff or Liverpool, or if a scheme is mooted to dispossess the squatters of Rhodesia of more of their land, or a General Dyer machine-guns a crowd of civilians in the name of keeping order in India—it is absurd to think of the matter locally and provincially. It is discussed throughout the world. It is impossible to act now as if the subject races had no collective consciousness.So much for the point of view of the world outside America. There is another point ofview which is perhaps closer to those subjects specially treated in this volume. What the world does to the native and says of him are known in America. America has power to help the native races of dark color throughout the world, and many Americans, white as well as dark, are willing to do so. But there is one very serious difficulty, and that is the moral sanction.While those things occur; such as burning Negroes at the stake and denying them the equable justice of a true Court of Law, America has no right to speak; her truly grand idealism is rendered almost wholly impotent. It was the same in the promulgation of the League of Nations and the idea of helping small nations; it is the same with regard to American interference, in the name of human rights and ideals, in the Irish question. It can always be objected: Why do you not look after your own subjects first, and save your Negroes? An American said to me in Philadelphia: “I am not overfond of the Bolsheviks, but of one thing I am glad—The red hand of the Tsar will never rule again.”No?And another said: “Thank God the pogroms are over.”Are they?And a third said: “I am sorry America refused to take a mandate for Armenia.”But why not take a mandate for Georgia and Mississippi?In 1919, when the question of American delegations to Ireland was being discussed, a member in the British House of Commons asked if a British delegation could not be sent to America to investigate conditions among the Negroes.Mr. Bonar Law thought that a very humorous suggestion. The very humor of it was sufficient answer to America. No need for Britain to send investigators.As long as America with her ideals was enough unto herself the Negro question was strictly her affair. But when she takes the moral leadership of the civilized world it becomes to a certain extent every one’s affair.The point is that America as a whole cannot afford to tolerate what is done locally in particular States. It is not a matter of non-interference from Washington in the local affairs of Georgia and Mississippi and the rest. The baleful happenings in these States rob Americans in other States of their good name, and spoil America’s reputation in the world. The fact that the terms of the Constitution are not carried out, decreases throughout the value of the American citizenship. And the growing scandal causes America’s opinions on world politics to be seriously discounted.Thus though America was antipathetic to the old Tsarist régime, and still talks of the “bloody Tsar,” it is a fact growing daily more obvious that compared with the present régime of the great republic the rule of the Tsar over his subject races was in some ways better. On the other hand, the American press has lately been flooded with the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. The fact is, we, all of us, believe evil readily of a country which is far away, but are not ready to face evils near at home when they affect ourselves.Thus the matter affects the world and America. There is a third interest, and that is exclusively of the Negro himself. He needs a guaranteed charter, an authenticated minimum. If the vote cannot be given him, at least let him have justice; if he cannot be admitted to labor unions let his labor be adequately protected; if an offense against a white woman is regarded as specially heinous and dangerous let the legal punishment be increased; afford his women protection also. If the Whites have changed their minds about slavery let them state how much they sanction—what are its limits. Let the American Republic and the British Empire state their policy with regard to their colored population. Make it clear and manifest.The Negro’s chief danger lies in a consensusof evil opinion concerning him. The South rejoices when a race riot disgraces some Northern city and says: “They’re beginning to find out the Negro isn’t an angel up there.” When a General Dyer uses the machine-gun argument, or a mob of dockers fall foul of Negro immigrants at Cardiff or Liverpool, America smiles and says, “You also?” When there are reports of constant trouble in South Africa someone else says, “So you cannot get on with them either?” and when one is burned to death in Georgia, South Africa says, “So you burn them to death, eh?”Out of a cycle of happenings is derived the thought:No one can afford to feel virtuous about the Negro.That fact no doubt helps the Negro press in the chanting of its sorrows, but it does not help the Negro himself. In fact, it shuts out a good deal of hope which might have been derived from white sympathy, and it threatens the colored peoples as a whole with worse things to be. These are the days of democracies and white proletariats, and both show themselves less friendly toward Negroes and “natives” than the old monarchies. Their hostility is based on an old fashioned ignorant contempt; competition in the labor market, and a sort of fear. Probably it can be overcome in time, but if so it will not be through white enlightenment, but through a world organization and understandingon the part of the colored races. For while throughout the world the Whites degenerate somewhat, these others rise. The gulf between the two is being diminished, and there may come a time not very far away when the white hegemony will be lost.

THE WORLD ASPECT

TheAmerican Negroes are the aristocrats of the Negro world. It may be a paradox to assume that a proletariat can become an aristocracy, but an aristocracy is the best a race can produce in culture and manners. No doubt African Negrodom is made up of a great number of races, but all seem to have one common interest and to yield more homage to the name of Africa itself than to any constituent part, kingdom, or state or pasture. The American Negro is beginning to lead Africa as he is leading the Indies. The reason is that the children of the American slaves have made the greatest cultural progress of all Negroes. Though persecution has been less in some parts of Africa and on the West Indian islands, opportunity has also been less. In 1863 America committed herself to the task of raising her millions of black slaves to the cultural level of white citizenship. But no one has ever essayed to raise the savage masses of Africa much higher than the baptismal font. It is always pointed out to the American Negro that his good fortune is prodigious. The Negro retorts that if he hasgood fortune his fathers paid for it in the sufferings of slavery, and he still pays in the price of lynching. Yet, of course, the Negroes in Africa have suffered greatly, and their fathers suffered greatly. No Negro can deny that he owes America much. And Africa owes, or will owe, more still.

In America the door at least stands open for Negro progress. In Africa, and especially in South Africa, it is not quite certain that the door is not closed. If the door remains ajar it is not because the white man wills it, but because the American Negro has got his foot in. A low Commercial-Imperial idea reigns. The native is, “the labor on the spot.” An unfailing supply of cheap native labor is considered the great desideratum. Attempts on the Negro’s part to raise himself by education or by technical skill are looked upon with suspicion, and one must remember that as far as the British Empire or French or Belgian mandatorial regions are concerned there are no institutions in Africa comparable to Tuskegee and Hampton. If the labor unions in the United States are foolishly antagonistic to the progress of Negro skilled labor, they are twice more so in South Africa. If there is peonage in America there is an abundance of pseudo slavery in Africa, and while the American trolley car has its Jim Crow section the South African one often has not even that, and the Negro mustwalk unless accompanied by white employer. An open hostility has arisen between Black and White which much resembles that of the Southern States of America. If it were not for the leadership of the American Negroes it would not be promising for Negrodom as a whole.

Of course there is a vital difference between the British Empire and the United States; the people of the empire are subjects, and of the republic they are citizens. While Britain technically rules her four hundred million colored subjectsfrom above downwardAmerica theoretically holds that all her people are free and equal. The American ideal is higher, the British more practical.

There is another difference, and it is that our Blacks, except in the Indies, are mostly indigenous, and have not been transplanted from their native wilds. They have not been slaves and have not the slave psychology. In Africa the white man is in contact with masses of natives in a primitive condition; in the United States the Negro has been definitely cut off from his kith and kin. The American Negro was set free in a land rampant with democratic ideals and possessed of a sublime belief in human progress. But Africa has been and is increasingly a commercial domain whose only function from the modern white man’s point of view is the making of material fortune. The white man in Africa is much more exclusively a dollarhunter than the American. And though Britain has been much praised for letting South Africa govern herself it does not seem as if the Union was mating much progress in ideals and culture. The King of England was a better friend to the native than the local government is proving itself to be.

A blatant anti-nigger tendency is growing throughout the British Empire, and it is very vulgar, very undignified, and at the same time disgraceful. It applies to India and Egypt as much as to Africa. It is due perhaps to a general deterioration in education and training. One may remark that those who complain of the ways of their servants are generally unfitted to have servants, and it is characteristic ofparvenusto ill treat those beneath them, and I would say if a white man cannot get on well with a Negro it is a sign that he is not a gentleman. But the genuine type of English gentleman is passing. To think that the race of Livingstone and Stanley and Harry Johnston should be pitifully complaining about the Negroes, as if God had not made them aright!

The British people used to be able to manage native races well—in the age of the Victorian, when the Englishman could treat his native servant as if he were a gentleman also, never doubting that in God’s sight an equal dignity invested both master and man. Read the memoirs and letters of colonial people of timepast, and then compare with the current noisy prejudice in India and Africa. The falling away is appalling. And the “natives” know the change which has been coming about—the new type of officer and employer, the man with the whisky brain, the mind stocked with music-hall funniosity and pseudo cynicism, the grumbler, the man who expects everything to have been arranged for his comfort and success beforehand. Astonishing to hear young officers calling even Hindoos and Syrians and Arabs niggers! The native instinctively knows the man of restraint and good manners and human dignity and properly trained unselfishness. The lowest coolie can tell the difference between a gentleman and a cad; and the educated colored man, while he respects in the deepest way the nation of Shakespeare and Burke and Wellington and Gordon, is puzzled to find a common spirit in the English-speaking people of to-day.

“I was reared in an atmosphere of admiration—almost of veneration—for England,” says Dr. Du Bois. “I had always looked on England as the best administrator of colored peoples, and laid her success to her system of justice,” but he wavers in that faith now, having heard the new story of Hindoos and Arabs and the Negroes of South Africa and Negroes of West Africa.

In converse with Professor Hoffmann in NewOrleans, a British subject formerly in the service of the British Government in Northern Nigeria, an extremely capable and enlightened Negro, now head master of a colored school, I found confirmation of this. His impression of the change of spirit in the empire was similar to that expressed by Du Bois, and I found admiration of British rule giving way to doubt in many Negro minds. Indeed it has been possible for American Anglophobes to do a good deal of propaganda among the Negroes by representing how badly the natives now fare under British rule. There is some exaggeration in this respect, but it makes an important impression on the mind of the American Negro. He has begun to feel a care and an anxiety for the condition of his brethren overseas. The educated Negro of the United States now feels a responsibility toward the African Negro, and also toward all dark-skinned people whatsoever.

The assumption by the Negro of a common ground with the natives of India is somewhat surprising and amusing. There is no ethnological common ground. But the color bar of the British Empire applies almost as stringently to the Indians as to the Negroes. “We’ll smash them all to hell,” says a bellicose Negro stranger to a young Hindoo student at Washington, much to the astonishment of the latter.The advanced Negroes of America place the liberation of the peoples of India and Egypt in the very foreground of their world policy. They say also that the natives of South Africa must be delivered from the Union of South Africa.

One thing is certain, and that is that the British Empire will not hold together for long unless the Whites can manage the Blacks, and uphold the standard of justice which was formerly lived by. Votes are not necessary, but ordinary human rights of free existence and opportunity are necessary. The empire is at the crossroads. It is a question whether it can be held together by good will, or whether Britain will be forced to inaugurate a rule of force and obedience. The old conception of good will is being tested in South Africa and Egypt and India as it is in Ireland. Possibly as a result of the war, political circumstances may force it back to the ideal of force and a paramount central authority. The belief of native races in the King, and their hatred of the King’s intermediaries, is characteristic of the time. The American Negro is keeping a sharp lookout on the lot of colored people within the British Empire. As he leads in intelligence, in ideals, and in material wealth, he intends to missionarize the native world in the name of civilization. The missionaries are called agitators; their press seditious; their ideals dangerous; but words donot alter the fact that the flag of Pan-African unity has been raised, and the common needs of all dark-skinned races have been mooted.

The Republic of Liberia has often been dismissed as a failure, by the white man. But it is destined to be America’s advanced post in Africa for Black civilizing Black. I was fortunate in meeting in America Bishop Lloyd, just returned from Liberia, and he gave a very interesting account of the positive side of development there. First of all the American Negro is the élite, the aristocracy of Liberia. He is taking upon himself the immense task of educating the Negro masses of the interior. In this and in commerce and in the establishment of law and order, Liberia is very successful. America and American ideals are a gospel to the Liberian Negroes. Never a word is said of the injustices and sufferings which attend Negro life in the States, but on the contrary America is regarded as a Negro Paradise. When America declared war on Germany it was the joy of Liberia to declare war also, and her war effort was remarkable.

It is somewhat curious that while British difficulties with native races obtain large advertisement in the United States and elsewhere, the lynchings and burnings and race riots of America are in general successfully hushed up within the States where they occur. But of course the American Negro is very proud of theAmerica which he feels he helped in no small way to make. America has given the Negro an ideal, and she is to him religion. All that is new in the Negro movement, moreover, takes its rise from America.

We have seen inaugurated in New York recently the so-called “Black Star Line,” a line of steamships owned by Negroes, and manned by Negroes. Its object is to trade with Negro communities, and advance the common interests of the dark-skinned people throughout the world. Whether it is destined to succeed depends on the soundness of its financial backing. But it is an interesting adventure. Its first ship out of New York carried out the last cargo of whisky before “Prohibition” set in. A storm forced the vessel back to port after the port had become legally “dry,” and some thought the cargo would be seized. It was said there were many leaks to the ship, but after many parleys and reconnaissances with white officials theYarmouth, afterwards namedFrederick Douglass, got away.

It is generally advertised under the caption “OVER THE TOP—FOR WHAT?” and was started by a Negro orator called the Hon. Marcus Garvey. He founded a society known as The Universal Negro Improvement Association which boasts now a membership of over two millions in America, Africa, and the Indies. This is a militant organization. But its membershipis evidently useful as a ready-to-hand investing public who can be persuaded to put its money into a whole series of Negro business enterprises, such as “The Negro Factories Corporation,” “West Indies Trading Association of Canada,” and, of course, the Black Star Line. The association has its organ, “The Negro World,” and it meets, as far as New York is concerned, at a place called popularly “The Subway Church,” between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. Whites are not wanted, and indeed not admitted, but the crowds are so huge it is possible to slip in. Musical features alternate with impassioned oratory. Whether, like a bubble blown from the soap of commerce and the water and air of humanitarianism, this will burst and let the members down, or whether it is sound and genuine, it is at least instructive and interesting in its developments. The lecturers and speakers choose the largest terms of thought, and visualize always some four hundred millions of colored brethren throughout the world. A universal convention is even to be called.

How theYarmouthfared with the rest of her “wet cargo” during its six months’ trip has not been made public, but the Negroes hailed the progress of the vessel as a “diplomatic triumph,” and when it returned to New York an accession of 25,000 new members was announced. Five thousand in Cuba, two thousandfive hundred in Jamaica, eight thousand in Panama, seven thousand in Bocas del Toro and Port Limon; the staff of the ship and its “ambassadors” were feted on their return. All made speeches, and all were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm. Thus, at the “Star Casino” one of the ambassadors described the arrival at Jamaica:

“At last we came in sight of the emerald isle of the Caribbean Sea—that beautiful island that is ever green—that wonderful island Jamaica; and dear indeed is the island of Jamaica to me. With pleasure I saw the people as they crowded along the docks to catch the first view of our steamer, the first ship of the Black Star Line. I could hear the hurrahs and the huzzahs as she majestically wended her way up to Port Royal. We had taken on board our Negro pilot, who piloted us into the harbor of Kingston, one of the finest harbors of the world. As she sped along, the people of Kingston were running down the streets in order that they might catch a sight of theYarmouth. We steamed to the dock and they came on board. They did not wait for invitation to the captain’s cabin, but came up to the wheelhouse, they came into the chart room, they invaded every portion of the ship.... On the second night after our arrival a grand reception was arranged.”

The ship made a triumphal entry wherevershe arrived. At one port where the ropes were thrown out from the ship, the Negroes seized them, pulled her alongside the dock of a fruit company, and then with their hands pulled the vessel itself the entire length of the quay. No one had ever seen the like, but the Blacks wanted to feel it with their hands—their own ship.

This was strictly a new-world voyage, and a comparatively easy one, with plenty of passengers and of freight. The cry is for more ships and bigger enterprise, and if the company makes good Africa will no doubt see Africa come riding toward itself on the waves. It is possible, however, that the Whites of Africa may prove more hostile than those of the easy-going States of South America and the Indies. The news of the Negro line is no doubt very rousing for all intelligent colored people.

What in reality is Black Internationalism is hardly realized as yet, especially by Great Britain. Anything said against the Negroes is heard by a vast number of educated and intelligent colored people. Thus you find the words of the Germanophile E. D. Morel used to stir the masses against Britain. Says Morel, according to the Negroes: “The results of installing black barbarians among European communities are inevitable.... The African is the most developed sexually of any.... Sexually, they are unrestrained and unrestrainable. That is perfectlywell known.... For the working classes the importation of Negro mercenaries by the hundred thousand from the heart of Africa to fight the battles and execute the lusts of capitalist governments in the heart of Europe is a terrific portent. The workers alike of Britain, France, and Italy will be ill advised if they allow it to pass in silence.” And when theDaily Heraldsays that “Wherever there are black troops who have been long distant from their own womenfolk there follows a ghastly outbreak of prostitution, rape, and syphilis” it is necessarily treated as a slur by Negroes. A Negro writer who protested in a well-written and cogent letter to that newspaper fails to get his letter printed, but he prints it all right in the Negro press of America, and asks, “Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the sex-vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?”

If there is a race riot as at Cardiff or Liverpool, or if a scheme is mooted to dispossess the squatters of Rhodesia of more of their land, or a General Dyer machine-guns a crowd of civilians in the name of keeping order in India—it is absurd to think of the matter locally and provincially. It is discussed throughout the world. It is impossible to act now as if the subject races had no collective consciousness.

So much for the point of view of the world outside America. There is another point ofview which is perhaps closer to those subjects specially treated in this volume. What the world does to the native and says of him are known in America. America has power to help the native races of dark color throughout the world, and many Americans, white as well as dark, are willing to do so. But there is one very serious difficulty, and that is the moral sanction.

While those things occur; such as burning Negroes at the stake and denying them the equable justice of a true Court of Law, America has no right to speak; her truly grand idealism is rendered almost wholly impotent. It was the same in the promulgation of the League of Nations and the idea of helping small nations; it is the same with regard to American interference, in the name of human rights and ideals, in the Irish question. It can always be objected: Why do you not look after your own subjects first, and save your Negroes? An American said to me in Philadelphia: “I am not overfond of the Bolsheviks, but of one thing I am glad—The red hand of the Tsar will never rule again.”

No?

And another said: “Thank God the pogroms are over.”

Are they?

And a third said: “I am sorry America refused to take a mandate for Armenia.”

But why not take a mandate for Georgia and Mississippi?

In 1919, when the question of American delegations to Ireland was being discussed, a member in the British House of Commons asked if a British delegation could not be sent to America to investigate conditions among the Negroes.

Mr. Bonar Law thought that a very humorous suggestion. The very humor of it was sufficient answer to America. No need for Britain to send investigators.

As long as America with her ideals was enough unto herself the Negro question was strictly her affair. But when she takes the moral leadership of the civilized world it becomes to a certain extent every one’s affair.

The point is that America as a whole cannot afford to tolerate what is done locally in particular States. It is not a matter of non-interference from Washington in the local affairs of Georgia and Mississippi and the rest. The baleful happenings in these States rob Americans in other States of their good name, and spoil America’s reputation in the world. The fact that the terms of the Constitution are not carried out, decreases throughout the value of the American citizenship. And the growing scandal causes America’s opinions on world politics to be seriously discounted.

Thus though America was antipathetic to the old Tsarist régime, and still talks of the “bloody Tsar,” it is a fact growing daily more obvious that compared with the present régime of the great republic the rule of the Tsar over his subject races was in some ways better. On the other hand, the American press has lately been flooded with the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. The fact is, we, all of us, believe evil readily of a country which is far away, but are not ready to face evils near at home when they affect ourselves.

Thus the matter affects the world and America. There is a third interest, and that is exclusively of the Negro himself. He needs a guaranteed charter, an authenticated minimum. If the vote cannot be given him, at least let him have justice; if he cannot be admitted to labor unions let his labor be adequately protected; if an offense against a white woman is regarded as specially heinous and dangerous let the legal punishment be increased; afford his women protection also. If the Whites have changed their minds about slavery let them state how much they sanction—what are its limits. Let the American Republic and the British Empire state their policy with regard to their colored population. Make it clear and manifest.

The Negro’s chief danger lies in a consensusof evil opinion concerning him. The South rejoices when a race riot disgraces some Northern city and says: “They’re beginning to find out the Negro isn’t an angel up there.” When a General Dyer uses the machine-gun argument, or a mob of dockers fall foul of Negro immigrants at Cardiff or Liverpool, America smiles and says, “You also?” When there are reports of constant trouble in South Africa someone else says, “So you cannot get on with them either?” and when one is burned to death in Georgia, South Africa says, “So you burn them to death, eh?”

Out of a cycle of happenings is derived the thought:No one can afford to feel virtuous about the Negro.

That fact no doubt helps the Negro press in the chanting of its sorrows, but it does not help the Negro himself. In fact, it shuts out a good deal of hope which might have been derived from white sympathy, and it threatens the colored peoples as a whole with worse things to be. These are the days of democracies and white proletariats, and both show themselves less friendly toward Negroes and “natives” than the old monarchies. Their hostility is based on an old fashioned ignorant contempt; competition in the labor market, and a sort of fear. Probably it can be overcome in time, but if so it will not be through white enlightenment, but through a world organization and understandingon the part of the colored races. For while throughout the world the Whites degenerate somewhat, these others rise. The gulf between the two is being diminished, and there may come a time not very far away when the white hegemony will be lost.

XVUP THE MISSISSIPPIFromNew Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou, Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat. Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles. The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level, and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute sweetnesswhich rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very well in thepralineson which New Orleans prides itself.A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him, and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would seek him in vain if he wished to hide.The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping, felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear, but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands about and callssharply to the workers in Frenchpatois. He may be white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river, works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi, and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation, where a fairstretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes on steadily all the year round.”I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy trains listening to thevers libreof the man who offers in a low voice:chewing gum,cigarettes,iced coco-cola; and the country whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down stream in thousandsupon river steamers are now closely packed in railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore, with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters, and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat calledSenator Cordilland we made barely thirty miles a day, so many were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. Thewooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair, and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter. We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands, and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again. In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women. The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, andthere were only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with tablespoons for their coffee.Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon laid.“Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.We stop at various “landing places,” points and creeks and bends, the boat generally coming close to shore. A long plank is thrown out, and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible music. They lurch with their shoulders, kick out with their flexible knees, and whether taking long strides or marking time they keep in unison with the whole, their heads bent, their eyes half closed and bleared with some inner preoccupation. They are in all manner of ragged garments: one has a lilac-covered hat, another an old dressing gown, others are in sloppy blue overalls, some wear shabby Cuban hats, and they go screeching and singing and dodging knocks on the head, but always keeping step with the dance. The captain, with yesterday’s unlit cigar stuck inthe side of his month, gives directions about each bit of freight, using wonderful expressions of abuse and otherwise “encouraging” the “niggers.” Looking at the “rousters” you can easily understand that dancing of a certain kind is innate with the Negro and springs from him. He has an inborn sense of the beating of time which we call rhythm. It is so exaggerated that it tilts out ridiculously with his stomach and controls inanely his bobbing head and nose and dropping eyes. He looks a savage, but he is spellbound. He is completely illiterate and largely unintelligent, but he has solved the problem of carrying huge cotton bales to the ship, providing a rhythmical physical stream for them to flow upon. It is not half the effort that it would be to white people without rhythm.One of the reasons why the Negroes box so well is because they do it in the same rhythmical way they shift these cotton bales.Presently they commence to sing while they haul up the anchor, and a rowing boat passing us with Negro oarsmen is also choric with bright, hard, rhythmic music. These people understand music and time in their bodies, not in their minds. Their blood and their nerves have consciousness of tempo.The many stops in Mississippi State afford opportunities of going ashore, picking up wild pecan nuts, talking to Negroes at their cabin doors. One never sees a white man. This alongthe Mississippi is the real black belt. According to the census, the Negro is in a clear majority. This causes the Whites to be always apprehensive. The idea prevails that the Black can only be kept in his place by terror. As regards this point of view, the Whites prize above everything solidarity of opinion. They hold that they cannot afford to discuss the matter, and they will tolerate no cleavage. In politics all are of course Democrats, and if the American Democratic party is on the whole much less liable to “splits” than the Republican party, it is largely due to the discipline of the black belt.“They outnumber us ten to one,” says the agent for timber, exaggerating characteristically. “It’s come to such a point hereabout that they’re pulling the white women out of their houses. It’s done every day.”I could not believe that.“But if a Black attacks a white woman hereabouts he is certain to be lynched, and knows it,” said I.“Yes, it’s the only way.”“But there is not a lynching every day?”“No.”“So there are not really so many attacks on the women.”But the day-moth of his thought refused to be caught in a logical net.“Did you ever see a man tarred and feathered?” I asked of the district attorney.“No, but I’ve seen one lynched, and helped to lynch him,” said he.“But lynching isn’t very good for legal business,” I hazarded.He at once felt ruffled.“It doesn’t make any difference to the Negro,” said he. “He hasn’t got a soul. They don’t go to heaven or hell.”“How do you make that out?”“They’re just animals,” said he. “They were never in the Garden of Eden, for Adam and Eve were white. Consequently, as they had no part in original sin, they have no share in our salvation either. Christ did not come to save those who never fell from grace.”“I never heard that before,” said I, and was so greatly amused I could not help showing it.The attorney sought me out afterwards with Biblical proof. The sons of Cain, it appears, took themselves wives from the daughters of men; these other men were not descended from Adam and were probably Negroes—the attorney was perfectly serious. The judge, however, to whom we referred the matter, was of a cynical turn of mind, and chuckled heartily. “I am a subscriber to foreign missions,” said he. “If they have not Adam for their father, why do we send missionaries to Africa?”One of the chief places which I wished to visit was the Negro city of Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. In the blackest part of theState of Mississippi this is a city which is entirely Negro, possesses a Negro mayor, Negro policemen, and indeed is entirely without accommodation for white men. I stayed there a night in a Negro hotel where the old wall paper was in hundreds of peeling strips hanging on the walls, and everything in the bedroom was broken. It is a musical sort of city, all a-jangle with the banjo and the brassy clamor of the gramophone. Places of amusement are many—the Lyceum, the Casino, the Bon-Ton café (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant, etc.; one sees many advertisements of minstrel shows. But it is a working city, and at present, with the high cotton prices, it is tasting real prosperity. It is situated in the rich land of the Delta, very malarial and snake-haunted, and therefore not very suitable for white men, but the district produces the highest quality of cotton in the United States. It is in a way a one-man city, and owes most to Charles Banks, who is one of those agreeable and talented African giants, who, like Dr. Moton and others, seem to have an unexpected capacity for greatness. His energy and calm foresight and his money guarantee the gins and the cottonseed-oil factory and the Negro bank and probably the local newspaper and one or other of the churches.In Mound Bayou is no segregation and no racial trouble, and the Negroes show how happily they can live when unmolested. It is a typeof settlement well worth encouraging. The chief interest of the city just now is the building of a “consolidated school.” All the small schools are to be pulled down, and the money has been subscribed for the building of a handsome new school on modern lines. It will be put up facing the Carnegie Library Building. I was sorry to see the latter devoid of books, and used as a Sunday school, but the building was given before the city was ready for the responsible work of organizing and controlling a public library. I talked in the infants’ school to a strange array of children with heads like marbles, and found a common chord in interest and love for animals. We imitated together all the animals we knew, and agreed that no one who did not love animals ever came to anything in this world. But if they loved their animals, they must love teacher too. I talked in the beautiful Wesleyan church on the difference betweenE pluribus unumandE pluribus duo, but that was to grown-ups—and they were so dull, compared with the children. The point was, however, that though the United States might fail to obtain unity of race, her peoples, white and black and yellow, Teutonic and Slav and the rest, could still be one in ideal.“We are trying here to understand the beauty of being black,” said one of the audience edifyingly. “Solomon’s bride herself was black,” said he.Mound Bayou is the pride of Mississippi, as far as the black part of it is concerned. The crowds that appear when a train comes in remind one of similar pictures in Africa. America seems to have disappeared and Africa to have been substituted. An entirely black South, or even one State entirely black, is, however, unthinkable. The white man has shed too much blood for his ideals there. He can never easily abandon any part of it. He must rise to the standard of his sacrifices. To my eyes, Mound Bayou was a little pathetic—like the sort of small establishment of a woman who has been separated from a rich husband through estrangement or desertion. It is not quite in the nature of things, and is more like a courageous protest than the beginning of something new. It stands, however, as a symbol of incompatibility of temperament.There are many who say that when left to himself the Negro slips back from civilization into a primitive state of laziness or savagery, and they instance life in Haiti and the supposed failure of Liberia. It is said that he does not keep up the white man’s standard, he is not so strenuous, he is not a good organizer, nor dependable. That is not entirely true, but there is some truth in it. Mound Bayou is situated in a highly malarial region, unfitted for white habitation, but being surrounded with the best cotton-growing land in America it ought to beexceedingly prosperous. The best that can be said is that the local planters are in a better plight than their neighbors who are intermingled with Whites. Complete financial failure has threatened the little city in the past, and if it were not for the founder, Mr. Montgomery, and its financier, Mr. Banks, most of the proprietorship must have passed over into white hands. To all appearances, the Negro needs decent white co-operation in business, and mixed commercial relationships are better than segregated ones. The difficulty is to find conscientious business Whites who realize that the prosperity of the Negro is worth while. The fixed idea of the white business man is to fool the Negro and exploit him to the last penny.Mound Bayou has its own Negro cotton buyers, who give a fair price for the cotton. But it is with the greatest difficulty that a Negro planter can obtain from a white buyer the true market price, and it is rare that a landlord who receives cotton bales as rent will take into consideration the enhanced price of cotton, even though the enhancement is supposed to be primarily due to the smallness of the harvest. Where the white man is in control it is true the Negro produces more because he has to in order to live, but he is nevertheless the victim of a systematized swindling, and he knows it. It is causing a growing discontent among the black peasantry, and I was continually told about it.One of the worst riots of 1919 took place on the other side of the river—in the State of Arkansas, at Elaine. It is also in this so-called Delta region. The origin of the riot was rooted in the economic problem. The white buyers and landlords had been consistently defrauding the Negro countryside by overlooking the enhanced value of cotton. Cotton had risen in price from a pre-war average of ten cents a pound to twenty-eight cents in 1917 and actually to forty cents in the current year. Formerly it was generally represented to the Negro that he was always deep in debt for his “rations” or his rent. The white policy was to keep the Negro in debt. It was never the custom to render him accounts or to argue with him when he claimed more than was handed him.“You had a fine crop—you’re just about straight,” was a common greeting in the fall of 1919.But with the prolific Delta crop of cotton and a quadruple price, the discontent of the Negro can be imagined. It was intense, and was growing.There are two versions of the outcome of it. One is that a firm of white lawyers approached some of the Negro planters with an idea of taking the matter to court and seeing what could be obtained in redress. The other is that the Negroes “got together,” organized a body called “The Farmers’ Progressive Union,” which then approached the firm of lawyers on its own account. I incline to think that the former is the more probable. The white firm thought there was money to be made from fighting Negro claims. Some of the Negroes were actually agreed to take the matter to a Federal Grand Jury, and charge the Whites with frustration of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.The Negroes were undoubtedly daring, and held public meetings and used sufficient bravado to alarm the local white population. The rumor flew from farm to farm that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection. Someone discovered a heap of rifles stacked where they had been left and forgotten when the Armistice had interrupted drilling. This gave the necessary color to the idea. Besides the rusty rifles, the Negroes were seen to be not without firearms of one kind or another. The Negro loves weapons, as an Oriental loves jewelry. Shotguns and revolvers in plenty are to be found in the cabins of the colored country folk. The Whites put up aprovocateuras before a pogrom in Russia. He started firing on Negroes at random in the Elaine streets. Then two white officials attempted to break into a Negro meeting, resorted to arms, and were met by firing in return. One of the Whites was killed, the other wounded. This started the three days of destruction in Phillips County. The whole Negro populationwas rounded up by white troops and farmers with rifles. Machine guns were even brought into play against an imaginary black army. A great number of Negroes were put in a stockade under military arrest, many were killed, many wounded. And three hundred were placed in jail and charged with riot and murder. No Whites were arrested. The governor, a Mr. Brough, was largely responsible for this method of investigating the alleged conspiracy of the Negroes to make an insurrection. The whole occurrence was astonishingly ugly, and it was followed by ten-minute trials before exclusively white juries, and swift sentences to electrocution for some Negro prisoners, and to long terms of penal servitude for others. The riot and the trials so exasperated Negroes throughout the United States that there is no doubt a Federal Commission of impartial men might well have been appointed to investigate the whole affair, both as regards its inception and as regards its military culmination and its aftermath of trial and punishment. As it is, though Governor Brough says to the Negroes, “Youdidplan an insurrection,” and though the Whites of Elaine may feel happier and more secure, it is an obvious truism that the white population of other States cannot be feeling more secure because of it, and that the Negroes in other districts feel less secure—they feel theneed to arm. It has caused a great increase in public insecurity. Perhaps because of this the riot has been more discussed than other riots. Somewhat shocked and fretful, the governor, who is probably a brisk business man, and in no way like one of those more neurotic governors of Russian provinces which occur in Aùdreyev’s tales, called a meeting. Some four hundred Whites and tamed Negroes were brought together to see what could be done to improve race relationship. This was a month after these events.TheCommercial Appealof Memphis reports the governor’s remarks:“This meeting has been called for the purpose of a heart-to-heart discussion of the relations between the white people and the Negroes of the State. These relations have become strained, especially by the recent rebellion in Phillips County. I say ‘rebellion’ advisedly and without qualifications, for it was an insurrection, and a damnable one.“And I want to say in the beginning that Arkansas is going to handle her own problems. I do not intend to go to New York City or to Topeka, Kansas. When I want advice from Negroes I shall ask it from Arkansas Negroes, and when I want similar advice from white people, I shall get it from the white people of Arkansas.“I also wish to say that I do not intend to be intimidated by any publications or any letters I may receive. I have already received several letters which said that if I permitted the execution of these twelve Negroes from Phillips County to go through, I would be assassinated. One of the letters contained a crude drawing of a coffin, represented to be my own in case the Negroes were electrocuted. I received one letter to-day which stated that the entire city of Helena would be burned if these Negroes went to their death. But I repeat that I will not be intimidated by any outside influence in this question. Our own questions must be settled within the boundaries of our State, and I believe that there are not enough representative Negroes in the State to do this.”So said the governor, but it is rather a question whether in these days of Leagues of Nations and Alliances and “sympathies” one State like Arkansas, washed partly by a great river, can live entirely within its own boundaries and without outside consideration.The mighty Mississippi rolls onward, bearing the spars and the sands of half the States of America to the sea. And after the massacre at Elaine, for some days, dead bodies of Negroes were washed up on other shores. Doleful messengers, these, on the river of Time.

UP THE MISSISSIPPI

FromNew Orleans I traveled up the Mississippi; calling at such characteristic points as Reserve, Vicksburg, Greenville, Mound Bayou, Memphis, accomplishing the journey partly by rail and partly by boat. Reserve is a vast sugar plantation owned by five brothers. It is only thirty miles from the great city and the Whites are mostly Creoles. The Mother of Rivers, clad in brown silk, flows toward the green humps of hundreds of levees and embankments. The shores are low and level, and there grows almost to the water edge a vast, close, ten-feet-high jungle of sugar cane. You walk along the top of the levee till you see a lane running across the plantation like a trench dug through it. In the lane itself there is no view except the erect, green wall of canes on either hand and the blue sky above. Beneath your feet are cart ruts and withered stalks of sugar gone purple at the joints and straw-colored in the flanks. Take a stalk and break it across, and it breaks in shreds like a bamboo, revealing the inner fatness of sweet pith which you can suck if you will, for it is sugar. It has a dilute sweetnesswhich rapidly cloys an unaccustomed palate, though the people of the countryside suck it continuously, and many consider the natural sugar the source of all health. The taste is reproduced very well in thepralineson which New Orleans prides itself.

A long and novel sort of lane this through the sugar! A Negro worker coming along the road sees a white man, but does not want to meet him, and he takes three steps into the dark-green depths, clawing his way inside as through many barely shut doors, and he is lost. You would seek him in vain if he wished to hide.

The lane debouches into a sun-bathed, half-cleared area which is covered with stricken canes looking like warriors tumbled in death after a great battle; for it is winter and the time of the taking of the harvest. Negro gangs with rough bills like meat choppers are slicing the side leaves from the cane and then cutting, slicing and cutting, all over the plantation, with joyous noise, and there are great numbers of dark girls in straw hats working methodically and rhythmically from the shoulder and the bosom, striking, clipping, felling, as it were automatically, unwaveringly. They break in and cut in, strewing ever more extensively the carpet of canes in their rear, but the wall they attack is ten times as dense as the thickest field of corn and twice as high. The master or overseer, on horseback, stands about and callssharply to the workers in Frenchpatois. He may be white Creole, but is often as dark as his gang. Where sugar is not rising, beyond the plantations if you walk as far, Nature seems sunk in swamp and swarming with snakes. The low jungle over the Mississippi marshes has many alligators and a multitude of other reptiles.

In a clearing of the sugar harvest it is possible to sit on a hummock of grass and see something of a plantation as a whole. It is a cloudless day with the faintest haze over the blueness of the sky. The sun heat is tempered by a delightful air which keeps on moving all the time like an invisible river of health and vigor. There is a whispering in the myriads of the canes, and you hear the slashing and the clumping of the cutting which is going on all the while. On one hand are the rudimentary huts of the Negroes, like dressing rooms, on the other the lofty refinery of white-painted corrugated iron, with many chimneys and cranes. The refinery, using electric power taken from the river, works off all the local cane and also imports large quantities of raw sugar brought from Cuba. Pile driving is going on in the Mississippi, and there will soon be a landing stage to which the Cuban steamers themselves can approach. The Louisiana cane is red and the Cuban is yellow-green, and the latter is much the sweeter. On the plantation, where a fairstretch of ground has been cleared, the motor plough is at work with huge spiked wheels, turning the black soil over the sugar seed for next year. The cane has an eye at each joint, the eye is the seed, and from it sprouts next year’s plant, growing at right angles to the old cane in the earth. “In February,” says the young Creole ploughman, “the young plants have to be dug up and replanted. Work goes on steadily all the year round.”

I resumed my way up the Mississippi on an old, broken-down steamer with a remarkably high, wooden, dripping, splashing paddle wheel. To go by boat used to be a favorite way of traveling, but the new railways on each side of the great river have killed the water traffic by taking away all large freight. It does not seem a profitable enterprise to ply the Mississippi for passengers alone. There are therefore only a few river steamers left, and these have to call at all the tiniest and obscurest waterside places and lumber camps, and can seldom make more than forty or fifty miles a day. Few people will travel a week or ten days or a fortnight or anything you like to Memphis when a locomotive will do it in twenty-four hours. The passengers therefore sit in stuffy trains listening to thevers libreof the man who offers in a low voice:chewing gum,cigarettes,iced coco-cola; and the country whirls past them unprofitably. The cotton bales which used to go down stream in thousandsupon river steamers are now closely packed in railway trucks; and the molasses goes no longer in barrels, but in huge, iron cisterns on wheels. There is therefore little traffic on the mighty river—she is happier and freer, more as she was of yore, with few steamers, few barges, few rafts—instead, only an occasional rowing boat and a ferry. The water is brown and vast and placid, and runs in many courses beyond wooded islands, beyond vast, swampy forks and tongues of the mainland. It is a sort of café-au-lait color, and the shadows mantle softly upon it deliciously. Willows grow in the water on its shores and islands, and in shadow or sunlight the water laps gently the many tree trunks or lies still under the green shade of the branches. It is a great, intricate, unexplored labyrinth of waters, and now you see it unadorned and lovely, with no advertisements on its banks and no shoddy reminder of our civilization on any hand—the Mississippi as she was when we first saw her. I traveled on a boat calledSenator Cordilland we made barely thirty miles a day, so many were the stopping places, so many the accidents. It cost a little over a dollar a day, including board, and was the nearest approach to a gift. The ship had a motley gang of colored laborers fetching freight on their backs in intermittent procession, beating out dust from the long, wooden gangway up which they tramped with their burdens. Thewooden paddle wheel, which was ten feet high, had got into disrepair, and at a riverside town where we stopped some colored carpenters were at work fitting new wooden parts into her while close-cropped Negroes with coal-dusted skulls shoveled coal aboard from a lighter. We had three wooden decks rolling with small freight for tiny places in Louisiana, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. In the cabins were huge family bedsteads, and no locks on the doors. When the wheel was repaired and the time came for departure the Negro crew deserted en masse, and the captain, with the unlighted cigar which he had rolled and bitten in his capacious mouth all day, stood on the bank and accosted all and sundry, begging them to come aboard and work on the ship. Meanwhile in a quayside hut Negro girls were “shimmying” as they brought in food for their colored boys, and our erstwhile crew was heard singing and shouting. Only next morning did we get enough hands, and at the misty dawn, when the river was so still that it looked like an unbroken sheet of ice, we raised anchor and plunged outward again. In the main current whole trees were seen to be floating, and our wheel might easily strike one of them and get broken again. We sat down to breakfast, the eight passengers: one was a judge, another a district attorney, a third was an agent for timber, and the rest were women. The china at table was of different shapes and sizes, andthere were only three teaspoons—so the rest of the passengers were served with tablespoons for their coffee.

Judge T—— insisted on having a teaspoon from the colored girl who waited on us, but was obliged to content himself with the tablespoon laid.

“Teaspoons is sca’ce,” said she.

We stop at various “landing places,” points and creeks and bends, the boat generally coming close to shore. A long plank is thrown out, and then commences the cakewalk of the Negro “rousters” carrying out all manner of goods—in one place it is materials for the building of a church—and bringing back cotton bales or whatever else may be waiting for us. It is a sight at which one could gaze spellbound for hours; for the Negroes keep in step and seem listening to an inaudible music. They lurch with their shoulders, kick out with their flexible knees, and whether taking long strides or marking time they keep in unison with the whole, their heads bent, their eyes half closed and bleared with some inner preoccupation. They are in all manner of ragged garments: one has a lilac-covered hat, another an old dressing gown, others are in sloppy blue overalls, some wear shabby Cuban hats, and they go screeching and singing and dodging knocks on the head, but always keeping step with the dance. The captain, with yesterday’s unlit cigar stuck inthe side of his month, gives directions about each bit of freight, using wonderful expressions of abuse and otherwise “encouraging” the “niggers.” Looking at the “rousters” you can easily understand that dancing of a certain kind is innate with the Negro and springs from him. He has an inborn sense of the beating of time which we call rhythm. It is so exaggerated that it tilts out ridiculously with his stomach and controls inanely his bobbing head and nose and dropping eyes. He looks a savage, but he is spellbound. He is completely illiterate and largely unintelligent, but he has solved the problem of carrying huge cotton bales to the ship, providing a rhythmical physical stream for them to flow upon. It is not half the effort that it would be to white people without rhythm.

One of the reasons why the Negroes box so well is because they do it in the same rhythmical way they shift these cotton bales.

Presently they commence to sing while they haul up the anchor, and a rowing boat passing us with Negro oarsmen is also choric with bright, hard, rhythmic music. These people understand music and time in their bodies, not in their minds. Their blood and their nerves have consciousness of tempo.

The many stops in Mississippi State afford opportunities of going ashore, picking up wild pecan nuts, talking to Negroes at their cabin doors. One never sees a white man. This alongthe Mississippi is the real black belt. According to the census, the Negro is in a clear majority. This causes the Whites to be always apprehensive. The idea prevails that the Black can only be kept in his place by terror. As regards this point of view, the Whites prize above everything solidarity of opinion. They hold that they cannot afford to discuss the matter, and they will tolerate no cleavage. In politics all are of course Democrats, and if the American Democratic party is on the whole much less liable to “splits” than the Republican party, it is largely due to the discipline of the black belt.

“They outnumber us ten to one,” says the agent for timber, exaggerating characteristically. “It’s come to such a point hereabout that they’re pulling the white women out of their houses. It’s done every day.”

I could not believe that.

“But if a Black attacks a white woman hereabouts he is certain to be lynched, and knows it,” said I.

“Yes, it’s the only way.”

“But there is not a lynching every day?”

“No.”

“So there are not really so many attacks on the women.”

But the day-moth of his thought refused to be caught in a logical net.

“Did you ever see a man tarred and feathered?” I asked of the district attorney.

“No, but I’ve seen one lynched, and helped to lynch him,” said he.

“But lynching isn’t very good for legal business,” I hazarded.

He at once felt ruffled.

“It doesn’t make any difference to the Negro,” said he. “He hasn’t got a soul. They don’t go to heaven or hell.”

“How do you make that out?”

“They’re just animals,” said he. “They were never in the Garden of Eden, for Adam and Eve were white. Consequently, as they had no part in original sin, they have no share in our salvation either. Christ did not come to save those who never fell from grace.”

“I never heard that before,” said I, and was so greatly amused I could not help showing it.

The attorney sought me out afterwards with Biblical proof. The sons of Cain, it appears, took themselves wives from the daughters of men; these other men were not descended from Adam and were probably Negroes—the attorney was perfectly serious. The judge, however, to whom we referred the matter, was of a cynical turn of mind, and chuckled heartily. “I am a subscriber to foreign missions,” said he. “If they have not Adam for their father, why do we send missionaries to Africa?”

One of the chief places which I wished to visit was the Negro city of Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. In the blackest part of theState of Mississippi this is a city which is entirely Negro, possesses a Negro mayor, Negro policemen, and indeed is entirely without accommodation for white men. I stayed there a night in a Negro hotel where the old wall paper was in hundreds of peeling strips hanging on the walls, and everything in the bedroom was broken. It is a musical sort of city, all a-jangle with the banjo and the brassy clamor of the gramophone. Places of amusement are many—the Lyceum, the Casino, the Bon-Ton café (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant, etc.; one sees many advertisements of minstrel shows. But it is a working city, and at present, with the high cotton prices, it is tasting real prosperity. It is situated in the rich land of the Delta, very malarial and snake-haunted, and therefore not very suitable for white men, but the district produces the highest quality of cotton in the United States. It is in a way a one-man city, and owes most to Charles Banks, who is one of those agreeable and talented African giants, who, like Dr. Moton and others, seem to have an unexpected capacity for greatness. His energy and calm foresight and his money guarantee the gins and the cottonseed-oil factory and the Negro bank and probably the local newspaper and one or other of the churches.

In Mound Bayou is no segregation and no racial trouble, and the Negroes show how happily they can live when unmolested. It is a typeof settlement well worth encouraging. The chief interest of the city just now is the building of a “consolidated school.” All the small schools are to be pulled down, and the money has been subscribed for the building of a handsome new school on modern lines. It will be put up facing the Carnegie Library Building. I was sorry to see the latter devoid of books, and used as a Sunday school, but the building was given before the city was ready for the responsible work of organizing and controlling a public library. I talked in the infants’ school to a strange array of children with heads like marbles, and found a common chord in interest and love for animals. We imitated together all the animals we knew, and agreed that no one who did not love animals ever came to anything in this world. But if they loved their animals, they must love teacher too. I talked in the beautiful Wesleyan church on the difference betweenE pluribus unumandE pluribus duo, but that was to grown-ups—and they were so dull, compared with the children. The point was, however, that though the United States might fail to obtain unity of race, her peoples, white and black and yellow, Teutonic and Slav and the rest, could still be one in ideal.

“We are trying here to understand the beauty of being black,” said one of the audience edifyingly. “Solomon’s bride herself was black,” said he.

Mound Bayou is the pride of Mississippi, as far as the black part of it is concerned. The crowds that appear when a train comes in remind one of similar pictures in Africa. America seems to have disappeared and Africa to have been substituted. An entirely black South, or even one State entirely black, is, however, unthinkable. The white man has shed too much blood for his ideals there. He can never easily abandon any part of it. He must rise to the standard of his sacrifices. To my eyes, Mound Bayou was a little pathetic—like the sort of small establishment of a woman who has been separated from a rich husband through estrangement or desertion. It is not quite in the nature of things, and is more like a courageous protest than the beginning of something new. It stands, however, as a symbol of incompatibility of temperament.

There are many who say that when left to himself the Negro slips back from civilization into a primitive state of laziness or savagery, and they instance life in Haiti and the supposed failure of Liberia. It is said that he does not keep up the white man’s standard, he is not so strenuous, he is not a good organizer, nor dependable. That is not entirely true, but there is some truth in it. Mound Bayou is situated in a highly malarial region, unfitted for white habitation, but being surrounded with the best cotton-growing land in America it ought to beexceedingly prosperous. The best that can be said is that the local planters are in a better plight than their neighbors who are intermingled with Whites. Complete financial failure has threatened the little city in the past, and if it were not for the founder, Mr. Montgomery, and its financier, Mr. Banks, most of the proprietorship must have passed over into white hands. To all appearances, the Negro needs decent white co-operation in business, and mixed commercial relationships are better than segregated ones. The difficulty is to find conscientious business Whites who realize that the prosperity of the Negro is worth while. The fixed idea of the white business man is to fool the Negro and exploit him to the last penny.

Mound Bayou has its own Negro cotton buyers, who give a fair price for the cotton. But it is with the greatest difficulty that a Negro planter can obtain from a white buyer the true market price, and it is rare that a landlord who receives cotton bales as rent will take into consideration the enhanced price of cotton, even though the enhancement is supposed to be primarily due to the smallness of the harvest. Where the white man is in control it is true the Negro produces more because he has to in order to live, but he is nevertheless the victim of a systematized swindling, and he knows it. It is causing a growing discontent among the black peasantry, and I was continually told about it.

One of the worst riots of 1919 took place on the other side of the river—in the State of Arkansas, at Elaine. It is also in this so-called Delta region. The origin of the riot was rooted in the economic problem. The white buyers and landlords had been consistently defrauding the Negro countryside by overlooking the enhanced value of cotton. Cotton had risen in price from a pre-war average of ten cents a pound to twenty-eight cents in 1917 and actually to forty cents in the current year. Formerly it was generally represented to the Negro that he was always deep in debt for his “rations” or his rent. The white policy was to keep the Negro in debt. It was never the custom to render him accounts or to argue with him when he claimed more than was handed him.

“You had a fine crop—you’re just about straight,” was a common greeting in the fall of 1919.

But with the prolific Delta crop of cotton and a quadruple price, the discontent of the Negro can be imagined. It was intense, and was growing.

There are two versions of the outcome of it. One is that a firm of white lawyers approached some of the Negro planters with an idea of taking the matter to court and seeing what could be obtained in redress. The other is that the Negroes “got together,” organized a body called “The Farmers’ Progressive Union,” which then approached the firm of lawyers on its own account. I incline to think that the former is the more probable. The white firm thought there was money to be made from fighting Negro claims. Some of the Negroes were actually agreed to take the matter to a Federal Grand Jury, and charge the Whites with frustration of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Negroes were undoubtedly daring, and held public meetings and used sufficient bravado to alarm the local white population. The rumor flew from farm to farm that the Negroes were plotting an insurrection. Someone discovered a heap of rifles stacked where they had been left and forgotten when the Armistice had interrupted drilling. This gave the necessary color to the idea. Besides the rusty rifles, the Negroes were seen to be not without firearms of one kind or another. The Negro loves weapons, as an Oriental loves jewelry. Shotguns and revolvers in plenty are to be found in the cabins of the colored country folk. The Whites put up aprovocateuras before a pogrom in Russia. He started firing on Negroes at random in the Elaine streets. Then two white officials attempted to break into a Negro meeting, resorted to arms, and were met by firing in return. One of the Whites was killed, the other wounded. This started the three days of destruction in Phillips County. The whole Negro populationwas rounded up by white troops and farmers with rifles. Machine guns were even brought into play against an imaginary black army. A great number of Negroes were put in a stockade under military arrest, many were killed, many wounded. And three hundred were placed in jail and charged with riot and murder. No Whites were arrested. The governor, a Mr. Brough, was largely responsible for this method of investigating the alleged conspiracy of the Negroes to make an insurrection. The whole occurrence was astonishingly ugly, and it was followed by ten-minute trials before exclusively white juries, and swift sentences to electrocution for some Negro prisoners, and to long terms of penal servitude for others. The riot and the trials so exasperated Negroes throughout the United States that there is no doubt a Federal Commission of impartial men might well have been appointed to investigate the whole affair, both as regards its inception and as regards its military culmination and its aftermath of trial and punishment. As it is, though Governor Brough says to the Negroes, “Youdidplan an insurrection,” and though the Whites of Elaine may feel happier and more secure, it is an obvious truism that the white population of other States cannot be feeling more secure because of it, and that the Negroes in other districts feel less secure—they feel theneed to arm. It has caused a great increase in public insecurity. Perhaps because of this the riot has been more discussed than other riots. Somewhat shocked and fretful, the governor, who is probably a brisk business man, and in no way like one of those more neurotic governors of Russian provinces which occur in Aùdreyev’s tales, called a meeting. Some four hundred Whites and tamed Negroes were brought together to see what could be done to improve race relationship. This was a month after these events.

TheCommercial Appealof Memphis reports the governor’s remarks:

“This meeting has been called for the purpose of a heart-to-heart discussion of the relations between the white people and the Negroes of the State. These relations have become strained, especially by the recent rebellion in Phillips County. I say ‘rebellion’ advisedly and without qualifications, for it was an insurrection, and a damnable one.

“And I want to say in the beginning that Arkansas is going to handle her own problems. I do not intend to go to New York City or to Topeka, Kansas. When I want advice from Negroes I shall ask it from Arkansas Negroes, and when I want similar advice from white people, I shall get it from the white people of Arkansas.

“I also wish to say that I do not intend to be intimidated by any publications or any letters I may receive. I have already received several letters which said that if I permitted the execution of these twelve Negroes from Phillips County to go through, I would be assassinated. One of the letters contained a crude drawing of a coffin, represented to be my own in case the Negroes were electrocuted. I received one letter to-day which stated that the entire city of Helena would be burned if these Negroes went to their death. But I repeat that I will not be intimidated by any outside influence in this question. Our own questions must be settled within the boundaries of our State, and I believe that there are not enough representative Negroes in the State to do this.”

So said the governor, but it is rather a question whether in these days of Leagues of Nations and Alliances and “sympathies” one State like Arkansas, washed partly by a great river, can live entirely within its own boundaries and without outside consideration.

The mighty Mississippi rolls onward, bearing the spars and the sands of half the States of America to the sea. And after the massacre at Elaine, for some days, dead bodies of Negroes were washed up on other shores. Doleful messengers, these, on the river of Time.

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